Castle Garden

by Bill Albert

  There was more Buffalo Bill after that. The Buffalo Hunt, the Attack on the Settler’s Cabin, when he came to the rescue again and, of course, his famous trick shooting. First clay pigeons, then a row of twenty clay pipes, all shot fast as lightning. After that he rode full speed past Johnny Baker who threw glass balls high in the air. Blam! Blam! Blam! Shattered one after the other with a Winchester and then he did the same with his Colt .45. It was no less than I had expected from Buffalo Bill. No more city suits and soft carpets. No sir. This was the Buffalo Bill Cody straight out of the Dimes. The band struck up another spanking-bright march tune and the crowd clapped and whistled and stomped like to tear the place apart.

  “Buckshot!” Benny laughed. “And don’t them mugs buy it every damn time!”

  I pulled at his arm.

  “Yeah, Mouse. Ol’ man uses buckshot. Half the time he’s so damn bottle-scared he couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a hogleg!”

  I shook my head vigorously at Benny. Buffalo Bill wouldn’t cheat. I mean even thinking that was like spitting on the flag or worse.

  “Wadda ya reckon, huh? Wadda ya reckon all this is? Cowboys, Indians, buffalo hunts and the rest? Play-actin is all. So’s the mugs’ll come and pay their fifty cents. Won’t pay fifty cents if the old man don’t smash them balls for ‘em. Damn play-actin, Mouse!”

  I knew about all that other stuff. But buckshot? I realized then for absolute certain that Benny December didn’t know everything.

  10

  Buffalo Bill used buckshot. Of course he did. Twenty grams of black powder and a quarter of an ounce of Number Seven chilled shot. Just about everyone seemed to know that but me. “Why not? It is the job he must do,” said Charlie Pinto Face with a shrug. “Besides, Pahaska, he is a white man. The white man is always making the world as he wants it to be.”

  No matter what anyone said, I felt bad about the buckshot for quite a while. However, my life with the Wild West was filling up so quick that I didn’t have much time to dwell on it, what with the moving every few days, working for Mike Furlong at the mess tent, going around with Benny and my lessons with Charlie and Sunset Buffalo Dreamer. They didn’t call them lessons, but they were just the same.

  River, explained Sunset Buffalo Dreamer, cupping his hands waist high and then raising his right hand index finger extended to the left of his face and then to the right.

  Good, he signed, moving his hand left to right across his chest after I imitated the movement for river.

  Man.

  I raised my right index finger in front of my face.

  Push.

  I clinched my fists to my chest and pushed out as if working against a heavy weight.

  He signed, Are you hungry?

  I thumbed my chest, held my hand palm up at my stomach and moved it back and forth, curved my cupped hand past my mouth a couple of times and then with my fingers curled like a soft fist I tipped my hand towards my mouth. I hungry food want.

  “Good,” he said out loud.

  I moved my hand across my chest from left to right.

  Sunset Buffalo Dreamer almost smiled.

  Charlie Pinto Face said I was learning to sign faster than a Lakota. Sunset Buffalo Dreamer said it was because I couldn’t talk.

  Without a tongue, the hands grow quick, he signed.

  I had a tongue and my hands weren’t growing, but sign language is like that. Once you work out the signs, then you have to figure out what they mean all run together. A riddle inside a riddle.

  I heart on the ground—I am sad. I house sit—I live here. I have heart sunrise—I have a good time. Buffalo old no good—Newborn Buffalo Calf.

  Signing beat having to write notes to Charlie all the time and it meant depending on him a whole lot less. The Indians, except Bent Nose, who pretended I wasn’t there, were more than happy to practice and show me new ones. Within a few weeks I could just about get by with simple things, though sometimes I got mixed up. Then it was either blank looks, scowls, or the Indians falling about laughing so they could hardly stand up.

  You must be made ready, Sunset Buffalo Dreamer would sign.

  When I asked him for what he would shake his head and sign to me that we were swimming across a big water and couldn’t see the other side yet.

  If you stop swimming you will sink like a rock. That is all.

  It looked pretty damn final the way he did it.

  When I asked Charlie to explain to me what learning sign had to do with swimming, he jumbled it up worse than ever.

  “Without the sign words there is nothing to hear as Sunset Buffalo Dreamer waits in the dark for the sunrise.”

  After that I stopped asking.

  Benny told me I was wasting my time.

  “They got nothin to learn ya, those Injuns. Just look at ‘em. Sittin outside their tipis, crazy as bedbugs and just ‘bout as useful.”

  I couldn’t argue with him. In fact, with me not talking and him not reading, my side of our conversations was paired down pretty close to the bone. Yes and no, looks and gestures, him guessing what I wanted to say or working his way towards it. He was good at that. It got so he was almost talking to himself and Benny was a mighty good talker.

  You make coffee, I signed at him, hand cupped to my mouth, then finger pointed at him, then my right hand turning above an open-palmed left hand.

  “Wait up now. Ya don’t wanna start that Injun shit in on me, Mouse. I ain’t gonna do it.”

  I reckoned that if I could teach Benny some sign it would make getting on with him that much easier. He was dead set against it though.

  “You see, Mouse, it’s like this. Ya start throwin yer hands ‘round like that, people gonna think how yer cracked, bughouse or somethin. Now how ya gonna get anywheres in this here world if people is thinkin that ‘bout ya?”

