Huck Out West

by Robert Coover

  She says her brother was “a Chinaman coo-leee,” which seemed mostly a way to die before you catched old age. She says all the men in their village come to America on the same ship they did. Things in China was “so-o-o ba-a-a,” she says. “Many trub-oh.” Women was s’posed to stay back to take care of the old people, but their mam and pap was killed in the troubles, and her brother didn’t want that to happen to her, so he brung her over with him. Girls warn’t allowed on the ship, so she had to pretend she was his little brother, though she was older’n him, and she worked alongside of him in the mines and on the railroad till they found her out, and since she warn’t legal, they done with her whatever they wanted to.

  She says when her brother asked for water one day and got hanged as a troublemaker, the rail boss took her away and misused her every which way he could think of, then handled her over to the bad man who was working for him. The bad man horsewhipped her naked just for fun till she thought she was going to die, but he didn’t have nobody else to beat on so he kept her alive in a box in his lean-to and fed her potatoes and berries. She says he warn’t American, but wanted to be, so he joined the army to become one. Also it suited him. He liked shooting and hurting people. He dragged her along with him on his way to the war the first day or two, but she slowed him down, so he unloosed his orneriness on her till he was wore out and then he left her there to die on the trail. She hoped he’d get killed in the war, but now it was ended, she was afraid he might come back looking for her. “If I scleam at bad man, Hookie, don’ come herrp me!” she says. “Lide way fast an’ don’ come back!”

  I was mighty surprised. “The war’s over? I didn’t know that,” I says.

  “Rong time yestidday,” she says. “That nice plesident, man kirr him, too.”

  I warn’t paying much mind to the rest a the world after I buried Ben Rogers. Except for saloons, I didn’t need the world and it didn’t need me. For beer money, I hired on with emigrant trains and wagons, taking on work wherever I could find it, me and Jackson drifting generly northards, and it was up a-near the Oregon Trail where I found Nookie, or she found me. Chinese ladies warn’t in much demand, but she’d struck a little abandoned sod cabin to move into and, like me, she didn’t have many wants. I seen her setting cross-legged outside her cabin in the sunset and she seen me and motioned me over and give me something to eat and we started having baths. She said she asked me because I was so skinny, but she was skinnier.

  Her telling me the war was over made me think of Jim. Nookie didn’t know who won the war, and when I asked others, they just laughed at me or punched me if they thought I was making fun. Which was how I calculated the North must a won. So I reckoned maybe Jim was free now. This cheered me up some when nothing else did, except maybe Nookie’s baths.

  Then one day I come back from leading some people in funny hats over to the Mormon Trail junction and found her cabin all busted up and Nookie gone. She’d left her tin bathtub behind. I waited two or three days, but she never come back, so finally I washed myself in the tub one last time, thinking how she done it, and struck out for the Bozeman trailhead to look for work as a scout and guide. There was forts being built along the trails up there to protect the cows and emigrants rumbling through, and it didn’t take me long to know the trail and the tribes along it. The worst was the Lakota Sioux. It was like they was born angry. I was deathly afraid of them. Them and snakes.

  It was in one of the forts I met Dan Harper. Dan was a Union soldier, a Jayhawker from Kansas who had volunteered for the army in a fit of patriotics, but the war betwixt the States was over before he got to kill nobody, so they sent him out west to destroy Indians instead. He was lonely like I was, so him and me we spent a good while just setting over our pipes and jawing. I told him I knowed a Harper back in St. Petersburg who wanted to become a robber but who probably took up loafing like everybody else, and Dan says he might a been a relative, it was a sizable clan, but he’d only been to Missouri once and that was to burn down a town full of Rebs. He says it was fun at the time, but he didn’t know what good it done. He hoped I didn’t have no relations there, and I says I didn’t have no relations nowheres.

  I told him about Tom Sawyer and Ben Rogers and Nookie and her muddytatings, and he told me about a fat lady in Fort Laramie who could crack nuts with her bottom. I says I didn’t believe that, and he says he don’t neither, but that’s what they say. When I told him about Jim, he says he ain’t never knowed any Negro people up close like that and warn’t sure he wanted to. They didn’t have none in the town where he growed up, even though they was abolitionists. I said about Nookie’s brother stopping work to ask for more water and getting strung up with five other Chinamen as a warning to the rest of them, and how white folk come and cheered the hangings and shot the dead bodies for sport.

