Huck Out West

by Robert Coover

  Then all of a sudden the horse stopped in his tracks. He was still nervious-kneed and all a-tremble, but he dipped his head and snorted like to say I could please to get off if I wanted to. The army would a clapped me, but the Lakota they was silent and stony-faced like always. Maybe it was because I’d spoiled their joke, or maybe because they already had a notion what was going to happen next. The horse he suddenly raired up and sent me skiddering down his back, leaving me hanging on only by his mane and the thong—then away he tore like a house afire! He galloped straight for the corral fence and ripped clean through it, whacking it down with his mighty hoofs, poles and brush flying everywheres! I ducked the flying rubbage and hung onto the big stallion’s neck with my eyes squeezed shut, too scared to let go.

  He was on a tear, but he warn’t bucking no more, only galloping, and by and by I was able to peek out at where we was going. We was pounding over a desert, but when I peeked again we was suddenly splashing through a river, then tromping a wheat field, and next on the grasslands, scattering herds a buffalos and yelping coyotes. I had to scrouch down when he run through a low forest, not to get scraped off, then pull my knees up as we raced through a narrow gorge. We hammered in and out a mining and cow towns, Indian camps and army forts. There were gunshots a-plenty, but I judged we was safe, the bullets couldn’t catch us. We was going faster’n I never went before, even when riding for the Pony or shooting down the Big River in a storm.

  We run all day and when the sun started to set out a-front of us, the horse barreled towards it, like as if he wanted to go where the sun was going. Or maybe he was racing against it, seeing who’d get there first. It was dropping behind a mountain, and we clumb up that mountain wonderful fast, though we didn’t catch it. There was a lake up there and the horse held up for a long drink. Betwixt swallows, he shook his big head like he was disappointed, and looked all over the sky to see where the sun had gone. I was thirsty, too, but I couldn’t resk getting left behind if I crawled down.

  The moon was rising ever so peaceful over the lake in a sky all speckled with stars when we started back down, and I was just setting back for the dreamy ride, when we was suddenly moving flat out again, ripping through the night like we’d ripped through the day. But I warn’t hanging on to his neck no more. I warn’t scared. I was leaning into him, urging him on, slapping his shoulders and haunches, feeling him under me like a part of me. I didn’t know where we was, but I didn’t care, so long as I could stay with the horse. I ain’t never been happier. I didn’t want the night never to end.

  We run all night and some a the next day. The rising sun ca’med the horse’s excited spirit and by and by he slowed to a canter and then to a brisk walk. He seemed mighty pleased with himself. Maybe he reckoned he’d won the race after all.

  There was a river up ahead, glittering in the morning sunlight, and I walked him over to it. I found I could do this with nothing but my knees and a little tug on the thong. We got down into the water up to his withers and freshed ourselves up. I nearly drownded on the Big River back home, but I didn’t. Instead, I come to love the river, though the river never loved me. That’s how it was with this horse. Ever so splendid and mighty, but indifferent as running water.

  Even when it was wet, his coat warn’t a shiny dark, but one that was murky like a secret or like a river at night, witch-dark as Jim would say, and it had lighter flecks like when shore lights glimmered on the Big River’s surface. I knowed his name then.

  We moved towards the sun as it rose up over us, and directly we could see the tribe’s encampment. It was scattered out over the plains like pointy pegs on a giant cribbage board. Hundreds of horses wandered among the lodges and in and out of them. It was a welcome sight, but it warn’t home. I didn’t have none. Wouldn’t never.

  I was saddle sore without no saddle, beat out and well broke in even if the horse warn’t, but I was setting tall and easy as we entered the camp. They come running out of their lodges to meet us. They all wanted to touch the horse, as if they warn’t for certain he was real, and the horse snorted and shook his head and scared them. They wanted to know what I had seen on t’other side. I says it was mighty lively. They nodded very solemn at that, though I didn’t know what I meant and I didn’t know what they meant nuther.

  Later, Eeteh says he was glad I come back, but he didn’t expect me to, so he told them when we went tearing off that we was going to the land of the dead. Coyote was disguised as a horse and he was taking me there to show me the sights. Now they’ll ask me what I seen there, he says, so I should think up what stories I could tell them. I don’t have to make nothing up, I says. I really was somewheres else.

