Huck Out West

by Robert Coover

  Tom told me about how St. Petersburg was emptied out now, leaving only the losers behind. “Ain’t nothing happening there,” he says. “The place is dead.” I says that sounds perfect, and told him about the lonely cattle trails I rode after he was gone and about the wagon trains and the hellion and the bullwhacker. Tom roared with laughter and says, “I’d of liked to’ve had THAT gal working for ME!”

  Tom wanted to know everything about this place he was now mayor-govner of, and I told him what all I could think of, but there warn’t much left that hadn’t lost its trueness. Most people in the Gulch had only just got here a day or two before, and more wagons was rolling in every minute, erasing everything that used to be. But Tom wanted to hear it all: about old Zeb, the pioneer miners and the Lakota tribes, about Deadwood, General Hard Ass, the yaller rock. “Warn’t worth shucks,” I says. “Felt more like a cork ball than a stone.”

  “Blossom rock, Huck. They call them floaters because you throw them in the water and that’s what they do. Sure-’nough sign a gold ore.” Tom always knowed things I never heard of. Eeteh had a story about Coyote throwing a rock into the water and saying if it didn’t sink, everybody’d live forever. Too bad Coyote didn’t know about floaters, he could a saved the whole world. “I bet when the colonel come and took the rock from the old cross-eyed sourdough, the first thing he done was heft it.”

  “That’s right. He done that.”

  “Where there’s a floater, there’s a seam. Ever hear of somebody finding one?”

  “People’s scratching about for something like that, but I never seen it nor went looking. I s’pose a seam’s something like a stitch in the ground?”

  “Well, you could say so. Though sometimes it’s more like a stitch in the side.”

  “I know what you mean. That’s what all these emigrants piling in has been like for me.” I told him about finding Eyepatch and his two pals in my tent that first morning and how I chased them out with a story about a brother who died in there from the pox. I says I was trying to think up the sort of lies Tom Sawyer might a told. Tom laughed and says I ain’t never been a slouch at stretchers myself. The Cap’n was one a the low-downest bad men he ever struck, he says, as mean and ornery as they come, but what he had was STYLE. “It’s there or it ain’t, Huck, you can’t grow it.” He says he made him think of river pirates back home, though he couldn’t name none who actuly had an eye patch, so maybe he was only thinking about pirates he’d read about from books.

  “You recollect how little Tommy Barnes come to your robber gang meeting dressed up like a pirate?” I says. “He had a wire ring in his nose, a birchwood sword, and a paper hat with a skull and crossbones inked on it!”

  Tom snorted. “But then the cry-baby wouldn’t prick his dern finger for a blood oath!”

  “Ben Rogers said he should oughta walk the plank for that!”

  We both laughed, thinking about little Tommy Barnes. Tom drunk from the bottle and passed it across to me. There were wrinkles round his eyes now, and sometimes a kind of sadfulness crept in, even when he was laughing. “Well, Tommy Barnes ain’t no more, Huck. He enlisted into the Union army to get the bonus they was offering, then deserted and volunteered at another recruiting station with a different name for another bonus. He come home to St. Petersburg bragging about that, picking up girls by throwing his extra money round. They pretty soon cleaned him out, though, so he tried to enlist for a third time somewheres else and got caught. They accused him as a deserter and a bounty jumper and shot him with a firing squad.” What I seen in my head was half a dozen leather-headed bullies with field rifles aimed at a little cry-baby in a paper pirate hat who still peed his pants. I felt the jolt of it when they fired and says I was dreadful sorry to hear it and passed the bottle back.

  Tom he only laughed again and says that Tommy Barnes was a hero for half the town who thought Yanks and Rebs should both go to hell. He took a long drink from the bottle, and by and by he says, “My old pal Joe Harper, though, he was a genuine hero. The Shucker of Pea Ridge, they called him back in St. Petersburg after he shot a general up there. They made him a corpral major and loadened him down with medals, and then he got killed on Graveyard Road in Vicksburg, leading a ladder assault on a stockade. I allowed all them medals made him slow afoot. I was there when they fetched his body back up the river by steamboat. They raised money in town to make a statue of him. I give them four bits.”

