Huck Out West

by Robert Coover

  I felt comfortabler down by the shore. A river don’t make you feel less lonely but it makes you feel there ain’t nothing wrong with being lonely. The Minnysota was a quiet little wash, near shallow enough to walk across without getting your knees wet, but a flat-bottom steamboat run on it, and it was setting out there then with a passel of whooping gawkers on it, watching the hangings through spyglasses. It had started freezing up at the shore, and soon walking across it would be all a body COULD do.

  Past the steamboat landing, the shore was low and woodsy like a lot of the islands in the Big River back home, and it got me to thinking about other ways a body might blunder through life. By piloting a riverboat for a sample. That would be ever so splendid, and just thinking on it lifted some my sunk spirits. But probably I warn’t smart enough. Well, I could do the loading. Folks running away from the war was saying the whole river back home was on fire and the bullets was flying like mosquitoes in August, but in this nation a body can get shot anywheres, and getting shot on the river beats getting shot in the desert every time.

  The day warn’t hardly more’n begun when I got back to the church, but it was already growing dark and puckering up like it might snow some more. The preacher warn’t around. Maybe he was hiding somewheres from all the right-minded townsfolk. I found a morsel of bread on his pine table and, though it was at least a week old and worse even than the hardtack we got fed at the army forts, I borrowed it and went and stretched out on a pew under a heap of blankets to gnaw on it.

  The next thing I knowed, Tom was setting there talking to me. I judged it was Tom. He seemed more like a spirit, appearing so sudden like that and in such a place. He had a candle, and the light from it made his face come and go. “What I wanted to tell you, Huck, is that there is two kinds of injuns,” Tom says, if it was Tom. “There’s the ones who slaughter white folks and roast them for supper, and there’s the ones they call friendlies who ain’t cannibals. The friendlies respect the white man and try to act just like him, which is why some of them keep slaves and eat with forks, and lots of them is even Christians.” I believed Tom like I always done, but I didn’t believe him. I was glad he come back, but I didn’t know why he’d waked me up to tell me that. Then I seen the others. Becky Thatcher. The preacher. Tom’s horse. “Huck, I’m gonna leave you for a time,” Tom says.

  It turned out him and Becky was getting hitched by the preacher, and me and the horse was the witnesses. Tom was giving the horse to the preacher as pay for marrying them, and him and Becky was taking the steamboat upriver the next day on its final journey of the year to connect up with the big riverboats headed down towards St. Petersburg. “You can come and see us off,” he says.

  The news shook me up considerable, but I done my best not to show it. Neither me nor the horse didn’t say 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 act proper. 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 celebrate the wedding with and after the preacher had went 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 hotel 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.

  CHAPTER V

  HEN ME AND the general first crossed trails, Tom Sawyer had been gone east some five or six years. Though he said he’d come back out and find me, he never did. I allowed he must a forgot. I seen a pretty girl who looked like Becky some years later over a-near a Wyoming trailhead, and if it was her, I judged that Tom was like enough there, too, but he didn’t show himself.

  When he left, I carried on like before, hiring myself out to whosoever, because I didn’t know what else to do, but I was dreadful lonely. I wrangled horses, rode shotgun on coaches and wagon trains, murdered some buffalos, 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, but I warn’t never nothing but stone broke. The war was still on, each side chasing and killing t’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 whisky 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 of 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. I move we jest 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 chipp
ed 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 couldn’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’n 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 must 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 emigrant trails with his Missouri Piker gang, and I helped hold up the sort 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, 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 a few miles away to a saloon that I knowed from the Pony days to have a drink and buy some bottle whisky for the others. There was thousands a birds a-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 tight when we rode back, Ben personating a Big River steamboat 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, elks blowing their whistles. On the island, though, there warn’t nobody singing, nor howling nor whistling nuther. 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, t’other Confederal. I disremember 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 nigger slave. I says it was Tom’s idea of a bully adventure, and maybe we might could even turn a profit off of 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 sadful 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 what 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 whisky 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 of 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 spy 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 whisky. 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 judged 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 carried 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 a-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. If I ever got there. 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. My bandit days was over.

  CHAPTER VI

  OOKIE TOLD ME about the bad man whilst we was taking a bath. Baths warn’t something I was partial to, but she done things with her spidery fingers that made them more favorable. It was like sometimes she had an extra pair of hands. Maybe she used her strange unregular feet with the wiry little toes. She could do most anything with them, including licking them like
a cat or lacing them behind her neck. But they warn’t so good for walking. I done more baths with Nookie than all the rest a my life piled together. I knowed they could do a body harm, so I been cautious to mostly stay away from them, but I ain’t sorry for the ones I had with Nookie.

  Her painted tin tub was just big enough to stand or set in, with a little ledge on one side. I never seen nothing like it before, generly using rivers and rain to get wet in. Nookie would squat at the edge with me raired up on my knees in the tub and sponge my backside with a soft squshy soap she made herself, and then she would crawl in at my feet when it was the other parts’ turn. She made a whiny sound whilst she done it, which was maybe Chinese singing. She says she was muddytating. The tub was made for one body to set in, but we was so skinny there was room for both of us, so when she poured warm water over me to wash off the stink of the soap, she got in, too.

  Then it was Nookie’s turn. Helping Nookie soap herself was one a the comfortablest things I ever done. The Widow Douglas always used to learn me that it was better to give than to receive. You couldn’t credit nothing the widow said, but it was maybe true about baths. Of course, there warn’t much of Nookie to wash, we was both slathering up skin stretched tight like wet wrapping paper around bones, and hers was most like bird bones. If she’d been bigger, maybe it’d seemed less agreeable. “You rike my bluzzer, Hookie,” she says, looking sorrowful at me. “He skinny, too.”

  When Nookie called me Hookie, it sounded like cookie, both our names did the way she said them. She says it was the bad man who named her. She told him her real name, but he couldn’t never learn it. He told her Nookie was what her name meant in English or some other language. “He say, I am Rooskie, you are Nookie. Is only time I hear he laugh. Zen he hit me. Har-r-r. Like he mad bout sumssing.” She says Nookie was sort of like her real name, but when she told me the real one, it warn’t nothing like. It was more like a bee in her nose. I couldn’t learn it neither.