  “Leastways they was already dead,” Dan says, and he tells me the worse thing he ever done was when they catched some Indians and the officer made them throw them live off of a cliff. “’Le’s listen at ’em yell!’ the officer shouts, but the Indians didn’t yell. The silence was awesome scary. Finally, the officer he begun yelling for them. YI-I-I-i-i-iee . . . And then we all did.”

  His fort was on Lakota land and the tribe was cranky about it, so their warriors was forever attacking it, and Dan had shot and killed a few of them, but he warn’t bragging about it. “Of course they’re bothersome,” he says. “These lands was their’n and we’re bullying in and taking it all away from them. If they was doing that to us, we’d be bothersome, too.” I told him about hiring on to shoot buffalos up in these parts not long after the war was over, and he says he got ordered by a general to do that, too, but he didn’t like it.

  “I didn’t neither,” I says. “It was like killing bedrolls. But it don’t matter, they was only cows.”

  “No, they warn’t, Huck. We was killing the Indians. They can’t live without buffalo. They use them for food, clothes, their tepees, soap, plows, thread, ever blamed thing. They burn dried buffalo shit to stay warm in the winter. They use their skins, their bones, their skulls, their horns, even their guts and ballocks. The little Irisher general he says, ‘Kill the buffalo and you kill the Indians.’ And that’s what we was doing, the whole derned point of it.”

  “Well, he’s a general, so I guess he knows.”

  “I guess he don’t.”

  When I told him about the Minnysota hangings and what the loony old preacher said, Dan says he was maybe crazy, but he was also brave, standing up like that against everybody else. “When you’re living with a mob of other people, it’s hard not to fall into thinking like as they do, and then you ain’t YOU no more. It’s like when you’re in the army. You could rightly say everybody else in that town was crazy except the preacher. When we burnt down that Missouri town and killt all them people, I felt like a cloud had come down and sucked me up into it and it warn’t me that was doing the awful things I done.”

  I was learning a lot from Dan. He was younger’n me, but he knowed more. There was some in the fort, he says, who didn’t like him for the things he said. They called him an injun-lover. Some a them was wearing scalps on their belts and they liked to get him down and rub his face with them. “That ain’t the pleasantest thing, but it don’t change what’s true and what ain’t.” Tom he had a way of talking like the books he read that sometimes beflummoxed me, but what Dan said mostly made tolerable good sense even if he was a Jayhawker, and we started looking forward to my passing through the fort with one wagon train or nuther, so’s to set back and smoke and jabber into the night.

  Dan didn’t have no appetite for the army life, and we reckoned we might ride together when he was freed out of it. I says we could go up into the northern hills where the fishing and hunting was prime, and Dan says maybe we could go exploring down the Colorado canyons where nobody ain’t never been before. We was full of notions like that and they was all smartly better’n the lives we was stuck in. Dan’s bulliest idea was to join a circus, where we could
do bronco riding and fancy shooting and lassoing tricks. “We can even set up our own circus if we can’t find one’ll take us. We can get some Indians to join with us and we can have some pretend fights and then be friends after.” I was most excited by this notion and I begun practicing on the dogs and pigs at the fort.

  But then one day, when I was guiding some wagons bringing supplies up the trail towards the fort, we got set upon by a passel of wild whooping Lakota warriors storming down on us, painted up like demons out from the Widow Douglas’s end-times Bible stories. We was overnumbered, so we abandoned the wagons, set off some gunpowder to back them off, jumped on our horses and humped it out a there, making straight for the fort, arrows flying about our ears and off our backsides and those of the horses. A garrison was sent out to drive off the war party and fetch the wagons back and the captain took Dan with him. Then, another patrol was sent out later to bring back the bodies.

