Huck Out West

  I drawed in some smoke, tasting the sweetness of it, my fingers wrapped round the warm horse head, and says I had a dream last night about Tongo. “Anyways, I think it was a dream. He come into the tent and nuzzled me to wake me up and says he wants to keep running like we done that first time, and never stop. He says a body is free till it don’t want to be, and he ain’t got to the not-wanting time. He says he hopes he dies before he gets there.”

  “Me, too,” Eeteh says.

  “Tongo announced some more things that don’t make no sense, like freedom IS power, but he was jabbering in Lakota and neighing at the same time, I couldn’t hardly understand half of it. Then Tom’s big stallion Storm come in and says freedom without power is only a pretend freedom, and don’t amount to beans, or horse words to that effect. Storm talked more like an emigrant. He says if you ain’t got the power to hold on to freedom and use it, it ain’t no bigger’n what a prisoner’s got on his way to the gallows. Power IS freedom, he says. Tongo he snorted and says Storm should talk about freedom when he ain’t hitched to a saddle. He says power don’t help a body keep freedom, it only knows how to keep’n make more of itself. When a body is trying to hang on to power, he ain’t free to do nothing else. Storm got mad and dumped a golden load out his rear end and says THAT’S what your FREEDOM is! Tongo done the same and says THAT’S your POWER! Tom come in by and by and drunk some whisky and give me some advice and I told him to watch out for the horse dung. He thought I was talking about his advice and says if I warn’t so sick he’d go find some horse dung and make me eat it. Everything was ordinary except that Tom was laying about six inches above his cot. I reckoned he was just showing off.”

  Eeteh laughed and says he don’t know who’s Tom, so I remembered him that Tom Sawyer was the friend I first come out west with, but hadn’t seen in all these years after he went home to get married. I says how Zeb’s killers catched me and tried me and was just hanging me from the new gallows, when Tom he come a-galloping in out a nowheres and shot the rope and the hangman as well. Eeteh whooped like it was the wonderfullest thing he ever heard, and then he says how scared he was when I got catched. I never answered his owl hoots for a whole day, and when I did it was mixed up with other hoots. Then he didn’t hear nothing at all, except somebody trying to imitate me. When his brother come back from the powwow after the wagon train attack, he says I warn’t in the camp no more. “He say Hahza dead.”

  He raised the bottle, shook his head and laughed. “TOM!” I clicked my pipe bowl on his raised bottle and says, “TOM!” right back and we both laughed and I took a deep puff to Eeteh’s swallow. The bats was growing restless above us. “Me and Tom was boys in the same town, we played bandits and pirates together, run away together. There ain’t nobody alive with more brains and gumption and plain level-headedness than Tom Sawyer. People love him wherever he goes and want him to tell them what to do, and so he does.” I blowed more sweet smoke up at the fluttery bats. “Tom he wants me to stay now and help him run the camp. He says he can keep me safe from General Hard Ass. I ain’t so sure about that, but even if he could, this place is plumb ruined for me. After my fever’s gone, there ain’t nothing to keep me here except Tom Sawyer himself, and I’m hoping I can push him to go with us.”

  Eeteh says it’d be an honor to ride with such a great shootist, though he hoped he’d make up his mind fast. Then he stared at me for a moment, and turned back to look through the chink in the wall again. “Who send tu’wayuh?”

  Down below, Oren was moving his overalled belly from tree to tree. “I don’t know. Tom probably. He’s the boss now. He’s off chasing a claim and, whilst he’s gone, he’s probably worried about me.”

  “Scout follow you, find me,” Eeteh says. “Maybe try kill me.” He didn’t say nothing for a moment. He warn’t smiling. “Tom . . . He bad man in white hat?”

  “He does wear a white hat,” I says. Tom led an attack on the tribe in that hat, I’d forgot that. Eeteh was the best friend I had for years. I felt like I already knowed him better’n I never knowed nobody else. But Tom was my pard, always had been. I didn’t want to leave neither of them behind. “Tom makes up adventures like he reads out a books, though he ain’t scrupulous about the consequences, and he maybe does some things he oughtn’t, but he ain’t really bad inside. Life by itself just ain’t enough for Tom. It ain’t got no point and the way it ends makes him mad. So he contrives up these adventures to get him through it.” I told him about the meeting yesterday, how Tom wanted peace with the tribe, but all his best pals was against him. “I never seen them buck him like that before.” Eeteh nodded, thinking about that. He says he understands. He says his friend who got scalped by white emigrants warn’t perfect, too.

