Huck Out West

by Robert Coover

  I laid my rifle across my arm like I was thinking about maybe shooting somebody just for the heck of it and said we had to get back to the fort whilst there was still enough light to follow the mountain trail. I asked Zeb for some feed for the panther so’s it don’t bite my head off when I get back. Zeb was feeling flush with the windfall the barter of his antique vest had fetched him, so besides the feed sack he throwed in a couple of lumps of sugar. Deadwood was having a grand time and warn’t easy to shift, but I remembered him not to forget what Dan’l Boone once told him, and that confused him enough to stumble out after me with his jug and gunny sack.

  “What’d he say? What did Dan’l Boone say to me?”

  “He says, Deadwood, he says, when strangers start a-crowding in, it’s time to pick up and move on. You got them greedy boys all in a froth, showing them that rock a yourn, and now they want it, and they look ornery enough to try’n get it, any which way. I reckon you best stay with me tonight, and hope only we don’t get followed.”

  “Dad-burn it, I ain’t humpin’ myself over no mountains t’bunk down with a blamed panther!”

  “Well, stay and get killed then. But just so’s you know, them mountains is all downhill from here and my panther has got better things to chaw on than smelly old prospectors.”

  He glanced back over his shoulder. There were three of them hard-looking strangers standing in the doorway, watching our way and talking together. Deadwood fetched out his fob watch and squinted his cross-eyes and studied it a moment. “Well, awright then,” he says.

  I throwed his gunny sack over my shoulder and walked us towards his shack until we got hid into the woods, shadowy now with the sun lost in the branches, then I made a quick turn down to the crick and hurried along it upstream to the tepee, moving faster’n suited Deadwood, grunting and complaining about his rheumatics behind me. There’s a sad creamy glow about twilight that smooths off the edges and mashes thoughts and things together, like memory does when it’s let loose on its own. It’s the time of day when I most find myself thinking about the faraway river town where I growed up and about all the things I done there and the folks I knowed, most specially Tom Sawyer, who always had a lively idea of what howling adventure to try on next. Long time ago. Felt like a hundred years or more. So many awful things had happened since then, so much outright meanness. It was almost like there was something wicked about growing up.

  Deadwood was weaving about, having oversampled, and was panting like an old dog when we reached the tepee, so I set him down by the woodpile with his jug and sack and went to feed Tongo the forage Zeb give me, letting him nubble the sugar out of my hand. I was glad to see him and he was glad to see me, bobbing his big head and snorting like as if to say so.

  It was the tribe that give me the horse, about the same time they give me the woman. They come in the same parcel. I mostly got on better with the horse. My old horse Jackson had been with me since our Pony days, and if you counted up the miles, he’d hoofed it round the world a hundred times and at least thirty times flat-out. He was plumb knackered. I’d named Jackson after an island in the Big River where my life took a change because, with me and Tom setting out on our western adventures, it was a-changing again and I wanted to mark that. The tribe cooked Jackson up and et him which they said was doing him a great honor. When I named the new horse, Eeteh says to the others, “Ne Tongo,” and they approved of that and give him a few baptizing slaps on his croup, and I approved of it, too.

  That horse was a grand adventure, and I named him after the Big River, what the Lakota called the Big Water, thinking about the grand adventures me and Jim’d had on it all them years ago. We’d brung Jim out west with us when we’d run away, Tom and me, but we shouldn’t never a done. When we hired on as riders for the Pony, we didn’t know what to do with him. The war hain’t yet started up, and though Jim was a free man, the bounty hunters didn’t always mind such particulars. Sometimes we had to pretend he was OUR slave, and we always had to be on the watch-out he didn’t get stole. The Pony Express Stables, however, was hiring only skinny young white orphans like me and Tom, and though Jim was surely an orphan, he come up short on the other requirements. The station-keeper said if we wanted the job, we had to get rid of him. I says we can’t leave Jim behind on his lonesome, we have to look for another job. But they paid fifty dollars a month, which was more money than a body could tell what to do with, and Tom says we hain’t no choice, and he sold him to a tribe of slaveholding Cherokees. “It’s the right thing to do, Huck,” Tom said after he’d gone and done it. “Jim’s used to being a slave and he’s probably happier when he has someone telling him what to do. And besides, they’re more like his own kind.” I knowed Tom was surely right as he most always was, but it made my heart sink into my wore-out bootheels to see Jim’s grieved eyes that day. I waved at him and he looked at me like he was asking me a dreadful question, and then he was gone, with a rope round his neck. Tom bought us new riding boots with the money.

