Huck Out West

by Robert Coover

  CHAPTER XXIV

  WAS IN A tight place. I’d crawled into an empty hogshead behind the slaughter-house and fell asleep and now I was stuck. Somebody must a nailed the lid on. Sleeping on the street or in the woods, I always waked up with the sun, but there warn’t no sun in here. It was dark and hot and stunk a stale whisky. I couldn’t breathe. I had to get out. Someone was waiting for me. Then I seen a way to crawl out, but somebody was a-holding me back and I had to fight him off. It was Tom. “Easy, Huck,” he says.

  The fat cannibal doctor was there, too, trying to pour something biling hot down my throat. He was devilish red-eyed and his grizzled face hairs sprung random and weedy on his fat jowls like a wolf’s. “Willow bark tea,” he says. “Drink up, boy. It’s good for you.”

  “You catched a fever, Huck,” Tom says, his hand on my forehead. “You’re burning up.”

  I was laying on my cot in the big tent in a heavy sweat. “Blame it all!” I says. I felt all quivery. “What time is it?”

  “A little past noon,” says Tom. “I come back from exploring up the Gulch and found my old pard thrashing away in a sorry state. Now, drink some a Doc Molligan’s tea. It’ll bring the fever down.” Whilst I was trying to do that, Tom showed me a rock that looked like Deadwood’s. “Turned up this morning down at the crick. It’s mainly what we was looking for. I traced it back upstream. I think I seen the blowup where the old sourdough’s rock might a broke off and fell from, then washed down here. But people was following me, so I had to act disgusted and walk on by. Others may a seen what I seen, though. Quartz is hard to miss. Caleb has staked a claim for us, it’s ourn now, we got it legal, but we may have to shoot a few thieves and yokels who don’t know where the claims office is. This ain’t only plasser gold, Hucky, this may be the tarnal mother lode herself! If we can hang on to her, we’re rich! Richer’n you and me can’t never imagine!”

  That warn’t all Tom done that morning. Bear told me later that, first thing at dawn, Tom led a posse out to defend some arriving emigrants from an attack by the tribe. Bear had fetched me some fresh water and was helping me drink it by holding my head in his big paw. Tom tried to roust me out to ride along, Bear says, but I was like dead. Nobody knowed yet about the fever, but Tom called Molly to come take a look. He says it must be the yaller janders, though he warn’t sure. “There was wagons a-pulling in by the minute, and then suddenly there warn’t,” Bear says. “So us and Tom we rode out to see what was wrong, and we come on a wagon train being set on by the bloody Sooks. Folks was a-laying dead all over the place. ’Twarn’t fair, attacking them innercent white folk like that! Tom he rode straight at them savages on Storm, his cremson bandanna flying and guns a-blazing, and they was most astonished and couldn’t turn tail fast enough. Tom killt at least three of ’em and prob’bly hurt a dozen more. Now he’s laying plans for a revenge raid on the tribe.” Big Bear’s black brows frowned down his warty nose so low, his eyes had to peek out from below them like they was hiding under a woodpile. “We’re at WAR!” he growls.

  Bear was right, the war was begun. I knowed that, even in my fever. Emigrants was still a-rolling in like they owned the place and battles was happening all across the Territory. There were rumors that Sitting Bull was gathering the tribes up in a big army, and the price on Indian heads was shooting up. Didn’t matter who you killed or how, so long as they was Indians. I heard all that from my cot. I tried to get up, I needed to find Eeteh somehow, but I kept falling over. All I could do was crawl back up in my cot again, ready to die some more.

  There was several days a-going by like that, and I couldn’t really tell which was which. On one of them, Tom put on his white hat and led the settlers in a raid on the tribe. Everyone was amazed how brave Tom was, but this one didn’t turn out so good. Two emigrants was killed and Bear got a pison arrow in his rear and was sick for a time with the jimjams.

  Tom was spending most of his days at his new claim, so he moved out and let Bear have his cot, Oren taking over guarding Zeb’s old shack, where Eyepatch and the judge was being bunkhoused till they could be tried and hanged. Bear was shouting out that scorpions and rattlers and mad dogs was after him. There was times he jumped out a the cot and throwed himself about like he was rassling with the wild things. Everyone down at the shore was afraid he was going to bring the tent down, so they dragged him out into the open air where he could rassle with the trees. Sometimes he bawled like a baby and called out for his ma. Once, he screamed he was being pecked to death by owls.

