Free Bless the Beasts & Children by Glendon Swarthout Page B

into which he had hurled himself before he recognized his mother's face and her bullet broke his brain.
    He held them until the moon was obscured. Then they climbed the gate, handing over rifle and pillow and head and horns, and left the road to cross the killing ground.
    Suddenly the earth was treacherous underboot. They slipped and reeled. Goodenow fell. Balancing, they waited for him to rise, but he did not. Instead, he began to retch. On hands and knees he was paralyzed by a series of dry, ghastly heaves.
Goodenow threatened suicide a second time after Cotton caught him telephoning his mother one night and wrestled the phone away and cut the connection. Goodenow burst into tears, which he did on the slightest excuse. Cotton reminded him of his original orders: no calls or letters home. Blubbering he was going to hang himself, Goodenow rushed off through the dark toward the tack barn. "Go bead a belt," Cotton said disgustedly, recalling how the sissy had stood chin-deep in the tank all day making a fool of himself, and let him go. Ten minutes later, on second thought and also because they were both from Ohio, he went to the barn, to find Goodenow standing on a feed bin with a rope over a rafter and a noose around his neck, ready to jump. Cotton was up half the night convincing Goodenow of the wisdom and equity of his rule. If they were ever to act their age, and Goodenow was fourteen, if they were ever to stand on their hind legs and spit life in the eye, they must begin now, this summer. Goodenow came down from the feed bin finally, and on the way back to bed he told Cotton about a thing they had done in the special school he'd gone to in Shaker Heights. "Bumping," it was called. When everybody was about to crash and burn and needed help, fast, the teacher would have them huddle and close eyes and hug each other and touch each other for a minute, and it really worked. Goodenow said he could use a little bumping once in a while, all of them could, and Cotton said okay, they'd try it. He never knew whether Goodenow would actually have hung himself or not.
    They were unable to get Goodenow off his hands and knees, and he was too convulsed by retching to tell them what was wrong. They knelt about him to help, but in so doing touched earth with their own hands and instantly, reflexively, withdrew them. They had been walking in, had put hands upon, something wet and cold and viscid. They tried to cleanse hands on jackets and jeans but could not. They tried to rise and run away, but slipping, sliding, could not. They wallowed. They were like children making terrible mudpies.
    Then the shutter of cloud opened. They saw. They knew. In a lens of unnatural light the Bedwetters posed, kneeling, squatting, sitting in a grotesque of horror, faces contorted, several groaning, all six of them in stasis. One click of moonlight exposed the game and ended the adventure. One look shrieked what it was that smeared their palms and pants and chins and boots. It was blood.
     

11

    BUFFALO PRESERVE ARIZONA GAME AND FISH DEPARTMENT ROSCOE RANCH 4 MILES SOUTH VISITORS WELCOME

    This was the yellow lettering on a big brown sign alongside U.S. 66 eight miles east of Flagstaff. They had seen it from the pickup early yesterday morning while headed back to Box Canyon Boys Camp after an overnight camp-out in the Petrified Forest. Wheaties was driving, two boys beside him in the cab and the other four in the bed with sleeping bags and gear.
    The Bedwetters had the idea simultaneously. Those in back hammered on the cab window, the two in front argued they were not due in camp till afternoon anyway, this might be the only chance they would ever have to see a herd of real buffalo, and after a mile or two of debate, Wheaties gave in, chauffeuring them back to the sign and through the gate and down the dirt road across the plateau.
    They stopped at a closed gate. The road on the other side continued past a ranchhouse and a motley of vehicles, most of them