  CHAPTER XIII

  HEN THE GENERAL left the Gulch and went back east with Deadwood’s glittery rock, he wrote up about it and took the credit, though it was really the loony old prospector who set off the Black Hills Gold Rush. Not that he had no profit in it but a tale or two. It swept right over him like that hurry-cane of his, but this time it didn’t pick him up, it knocked him down. A body has to live in one to know why they call it a rush. One day there’s a few shaggy sad-eyed loafers setting in a shanty sucking up home brew and wondering how the heck they’ll ever get back home again and what they’d do if they got there, and the next day there’s a million people stampeeding in and crowding up the crick shores and hillsides, claiming one patch or nuther with handwrote wooden stakes and fighting each other over them, and then another million comes piling in right afterwards with their wagons and pack mules to try to make money off the first million.

  I’d waked before sun-up that morning and had set out my trot-lines and clumb up on Ne Tongo with a couple of whisky-jugs and rode out through the hills to the tribe’s lodges to do some trading for Zeb and have a smoke with Eeteh and maybe some a them fried turnips they’re so proud of. But the lodges warn’t there. Only ashes from small cooking fires spotted about, a few still smoldering like the tribe had packed up and left in a hurry.

  I warn’t certain what made them decamp like that, though I could guess, and when I rode back to the Gulch I seen I guessed right. There was tents and lean-tos and wagons and mules and people swarmed up everywheres, with more rolling in every minute. And noise. The Gulch was the silentest place I’d knowed since back on the Big River deep in the night, and now there was hammering and clanging and sawing and horses whinnying and donkeys hee-hawing and all manner of shouting and cussing and arguing, a general lunatic hubbub. Everybody wanted to get rich but only a few would, if any, so they warn’t polite. I heard the crackle of gunfire going off somewheres, sounding like a prairie brush fire, and I knowed it warn’t the last I’d hear.

  When I reached my tepee, there were three raggedy men squeezed into it, frying up a pan of fish which I reckoned come direct off of my trot-lines. The tepee was smoky because they hadn’t opened the tent flap above the fire. One of them had a black eyepatch and a row of gold teeth like he was doing his banking there, and another with a wooden leg was smoking my stone pipe. They was all three sporting scars got from fights or from getting catched thieving. Pegleg’s greasy hair hung down over his ears which was both cut off. Their guns was close to hand, but they seen the rifle I was carrying and where my finger was.

  “This yer tent is occupied,” Eyepatch says in the snarly way like old Pap used to talk. His black hair was tied into a knot at the back and hung to his shoulders like the tail of a pony. He wore a black bandanna round his head and gold loops in his ears like a river pirate, and his shirt was black. All he lacked was his pal’s wooden leg. All three was trying to look like they warn’t about to jump for their guns the moment I blinked. “That’s right,” I says, “I live here.” They says they judged it was only some damn injun’s and was surprised a white man, if I WAS white, was living such savage ways. “But we left you a corner over there by the back flap, chief. It ain’t exceedin’ clean, but it’s all yourn.” They laughed a mean laugh at that.

  “Oh, I ain’t staying,” I says. “I don’t use
it no more, not since my brother Jacob died in here. It don’t feel right.”

  “Your brother? What was wrong with him?”

  “He got the pox and there warn’t no doctors round here to cure him from it, even if they could of. It was dreadful to watch him go. He screamed all the way t’other side.”

  “Pox? You mean, small—?”

  “Warn’t nothing small ABOUT it! Jake had the gashliest sores you ever seen, all bubbling up from head to toe like hot springs, and he spitted up green stuff that had something crawling inside it. It most made me down sick to see my own brother in such a woesome state. His only relief was sucking on that pipe you’re smoking.” Soon’s I said so, Pegleg warn’t smoking it no more, only staring at it through his tangle of greasy hair like it might shoot him. “His birddog Ranger wouldn’t leave his side and the poor cretur catched it, too. It let out a nasty drool like Jake’s and its eyes filled up with pus so’s it couldn’t see. Him and Jake they died at the same time, the dog’s paw on my brother’s chest. It was ever so sadful. I most wish you’d been here to see it. They was a-laying together, right there where you’re setting.” The one setting where I was pointing jumped up and brushed off the seat of his pants, mumbling something around the two or three brown teeth left in his mouth about how he s’posed at least the fish fresh from the crick was in good health, and I says they probably was. “Jacob used that frypan for a spittoon as he was a-dying, but I rinsed it off in the crick and drownded most a them crawly things.” Thinking about that poor faithful dog a-dying by its master, even though there warn’t no such animal, had set my eyes to watering up, and that done it for them, they was all three out of there on the double, spewing out the fish they’d been chawing.

