Affinity

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

  If all them red-eyed immigrants reckoned I was the one who beat up Deadwood, they also reckoned I doctored him afterward, because when they seen that his bandages was ripped from their own missing shirts, they shouted that if they catched the new-monia and died, there’d be even more murders to hang me for. Others was cussing me out for pisoning Zeb’s whiskey, saying I was the worse killer since Ulysses Grant, nor else Robert Lee, they warn’t all agreed which one was prime.

  Eyepatch says Zeb was toting some a that pison in a fancy box which probably his killer hid there to be shut of it after he stole everything else. When they smelt its horrible stink, he says, they poured it out so’s it wouldn’t harm nobody never again, hoping only it didn’t kill off all the trees.

  “You oughtn’t a done that,” I says. “That was his mother.”

  “Sure it was,” says Eyepatch, “and you’re my sister.” And they all fell about snorting and hee-hawing.

  I asked Pegleg why he don’t point out the bullet holes in Zeb’s back, which was what killed him, and he spit a gob and says, “What bullet holes?” The old whiskey-maker’s body was still a-drooped over the mare’s back and them holes was in plain view.

  “You can see how desprate he is, yeronner,” Eyepatch says to Yaller Whiskers with a meloncholical smile, fingering his badge, “unloosing bare-face lies like that to try’n save his wretchid hide whilst losing forever his pit-black soul.”

  The jury thought that was the splendidest thing that they ever heard and they clapped their hands together in testimony of it, leastways those of them that warn’t back to sleep again or throwing up or drifting off to attend to the biling disturbance in their bellies, grabbing their guts and holding up two fingers to ask Bill’s permission.

  My lawyer he stuffed a plug of chaw in his jaws and says I should ought to plead guilty. I says I warn’t guilty a nothing and I ain’t saying I was. “The defender says he’s guilty, Judge,” Pegleg says, and Yaller Whiskers rapped the hammer down on the tree trunk, and says there ain’t nothin’ for it, I got to be hanged till I’m completely mortified, the trial was done and over.

  They swarmed over me again. I thought I was about to join that rube in the tree and my heart was in my throat, but they fetched me along to Zeb’s shack and throwed me in it. The chinless mule-toothed prospector who struck the gold fleck the day before was posted at the door with an old shotgun, looking like he’d only made it partways into the new day and warn’t inclined to go no further. His mustaches hung like sad stringy curtains around his big front teeth.

  The old whiskey shack stunk more’n it commonly done, not only of sick and privies and stale whiskey like always, but also from a couple of carcasses laying about and starting to go off. They’d stay there till somebody decided they wanted the shack for theirselves, and then they’d get throwed in the woods for the wolves to supper on. Which was where I was headed. Wolf vittles. My feelings was sunk low and such thoughts warn’t of a nature to raise them up again.

  Mule Teeth was soon tipping back in a chair, taking a snooze, the shotgun leaning against the wall, and I judged I could walk out past him and just keep on going. He half opened one bloodshot eye under his floppy hat brim and seen me calculating. “I know what you’re thinkin’,” he drawls from under his two monster teeth. “I don’t sejest you try it. I don’t give a keer, one way or t’other, and I ain’t goin’ to stop you, but they’s a posse a hongry bounty hunters out thar jest a-waitin’ for sumthin live to shoot at.” He raised the other eyelid halfway up and struggled slow to his feet like his bones was made a lead. “C’mere. Look at behind all them wagons and trees. See ’em?” I seen them. All watching my way. “I don’t reckon you done what they say you done, and I’m nation sorry for you, but there ain’t nothin’ I kin do, nor not you nuther.”

  “It warn’t me who killed Zeb. It was that one-eyed persecuter and his pals who done it.”

  “I know it,” he says, sinking dozily back into the chair. He slurped noisily and says he judged the Cap’n was setting to take over here, him and the judge together, and my hanging was their ticket for that, so it didn’t matter whether I done nothing crinimal or not. Mule Teeth was right. The rule a law warn’t about such matters. Eyepatch and his pals was rich now after robbing Zeb, and they was calculating how to use the law to get richer. Mule Teeth says that like enough they was the ones who robbed all my goods too, because there warn’t nothing left down by the crick except the tepee poles.

