Affinity

by Affinity- The Friendship Issue (retail) (epub)

  The news shook me, but I done my best not to show it. Nuther me nor the horse said nothing, though the horse wagged his head about like he was looking for the way out. Well, he’d never been to church before and he didn’t know how to behave. It sure warn’t the place to be dropping what he was dropping, but he didn’t know that. Becky had bought some beer with her pappy’s money to celybrate the wedding with and after the preacher had gone and took the horse with him, the three of us set there in the church and drunk it. She’d also found some doughnuts and jelly somewheres to go with it. The hotels was jam full, Becky said, but a gentleman give up his room for them. She was staring at Tom like he was the most amazing thing she ever seen.

  “You missed something great, Huck, when you left,” Tom says. “One a them injun braves starts yelping out that if we found a white man’s body with his head cut off and stuffed up his own backside, he was the one who done it. And he beat his chest with his tied-up fists and somehow got his britches down and wagged his naked backside at everybody. Ain’t that a hoot?” Becky was blushing and excused herself to step outside a minute and Tom leaned close and says, “I learnt something here, Huck, about the law and how it makes some folks poor and some folks powerful rich and famous. I want me some a that power, Huck. Judge Thatcher will learn me. I’ll come back and I’ll find you wherever you are and we’ll have adventures again. But they’ll be better ones.”

  When they’d left, I blanketed me and Jackson and we headed south.

  HUCK FINN’S BANDIT DAYS

  When Tom Sawyer left me alone in the West, I carried on like before, hiring myself out to whosoever, because I didn’t know what else to do, but I was powerful lonely. I wrangled horses, rode shotgun on coaches and wagon trains, murdered some buffaloes, worked with one or t’other army, fought some Indian wars, shooting and getting shot at, and didn’t think too much about any of it. I reckoned if I could earn some money, I could try to buy Jim’s freedom back from the Cherokee Nation, but I warn’t never nothing but stone broke. The war was still on, each side chasing and killing the other at a brisk pace clean across the Territory, and they both needed a body like me to scout ahead for them, watch over their stock at night, pony messages to the far side of the fighting, clean their muddy boots, and help bury the dead, of which there warn’t never no scarcity, nuther boots nor dead.

  Out in these parts both armies warn’t tangling so much with each other as they was with the natives, who kept getting in their way like mischeevous rascals at a growed-ups’ party. I was riding generly on the Northern side because that was where I found myself. They called theirselves Abolitionists and what they was mostly abolitioning was the tribes. Every time they ruined a bunch of them, they ended up with herds of captured ponies, and somebody had to put saddles and bridles on the ones that warn’t summerly executed and break them in the white man’s fashion, and I could help do that. I s’pose I was having adventures like before, but without Tom to make a story out of them, they didn’t feel like it. They was more like a kind of slow dying, and left me feeling down and dangersome.

  Fetched low like that, I fell in with a band of robbers, though I didn’t want for nothing to rob, except maybe a shot a whiskey or a beer. I’d been hired on to guard a stagecoach from the East on its way up the Oregon Trail to Frisco, hauling a load a mail-order brides for gold miners who’d struck it rich out there, but I fell dead asleep just when the coach was set upon by a masked gang. When the shouting and hallooing begun, I couldn’t hardly think where I was or even who I was. The bandits yelled out they don’t kill women, it ain’t in the books like that, so everybody could just leave their money and julery and weapons and run away and tell everybody they’d been robbed by the Missouri Kid and his murdrous gang, the Pikers, though if anybody wanted to stay and get shot, they could do that.

  Whilst the Pikers was busy collecting their riches, I mounted old Jackson, ducked my head, and slid in with the others, but the ladies was mad at me for not trying to save them and they give me away. The bandits grabbed me off Jackson and tied me up, and when the others was galloped off, they begun arguing about what to do with me. Some of them wanted to write a direful warning on my backside with their sheath knives and hang me from a tree for a lesson to passing strangers, others wanted to ransom me for money. “He won’t ransom for two cents,” one of them says, “and his butt ain’t big enough to carve even half a cussword on it. We’ll jest have to shoot him.” They was all finally agreed that was the best way, and the Missouri Kid he cocked his pistol and asked me what my name was so’s they’d know what to write on my gravestick.

