Bless the Beasts & Children by Glendon Swarthout Read Free Book Online Page A

"From now on none of us writes home or phones home. We're on our own. Our mothers and fathers can go to hell. Second, we call each other by our last names, Lally 1, Goodenow, so on. Anybody calls me John Cotton gets a mouthful of teeth. Now my last order—get our cans out of bed and up to that chow cabin and don't bat an eye no matter what anybody says. Now move it."
    They poured through Oak Creek Canyon like tea through a tin horn, then slowed to a crawl as Teft downshifted from drive to third to second and finally to low gear for the climb. They had reached the Mogollon Rim. It was a fault of earth, inconceivable and Paleozoic. It was the sheer limestone scarp at the southern jump-off of a plateau upheaved from sea bottom in the age of dinosaurs and armored fish and forming now vast areas of four of the United States. They must scale it. To and fro and up along the wall the pickup labored, gulping oil and shuddering. From four thousand feet they climbed to five thousand and six thousand and seven thousand, and suddenly the air was rare and cold again and the truck gasped for it and gained speed and they were on top.
    Shecker, Lally 1, and Cotton were in back, bundled together. After they had covered ten miles or so of tableland and forest, Cotton unwrapped himself from Lally 1, clamped the strap of his helmet liner under his chin so that it would not blow off, got onto his knees, and raised his head into the airstream above the cab.
    The horizon shimmered. Behind it, black against a purple sky, were three cones familiar to him, the San Franciscos, peaking at twelve thousand feet. But the dazzle along the horizon was what made him drop down and drum the cab window and point. Teft and Goodenow snapped to and Lally 2 woke up and peered ahead as Cotton, shouting, made mute syllables with his mouth:
    "Flag-staff!"
     

7
    "I gotta eat," Shecker whined. "Hot pastrami and a pickle and a strawberry shake."
    "We're not stopping," Cotton said. "We don't have time and you know it."
    "So am I starving," said Lally 1.
    "My gut doesn't know it," Shecker said. "Me for food, glorious food." He climbed over the side of the bed and stood in the street, gnawing at a fingernail. "So go on without me and have fun."
    "Me, too," said Lally 1. "You can't order us around all the time, Cotton."
    Cotton was irate. They had stopped for a red light at the fringe of Flagstaff and now the light was green. "Get the hell back in here!"
    "Up yours," Shecker said. "I've sat in back all the way, I should get something."
    "We do what we want!" cried Lally 1.
    As far as Cotton was concerned, that tied it. Teft and Goodenow had their heads out the cab window. "Okay, leave 'em!" he ordered Teft. "Go on, leave 'em!"
    Teft obeyed, and the truck moved away and the mutineers began walking and none of them could quite believe what was happening, that the Bedwetters were breaking up, zap, pow, just like that, over nothing, when they were nearly there. But in less than a block Cotton pounded on the window and ordered Teft to pull over and in a minute Shecker and Lally 1 caught up with them. Cotton said okay, to get in, everybody was probably hungry and would operate better after some food, so get in and hit the floor while he looked for a place, there'd be a lot more fuzz in Flag than there had been in Prescott. He put Goodenow in back with them and slid in beside Lally 2 in the cab and they started again.
    Intersecting with the main street, Teft turned right. This was U.S. 66, the central east-west conduit of the nation. In the good old days, guiding on a tall pine trimmed of boughs, known then as a flagstaff, wagon trains had watered at the springs here and bedded down for the night. Now the town was a day's run out of Los Angeles, and its main street, U.S. 66, was a caravansary of ten-dollar rooms, diesel spatter, clogged urinals, tubercular waitresses, anti-sleep pills, yesterday's pastry, flat tires, paper diapers, cigarette butts, and exhausted coffee, as tawdry