Huck Out West

by Robert Coover

  Tom set the drummer in his black derby to rattling away, and ordered the two robbers be dragged out of Zeb’s shack. They seen straight off what was about to happen, but their ankles was roped together and when they tried to run, they could only hop and fall down. All the men in the street was laughing at the sight and hollering out friendly cusswords, and then tripping them up so’s they’d fall again.

  As the crowds gathered, Tom stubbed out his seegar, put on a pair a wire-frame spectacles, set his hat straight over his scowl, and declared that the two prisoners was notorious murderers, highwaymen, skulduggerers, army deserters, blastemers and perverts. He says he has been tracking them for months and has been appointed by the American Congress to bring them directly to justice.

  “We ain’t perverts,” one of them says, and the other says, “We ain’t none a them other things nuther.”

  Tom peered over his eye-glasses and laid into them then with slathers of insofarases and wherefores, and though they couldn’t cipher out whatever he was talking about, they knowed it was going against them. They was both badly marked up, the sad stories of their lives carved into their hides like gravestone writing, scars drawing half-hid pictures of past crimes in their black beards. You couldn’t hardly tell them apart in their raggedy shirts and black waistcoats, except one of them had a gray ponytail hanging down to his bony shoulders, whilst t’other’s neck was sunburnt and bare.

  Tom named all the scores a people they robbed and killed, including, with a sober wink at me, his Aunt Sally Phelps. I ain’t heard that and it made me terrible sadful to learn it. He swore in one of his gang members named Oren as a maternial witness to a famous Oregon Trail robbery and murder near Julesburg, which was one of the wickedest places we had to ride through when we was working for the Pony. Tom described it to a T. Oren hooked his thumbs in the straps of his bib overalls and called the killings that he seen “the terrible Devil’s Dive Massacree,” and says he lost his dear old pap on that dreadful occasion. “The old man was riding shotgun for the stagecoach and he throwed up his arms in surrender, but got croolly blowed away by them wicked buggers. That there,” Oren says, pointing, “was his fob watch.”

  “Well, I guess we don’t need to wait for justice no longer,” Tom says.

  “Wait! I ain’t done nothin’!” Ponytail yelped.

  “Of course,” says Tom, stroking his jaw and looking at one of them, then t’other, “we can’t be sure which one of them done the actul killing.”

  “I never done it! HE done it ALL!” screamed Ponytail, pointing at his partner.

  “What are you saying, you snivelin’ low-down back-stabber?” says t’other one. “We warn’t even there!”

  “I seen him! I SEEN HIM!” screamed Ponytail, his pointing finger all quivery. “Look! It’s HIM’S got the fob watch! HE murdered ’em all!”

  “Consarn it, you traiterous bloodthirsty liar!” yells Redneck. “It was YOU done all the killin’! I says to take pity, fer God’s sake, spare them pore innercent people! But you cain’t wait t’cut their throats!”

  “You lined up all them men and boys and shot ’em like they was bottles on a stump, you mizzerbul hyena!”

  “It was YOU done that, you filthy piece a ratmuck! ’Member that lady whose belly you carved open jest to see what her dang innards looked like?”

  Wyndell and Oren had already tied the robbers’ legs and elbows together and raised the two of them up on the scaffold platform. Wyndell was laying a prayer on them, but they warn’t listening. They was back-to-back, but still screaming at each other over their shoulders, and never stopped even when Tom fitted the ropes round their necks. It warn’t my intention to get them hung—that warn’t my intention for nobody—but that’s what happened. The rope burns on my own throat was tingling and I could feel again that fall into nothing, when I turned my back and heard the robbers drop. Somebody grunted. Might a been the robbers theirselves.

  CHAPTER XXII

  HEN TOM WAS gone east, there warn’t no way to tell one day from t’other. They just went a-slipping along like drift logs on the Big River, and near as dark. But now Tom was back, and the day was alive again, lit up and frisky. In less’n one of them, he rescued a pard from a lynching, showed off his shooting and lasso tricks, got himself elected mayor-govner of Deadwood Gulch, thought up a bunch a new laws, captured gangs a thieves and murderers, tried and hung some robbers, organized a funeral in a bran-new burying ground that he conjured himself, and let fly an amazing yellocution for an old whisky-maker he never even knowed.