  When I told him, the others all laughed because of how long it was and hard to spell, but the Kid he staggered back like he’d been smacked in the jaw and says, “Huckleberry Finn! I cain’t BELIEVE it! Is that really YOU behind that raggedy beard, Huck? This is MOST amaz’n!” He pulled off his mask to show me a gashly face with a broke nose and one eye whited over and a thick black beard sprouting round a loose scatter a chipped teeth. “It’s ME, Huck! BEN ROGERS! Don’t you ’MEMBER me? We was in Tom Sawyer’s robber gang together, back when we was jest mean little scamps!”

  He untied me and give me a happy punch on the arm. Ben Rogers! It did feel good to find someone I knowed out in all that miserable wilderness, even if he was a bandit and a body couldn’t hardly reckonize him. “Gol DANG it, Huck!” There was tears in Ben’s good eye. He says he’s been so horrible lonesome for me and Tom and all the others from back home he most can’t stand it, and he begged me to travel with him and his boys for a spell. He says the Pikers only rob from the rich and give to the poor, specially poor orphan children, but they don’t know nobody poorer than what they are and they ain’t met up yet with no orphans before me, so they mostly give it to theirselves so’s not to waste it. “C’mon, Huck! It’ll be jest like old times!” Ben says I don’t have to do nothing I don’t want to, except promise to bury him if he gets killed and be sure to tell everybody back home about the Missouri Kid and what all he done. He says I can add a few stretchers if I want to, and I says I could do that.

  So I become a highwayman and me and Ben Rogers rode together for a time, working the Platte River immigrant trails with his Missouri Piker gang, and I helped hold up the kind of wagons and coaches I used to ride shotgun for. Ben and me talked about the fun we had in the old days back on the Big River, and he told me all his adventures since then, saying I should maybe be writing some of them down whilst he could still recollect what he just said. He says he lost the eye when an old prewar pistol backfired on him, but I could say it was because of a fight he got into with a hundred Mexican bandits along the Rio Grande. He says he ain’t never been there, but he heard it was as mighty as the Big River and twice as muddy.

  I ain’t had no adventures since Tom left, so I told him about me and Tom riding the Pony Express together, which made Ben whistle out his beard and say it was the most astonishing thing he ever heard in all his born days. I told him about the Fighting Parson’s righteous slaughter of the tribes and about riding northards in the winter with Tom to see all them poor Santees get hung. Ben says he wished he’d seen that, and I says I most wished I hain’t.

  One evening, when the Pikers was holed out on a woodsy island in the middle of the river, me and Ben moseyed off to a saloon a few miles away that I knowed from the Pony days to have a drink and buy some bottle whiskey for the others. There was thousands a birds fluttering through the twilighty air, making a body restless, and fish was a-jumping and plopping in the still river like they wanted the birds to pay them more mind. The saloon was fuller of loose women than I recollected, and Ben, scratching his black beard, says he had a weakness for their kind and he warn’t leaving till he’d got close acquainted with at least six of them. Serviceable ones ain’t easy to come by out in the wilderness, he says, so a body had to store up a few extra to fill in for the off days.

  We had a good time that night and was tolerable drunk when we rode back, Ben personating a Big River steamb
oat and its bells, making wide turns on his horse and singing out a load a ting-a-ling-lings and chow-ch-chow-wows, the wolves and coyotes yipping and howling along with him. On the island, though, there warn’t nobody singing. All Ben’s gang had been murdered by a rival gang. The rivals was called the Boss Hosses and all the corpsed bodies had horseshoe nails hammered into their chests or backsides. Ben cussed and wailed and fired off shots into the trees around. Then we left the island and went back to the saloon because Ben says he has to dunk his sorrows. One of the two rival gangs was Union, the other Confederal. I disremember now which was which, but it probably don’t matter none.

  We still had some swag left, and Jim had been worrying my mind, so I sejested we go see if we can buy him back from the Indians who bought him. Ben didn’t know who Jim was and, when I told him, he says he ain’t going to resk his neck for no dad-blame slave. I says it was Tom’s idea of a bully adventure, and maybe we might could even turn a profit off him. Ben still warn’t convinced, but he finally agreed when I told him how friendly the Cherokee maidens was. Mainly I s’pose he was scared and sad after the massacre of his gang by the Boss Hosses, and just only didn’t want to be left alone. I reckoned after he met Jim, he’d like him like I liked him and would forgive him and wouldn’t want to sell him back into slavery again.

