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argument upon a bibliography of broken wind. They spat. They whittled. Waving tobacco cans, they cackled at pretty girls. Boys they dismissed with a fine misanthropy. Righteous and grand, they were also pathetic. They were dusty bugles, hungry for new lips. They were notes from the past adrift in cracked bottles, praying fair skies and kindly shores.
    "Teft?" When they had turned onto Gurley and were beaded up the hill and out of town, Cotton spoke.
    "Yo."
    "Bagging this crate. Damn well done."
    "Thanks."
    They began to roll. The Chevy ran hot and misfired on a cylinder or two and the front wheels wobbled out of alignment and the safety chains on the tailgate rattled unmercifully, but it would do. Leaving the last of the neon they connected with the state highway, curving north past the veterans' hospital on the site of what was once Fort Whipple, then on into bubbles of rock rising like yeast. When they took the right fork and were delivered, all at once, into wide open range, it was bye-bye cops, sleep tight Box Canyon Boys Camp, adios Prescott, and they were safe. The three flat in the bed came to life and pounded exuberantly on the cab window and Cotton and Lally 2 untangled onto the seat and pounded back and the Bedwetters cheered.
     

6
    It was 12:35 by Cotton's wrist. Teft clapped on his Afrika Korps cap and said they could be there in two hours. "Sooner if I gun it."
    "Lessee. Two-thirty there, half-hour for the job, three o'clock—home at five a.m. That's tight as hell," Cotton said. "Gun it."
    They really rolled. Over a two-lane road as white and true as the part in a dude's hair they traversed range open as far as the eye could see, twenty treeless, houseless, humanless miles of it. But there was much moonlight. Out in the distances the fans of windmills twinkled, turning, and about the base of each, about the drink tank, was a speckle of dark dots, a gather of cattle grazing in moonlight and meditating upon good grass, block salt, impermanence, and love.
    Lally 2 fell asleep, hatbrim crumpled on Cotton's shoulder. In his jacket the Temptations wailed.
    Propped between his knees, the rifle bothered Cotton. He was too conscious of it. It was too tangible. Only a means to an end in camp, an implement such as a stirrup or a baseball bat, here, on this night, it took on a chill and oily identity of its own. It purported. He wished Teft had not brought the damn thing along. Even more vehemently he wished that they were back in their sacks and that yesterday had never been.
    Beside him the sleeping boy stirred, mumbling protest. Lally 2 had returned in dreams to the carnage which had racked the cabin after lights out, to the trauma which had compelled a twelve-year-old to set out by himself through the piney woods. Now all six of them were on their way, over the same road, through the same towns, backtracking physically to the scene of that original horror. They were crazy as hell, Cotton assured himself, but great, too, he assured himself. He must quit swearing. He no longer needed it, nor did they. His mouth was sour, the residue of yesterday's nausea. He closed his eyes. In the gardens of God a unicorn sang, a hippogriff danced, and Goodenow vomited.
    Teft tooled up Mingus Mountain. Tires squealed on hairpin turns, and the air near the stars was cold. Below them the Verde River cut a fertile and enormous trench, and downriver, deep in cottonwoods, lay old Camp Verde, where Crook had been commander. Many a redskin had bitten the dust for this valley.
    Teft tooled them over Mingus Mountain. He drove like a demon, but all of them were driven. It had been unanimous.
    They zigged and zagged down through Jerome, peopled once by fifteen thousand bodies, reduced now to fifty haunted souls. The mountain here resembled the bare abdomen of a woman, a dead, a mangled woman. In her, fathered by Phelps, Dodge, and Douglas, were a hundred miles of shafts, drifts, and stopes, and out of her, by pick, shovel, and caesarian section, a