  And he warn’t done. Once Tom Sawyer set off adventuring, a body couldn’t hold him back. Whilst we was still lowering old Zeb into the ground—Zeb only had one gold tooth and, before they closed his box, I seen he didn’t have that one no more nuther—Tom asked me what happened to the traps and scrotum bag full a money stole last night from the old fellow? I says that probably his murderers has it all, and Tom says, “If so, they ain’t parading it. Le’s go find where he got killed while there’s still light out!”

  Tom was in a sweat to do that right when he was still thinking about it, he couldn’t rest till his doing catched up to his thinking, so he signaled Wyndell to hurry up his amens and get to throwing in the dirt—“He ain’t called Wyndy for nothing,” he says—and next thing we was on our way. Tom decided to take along one of the murderers to show us what they done with their plunder. He chose Bill because he judged he’d crack quickest once he was away from the others, and with his shooting hand ruined he warn’t likely to cause no trouble. Tom and Bear tied Bill’s hands behind him, set him on an old mule, and slung a rope round his scrawny neck, which Tom says was to remember him of the meaning of life. Tom clumb up on his big white stallion Storm, who he says he named Spirit a the Storm after a famous pirate ship he once read about. He give me a skittery young pony the same style of our Express ponies, and the three of us rode the back trail out from the camp like Zeb done the night before.

  After setting the saddle a while, I growed customed to it, but it warn’t comfortable. I was missing Tongo badly and worrying about him, and Eeteh, too. I didn’t know if they was alive nor dead. Them two was what I had like adventures, and I wanted to brag to Tom about them and go with him to look for them and rescue them if they was in trouble, but after what he said up on the gallows, I was afraid he might be disappointed with me and go away again. I was ever so happy he was back, I didn’t want nothing to spoil it, so I didn’t say nothing, not yet.

  As we was moving slowly along, watching for what we could see, I says to Tom I was nation sorry to hear about his Aunt Sally.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “You know, them two robbers that KILLED her!”

  Tom laughed. “Aunt Sally’s still kicking, Huck. She’s got almighty old and cranky and she can’t remember five minutes ago, but she can still haul off and give a body a rememberable larruping.”

  “But the robbery, the massacre—!”

  “Aw, Huck, there warn’t no such. We made it all up. I thought you seen that. I set the whole yarn down in Julesburg just so’s you’d have a laugh. Ain’t you got no sense a humor?” He bit off the end of a fresh seegar, and leaned away from Bill to spit it out. “Maybe we can round up forty of these scoundrels and get them all to fessing up to one awful crime or nother like them robbers done and set a new one-day hanging record,” he says with a grin, lighting up his seegar. I was also grinning, but I didn’t know why.

  I reckoned the murderers had been waiting for the old distiller and begun following him as soon as he crumb out a the ravine, but they might of chased along behind him for a time till he got further alone. That would of give Zeb time to do something with the money and goods he was carrying after he heard the robbers back of him, so I kept my eyes peeled for hiding places. Bill had his head down and warn’t giving no sign. When Tom poked him with his rifle barrel and asked him what they done with all their booty, he cussed and says there warn’t none.

  “Must of been the Cap’
n who murdered the old fellow,” Tom says to me, but loud enough for Bill to hear. “He’s the one’s got money in his pockets.”

  “He’s the one,” says Bill. “But he ain’t got nothin’ in his pockets except holes to push his fingers through to claw his itches with.”

  We passed an old oak with a bole hole in it. On a hunch, I stuck my fist in, hoping only there warn’t no rattlers coiled up inside, and I fetched out some pocket watches and a string a black flea-bit scalps, some with dried-up ears on them. “Well, at least we ain’t rode out here for nothing,” Tom says with a laugh, pocketing the watches and settling the scalps over his saddle. Bill didn’t look happy at what he seen. “You judge these was the whisky-maker’s?”

  “He was packing along any goods he could barter with. I reckonize them scalps.”