  There was so much we needed to talk about, but Oren was a-scrambling up closer. Eeteh says he needed to go where the spy couldn’t find him, and he asked me to set outside to keep him busy while he slipped away. He handled me the whisky bottle. “Take it, Eeteh,” I says. “It’s yourn.” He shook his head. He says the tribe expects him to tell them everything, so he don’t want them to know we even seen each other. “I’ll leave it here in the cave for you, then. I ain’t s’posed to drink with what I got, so if they ask, I’ll tell them I come up here to sneak a swallow now and then.”

  While Eeteh crawled towards the back of the cave with the bottle, I took my rifle and went out and set on a rock. When Oren seen me, he ducked behind a tree. “Hey, Oren!” I shot a branch off over his head. He made a little squeak like a mouse does when an owl grabs it. “You come to shoot me?”

  “NO!” He peeked out with his hands in the air, his rifle pointed up to the sky. “I only come t’say hello.”

  “Well, hello, Oren,” I says. “’Bye.”

  “Tom sent me to pertect you!”

  “From what?”

  “Injuns. Bears. Coyotes. Whatever. Kin I come up?”

  “I reckon. If you’re careful.” I kept my rifle pointed at him. He set his over his shoulder and clumb on up. He tried to keep his eye on me, but whenever he looked up, he slipped in the mud. His bib overalls was a mess. I wiped the rain out a my face and says, “A body’d have to be pretty stupid to be out in this weather, hey, Oren? Without they got something big to do, like tromping up a mountain to say hello to a sick old trail bum.”

  “So what brung YOU up here?” he grunted, pulling up onto the flat space a-front the cave. His muddy overalls was full of heavy breathing.

  “Reckon I must be one a the stupid ones.” He stood there, gripping his rifle, studying the cave mouth. Eeteh was right. He was come to kill.

  “There’s somebody in there,” he says. “I kin hear ’em!”

  “You scared a bats, Oren?”

  “Ain’t scared a nuthin!” He gritted his teeth and busted on in, blasting away into the darkness. And busted right back out again, chased by the furisome black flutter of a million squeaking bats. He dropped his gun and went shinning down through the gulch considerable faster’n he clumb it, swarmed about by distressid bats. You could hear him screaming clear to Jericho. There was a yowl and a crash through branches and then it was quiet. He must a struck where the gulch dropped away of a sudden.

  Eeteh come out with the whisky bottle and done a wobbly little dance like he drunk too much. I asked him what he’s doing and he says it’s a rain dance. “It’s already raining,” I says, and he says he knowed that, but he don’t trust his luck enough to dance a rain dance when it ain’t.

  He squatted by the rock I was setting on and tipped up the bottle. “I thought you was gone,” I says. The bats was wheeling around overhead again, finding their way back to bed. Eeteh wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and says he was thinking about Coyote, how him and Snake was such good friends, had been since they was little tykes, but how a problem was growed up between them. Coyote made the world and all the creturs in it and he judged that give him the right to lay with any woman he wanted to. He could change his shape, so he could try on cougars and beetle
s, sandhill cranes and porkypines, and he laid with them all and always had a good time doing it. But when he took a turn on Snake Woman, Snake warn’t happy about it, and he come to have a considerable less friendly altitude towards Coyote.

  I says that I thought Coyote killed both Snake and Snake Woman and et them, and Eeteh says that he did, but that was a different story. I seen right off I was going to have some trouble with this one. I was also wondering, if Coyote made the world, how was him and Snake both tykes at the same time, but I knowed better’n to ask. I warn’t made to understand everything in this world, and maybe not none of it where Coyote was concerned.