  I opened the smoke flap in the tepee and stirred up the fire, and then took my pole down to the crick to catch us some supper. Dusk’s half-light is always prime for fishing. Hardly before I’d begun I had me a handsome black crappie close to a forearm long to go with the half-dozen panfish on my morning trotlines, some of them still snapping their tails about in a kind of tragic greeting when I hauled them up. I know it don’t make them happy, but it seems only fair for us fellow creturs to give up our bodies to others’ appetites. I don’t want to get et by mountain lions, but I wouldn’t hold it against them.

  I larded up a frypan and set it on the fire, throwed in some salt and the cleaned fish, and set back to enjoy an evening pipe. The Lakota had gave me a carved stone pipe which was soft and smooth and warmed the hand. I kept it in the tepee where I wouldn’t lose it. It was what I had for good luck when the world was mostly throwing bad luck at me. It was such moments as made me feel I’d finally come to the right place. Plenty grub and an easy life, ain’t no bad thing, as that humbug king we traveled the river with was like to put it.

  At the same time, I misdoubted it could last. Though I didn’t know it at the time, Deadwood’s unlucky find would make sure it wouldn’t, but you had to be blind in both eyes not to see there was already changes happening. The Gulch when I first slid into it felt like it was fixed here forever, but it warn’t. There was always new fortune-hunters riding in, discovering their way to the whisky in Zeb’s shack, and there was ever more and more of them, prowling the hillsides and crick beds. Some had staked claims, others just swarmed round to see what they could steal. They was tramping up the place and every day it looked ever more wore down and sivilized. These new folks warn’t near as friendly as the old ones. Of course they was just like the old ones, warn’t no beauties in the Gulch before them, only these new ones hadn’t got rectified yet by failure and disappointment. And none of them was reckoning with Eeteh’s people when their dander’s up. For the Lakota, these scoundrels was all trespassing. Any fool could see, rough times was a-coming.

  I’d just pocketed my pipe and took the fish off of the fire, when all of a sudden there was a muffled gunshot and a ball ripped through the tepee one side and out t’other, missing me by a whisker. Deadwood was screaming. “HALP! HALP! I been SHOT! I’m DYIN’!” I grabbed my rifle and dove under the cover at the rear, rolled over towards the woodpile, firing into the woods above us. I couldn’t see nothing, so I listened as hard as I could, but I couldn’t hear nothing neither because Deadwood was still thrashing around and howling and groaning pitifully. I shushed him, warning him he’d just draw more fire, but he yelped more louder’n ever.

  “MY POKE! MY POKE! THEY’VE TUCK MY POKE!”

  I always had enough trouble finding my way back to the tepee at night, even knowing where it was, so I was surprised that them new-comers had somehow tracked us here in the dark. Well, they hadn’t. Nobody had. It turned out that Deadwood in his drunk befuddlement had rolled onto his old fowling piece and set it off, sen
ding that shot through the tepee. He was laying on his coin sack. When I finally dragged him and his truck inside and stirred up the fire for a look, I seen there was a hole burnt in his new vest. He was likely burnt and bruised under the hole, but he warn’t bleeding.

  “Did ye git any of ’em?” he groaned.

  “Get who?”

  “Why, them dern robbers that was attackin’ me! I lay I musta ruint at least six of ’em.”

  “I don’t know about them, but your shot near took my ear off. Look at them holes in the tepee cover.”

  “That warn’t me, it was them robbers. That just shows you they was out thar. But where was you when I needed you? I had to stand off that whole pestiferous gang alone!”