  Mule Teeth called Eyepatch Cap’n on account of that’s what he was in the Confederal Army in the recent troubles. He lost his eye at the Battle of Shiloh, and he come out west after that to help the Rebs cut a trail to California through the New Mexico Territory to where the gold was. Leastways, that’s what Mule Teeth says that Eyepatch says. Me and Tom was scouting down there for the Rebs back then so, until we got lost and ended up scouting for the Union instead, us and Eyepatch was maybe traveling together. But though I seen plenty one-eyed bandits like old Ben Rogers, I ain’t got no recollection of any long-haired one-eyed captains. Lying come easy to Eyepatch. Most probably he was a plain deserter, living off of robbing and killing like other ordinary runaway soldiers.

  When Mule Teeth warn’t drowsing under his hat, him and me talked away the morning. It was my last one and it seemed as how there must probably be liver things to do with it, even penned up in a smelly old shack, but I couldn’t think of them. It was just only a morning like any other morning and it slipped by like they all done.

  The bounty hunters was still outside, watching the open door, hoping I’d make a run for it, so I held my nose and stayed back in the shadows in case them fellows’ fingers got itchy. Mule Teeth told me about having to pay extra for prostytutes on account of his teeth, and asked me what it was like to kiss a woman because ain’t none a them ever allowed him to do that. I says I ain’t done much kissing neither, because there warn’t nothing romantic about most a the women I knowed, except for one maybe, and my Crow wife she didn’t have no nose and was uncomfortable about a body getting anywheres close to the area.

  “You had a squaw?”

  “For a while, till she cussed me out one day and walked out a the tepee and never come back.”

  “You lived with injuns? That’s innaresting,” he drawls and slurps again. “They say a squaw’s business runs sidewise ’stead of fore’n aft. Is that how you found it?”

  “No, just ordinary,” I says. I was worried to know more about Eeteh and Ne Tongo, but this didn’t seem the right way to get at it. “Old Man Coyote, though, had a wife with one that was like the mouth of a coiled-up snake that swallowed you down in like a whirlpool.”

  “That must of been fun. But who was Old Man Coyote?”

  “They have stories about him. A friend told me.”

  “Injun friend?”

  “Fellow who used to help the owner of this shack trade with the tribes.”

  “The one you murdered. Or they say you did.”

  Out a-front the shack, men was hacking away at the foot of the hanging tree, making the dead country jake jiggle and dance on his rope like a puppet till his straw hat fell off. Mule Teeth says they was chopping the tree down to knock up a gallows there. “The persecuter and the judge reckon it ain’t possible to sivilize a place without you got a proper insterment to hang a body. The coffin-maker’s busy a-buildin’ it, so you still got a little time. Wisht I could find somethin’ to help you pass it better, but we pretty much drunk the camp dry last night, and I’m anyways dead sick from it and ain’t got no stake left to buy nothin’. Don’t even have a dang chaw to share.”

  I asked him what he done with the gold fleck the yaller-whiskered land surveyor helped him find. “I give it back to him,” he says. Yaller Whiskers was setting up a table in the street and there was already a line of immigrant prospectors waiting to buy one of his hand-drawed survey maps. “The judge only borry’d it to me to set out his bonyfydies, as he called ’em, so’s he’d fetch a fair price for his maps.” Yaller
Whiskers was drawing pictures fast as he could, but newcomers was rolling in by the minute, he couldn’t keep up. He was finally only putting a few marks down on each page, and yelling cusswords whenever a body complained.

  Meantimes, the tree with the rube still hanging in it got cut down and dumped upstream in the Gulch where all the other dead trees was. The coffin-maker had already built sections of the new gallows, and now he set to hammering it all up together where the tree had stood. A lantern-jawed picture-taker in a billed cap and black frock coat was setting up his camera in front of it.