  When he’d swallowed enough a Doc Molligan’s tea to ca’m down for a spell, he says that just THINKING about shooting that owl must a fetched him the bad luck. He swore never to think bad thoughts about owls again. He’d just quietly kill them all till they warn’t no more. Doc come every day to what he called the camp horse-pistol and fed us both thin brothy soup. I hoped there warn’t nobody’s remainders in it. Doc warn’t the only visitor. We warn’t never lonesome. There was a passel a folks living down by the crick now, and one or t’other of them was dropping in on us most all the time, mostly to sample Tom’s whisky. The crick was swoll up with the spring rains and getting harder to work.

  One day when Bear was out rassling with the trees again, Tom comes in and sets on my cot and says he had more to say about Jim. “We was having such a good time that night, I didn’t want to spoil it,” Tom says. “But one day Jim’s rain dance worked TOO good and the tribe got flooded. They warn’t dressed proper and some a them drownded. They thought Jim may a done it a-purpose and that made them mad, so they sold him off to some missionaires passing by. Them holy rollers believed in saving souls by whopping folks and busting their teeth out. Jim got saved and become a preacher and they respected him like they ain’t done before, but all he could eat afterwards was flapjacks and biscuits.” Tom must a been half-awake behind his snores that night. He was telling awful lies again, but I let him.

  The picture-taker come to see me after Bear’d got better and moved out. Somebody told him I was dead. When he seen I was still blinking, he says he already wasted a glass plate on me when I was on the gallows, so this time he’ll wait. “I ain’t feeling so good,” I says. “Hang around ten minutes and see what happens.” He drawed close to squint into my eyes and trace the rope burns. I opened my mouth and he peered into it and shook his head gloomily. “Meantimes, help yourself to a glass a Tom’s whisky,” I says. It was what he was waiting for. He was one a them lantern-jawed fellows whose grins split their faces. He set down with just such a grin breaking his face in two and turned his billed cap backwards and poured himself a glassful. “How long you been traveling with Tom?” I asks him.

  “Since Yankton.” He swallowed the whisky, poured himself another. “My workshop’s thar. Mostly I done pitchers a dead people. Tintypes a dead babies is my famous speciality. If I get the little tykes quick enough, I prop them up like they was still alive. I keep straw dolls in the workshop to stick in their tiny fists. Old folks is mainly easier if they ain’t got stiffened up, but they ain’t as purty. I made pitchers a live people, too, but they warn’t so popular.” He showed me a photograph he’d took of Tom in his all-white rig with his hand tucked in his shirt, setting Storm like a general. He tucked a cheroot in his wide lips, lit it and smiled. “The Amaz’n Tom Sawyer he come’n found me there, and I been out on the trail with him ever since. I take his pitcher wherever he goes, fighting injuns and highwaymen and injustice and hunting for gold and hanging crinimals, but mostly when he’s having a rest on his horse in his white hat and doeskins. He’s the Sivilizer of the West, he told me so. He’s making a famous book about hisself.”

  “When did he find out I was here in the Gulch?”

  “Don’t know. Since before I was with him.”

  I laid there, thinking about this. I remembered now that the picture-taker was there at the gallows that day setting up his camera, before Tom come a-riding in. “Why didn’t he try to find me sooner? Why did he wait till I was most dead?” Well, I knowed why. It
was how the story went.

  “We was here in the neighborhood a couple a times,” the picture-taker says, and helps himself to more whisky. “But I think he was aiming to surprise you.”

  “He surely done that. But he only give himself one shot. What if he missed?”

  “Well, I’d of got my pitcher,” he says with a thin wicked grin. He plucked some grains a tobacco off his tongue. “But it warn’t likely. He’s the Amaz’n Tom Sawyer, ain’t he?”

  A couple of nights later, Tom come back from working his claim and we set up smoking and jawing into the night again like we done before I got the fever. I was glad he was back because, when I was alone in it, the big tent give me nightmares. Sometimes I propped the bedclothes up to make a little tent inside the big one, and I slept better.