  Snake, Eeteh says, had took a particular fancy to Lark’s eggs and stole them whenever he got a chance. Lark suspicioned Snake was the thief, and says so to everybody, but he was a slithery fellow and she never catched him doing it. Snake felt Lark was being unfair in blaming him alone because he reckoned everybody in the nation was stealing her eggs. And that give him an idea. He told Coyote about how much fun it was to lay with Lark, and got him excited, and off he went, using the new wings he’d just put on. Snake called his pals together, specially those he knowed to be secret egg-smouchers, and says he was going to prove to Lark that it was Coyote who was thieving all her eggs, but he needed their help and he told them what to do and say, no matter what he done and said. They was more’n glad to find someone else to blame their crimes on. Meantimes, Coyote was having a most splendid time and so was Lark, who never had such a vigrous lover. They rubbed together in all the hundreds of ways that birds do, till they was both about wore out, and they fell off sound asleep. Snake come then and et Lark’s eggs and dropped the broke shells on Coyote. Lark waked up screaming, and directly all the other birds was screaming, too. For them, stealing eggs and eating them was murder. All Snake’s pals grabbed Coyote and netted him before he could fly away. The net was too fine even if he changed into a gnat, and too strong if he turned into an elephant or a buffalo bull. Some wanted to kill him straight off, but Snake says Coyote should have a trial fair and square and he invited any testimony. Most didn’t know what to think, but Snake’s pals say they seen him hiving the eggs and eating them, and accused him of also being too full of himself and of corrumpting the young braves with his ridiculous notions. Lark herself says how she was seducted by Coyote against her will, though she warn’t widely credited, and Muskrat accused Coyote of making fun of the Great Spirits and not taking them serious. Muskrat was mostly right, and Coyote ain’t got nothing to say about that. Snake defended his old pard by saying it warn’t fair to charge a natural-born egg-sucker with thieving his own vittles, but Mountain Goat spoke up and says he warn’t only guilty a collaring the eggs, he also was a liar and had a sick comical view of life. Life ain’t comical like that, Mountain Goat says. It’s an insult to the Great Spirits and to the nation. Everybody seemed agreed to that. Snake looked sad and done a little shrug, best a snake can shrug, like to say he was awful disappointed but he done all he could for his pard. Spider Woman crept up to Lark on her tiny toes and whispers she seen Snake steal the eggs and scatter the shells on Coyote whilst he was sleeping. Wait a minute, Lark says. I don’t think Coyote done it! I think it was—Snake’s tongue shot out from nowheres like magic and snapped her up. This lightning show of power scared some folks and convinced others that Snake was the boss they was looking for. Spider Woman skittered away not to get stomped on. Whilst they was all debating how to kill him once and forever, Snake Woman slid up to the net and whispered to Coyote to change into a snake, and she’d make a little hole he could wriggle out of and they could run off together. But the hole she made was too small and he got stuck. Snake’s assassin pals was all waiting for him with knives and tomahawks and they chopped him into bits, then chopped the bits into bits, and thronged the pieces far out in the sky so’s he couldn’t noway be put back together again. And that’s how all the other worlds out there got made.

  I laughed. Eeteh always told comical stories. “Of course, he COULD be put back together, and that’s how the next story begins. That lying sneakthief Snake is in trouble!”

  Eeteh shook his head. He warn’t smiling. He says it’s the end of Coyote and his stories. There ain’t no more. All stories now will be Snake stories.

  It was an awful story. I don’t know why he told it to me.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  AIN’T QUICK AT ciphering things out, but with Eeteh’s help it fin≤ally come to me that there warn’t going to be no attack on the tribe that Sunday morning. They was just trying me out to see if I’d spill their plans and rile the natives up into their warpaint. To do that, I’d need Eeteh, and they hoped I’d lead them to him. They hoped right. Eeteh was smarter, but they made a fool out a me. I warn’t happy about that, so before dawn I holstered up and took up my rifles and went over to roust out Tom and ask him, tarNATION, pard, when does the danged Black Hills Brigade ATTACK begin? He’d got in overnight and was sleeping like a dead man. He was madder’n the dickens and roars at me didn’t nobody tell me, dammit, there warn’t no attack, it was called off. “Besides, you’re still the color a week-old horse piss, Huck, you oughtn’t to be going nowheres.” And he rolled over in disgust and set to snoring again.

  Later, when he was drinking coffee out by the spit and chawing on a cold mule-deer leg for breakfast, I asked him why he sent Oren chasing after me. “Clumsy numskull,” he grumbled. “Fell’n broke his damn arm. Don’t know WHAT the leather-head was doing up there, any more’n I know what YOU was doing.”