  I went to where Dan was laid out with the others. They was all shot up with arrows and scalped and tomahawked, and some was eating what before was betwixt their legs, a most gashly and grievous sight. The Lakota had fooled them by disappearing, then popping up again further on, beguiling them over and over till they was trapped too far from the fort for help. Dan’s chest and belly was full of arrows like a porkypine’s, but there warn’t no blood. It was like as if all their arrows had been shot into a dead man. Laying on his back. “If I don’t come back, they’ll say I was deserting and they hadn’t no choice,” he said. I could a turned him over to see if there were bullet holes in his back, but I didn’t do that. Other soldiers was watching me like they was considering over something, so I packed up that night and drifted back southards and took up the cowboying line, and not long after, found myself marching through the snow with General Hard Ass.

  CHAPTER VII

  HEN DAN GOT himself massacred, I felt like I’d hit bottom, but the bottom was soft and ashy like Nookie’s soap and I only kept sinking deeper and darker, like there warn’t no end where misery could take a body. I ended up working for Texas ranchers, wrangling their spare horses whilst the cowpunchers was drovering the cows along. I got paid less’n the others, and it was a desperate hard life, but on the trail nothing cost nothing, and it beat shooting Indians and their ponies. And I was comfortablest around horses. Tom always tried to learn me about nobleness from the books he read, and fact is, horses has a noble side and human persons don’t.

  As the railroads growed, the ranchers borrowed old Indian trails to river crossings and cut some new ones, driving longhorns up through the tribal lands to the new Kansas railheads so’s they could be carriaged to their last rites out east where the main beef hunger was. The natives that was in the way didn’t like it and so sometimes them and their ponies had to get shot just like before, but cowpokes ain’t settlers, and the tribes was mostly pleased to let us ride through for a dime a head and two-bit jugs a whisky for the chiefs on the side.

  Moving two or three thousand cattle over all them woesome miles warn’t no Sunday-school picnic. We rode slow, not to burn too much meat off of the beeves, pasted to our saddles for upwards of eighteen hours a day in all kinds of weather, with nothing for grub some days but bread and coffee. There were boils and blisters to tolerate, ague, dispepsia, piles, and newmonia, plus rustlers and rattlers, trail bosses and wolfpacks, prairie fires, hailstorms, and stampeeds. A crack of lightning and the cows’d go thundering off like they’d et too much locoweed, and sometimes under sunny skies for no reason at all other’n to aggravate the cowhands. Some days it rained like it warn’t noway going to stop, the mud slopping up so deep the poor creturs resked getting stuck and had to be cruelly lashed to keep them plodding ahead, whilst other days it was so dry and dusty, riding drag at the rear, where I generly was, was worse’n getting buried alive under a pile a filthy potato sacks.

  Some of the range hands went crazy on account of the horrible moan of the wind, the awful emptiness, and the way the sun seemed to eat a body alive, but I growed customed to it and it suited me. The desert seemed as lonely and sadful as me, so we got on in a family way. I owned my saddle, my guns, my hat and bedroll, bought back when I was earning extra riding for the Pony, and I had old Jackson to get me about. There warn’t nothing else I wanted, including being somewheres else, without it was back on the Big River, and maybe I didn’t want that neither. Since Dan Harper had got killed, I had the blues down deep, but I reckoned I’d never not had them, and I’d growed customed to that, too.

  In my desperate low-spiritedness, I’d took up some of Pap’s habits, so when I warn’t on a horse I was likely in a saloon if there was one about, and there most surely was, for they was common as sagebrush. They was rough but easeful places where a body could generly find a plate of hot biscuits and bacon and maybe a loose woman or two, which I’d come to appreciate in my lazy and nonnamous but mostly grateful way. And one night in a saloon up at the northest end of the Chisholm Trail, after I’d just been paid off by the cattle ranchers and turned loose for the winter, a drunk army officer holding up the bar beside me set to blowing round about his general, calling him a mean low-down poltroon who didn’t give a hang about his troops, who wore out them and their horses till they all got sick and died whilst he was kissing bigwigs’ behinds and perfuming himself and chasing the ladies. “When his own soldiers got ambushed by savages, he warn’t even man enough to go back and try and rescue them!” he roared out with his fist in the air, and then his eyes crossed and he keeled over, busting his head on the bar as he dropped.