  I says that I met up with a young soldier out here with Joe’s family name, and he’s dead, too. All Tom had to say about that was that, if he was dead, he didn’t care to know him, and he handled me the bottle and relit his seegar.

  Joe Harper was the boy me and Tom run away with to Jackson’s Island to live the pirate life, and we thought back on that a while. Tom says he still had some cutlesses and a pirate flag that he borrowed from a museum, thinking he might give up the West some day and go to sea like a pirate, and says maybe we could do that together. I says great, let’s go. Jackson’s Island was where I learnt both him and Joe to smoke. It made them dog-sick, and that give me a laugh. But I showed them other things, too. They didn’t know nothing about living in the rough, just like I didn’t know nothing about school and church and all them sivilizing concerns. I done most a the work, but it warn’t LIKE work. I was Finn the Red-Handed, and I ain’t never been happier. Joe and Tom they was running away from home, but I didn’t have no home to run from and none to go back to. I was at home right there on Jackson’s Island. They was looking for buried treasure. For me, the treasure was out a-front of our faces, plain as sun and water. I took a swallow a Tom’s whisky in memory of it and of old Joe Harper. And of Dan Harper, too.

  Our stories was all mostly sorrowful ones about old pals dying and I didn’t know if I should tell him about Ben Rogers getting his skull clove in for chasing after a little Cherokee girl. But I did, and Tom he says, “Good for old Ben. Way a chap OUGHT to go, not in some stinking war. I hope he done the little heathen’s privates some serious damage before they massacred him, so’s he never died in vain.” I was going to say what we was doing in the Cherokee Nation in the first place, and about how famous the Missouri Kid’s bandit gang was because I promised Ben I would, but Tom blowed a lungful a seegar smoke up at the tent roof and says, “Ever smoke opyum, Huck?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I had a Chinese lady friend who give me something for my pipe that was mighty relaxing.”

  “That was probably it. I mostly only lay with white women as a rule, but one night in Tucson I ain’t got no choice. Half the girls was sick, the other half was already bought and bouncing, and all that was left in the crib was a scrawny old Chinese granny, who was maybe a hundred years old. She drugged me with opyum and sent me down what she says was eight folding paths to heck-stasy. The opyum left a body feeling dead with its spirit floating over it. I was scared, not having no control over whatever was happening next, and sometimes what she done hurt like blazes, but in the end it was most amazing. I ain’t even reached the fourth folding, when I’m geysering like old Yallerstone. She says she learnt the trick from Confusion. Was it like that for you?”

  “No, Nookie was more interested in giving me baths.” Even then, laying there in Tom’s tent, I could feel her spidery hands on me. “She spent a considerable time at it and when I asked her what she was doing, she says she was muddytating.”

  “Muddytating on what?”

  “On my backside, mainly.”

  “Hah! Is that all you done?”

  “No, but it’s what I most remember.” I also seemed to hear her screams when the bad man come back and grabbed her away. I never actully heard them, I was guiding emigrants out on the trail, I only seen the ruins afterwards, but still they ha’nted me, and they was ha’nting me now.

  There warn’t many girls and women in my life. Mostly, I ducked and run. It’s what I told Tom to do, too, but he didn’t pay me no heed. He up and married one. I took another swallow and passed the bottle over and asked about her, and h
e says Becky wanted babies, so he left her back in St. Pete, doing that. “I got things to do in this world so long’s I’m in it, Huck. Ain’t got time for family. Don’t believe in it. Ain’t it funny how people think they’re creating up something new, when all they’re making is more miserable copies of themselves?”

  “You just a copy?”

  “Hope not, but I can’t say. I never knowed my pa and my ma died young. I allow I mostly made myself. I surely ain’t no copy of Aunt Polly!”

  We laughed, thinking about his crotchety old Aunt Polly, and the way she’d grab a body by the ear and crack his head with her thimble, though I was also thinking about Eeteh and whatever happened to him when I run the wrong way this morning. Nobody never mentioned him nor the horses all day, so I could hope he was still alive and I might find him again. I so wanted him and Tom to be friends, but Tom still thought about Eeteh’s people like he thought about Injun Joe.