  The rest of the day, I kept Tongo with me lest he get stole, walking him by his rawhide thong through the strangers crowding in. Tongo wouldn’t let nobody but me ride him, but a body who’d got throwed or kicked might be mad enough to want to shoot the horse that made such a damfool of him, so I didn’t plan to let him never out of my sight. As we walked along, I explained to Tongo what was happening, so as to get him of a disposition to give up his pasture and move on again, and he shook his head from time to time and snorted. He didn’t like the looks of things, nuther.

  The fortune hunters was still rolling noisily into the Gulch like they was coming to the circus, most of them tearing off into the hills with their picks and pans and wooden stakes. One country jake carried only a pitchfork and a big wheelbarrow for toting all the gold he was going to dig up like potatoes. He was wearing muddy brogans and a floppy straw hat just like the ones I used to wear back in St. Petersburg, and he looked a fool like I must a done. I couldn’t let the tepee out of my sight and had to go back down there from time to time to make sure nobody else warn’t thinking about moving in. It looked like poor old Jacob was going to die a thousand deaths before the day was done.

  Most of the new emigrants was heading out to mine the cricks and hills, though some was setting up to mine the miners. A stout man with bushy yaller whiskers put up a sign saying he was a banker and also a dentist at a dollar a pull. One chap come hauling in an old shackly wagon all weighted down with painted signs, mirrors, doorknobs, pump handles, and fancy wall clocks, even some hinged doors and old chawed-up hitching posts, which he says he’d cleaned out from a deserted mining ghost town. There was lots of wagons filled with borrowed truck like that. It was like the towns theirselves had hitched up their pants when they got left behind and had went chasing after their restless townsfolk.

  By the middle of the afternoon, even with many of the prospectors out digging and panning, the Gulch was filled up to near half as big as St. Petersburg and twice as ugly, and it got ever thicker and nastier by the hour. A body could learn more cusswords in five minutes than in a lifetime back on the river. There warn’t no women around, so the whole camp become a public outhouse. The banker-dentist with the yaller whiskers had set out a plank table and added a new sign saying he was also offering a friendly game of cards. The ghost-town scavenger was nailing up a storefront, startling up all the birds and people was shooting them. Under the falling birds, a long bony man in a black stovepipe hat come riding in with a wagonload of pine boxes which looked like they might probably be coffins, and folks stepped out of his way and let him pass.

  Word had got out that General Hard Ass’s famous chunk of ore had been found by Deadwood, and each new arrival dragged the old prospector out to show where he found it, and so he was famous in his way but he warn’t happy. I lettered a wooden sign that claimed him the spot, and most everybody respected that, like enough because they didn’t believe the rock was really born there and he didn’t nuther. Most of them looked up into the hills above the Gulch, trying to cipher out where it might of fell from. Some of them offered him a share of their stake if he could fetch them to the source. One of the old loafers passed by and asked Deadwood with a wink at the others to show them another rock from that giant lode he struck. “No, I ain’t taking no resks,” he says. “I put ’em all where that bandit cunnel can’t find them. I done a good job of it. It’ll take me more’n a week to find ’em myself.”

  The sun scrunched down behind the hills like it dreaded to see what was going to happen next, and throngs of prospectors, empty-handed and feeling grumbly, begun drifting back, scowling round to make sure nobody had beat them to a find. It was early spring and still chilling down when the sun dipped. Open fires was built in the streets and birds and small animals was spitted over them. You had to watch where you walked not to stomp on the heads and innards being flung about. The plank bar in Zeb’s shack was crowded round with gruff sweaty men toting picks and shovels like battle-axes, a bonanza for Zeb maybe but not for his old regulars, who couldn’t even squeeze in the door and was apt to get a drubbing if they tried too hard. The prices had shot up, but Zeb, surrounded by ornery bands of strangers fighting each other for custody of his goods, did not look all that happy, even if he was getting rich.