  His friends come over and dragged him away. “Delirium tremenjus,” one of them says, a scraggly little chap in fringed buckskin and pinned-up slouch hat. He picked up the drunk’s beer and finished it off, then with a twitchy wink stuffed a plug in his whiskers. This gent, who called himself Charlie, says he’s a scout for that selfsame general, and when he asks what I was doing in this hellbegot town, I says I’d just rode in with a herd of beeves. “So you’re prob’bly out of a job,” Charlie says, knowing all about it. “Our wrangler at the fort catched the choler and ain’t no more, so they’re a-looking fur somebody new. You any good with hosses?” I told him what I could do, but also that I warn’t interested in nothing to do with soldier types, and he nodded and spit a brown gob on the dirt floor and squshed it with his boot and bought me a beer and struck a lucifer to light my clay pipe by and somehow, one thing stumbling along after t’other, there I was next day in an army corral trying to set a rumbustious young mustang. Tom is always living in a story he’s read in a book so he knows what happens next, and sometimes it does. For me it ain’t like that. Something happens and then something else happens, and I’m in trouble again.

  This time the trouble come from the dandified curly-haired general with the red silk noose at his throat, watching me bust the bronc. The horse was a wild mustang with a white star in his forehead and a long thick tail that swopped the dirt when he reared. His belly was swoll from the free grazing life, the difficultest trick being to cinch the saddle round him, but I had him roped and hobbled and snubbed to a corral post, so in the end he didn’t have no choice. When he was bridled and saddled, I freed him from the ropes and, twisting his ear to keep his mind off of ought else, grabbed the saddle horn and sprung aboard. He was a feisty cretur and done what he could to buck me off him, but I finally wore him down and rode him to a standstill. The general nodded like I done what I was s’posed to do and says to get some horses ready, we was going to take them for a walk.

  It was already darkening up into an early night, and Charlie had just come riding in to declare a snowstorm rolling our way—“Like dark angels on the warpath!” he says—so I warn’t sure I’d heard the general rightly. But he was soon back and a-setting his horse in his bearskin coat and shiny calvary boots, and he fetched out his sword and stabbed the low sky with it and give the order and we all slung on a cartridge belt and marched off into the blow. I was still on the pony I’d broke, so I left Jackson in the stables so’s Star, as I
’d come to call him, could work off some of his excess belly. He was still a-quivering like he’d catched a fever, but he did not reject my company.

  That night I learnt why his troops called him General Hard Ass. We was marched all night through a power of swirling snow and nobody warn’t happy. It was so cold, a body couldn’t think two thoughts in a row. The troopers I was riding with was a hard lot, with every other word a cussword and scalps of all sizes strung from their belts like fish on a trot-line. They liked to brag what they done to the native ladies before they took their hair off. Or whilst they was taking it off. Some of them was former runaway-slave hunters, now chasing down natives whilst still lynching ex-slaves whenever they could snatch one in the neighborhood. There warn’t no bounty profit in ex-slaves no more. They said they done it for honor. Which is about the worse reason for doing whatever except, maybe, passing wind.

  The officers was all riding up front with the general, so the troopers felt free to cuss him out behind his back. But they was scared of him, too. They wanted to run away, but they knowed he didn’t tolerate it. Back as a Union officer in the war, he was already famous for hanging deserters and he had not give up the practice.

  A beefy character name of Homer was riding alongside of me, his bushy red beard peeking out through the snow heaping up there. He had a squeaky bark when he talked that minded me of people I knowed from the Ozarks back home, and when I asked, he said he might of been from there or thereabouts, but he was born a rambling man and place didn’t stick to him. As for the general, he says he was a dirty low-down liar and a fraud. “He ain’t even a general, only just a cunnel, he dresses like a floozy, and a hatefuller bully I hain’t never seen. He shot deserters without no trial and wouldn’t let doctors tend the wounded nor drug their pain whilst they was a-dying. I was there. I seen it. They court-martialed the weasely shite-poke, but here he is, sporting about free and easy, whilst the only officer who ever had the guts to stand up to him has been wholly ruint!”