  I asked him where was Pegleg getting buried, and Tom says he ain’t. He says the doctor desecks them. “I think Molly also eats them, the mushier parts anyhow, like their brains, livers, and oysters. The old sawbones calls it going to market.” I says I hope I don’t never need his close attention. Tom says Doc first went west with some settlers who got caught up a mountain in a long winter snowstorm and was obleeged to eat each other, nor else starve to death, and he developed an appetite for it. But he’s a good doctor. He was dislicensed as a doctor for doing unlegal favors for the working girls.

  We come on a roughed-up patch on top of a ravine with hoof marks tromping on other hoof marks in the mud. “Probably happened here,” I says, and Tom set his seegar in his jaws and clumb down off of Storm.

  A chill breeze struck up and the sun sneaked behind a cloud and I felt something cold and wet on my neck like getting licked by a ghost. But not Zeb’s ghost. Abaddon’s. How the dog sometimes greeted me when I give him a hug. I seen again his slit throat and horrible smile, and it give me the shakes so bad I had to slide down off of the pony before I fell off.

  We could see some a Zeb’s goods scattered about in the ravine below, so we hobbled Bill’s mule and crawled down to look around. It was mostly just Zeb’s old rags and spilled vittles, but I did come on his yist-mash bucket. It was still half-full of muck, with maybe enough live yist left in the stillage to seed a new batch, so I hoisted it up and toted it along. I says it was Zeb’s mother, and Tom says, well then, we can charge them with mattresside. “We can bile them in oil, if we got any. That’s what the books say.”

  Tom raired his nose and sniffed. “I smell something else,” he says, and he crawled deeper down in the ravine. “And here it is!” he shouted from the bottom.

  It was already turning dark down there, but when I crept closer I seen it: the carcass of Zeb’s old packhorse with Tom’s fist up its backside. “Hah! We hit a seam, Huck!” He pulled his arm out and held up what he found in there: Eeteh’s soft leather money pouch, even fatter’n when Eeteh give it to me! “Filthy LOO-ker,” Tom howls with a moustachioed grin, his seegar bobbing.

  “How’d you ever think to poke around in there?”

  “Well, I asked myself what I’D do if I was being chased by robbers and wanted to hide my goods. I s’posed they’d take my horse and everything else, except maybe this old rackabones, and there warn’t many other places I could hide nothing on or in him.” There was a small crick down there, and Tom scrouched down and washed the bag and his arm off in it. “You’d have to be crazy to dig for treasure up a packhorse’s arsehole,” he says, and winked up at me again. He says he don’t think Sarah Sod ever thought of that one.

  When we crawled back on top, we seen that Bill’s mule had somehow kicked free of his hobbles and was meandering sluggishly on down the trail into the dimness. Bill, still bound, was pushing the mule on with desperate grunts and humpings. I felt ha’nted again by Abaddon and seemed to hear him snarling like he done before he took a chaw on a body’s leg. Tom was counting through the money in Eeteh’s pouch as if he didn’t care no more about Bill. Maybe he was letting him go free. No, he warn’t. Without really looking at him, Tom turned and shot him, then swung up on his big white horse and begun to head back to the camp.

  “Wait!” I says. Bill was a-laying still and lonely on the trail, the loop of rope loose round his neck, his arms tied behind his back. Abaddon’s ghost had stopped snarling, though my neck rope burns was itching again. “Don’t you want to see if he’s dead or not?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “But why’d you have to do that?”

  “DIDN’T have to. But he was stealing our mule. Better’n taking him back and hanging him for it, ain’t it?” Tom was watching me, a sad smile on his face. “He’s a hard case, Huck. He tried to lynch you. And he’d do it again if we give him half a chance. We ain’t doing that.”

  “But you said everything was going to be LEGAL now and on the UP’N UP!”

  “And so it is and will be, Huck. Now, if you want to help, you can go get that mule. We’ll lead him back where we borrowed it.”

  The mule was wandering on down the twilit trail, but I give a pull on his bridle and he swung back to go our way without no fuss. Bill was facedown with his hands tied behind him and a hole in the back of his head. I picked him up and slung him over the mule’s back. Tom don’t say not to. He only says to untie him.