  Deadwood was setting on a three-legged stool outside Zeb’s shack, studying his fob watch from time to time in the half-light, popping it open, snapping it shut, and regaling the drunks with his stretchers. Deadwood was about all what they had for entertainment, and sometimes they spotted him a ten-penny glass of whisky or a dribble of whatever they dug out of their saddlebags—“To grease up his wheels,” as they said. As me and Tongo passed by, they was asking him how the hole in his vest got burnt. He says it happened when he was defending the Alley-mo, his gun getting so hot he had to drop it in his pocket to cool it off and it set the vest on fire. But then Davy Crockett sent him off to find Sam Houston and bring back help, which was how him and them other fellers lost the Battle of the Alley-mo and all got killed. “Ole Davy was a passable tale teller, but he warn’t worth a mouthful a cold ashes as a cunnel. He’s got a plague of ornery Messykins flooding over the wall, and what does he go’n do? He sends his best dern shooter off shaking wild gooses.”

  “You purty good with a gun, Deadwood?” someone asked.

  “I was handy. They useter call me Dead-Eye Deadwood. I got stories wrote in books about me.”

  I’d wanted to let him know about my new brother Jacob and his tragic disease so’s he didn’t speak to the contrary, but it warn’t no use, he was wound up for the night. I seen Eyepatch and his two pals looking me over like they was measuring me up for one a them pine boxes, so me and Ne Tongo headed back down to the tepee to see what vittles they might a left us for supper and to consider what we was going to do next. “Tongo,” I says, “we got no place to go and we got to go there.” He snorted like he understood, but like he warn’t no more pleased than what I was.

  Who I found in my tepee this time was Eeteh, setting in the shadows and sampling from one of the jugs I’d laid aside for the tribe, his tomahawk in his lap. I was ever so glad to see him and I told him so. I told him I’d went looking for him with that jug and found everybody gone, and he says he was glad I didn’t get there sooner be
cause they was so tore up about all these stampeeding white folks they might have scalped me on the spot.

  “Even if I was bringing them whisky?”

  Eeteh nodded. “All crazy,” he says, looking up at me through the stringy black hair hanging loose over his face and shoulders from under his headband. All the tribe wore long hair, they allowed it roused up their spirits, but the others kept it braided. Eeteh didn’t like nothing knotted up, and let it hang long and snarly, like mine. He never wore no eagle feathers in it, because they was tokens a killed enemies, and he never killed no one that he knowed of. The vest he wore was really an old fringed and beaded buckskin shirt that a cousin was wearing when he got killed in a battle. Eeteh tore the bloody sleeves off and worked some porkypine quills into the beadwork, which he says is who he is. Needley. “Tribe on warpath, Hahza. Want guns, no whisky.” Hahza is my real name in Lakota. When Kiwi first heard it, she busted out laughing and give me a punch where it hurt, and that set the whole tribe off laughing, except for Eeteh who said that his name was also a joke for everybody, so for him it meant the same as “brother.” Eeteh had brung along some buffalo jerky and we chawed on it, while sipping at Zeb’s liquor. “Long Hair,” he says. “Want war.”

  “I know it,” I says. “When he rode in here, he had a thousand calvary boys with him, and I judge they ain’t far away, just itching for something to shoot at. It’s all too many for me. The general ain’t spotted me yet, but I don’t aim to let that happen. I’m riding out soon’s I’m packed up.”

  Eeteh nodded and says he wants to go with me. He says the tribe with its glory fancies was driving him as crazy as they was, and Coyote told him that him and me had to leave before it become our fate to shoot at each other. But he says we wouldn’t get far if we didn’t find some guns for them because that’s what they sent him here to do, and he don’t want to think about what they’d do to him if he didn’t at least bring them back a few rifles. “They give me money. Silver.” He held up the soft leather pouch and jangled it. “Help, Hahza.”