  Tom says he may a misguessed the seam by a hundred yards or so. We’ll all still be mighty rich, but probably richer if him and the others form up a consortion. It’s something he knows how to do regular as a lawyer, and his partners all appreciate that. He may make himself president of the consortion. I says what the picture-taker told me, and Tom says, “I heard you was somewheres in this corner a the Territory, and come a-looking, but I couldn’t never find you. Nobody even knowed who you was except one old miner who says, last he seen, you was off hobnobbling with the injuns and living in tepees. I was disappointed to hear that, but I s’posed you must of was scouting for somebody.”

  He lit up half a seegar and says he’s been holding talks with the Lakota chiefs. “We smoked peace pipes together and they says we was all children of the Great Spirit, we shouldn’t be killing each other, it warn’t convenient. They fetched in a drag loaded with buffalo hides and says it was payment for the settlers that got killed. They was sorry it happened. They says it was some young bucks done it, boys being boys. They been punished for it. The tribe don’t want to be called hoss-tiles no more, though I says that’s exactly what they was. They says they was a free people living off roaming creturs like the buffalo, and they’d only starve if they was penned up on a reservation, so they can’t go along with that. But they don’t mean nobody no harm and says there’s room in the world for everybody. I says that may be so, but not in these parts. They say this land is sacrid to them, and I says, then maybe they should have a gab about it with their Great Spirits, and see if they don’t have other sejestions.”

  Tom picked up the whisky bottle and poured some in a tin cup and come over to my cot to see if I wanted any. I shook my head. “Even your eyeballs is yaller,” he says, and crawled back into his cot. “Before them hoss-tiles left, they asked about somebody named Hahza,” he says, sipping at the cup a whisky, “and finally I allowed they was talking about you. I think they wanted you to be there. I says you was very sick with the yaller janders. They muttered some injun words about that and rode away.” He blowed some seegar smoke up at the top of the tent. “Who is this fellow they call Eat-A?”

  “He’s a pard a mine. He’s a loafer and a drunk like me and he don’t fit in with his people no more’n I fit in with mine.”

  “I thought I was your pard.”

  “You warn’t around.”

  “Am now.” He finished off his whisky, stubbed out his seegar, and blowed out the lamp. “Palling around with injuns, Huck, is right down dangersome. You can’t trust ’em. Remember what happened to them poor emigrants we met when we first come out here. You’ll get your throat slit before you know it. And it ain’t right. There’s a war on.”

  “We made the war, not them,” I says, recollecting what Dan Harper said. “We been bullying in and taking away everything they s’posed was their’n. They’re only just defending theirselves.”

  “Well, from where they set, Huck, they got a point. But we ain’t them. We got to stick with our own tribe, even if they ARE all lunatics. If we don’t, we’ll end up crazier’n any of them. You remember that poor preacher up in Minnysota? Even if he was maybe right, his rebel notions was turning him plumb loco, and in the end they probably got him lynched by his own congregation. These lands is become our lands, that’s the story now, and it’s only got just one ending. There ain’t nothing them hoss-tiles can do about it, nor not you nuther.”

  “Tribes,” I says. “They’re a powerful curse laid on you when you get born. They ruin you, but you can’t get away from them. They’re a nightmare a body’s got to live with in the daytime.”

  “I ain’t never told nobody this, Huck. I don’t know if I should tell you, but you’re my oldest and best friend.” He was talking in the dark. His voice seemed like different from the rest of him. “When my pa went west, I always s’posed he must of become a famous bandit or bank robber or at least a sheriff. When I was a kid, I probably told you stories about him that I made up. Mostly he got killed in some tragic way. I missed him awful, growing up. I reckoned in spite a my yarns he was still alive somewheres, so when I come west as a lawyer, I went looking for him. I finally found him in Baker City, selling used hats from a little wagon. Some a the hats had bullet holes in them. Warn’t a one of them ever been cleaned. They was full a nasty little varmints crawling round.” Them hats had somehow got in the cot with me. I was all over itching. “He was living with a fat two-bit whore who warn’t no cleaner’n the hats. He warn’t NOBODY, Huck! He didn’t have no STYLE! He says he still loves Ma, and when I told him she was dead, he busted out crying. He was making me sick. I couldn’t stand him. So I shot him. Had to shoot the whore, too, because she was watching. Left town that night. Ain’t been back.”