  “Let me tell you a story, Huck,” Tom says on the way back to the camp. “There was an injun tribe in a mining town down in the southwest where I was working like a lawyer. The injuns warn’t doing nothing, except just being ugly to look at. They didn’t belong. So a few local business fellows hired up a mob of Mexicans to go with them to the injun camp and kill them all. It was a dreadful slaughter, mostly of women and little boys and girls. You may a read about it. They clove their heads open with machetes, emptied out their bellies, shot all their animals, burnt their tepees, stole their julery, and peeled off scalps to sell in the market. Baby scalps was specially profitable. The businessmen come home to the mining town, bragging about the killing they done and showing off their scalps. They got arrested and charged with organizing the massacre, so’s, you know, everything’d be on the up’n up.” Tom’s seegar had went out, so he lit it up again. “I got hired as their lawyer and it took some smarts, but I got them all off scot-free.”

  “But warn’t they guilty?”

  “Of COURSE they was guilty, Huck. You ain’t paying ATTENTION! I’m telling you about the UP’N UP. The law is amazing. Like magic. I was famous for what I done. They made me a judge after, and one a them business fellows he become a govner or some such crinimal.” He seen me shaking my head, and he shook his and says, “Trouble is, Huck, you never growed up. You’re still living in some dream of a world that don’t exist.”

  Jaws was dropping and everybody was staring when Tom rode back into the camp with all them scalps dangling from his saddle. When people asked, Tom didn’t say nothing, he just pointed at me. He walked Storm over towards the picture-taker, smiling steady, and waited for him to get his camera ready and take his photograph.

  We left Bill and the mule off with Bear and, on the way down towards where my lodge was, we stopped at Deadwood’s shack to give him back the fob watch. Deadwood set to crying, he was so happy.

  “That old slant-jawed sourdough looks part injun to me, Huck,” Tom says as we continued on down to the crick, and I says, “We’re all mixed breeds, ain’t we, one kind or nuther.”

  Tom raired his head and scowled down at me in an unpardlike way. “I ain’t,” he says.

  Whilst we was gone, Tom’s pals had pitched up a large army tent for us where my lodge-poles’d stood. It was big as a horse shed. There were cots and blankets in it and mirrors and washstands and even a bottle a prime saloon whisky from the States setting on a table like a little soldier at attention. “It’s very grand,” I says, and Tom he shrugged and says he favored a hotel better. I favored my tepee better and was lonely for it, but I didn’t say so. It wouldn’t a fit Tom’s style.

  Outside, there was a fire snapping away with an antelope spitted over it. Hog nuts, prairie turnips and
wild onions was slow-roasting in the coals. Tom fetched the whisky along, took a long pull, and handled me the bottle. It warn’t the equal of Zeb’s home brew, but on a day that seemed’d never end, it was most welcome. Bill laying there on the trail with a hole in his head and Tom’s story about the up’n up was still festering up my thoughts, but the whisky eased them away. The sting of the rope burns, too. The birds was doing their day’s-end bragging and, far off, a body could hear coyotes howling in their soft sadful way. It was nigh as peaceful as rafting down the Big River. I felt like Deadwood felt—like I’d got my fob watch back.

  Down by the shore, near some smaller canvas tents that Tom’s pals was living in, there was a couple of fellows working a big sluce box to pan for gold. When Tom went down to talk to them, I judged he was aiming to chase them off, but he offered them a swig from the bottle and waved me to come on down. “Show him what you got there, Peewee,” he says. “See them specks there in the drag?” With the night settling in, it was hard to see nothing at all, but the specks did let off a peculiar spark. “Them’s colors. Plasser gold. Might be the richest gravels in the crick. You may be a millionaire, Huck.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” I says. I grinned back when they all laughed, but it warn’t a joke. Them gold specks was telling me that the day’s good luck might be fixing to change back again.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  HAT NIGHT, ME and Tom laid in our cots smoking and sipping bottle whisky by lamplight and gabbling for hours. We talked about when we was boys on the Big River and all the mischief we done, about the ha’nted house and the graveyard and the awful things we seen there, about our adventures when we run away to ride for the Pony, then everything we done since. It was just like old times and we was both feeling mighty happy. “This is great,” Tom says. “Everything’s going to be just like before, Hucky! I promise!”