  “You remember my old girlfriend Amy Lawrence?” Tom says, and sets the bottle down on the ground beside his cot. “Well, I seen something of her again when I was in St. Pete. Amy ended up marrying Johnny Miller, Gracie’s brother, and after he’d got his virgin tumble, Johnny left her. Him and her pa both headed west on the same wagon train and ain’t neither one never been seen since. Like my pa. Or, well, like you’n me, ain’t it? Adventuring’s more natural to a fellow than homebodying. Amy’s just a ten-dollar whore now, though she don’t call herself that. That’s a heap a money, I know, but she’s worth it. She ain’t so pretty like before, but she’s got some new angles, and she throws in a home-cooked supper with her and her ma, who sleeps in the same room as Amy when she ain’t doing business, and sometimes when she is.”

  I says about seeing Becky not so long ago over in Wyoming, and he grunts and says she must a run away again. I seen he don’t care to talk about her, so I asked him, if he was out here all this time, why he didn’t come looking for me, and he says what am I talking about, he ain’t STOPPED doing that since he rode back here with his new law diploma in his mochila, but I didn’t leave no tracks nowheres. He finally reckoned I must a give up and gone back east, so for a while he stopped looking. Then he got wind of me wrangling horses for some general in Abileen and he went inquiring round, but he couldn’t find nobody who’d ever heard a me. “Later, I run into a crazed desert rat in a doggery north a there who was one peculiar fellow. He claimed he knowed God personal and played stud poker with him on Fridays. He recollected somebody called Huckerbelly, but he says that fellow got hanged by the general as a deserter and a godless reprobate, and if he didn’t, he shoulda. It cost me three whiskies to find that out, and it warn’t exactly the news I was scrounging for.”

  I says I got in deep trouble with that general and I was still hiding out from him, and Tom says that was plain dumb. “Generals is all ignorant windbags to a man, so full a their stupid selves their eyes get squshed shut to the world around them. Ain’t one a them worth a peck a wormy apples, but they all got power. HANGING power. You got to mollycuddle ’em and get all you can off ’em.”

  “It’s too late for mollycuddles. He means to hang me. I’m aiming to run away to Mexico.”

  “Mexico! Aw, Hucky, don’t be such a knucklehead! Them cussed greasers is worse’n injuns! They even SMELL worse! That cactus juice they swill makes them crazier’n wild dogs with their tails on fire! And twixt here’n there ain’t nothing but trouble. You can’t get there alone!”

  “I was hoping you might go with me.”

  “Me!”

  “They got mountains of gold down there. And silver.”

  “They got gold and silver here. And Mexicans ain’t like injuns, Hucky. Injuns is setting round in sad little half-naked gangs, just hankering to get sivilized at the end of a rope or out the barrel of a gun, but Mexicans is a whole damn country. You’d need an army and a bunch a lives.”

  “Well, you can live with folks without trying to whup them.”

  “No, you stay here. I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry about the general. I got a way with generals. I can set out an appeal against him. Won’t be easy to win, but the law generly works by who a body knows, and I know everybody. Some day, the calvary’ll go after the Mexicans again, and next time it’ll get done proper. That’s when we’ll go there. Mexico will be just another American territory then, leastways till all the gold’s gone. But first we got to get shut of all these wretchid hoss-tiles.”

  “You used to say they was the most wonderfullest, giftedest, hospitablest people in the world.”

  “Well, I was still reading books. I’ve growed up since then.”

  “What’s made you hate them so?”

  “I DON’T hate them, Huck! I ain’t got NOTHING against them. Only, we’re building something grand out here, ocean to ocean, and they’re in the way. Some day, we’ll make statues of them, like they was our own heroes. First, though, we got to kill them all.”

  “All this killing, it’s too many for me,” I says. I was getting very sleepy and my eyes was closing. It had been a monstrous long day. I was still worrying, but I’d have to do the rest of it tomorrow.

  “Stuff! I don’t know what else humans is GOOD for, Huck,” Tom says, and yawns. “A hundred years from now, you and me’ll both be dead and forgot and people’ll still be killing each other. This is OUR killing time.”

  “If it is, everything just don’t seem to mean nothing, that’s all.”