  “He says you sent him. To protect me.”

  “Well, Hucky, you do need protection. Sometimes you ain’t got no common horse sense. Getting over-friendly with the enemy whilst a war’s on, a war we ain’t even winning yet, just ain’t rattling smart.”

  “Seemed like Oren was up there to kill somebody. Hope it warn’t me.”

  Tom sighed, took a sip a coffee, poured more from the tin pot resting in the coals. “You remember when I took Becky’s whipping for her? It was in that old one-room schoolhouse a-front of everybody, a gloriful moment, which you ain’t able altogether to ’preciate because you was luckier’n me and warn’t never penned up and tortured in there. Ornery old Dobbins really laid on the hickry that day and Becky begun bawling for what she’d got me into, but she got pretty excited too, as she told me later, feeling a vilent tingle on her own bum whilst mine was getting publicly flayed. To keep my mind off it, I read all the signs in the room I could see from the position I was in, and one of them says KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. At the time, getting flogged by a schoolmaster, I took that as a mean low-down joke, but later it become a kind of golden rule for me.” Tom tossed out his coffee and poured more and says, “That’s what Oren was doing up there.”

  “What? Getting his backside whacked?”

  “No, listen at what I’m saying, Huck. Knowledge is power.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know. I ain’t had much a nuther a them things, nor really cared to have some,” I says.

  “Which is why you need me, Hucky. I know all we need to know and I got enough power for both of us. Without power, you ain’t nobody, and you ain’t free nuther.”

  “Your horse told me the same thing.”

  “My horse?” Tom rolled his eyes like he was talking to a crazy man. “You must of catched a bad dose a brain-fever on top a your yaller janders, Huck,” he says. “I hope it ain’t fatal. See Wyndy over there with goggles on, watching you? I got to spend some time at the claim. He’ll be keeping an eye on you whilst I’m gone, so’s you don’t get in more trouble. Do me a favor and don’t sick your bats on him.” He give me a long look and then says he’s been to the cave himself. “I found one a my own whisky bottles up there, mostly drunk.”

  “That was me. Don’t tell Molly. The cave stinks because a the bats, but it’s comfortable for me when I’m off by myself. Used to be where them two robbers you hanged stowed their plunder.”

  “Well, please to don’t go up there no more, pard. I don’t want no accidents
to happen to you. When you’ve shook off the janders, I’m going to need your help. If you want whisky, help yourself right here in the tent. I don’t give a hang if you want to make yourself sicker’n you already are.”

  “What kind of accident you reckon might happen?”

  “Hain’t no idea. But look at poor Oren. Who’d a guessed a bat attack?”

  After what Tom said, I had to see Eeteh again, but, with Wyndell watching me all day long and sleeping outside the tent flap at night, there warn’t nothing I could do, not even when Tom was away, like he mostly was. I couldn’t even answer Eeteh’s lonesome hoots. Wherever I went, Wyndy was right behind me. When I turned around to talk to him, he only smiled sadfully and waited for me to start moving again. I’d begun shoving things we’d need for our travels to Mexico under my cot, like tarpolins and coffee and tin cups and ammunition, but now it was harder to collar things, with him always watching me. I dragged him around through the whole camp, hoping he’d get tired, but he never did. I did. I still warn’t over the janders.

  Old grizzled red-eyed Doc Molligan says maybe I won’t never be over them. On t’other hand, he says, maybe they’ll go away tomorrow. Science don’t know much about the yaller janders, he says. For sure, HE don’t know NOTHING about them. He come by the tent most every day to help himself to a cup a Tom’s whisky and jaw awhile about the horrible diseases and beautiful women he’s knowed. Both diseases and women was always mysteries to him, he says, which was considerable better’n knowing too much about neither of them. A mistake he never made a-purpose. He often described them both by how they smelt and tasted. He called it his prog-noses.

  Molly says carpentery’s more his line. He says he sawed off the ruined part below Eyepatch’s knee and strapped Pegleg’s wooden one onto the stump, and the Cap’n was near as good as new, though he warn’t a satisfied man. His prog-noses for Eyepatch ever being satisfied was the same as for my yaller janders. Not likely, but you never know. Dad-fetched mystery, like the rest of life.