  Ben Rogers warn’t no cleverer at hanging on to money than I was and by the time we fetched up at the border of the Cherokee Nation, we only had two dollars left. We spent one of them on a bottle a whiskey to carry along like a gift, and that left us just a dollar. Ben says it warn’t near enough and he wanted to go spend it on more practical things like women, but I reckoned a dollar might buy us an elbow or an ear and they could maybe borrow us the rest.

  The Cherokee Nation warn’t a tribe a feather-headed natives in wigwams. They was all Southern gentlemen, living very high off the hog. They wore puffy silk cravats and stiff high collars and growed magnolia trees and tobacco and had slaves picking cotton in their fields, though I couldn’t see Jim amongst them.

  The chief come out from his white mansion in his creamy pants and black frock coat, and I raised my hand and says, “How!” and give him the bottle a whiskey. He took one taste, spit it out, and throwed the bottle away.

  Ben yelped in protest and run to pick it up. “Tarnation! Who the blazes does that dang barrel organ monkey think he IS?” he roared. I tried to shush him up, but he went right on cussing and hollering and calling that Indian every name he could think of.

  I didn’t know no Cherokee, so I says to them as clear as I could, “Me looking for slave Negro name Jim.”

  They all busted out laughing. They took my dollar and passed it around like a joke, give it back to me. “We only accept Confederate money here,” the chief says, gripping his coat lapels in both hands and peering down at me like a judge. “You boys Abolitionists?”

  “No, sir! That slave belonged to my family back on the river, but he run off on us. My pap and uncle sent me and my cousin out here to try and hunt him down.”

  “Well, you’re out of luck,” the chief says. “We reckoned he was a runaway and there might be somebody like you turning up to claim him, so we sold him to some white bounty hunters, and they put him in chains and took him off east.”

  A little Cherokee girl about twelve years old was smiling up at Ben from behind one of the tall white pillars of the chief’s big house. “Hah!” Ben says. “There’s one!” She squeaked in fright and run away and Ben went a-chasing after. I yelled at him to come back, we was going now, but he cocked his good eye at me over his shoulder and shouted, “You can see how spunky she is, Huck! Won’t take me a minute!”

  “You’d better rein in your cousin,” the chief says coldly, fingering the little gold cross hanging round his neck.

  “That won’t be easy,” I says. “He suffered a dreadful head wound at Vicksburg near where our families’ plantations is, and he’s been crazy like that ever since. You can see how he was half blinded by it. I hope, sir, you can forgive him his trespasses.”

  “I can, but her father probably cannot.”

  He couldn’t. He clove Ben’s head in with a tomahawk. They brung the body, throwed it over his horse, and chased us out of there with war whoops and horsewhips and gun shots.

  So I rode out in the desert and dug a hole for Ben’s remainders and told the hole I’d let everybody back home know about the Missouri Kid. Then I rolled him into it and kicked some dirt in to cover him up and went back to killing buffalos and guarding wagon trains again. My bandit days was over.

  THE HANGING OF HUCK FINN

  Fourteen Years Later

  Gulch history got made by ’lowing me the novelness of a trial, but they didn’t lose no time in their charging, convicting, and condamning drills. After my licking, they hauled me up out a the mud and got right to it. Dawn warn’t even completely broke. They was dragging me straight to the hanging tree where that country boy was a-dangling, but Eyepatch stopped them and says that warn’t sivilized, they had to give testimony and take a vote, and THEN hang me.

  Eyepatch he was the persecuter, his pal Bill whose hand I shot was chairman of the jury, and his other pal Pegleg, who was earless and couldn’t read or write, was who they give me like a lawyer. Yaller Whiskers was the judge and the jury was all the scoundrels left over, mostly sick red-eyed immigrants just raising up from the mud or crawling out a their shackly wagons, not knowing what they was s’posed to be doing or even where in creation they was, but madder’n hell. To keep order in the court, Eyepatch hired on them two ugly pock-faced robbers who nearly done poor old Deadwood in, and they watched over the trial doings like turkey buzzards with clubs in their claws and their hat brims down over their beaks.

