Bless the Beasts & Children Read Online Free Page A

Cotton hissed. "Teft, can you actually steal a car?"
    "Actually. Just call me Clyde."
    They giggled.
    "Pipe down." Cotton rubbed imaginary stubble on his chin. "Bag a car, bring it back. Maybe that's the only way, though. Okay, let's get this damn pile of junk back in the shed."
    It was short work to let the truck roll down the rise, and after that, Teft steering, to push it into its slot. Lally 2 unloaded his pillow, Goodenow the buffalo head, and in a group they headed for the tack barn to saddle up. The camp was lifeless except for the lights in the latrines. Halfway, however, rounding one of the great pines, over the wind sound they heard a screen door squeak open and bang shut. They did statues. Cateyed, they made out the silhouette of a man standing on the stoop of a cabin, and a firefly. It was the Camp Director, smoking a cigarette. They had not known he smoked. He seemed to stare directly at them. They could not move a muscle until the firefly described an arc and the door squeaked open and banged shut again. They went on weak in the knees.
     

4
    In the black of the tack barn they fumbled among the baled hay and buckets and horse apparatus for bridles and blankets and saddles, then toted them into the corral. The animals knew them and behaved themselves.
    Cotton cinched up, standing near enough to Teft to whisper. "You sweating this?"
    "Are you?"
    "Damn right. If we hadn't happened to see that sign today and turned off. And then Lally Two breaking out. And the truck. I don't want to blow everything this close to going home. We voted, sure, but they don't know what they're taking on. We could wreck the whole summer."
    "It's wrecked anyway. Unless we swing this."
    Cotton flipped stirrups down. "You were grinding hell out of your teeth tonight."
    "I heard you holler yourself. Have a bad dream?" Cotton skipped that. "I guess we have to go."
    "Yup." They were through the corral gate when Teft held them up with a handwave, signaling to wait, gave Lally 1 his reins, and leaned away on long spider legs. He was gone several minutes, returning, to their surprise, with one of the .22 caliber bolt-action target rifles from the range. Then in single file they led the drowsy horses through the pines around the perimeter of the camp, cautiously over shale and needle droppings to join the sand road, and down the road a hundred yards before Cotton stopped them.
    "Teft, why'd you bring that gun?" he demanded.
    The others chortled. "Let's rob banks, Bonnie, baby!"
    "Kill! Kill!"
    "You'll never take me alive, copper!"
    "You get ammo?" Teft rattled a box of cartridges.
    "I thought they keep that rack locked now," Cotton said.
    "They do."
    Cotton shook his head and checked his wrist. "Eleven forty-eight. We're already behind schedule. Okay, mount up and move it."
    They climbed aboard, reached into jacket pockets, snapped transistors on, and clucked the string into a trot. They were no cowboys. None of them had been born to the penthouse of a horse. Seven weeks of practice, though, had taught them how to cover the ground even if ungracefully, even if they snubbed the reins too short and rubbed horsehide raw with their knees and the slap-slap of their hind ends on saddles sounded like applause. Motion got their blood moving. The sand road kept their secret. To ride out against the rules, to ride out on a night of moon and mystery with high purpose for a theme and hooves for a beat and a counterpoint of creaking leather and Johnny Cash mooing "Don't Take Your Guns to Town"—to a boy this was wine and watermelon, first kisses and fireworks, liniment and delight.
    The biggest entrance in the history of Box Canyon Boys Camp was that made by Sammy Shecker. He came down from Las Vegas in a limousine with his father, Sid Shecker, the famous comic, who was doing a month in Vegas and a month at Tahoe and decided a summer in the Arizona mountains would be healthier for his son than one cooped up in hotel air conditioning. As the chauffeur attended