  The bran-new street out a-front was so packed with immigrant miners, wagons, horses, and oxen, you couldn’t hardly move. The men was all excited and grinning ear to ear about the chance of watching a body get stringed up. Fingers was pointed at me in Zeb’s shack. They didn’t know who I was nor what I was s’posed to be hanged for, but that warn’t no matter. Eyepatch was right: the gallows was going to make the Gulch more sivilized-looking.

  A preacher come to see me about my soul, and how I could save it by fessing up to murdering old Zeb even if I ain’t done it. It was that chubby land-surveyor-banker-dentist-judge Yaller Whiskers again, only now he was a preacher. There warn’t nothing that fellow couldn’t do if he set his mind to it. He was wearing the hanged man’s floppy straw hat, which was the same color as his bushy whiskers. With his dusty clothes, he made a body think of a small round haystack with eyes. He wanted us to pray together to some of the same dead people the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson was always carrying on with, and see if we couldn’t strike a deal with the Lord about my soul before I danced the hempen jig, as he called it, and flew off to Providence, or some place even more unpleasanter.

  “Praying ain’t never worked for me, Reverend,” I says, “and I ain’t got no soul to barter with. Maybe I used to have one, but if I did, it got drownded on the Big River, nor else it was stole by a couple a royal bamboozlers like yourself who didn’t have none a their own.”

  The preacher he got a little hot under the collar then like he done when he was a judge and says he won’t be talked at so disrespectable. He says he should a sentenced me to a hundred lashes besides only getting hanged—he would a gratefully laid on the lashes himself, before, during, or after the hanging. He was going to go right now and fetch his horsewhip to the ceremonials, in case he got a chance to use it, and, given my rascally nature, he allowed he surely would.

  The more Yaller Whiskers carried on, the madder he got. He remembered me of old pap when he went to ripping and cussing like all fury, swearing to cowhide me directly as he got sober, and that made me smile, which made Yaller Whiskers so sore, he whiffed his pudgy fists around a-front my face till his cheeks was red and he throwed the rube’s straw hat at me and kicked at my knees and yelled, “What’re you laughin’ at, you goddam sneak-thief injun lover?”

  Then he ca’med down and picked up the straw and set it back on, saying he was sorry, and he went back to being a preacher again. Sin always got him riled up like that, he says, he just didn’t have no tolerance for it. But he had to learn himself more Christian forbaring, it went with being a man a the cloth, he says, though he probably didn’t know no more’n I done what cloth he was talking about.

  It was nigh noon. Yaller Whiskers and Mule Teeth tied my hands behind my back and took me by the elbows and walked me out to the gallows, tromping through the gumbo and the thickening crowds. All the busy hammering and sawing and hollering stopped when we stepped out a the shack, and people begun running toward the gallows, pushing and a-shoving to get the up-frontest places. I warn’t customed to being much noticed of a rule, but they was all gaping at me and didn’t want to look at nothing else. Some was laughing or shouting out cusswords, but most was only staring with their eyes wide open like they was trying to eat me with their eyes.

  That army drummer was at it again, banging out a march, and we was stepping along to it, the crowds opening up as we come on them. Eyepatch was a-waiting for us by the gallows in his black shirt, his black bandanna knotted round his head, his gold teeth and earrings and tin star glinting in the midday sun. He looked like he might a washed his hair for the grand occasion, nor else he only greased it. His pals Pegleg and Bill was standing longside him, Bill with a nasty three-tooth sneer on his face.

  The lanky coffin-maker in the tall black hat was there, looking monstrous proud of what he’d made. One of his empty body boxes was propped up against the contraption, and the picture-taker was aiming his camera at it. So I warn’t going to be throwed into the Gulch, after all. I was going to be a famous murderer and bandit with white eyes and a stretched neck, laying in a pine box. Maybe they’d even get to see me back in St. Petersburg.