  One a the robbers raised up his gold fob watch and says it’s time to get the blamed thing over with. Bill told his jury to ca’m down or he’d see personal to them being horsewhipped. There was some loud cussing in objection to his pronouncement, some declaring it was just as toothless as he was and stunk even worse, but Bill fired off some shots into the air with his good hand, and that settled the matter.

  Eyepatch shoved a thumb in his waistband and raired back and declared that I was an arched crinimal who was on trial for the gashly Bear-Claw Murder. He held up my good-luck neckless and says they found it fastened like a noose round old Zeb’s throat, his both eyes popping their last pop, and all his traps and his packhorse stole, and he asks me if the neckless was mine. I says I give it to Zeb for good luck, and he says to shut up and answer his question: was it mine? I says it was, but—and he cut me off again and says it didn’t bring nuther of us much luck, did it? And them loafers all had a good hoot.

  I was in a tight place. Zeb’s killers was my accusers and judges, but if I raired a fuss and said so, Eyepatch’d just laugh and turn the others loose on me. They was only looking for an invite, feeling monstrous sick and unhappy. I couldn’t spy half a friend among them.

  “And whar did this string a heathen julery come from, genlmen a the jury? Why, from them filthy iggorant Sooks who the killer has been pallin’ round with! You want to know whar your vegilanty rifles has got to? Ask them war-pathin’ redskins that give him this neckless in thanks for all he done for ’em! Finn ain’t only a cold-bloody murderer, genlmen, he’s a traiter to all white Christians everywheres! He’s a traiter to YOU’N ME!”

  His rising voice had all them rapscallions roused up and it warn’t sure he could hold them back if they took after me. Already I was getting punched and kicked by the nearest ones. Worse, Eyepatch was right in parts, I couldn’t deny it. Helping Eeteh the way I done so’s we’d be free to leave together was a low-down thing. Ain’t never done a low-downer thing. But what was the low-downest of all was I warn’t sorry for it. I would hive them rifles for him all over again. I only wished I hain’t been such a fool as to go and get caught. That was the most low-downest thing I done: letting Eeteh down. I was feeling terrible worried and sorry about him, but at least they warn’t passing hi
s head around like a trophy, so maybe he got away.

  “And that ain’t ALL!” Eyepatch says. “Him and his brother and his dog catched the POX and they didn’t TELL no one—did any a you ever hear of it? NO! Them flat-heads went on recklessly spreadin’ their mortal sickness round THE WHOLE TERRITORY! They wanted everybody to catch it like they catched it theirselves! Now the brother is dead, the dog is dead, only this KILLER is still a-kickin’! But, genlmen”—he looked around at them all with his glittery one eye—“he only’s got JEST ONE KICK LEFT!”

  They was all a-whooping and hollering for justice and saying they had to hang me NOW! They had a terrible itch in their pants and couldn’t wait no more. Yaller Whiskers had a hammer for a gavel, and he was belting a stump with it like he was trying to split it for kindling, and yelling for them to just hang on, ding-bust it, they’ll all get their chance.

  “And even THAT ain’t all!” hollered Eyepatch above the ruckus. There still warn’t much light in the sky. The day was slow at waking up like it was afraid to open its eyes. “He also shot our jury boss when there warn’t no warrant for it and ruint his hand so bad the pore man cain’t even pan for gold no more! Jest look at it! Hold it up thar, Bill! Ain’t that the horriblest mess you ever seen? If Finn ain’t been such a bad shot, he would a killt him, cuz he’s a natural-born crippler and killer! Why, jest last night he give our feller Gulch citizen Deadwood an unmerciless hiding that peart nigh destroyed the ole rip!”

  “That ain’t so!” I says, though I knowed better than to say nothing at all. Huck, I says to myself, you ain’t never going to learn.

  Eyepatch he only smiled his cold gold smile at me and signaled to his jury chairman to go for Cross-Eyes. They fetched the old toothless prospector on his plank and set him down and Eyepatch pointed at me and asked him if I was the one who give him his awful thrashing. Deadwood raired his head an inch or two and aimed one or t’other of his crossed eyes at me, groaned and nodded, and he fell back and they carted him away again. “I cain’t hardly believe how any human person could be so despicable crool and mean!” Eyepatch says. “Such a varmint don’t DESERVE to live!” Them two robbers was shaking their heads sadfully, like they couldn’t believe it nuther.