  “Deadwood, I know it won’t do no good telling you, but there warn’t no firefight. You rolled over on your gun and set it off.”

  It was so, it didn’t do no good. He carried right on. I could see he was contriving up a new tale for the loafers at Zeb’s. When I says if he killed some of them, maybe we should go look for their bodies to bury them, he says, “No, they’ll of drug ’em off by now.” When I asked him where was the bullet hole if he got shot, he says his old ribs is so petterfied the bullets just bounce off. But then he groaned and his eyeballs crossed till they most joined together, like he was trying to stare backwards into himself. “But they shore do sting!” he wheezed. “Hurts worse’n the time I got shoved off of Pike’s Peak by a claim-grubber!”

  He was drunk enough to not feel too much pain, but sober enough to smell the fish and he et a couple of the panfish, bones and all. I was hungry and the crappie I’d catched was near as tasty as a Big River catfish, and it washed down smooth with Zeb’s prime whisky.

  “Them robbers, you know, they may come back looking for their truck,” I says.

  “Well,” he says, “ef they do, maybe we can foller ’em, see where that rock come from.”

  “Maybe you should look right where you found it.”

  “But you put it thar.”

  I’d disremembered that. “Well, you always say I’m lucky, maybe the right place just come to me.”

  He pulled the gold fob watch out again to study it. I knowed that watch face didn’t mean nothing more to Deadwood than higher-cliffs, so I asked him what time it was. “I dunno,” he says. “It ain’t that kinder watch. It’s tellin’ me other things.”

  “Maybe it’ll tell you where to find the gold you’re looking for.”

  “Maybe.” His eyes was sliding together again. “Right now it’s tellin’ me them robbers is all dead . . . or else they . . .” And he fell back on the potato sack like he’d dropped there from a high place and set to snoring. His snores was outrageous loud, but I allowed they’d at least scare the wolves away. There warn’t room for two of us in there, so I went down to the pasture and snuggled up to Tongo.

  CHAPTER III

  EXT DAY WE found Deadwood’s shack tore up inside and out. It was always a wreck, but now it was a proper first-rate wreck. Them boys had gave it a powerful rummaging, even busting into the walls, and there was a bullet hole in Deadwood’s straw tick where his head would a been. Pretty soon the scene had drawed a pack of loafers, so of course that set Deadwood to telling them all how he beat off a gang of desperados with his bare hands. “I think it was Jesse’s boys,” he says. “I heerd ’em braggin’ about pottin’ Jayhookers.” He showed them the bullet hole in his bunk and they asked him how he didn’t get killed. “Well, I was too dern fast for ’em, warn’t I?” he says. “I ducked, and they only jest nicked me.” As proof, he showed them a scar under his chin where his whiskers warn’t growing, which he once told me he’d got from a Comanche arrow when he was riding with the Texas Rangers.

  There’d been some nights at Zeb’s when knives and guns come out during the fist fights, Zeb had to sick Abaddon on a few reckless drunks, and some prospectors had went out in the morning and never come back, but that bullet hole was a dismistakable signal that the sivilizing of the Gulch was hard under way. Soon there’d be more people shooting at each other and then laws and lawmen getting mixed up in it and me and Big River would have to move on again. Tom was just the contrary. The law was like a rousing adventure book to him and he reverenced lawyers so much he went off to become one, even though he hated nothing worse’n doing what he ought to do. Well, he was smarter’n me. He knowed you had to learn the law if you wanted to stay outside it and out of trouble at the same time.

  It was up in Minnysota that Tom made up his mind to give over cowboying and take on the law. Becky Thatcher was the daughter of a judge and maybe she give him the idea how to set about doing it. Before that him and me was mostly adventuring around without no thoughts about the next day. We run away from home all them years ago because Tom was bored and hankered to chase after what he said was the noble savages. At first they was the finest people in the world and Tom wanted to join up with them, and then they was the wickedest that ever lived and they should all get hunted down and killed, he couldn’t make up his mind. Some boys in a wagonload of emigrants we come across early on learned us how to ride and shoot and throng a lasso so that we got to be passing good at all them things.