  CHAPTER XXV

  N JACKSON’S ISLAND, when me and Tom and Joe Harper run away to be pirates and didn’t have nothing else to do, we laid on our backs at night, looking up at the stars, and Tom and Joe discussed about time and space. They couldn’t agree if the two, if they WAS two, run on forever or if they didn’t, and IF they didn’t, what was on t’other side a them. Joe argued in the Sunday-school manner for sudden bust-out beginnings and horrible ends, and he says that heaven and hell was out there past where the stars run out. The stars, he says, was like a huge sparkly curtain that God slung up for privacy. What was he doing back there, I says, that he don’t want us to see? GLORY, says Joe. It burns your eyes out. Tom says that bust-out beginnings and horrible ends was sure-’nough true about people, but the universe seemed more like a clock that had got wound up and then forgot, and people was just caught between ticks, which he says was the scientific idea about it. I says I couldn’t see no advantage about arguing, it was most awful beautiful up there, all speckly and grand, and it was enough to only lay back and watch it. Joe says that was plain stupid and only showed how ignorant I was. Tom defended me, saying it warn’t my fault, I hain’t never been to school and learnt how to tell true from beautiful.

  Now that Tom’s growed up, time don’t really happen for him no more. It’s just always NOW, nor else nothing. That’s probably because he’s always at the center of everything. The Amaz’n Tom Sawyer. For a body out at the edge like me, watching time go by’s like laying back and watching the stars. Mostly don’t nothing happen, but now’n then a star falls and streaks up the sky for a second. And it don’t matter if you seen it or not, it still happened. And will go on happening when you ain’t around to watch. But Tom’s right, I ain’t never really learnt how to think proper. He’d probably say something crazy like stars DON’T fall, even though any fool can see them do it, and yet the Amaz’n Tom Sawyer’d be right again like always. It was too many for me, really. Tom was mountains smarter. I should give him all the thinking to do for me and him both.

  I was laying on my cot, muddytating on all this, and wondering what Coyote would say about it, when Tom, suited up in his bleached doeskin, busted in like Joe’s universe to roust me out. He wanted me to come to a meeting in the public square to talk about the tribe’s peace offer. I didn’t have no pep yet and I was still a ripe shade a yaller, but I could stand up without falling down, so he allowed I was well enough to come help him out. “I been thinking about it, and I
AGREE with you, Huck, peace is BETTER’N war,” he says, helping me to my feet and setting a hat on my head. “I BELIEVE in peace. I don’t believe in nothing MORE! People have fun killing, but they don’t care to GET killed, so that’s how you make peace. But these emigrants is stubborn as mules. You got to HELP me. Come on. Le’s go see what you’n me can do.”

  The crick shore was a-filling up. There were more tents, more people, more horses and mules, more fires, more smoke, more rubbage. The crick was wider and rushing faster like to echo the persons’ rush into the Gulch. Peewee and the others was still panning for plasser gold at the water’s edge, and they give Tom and me a nod when we passed by. There was a horse path now up to Zeb’s old shack and we walked up it, climbing towards all the shouts and hammering. We passed some log cabins on the way with plank roofs and cooksmoke rolling out their mud-brick chimbleys. The forest that used to hide Deadwood’s shack from Zeb’s was mostly gone, but other shanties and tents and lean-tos had raised up round them, and the empty spaces between was full of wagons and animals. It warn’t clear where any more could be squeezed, but they was still rolling in like the first day, you could see them far out into the hills. They wouldn’t know nothing about what had happened. They had to learn everything all over again. If they wanted to. They mostly didn’t. They only wanted people to move over and let them in.

  The gallows out a-front the shack was bigger’n when I broke it in. There were nooses now for three necks and Tom says they may need more. The sad truth, he says, is that these new emigrants warn’t all decent citizens, come to get rich in honest hardworking American ways. Fact is, many of them was right down thieves, swindlers, highwaymen, rabble-rousers, crooked gamblers, gunslingers, thugs and murderers, and they had to be weeded out like the hateful pests they was. “I can see where this country is going,” he says, proud as pie, “and I can help it get there.”