  The preacher he says he’ll ask for mercy because of middlegating circumstances, if he could think of any. Though I knowed it wouldn’t make no matter, I hoped Mule Teeth might furnish some. “We fetched you the prisoner, Cap’n,” Mule Teeth says, and when Eyepatch asks him if I repented of my vilence whilst he was guarding me, Mule Teeth says I did not. “Fact is, Cap’n, he bragged about it, goddamming everybody and you in partickler. He’s a liar and a traiter and he pals around with hoss-tile hucksters. Got a squaw with a business that sucks a body in like quicksand.” That done it. Like my mean old pap used to say, it’s the ones who talk lazy and drawly you got to watch out for. Eyepatch nodded. It was all up for me.

  It was earless Pegleg who took over then and led me up the steps. The drummer had stopped his pounding and was commencing a drumroll. The drumroll was scary, but warn’t near so as the wooden peg knocking loud and hollow up the stairs ahead a me. Whilst climbing them, I recollected that crazy injun in Minnysota who Tom said dropped his pants and wagged his naked behind at all the gawkers. I wished I could do something owdacious like that, but I was too scared and downhearted. I didn’t never want to die, and now that it was happening I didn’t want it more’n ever.

  There was a powerful lot of steps to climb. The picture-taker in the long frock coat had moved his camera on its long skinny legs and was watching me through it. That chap with the fiddle was twanging away sorrowfully and whining through his nose something about jumping off into the other world. I was thinking about Ne Tongo, who won’t understand what happened to me or where I went off to. How do you explain that to a horse?

  From up on the platform I could see all the tents and lean-tos, the muddy streets, the half-built shanties and storefronts, the long line of incoming wagons stretching back into the hills. Many of the newcomers was hopping out a their wagons and running toward us with big grins on their faces. Others was galloping in on horses. They didn’t know what was happening, but they didn’t want to miss nothing.

  Pegleg stood me onto the trapdoor and fitted the scratchy rope round my neck. “Kin I have the next dance?” he asks with a mean grin. I warn’t able to grin back. I was feeling desperately lonely and wished there was somebody to hold my hand. But I was all alone. Did you ever notice, Eeteh says to me one day, how making a world always begins with loneliness? The Great Spirits could invent all the suns and moons and rivers and forests they wanted, but it warn’t never enough. They was still lonely. There warn’t nobody to talk to and nothing was happening. So they had to make us loafers to kill so’s to liven up the passing days.

  One of the arriving immigrants was galloping in on a high white horse with a passel a friends behind him. He was fitted out in bleached doeskin and a white hat, with white kid gloves and a red bandanna tied round his throat, gleaming silver spurs on his shiny boots. He had big bushy mustaches ear to ear and long curly hair, twinkling eyes. Puffing on a fat seegar. Coming for a laugh. “HANG HIM QUICK!” Eyepatch shouted. Pegleg drawed his pistol with one hand and reached for the lever with t’other and I dropped. My throat got snagged and then there was a shot and I kept on dropping, landing hard on the ground under the gallows. Then more shots, and Pegleg come falling through the trapdoor and landed on top of me. That seegar-smoker must a shot the rope!

&nbs
p; Only one man I knowed could do that. He was grinning down at me from his white horse. “Hey, Huck,” he says, flicking some ash off his seegar. It was Tom Sawyer! His own self!

  Useful Knots and How to Tie Them

  Rachel Blau DuPlessis

  THE MEDIUM

  There is yearn, then there is yarn.

  A strand is strung

  from a number of yearns

  twisted together.

  Rope is twined

  in a long building

  by pulling cordage

  out of sheer matter in

  the endless twists of

  how it matters, that it matters.

  And what matters.

  Space stands in for time.

  Stringently.

  THE OVERHAND KNOT

  The overhand is

  the simplest and smallest

  of all knot forms

  and the beginning

  of many more difficult ones.

  INSTRUCTION. OR FAILURE

  This is one more lump

  of the humped rope

  inarticulate, snarled.

  Stand ambiguates bight,

  end skeins twist.

  Quick or careless tightening

  results in a useless tangle.

  If you do not follow the pattern,

  you may get a different knot.

  Even no knot at all.

  OLDER TRACTION POINTS

  Climbing

  up fibrous ladders

  and rope sways together,