  That story turned poorly and we never seen what was left of them afterwards, but ending stories was less important to Tom than beginning them, so we was soon off to other adventures that he thought up or read about in a book or heard tell of. Sometimes they was fun, sometimes they warn’t, but for Tom Sawyer they was all as needful as breathing. He couldn’t stand a day without it had an adventure in it, and he warn’t satisfied until he’d worked in five or six.

  Once, whilst we was still humping mail pouches back and forth across the prairie on our ponies, I come on a rascally fellow named Bill from a-near where we hail from. He was also keen on adventures and he was heading back east to roust up a gang of bushwhackers in our state to kill Jayhawks over in the next one. The way he told it, he had a bunch of swell fellows joining his gang—that Jesse in Deadwood’s yarn was in it, and Jesse’s brother and some others—and he wondered if Tom and me might be interested. With the war betwixt the states starting, there was gangs forming up and making sport a burning down one another’s towns, which seemed like sure enough adventures, not just something out of books, so maybe we was looking in the wrong place. But when I told Tom about it the next time we crossed up at a relay station, he says he allowed he’d just stay out west and maybe get up a gang of his own, because he couldn’t see no profit in going back. But I knowed that warn’t the real reason. The real reason was he couldn’t be boss of it.

  It was while we was on one of his adventures in the New Mexico Territory that Tom got the notion to go watch the hangings in Minnysota, a notion that would change everything. The Pony Express company had suddenly gone bust the year before when the cross-country tellygraph come in. We never even got our last paychecks, so we paid ourselves with ponies and saddles, which was how I got old Jackson, who warn’t old then, but still young and fast.

  We was both broke, money just falling out of my pockets somehow, whilst Tom was spending his up shipping long tellygrams back to Becky Thatcher. He wanted all his adventures wrote down like the ones he’d read in books and she knowed how to read and write and was the sort of body who would be impressed by his hifalut’n style and not have nothing else to do, so she got elected. She couldn’t write back to him because there warn’t nowheres to write to, but that warn’t no matter, there warn’t nothing she’d have to say that would interest him.

  Riding, wrangling and shooting was what we done best and our backsides had got so leathery toting mail a body could strop razors off of them, so we hired on to guard wagon trains and run dispatches and handle horses and scout for whichever armies and exploring parties we come upon, and we had a tolerable good time of it. Back home we was Rebs, I guess; out here we mostly worked for the Union, though we warn’t religious about it. Fact is, that time back in the New Mexico adventures we started out scouting for the Confederals, who was try
ing to cut a route through the Territory to California to get at the gold and silver; but we got misdirected and ended up scouting for the Union army instead and having to shoot at our most recent employers. Tom thought that improved the adventure considerable, adding what he called a pair a ducks, which Becky, if he wrote to her about it, maybe understood better’n me.

  One a the Union colonels was a hardshell parson who carried such a strong conviction about the afterlife that he believed in shipping all his prisoners off there to populate it, sending along with them all their ponies, mules, grub, garb, weapons and wagons, just so’s they’d feel at home when they got there, he says. He needed plenty of shooting and burning for this holy work and we was volunteered to supply it. Tom was a good soldier and done as he was told. I warn’t and didn’t always and didn’t then. So I was oftenest in trouble while Tom palled around with the bosses. And it was while he was setting down with the parson over fresh roasted horse meat and the colonel’s private sin supply, as he called his jug of whisky, that Tom learnt that they was laying out intentions up in Minnysota to hang more’n three hundred Sioux warriors, all at the same time. The parson thought this was the splendidest notion since the Round Valley massacres and Tom says it was something he had to see.

  Tom loved a good hanging, there warn’t nothing that so lifted his spirits, and he never missed one if it was anywheres in the neighborhood, not even if it was an out-and-out lynching, which he says was only a kind of participatery democracy. I warned him about getting too close to them things, some day they may decide it’s his turn, and he says, “Well, if that happens, Huck, I’ll only be sorry I can’t watch.” And then he grinned under the new moustaches he was growing and says, “But you’re invited, Huck.”