  “Don’t nothing MEAN nothing, Huck! How could it? Two and two don’t MEAN four, they only IS four, that’s all. I worked out a long time ago that, no matter what you do or think, you DIE and it’s all wiped away. Your brain rots and your thoughts, wants, loves, hates, simply ain’t no more. Others may borrow your thoughts, but you won’t know that, you’re gone like you never was. What we got is NOW, Huck, and now is forever. Until it ain’t. So, you can’t worry over nothing except putting off the end a your story as long as you can, and finishing it with a bang. Bekase nuffn doan mattuh, as old Jim would say, no SAH!” Tom stubbed out his seegar butt in the ground beside his cot, blowed the lamp out and sunk back into his pillow. “Y’know, Huck, when I first got me some money, I went back to buy old Jim away from them injuns. I felt bad about what we’d done to him. But Jim smiled at me with all his teeth and says he ain’t going. He was become a Cherokee medicine man and had more wives than Sollerman. He says he ain’t never had it so good, and he thanked us for what we done for him.”

  “Are you talking about Jim?”

  “You remember how he always knowed when it was going to rain? Even when the sun was out in a blue sky and blazing away? Well, Jim waited till one hot day the signs was all lined up, then he got all them redskins into a rain dance. It warn’t nothing like their own dance, but he got everybody dancing like him, and down come the rain.” Tom laughs sleepily. “They always done it Jim’s way after that,” he says, “and sometimes Jim jumped in, but only when he was pretty sure there was rain a-comin’.”

  I says it warn’t like that, but Tom was already snoring, his moustaches rising up and down like the tail of a cantering pony. “I seen Jim,” I says, “when I guided some missionaires north. That hellion was with them. Jim was their cookie. His biscuits and flapjacks was the best I ever et anywheres. He showed me the stripes on his back where his white masters, the ones before the missionaires, whopped him. They knocked out some of his teeth with whip handles. He was already free then, but they didn’t respect it. He’s free now again for the second time and a-looking for his wife and children. He’s got religion and, with his big singing voice, they all listen to him.” I was talking to the tent, filled now with Tom’s snores.

  Though I ain’t slept in two days, I warn’t so sleepy no more. I picked up the whisky bottle and stepped out a the tent. The fire under the spit was just red ashes now. The tents by the shore was all dark. I was hearing some owl hoots I judged warn’t made by owls. They seemed to be coming from above the crick, high in the woods, from the direction of the robbers’ cave wher
e I first lived when I come to the Gulch. They was asking questions. Or the same question over and over.

  I wanted to crawl up there, but Bear was setting guard outside. I handled him the whisky bottle and says it’s a beautiful night and he guzzles and grunts and then acknowledges it is. I made an answering emigrant hoot to the hoot across the crick, and got a happy hoot in reply. Bear laughed. “Them owls is middling smart, Bear, they’re famous for it,” I says. I was ever so glad to know that Eeteh was alive and looking for me. “Out here in the Black Hills, they’re so smart, they sometimes even answer back, like that one just done for me. Try it yourself.”

  Bear hooted, but there warn’t no reply. “Like this, Bear,” I says, and sent out another hoot. This time there was an answer. So Bear and me set about practicing hoots, and finally Bear got an answering hoot. “That’s it, Bear! But watch out. That old bird may reckon you’re his missing wife and come try to make you a mother.” Bear laughed hard and tried again. I taught him happy hoots and watch-out hoots and see-you-tomorrow hoots, though he didn’t know that was what they was. Sometimes he was answered, most times he warn’t.

  Bear says, “That was fun. But maybe I ought to shoot that owl.”

  I says that shooting owls was a sure way to bring on bad luck. It was worse’n black cats, touching a snake-skin with your hands, and looking at the moon over your left shoulder, all at the same time. “And owls ain’t good eating. They’re mostly all feathers and their meat has a high smell.”

  Then somebody did shoot, cussing the owl for the noise it was making. “Hey! Y’all shot my pal!” somebody else hollered, and next thing, they was all shouting insults into the night and shooting at each other.

  “What did I tell you about bad luck, Bear?” I says, and him and me had a laugh about it, and that owl across the crick also let out a happy hoot. I left the whisky with Bear and stumbled back inside the tent. I couldn’t hardly make it back to my cot.