A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [133]
So, what did the bunch do? They created that hovering monster, The Government, who was really responsible for their misery.
“Wasn’t it inevitable, Maud, to come to this place?” she thought. Thank God, Red Peterson was with her. Lust and all, she felt safe with him now.
“Maud, every once in a while we stop, we think, we dislike ourselves. We don’t fire these weapons. Shut us down and ten more like us will pop up. Men were butchering each other with sticks and stones till they discovered bows and arrows. War is intrinsic in the human race, driven by the most passionate of all human drives, greed.”
“Spoken like a true Jeffersonian. Have you ever looked in the mirror and spit?”
“Yeah…once. I got a hymie friend in Panama, a jeweler. I saw the tattoo on his arm. What we are doing by comparison is just keeping the boys amused.”
Maud spent the balance of daylight pacing her little porch in contemplation. The White Wolf Ranch was perfect. Red Peterson was some brilliant piece of personnel. She had to weigh that against the questionable mental balance of Oswald Hudson.
Furthermore, who were these people around?
She had trained herself not to be at home when moral issues came knocking at her door. This time they pounded through to her.
Moral issues cause people to think of their grandchildren and become all teary. Red had explained it perfectly. She and he were only a pair of folks servicing a human need for blood lust.
The lunch and liquor caught up to her. The sounds of her wretching brought Red into her room. On her knees over the toilet bowl, Miss Maud just wasn’t all that sexy.
“Deep and abiding love,” he said, adjusting the angle of her throw, “means holding each other’s head over the bucket. You gonna be okay?”
“Ughhh.”
“Shit,” Red thought, returning to his own room and lighting up his hash pipe. He heard the shower going from her room. Now, that’s a good woman. She don’t want to smell bad.
Maud came to him scented in creamy, dreamy stuff. He’d have to get the name of it for Greta.
Colors!
In the courtyard Esteemed Personage gathered at the flagpole, and while the White Wolf flag was lowered, they all howled “Aaahhhhweeee! Aaaarhaweeee!” after which Wreck, damaged from cocaine, shot off a few clips. Wreck staggered…
“Aaaaahhhhhhhuuuuuuwwweeeeee!” his patriots answered, and began shooting off clips of their own.
From a distant place, a coyote responded.
Maud and Red excused themselves from dinner, taking a stomach-settling diet in his room. It made no never mind, because Wreck was unconscious.
“I saw the devil today,” she said, “and I’m part of him.”
“Speaking of the devil, how about a ’lude?”
“Is that a ’lude or a lewd proposition?”
“Take it and find out.” Down the hatch with a back of hashish. And soon the devil was all gone. Red set her up on the high bed and kicked off his boots.
“I’ve got to say, Red, you feel good.”
“Crocodile skin and all.”
“Yeah…cowboy…yeah…”
“Aaaaahhhhwwweeee,” he crooned.
“Assssahhhhhweeee,” she responded.
Chapter 37
FOUR CORNERS-LABOR DAY WEEKEND
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2007
Sun’s first rays slithered over the rocky bivouac as the hated reveille sounded from a bugler. A groan rose en masse all over the Eagle Scout encampment. Four hundred of them ran, shoeless for the most part and naked, to where Montezuma Creek trickled past under a bluff.
Scoutmasters hustled them. The sun went up high, quickly. Sounds of splattering urine as four hundred young men took turns over the slit trenches.
The column had been in the desert for three days, planning to reach their destination of Mexican Hat at the tip of Glen Canyon day after tomorrow.
Two other columns of Eagle Scouts traversed from different directions toward Mexican Hat. When they converged, twelve hundred, one fourth of the total national number of Eagle Scouts, would hold a jamboree: boating, rafting, a thousand contests of skill and endurance, songs, campfires.
The President of the United States was due to fly in and address them on Monday!
Hank Skelley, a revered old scoutmaster, sat in a circle