  For a guy who couldn’t read or write I reckoned Benny was being a touch unreasonable about the sign language.

  He waved his hands around wildly, stuck out his tongue and rolled his eyes.

  “See what I mean?”

  I shook my head. It wasn’t like that at all. Sunset Buffalo Dreamer made sign look like a flowing hand dance, all graceful and with a kind of rhythm to it.

  You make coffee, I signed again at Benny, trying to get the movement like Sunset Buffalo Dreamer did.

  “Shit, no!” spat Benny. “You and yer damned Injuns!”

  He stomped off.

  “The other fellas think the same,” he told me later that day as we sat out behind the mess tent after finishing with breakfast. “Ya should be with us, not livin in with them. Ya got no future in a damn tipi, Mouse. Look at ya, a white boy same as us. Ya ain’t no Injun. Shit no!”

  He was smoking a cigar butt he had found. It smelled real bad. He trid to hand it to me but I shook my head.

  “Suit yerself, Mouse, but don’t say I didn’t warn ya ‘bout it.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “I ain’t sayin for now,” he said, puffing out a fat smoke ring.

  It was times like that when I could almost bust for wanting to make Benny understand how it really was with me and Sunset Buffalo Dreamer. It was times like that when I hated Benny meaner than sin on a Sunday.

  11

  When I ran away from home I had been looking over my shoulder all the time to make sure there was a way back. Hyman Budnitsky saw to it that there wasn’t. I guess you could say he made it so I had to go down to the kitchen and bake my own sponge cake.

  I didn’t get as far as cake with the Wild West. I only made it to potatoes. Sitting on a splintery crate outside the mess tent with some of the other boys, peeling spuds and daydreaming about New York, it was only the good things that came back sharp and clear. My room and toys, my soft bed, my books, the collection of dime novels, playing in Central Park and not having ever to imagine what it was like to peel pot
atoes.

  Don’t get me wrong, everyone was treating me white, but being with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show didn’t mean being with Buffalo Bill. Of course, I saw him in the Show, but after a dozen or more performances that sort of wore itself out. Since that day in his tent he hadn’t said a word to me. A few times he walked by but without a glance. I had disappeared, one of his five hundred workers, not another Johnny Baker to be tutored in the lore of the plains and made into the “Cowboy Kid.” I was Newborn Buffalo Calf, Little Cut-Penis, Mouse, “Hey you, coffee,” and I was right-down-to-my-boots homesick for Meyer Liebermann.

  “Too much woolgatherin, child,” scolded Mike, binding up my cut thumb with a rag. “Ya think peelin potties ain’t important enough to pay proper mind to it? Is that whacha think? God love ya, child, I’m tellin ya that it is important. Everythin on God’s earth got it’s why-to-do-it and how-to-do-it, even peelin potatoes. Everyone was put here for a purpose. Don’t have to be a high one, no sir it don’t. All in His Great Scheme. Everyone fittin in with it as best they can. With me it’s waiterin. With you right now it’s peelin them spuds.”

  “Ya don’t wanna be listenin to Crazy Mike,” taunted Big Red. “Talks like a tent revival!”

  “Yeah,” added Benny. “Bullshit-preachin!”

  The other boys laughed and started singing “Onward Bony Soldiers Looking for some Whores.” Making fun of Mike sure beat peeling potatoes.

  Mike smiled at them like he was hearing the sweetest serenade. He told me that Christians only know they righteously got the call when they have to suffer for their faith.

  I was suffering too, from a deep cut, and when blood kept oozing through the rag I got scared. So did Mike.

  “Take you to the Doc,” he said. “Don’t want ya losin no fingers. Where’d ya be with that there Injun talk then? Come on, child.

  “You boys keep peelin at those potatoes or one of those black fellas’ll be out here after your hides and they don’t stand for no sassin.”

  They saluted and “yes sir’d” him like he was a general. Mike didn’t notice. He took my elbow and began to propel me across the showground, talking all the while.

  “Easy to get blood poisonin, child. Don’t stop at the finger it don’t. Seen men lose the whole arm for one little cut. Whole arm right up to there. Toes, feet too and legs above the knee. Can’t be too careful. No sir. Once it takes hold, well, there’s just no telling where it’s gonna end. Like sin it is.”

  Mike worked without a breath from my physical peril to my moral peril.

  “Godless and wild those boys. They’ll be cast down when the trumpet sounds. Laughin and mockin won’t help ‘em then. Mark it, child. Ya know the Lord? . . . No? Course not! How could ya, livin with them heathens. Colonel Cody said it were all right, so ain’t for me to say different, but I wouldn’t want no boy of mine to be. And you watch that Benny December, Satan’s own blood. Smokin, drinkin, takin the Lord’s name in vain and worse if it were known.”

  I knew most of it already. He smoked and he drank some, but Benny’s number one interest was making money anyway he could. One of his biggest earners was running whisky into the show. For the Indians mainly, but for others too.

  “What’s the harm?” he asked me. “Old Man, he drinks like a blacksmith, don’t he? Some of ‘em here can’t get off of the grounds easy as him, stayin in them choice hotels like he does. I don’t do it somebody else will. Right? I’m only providin a necessary service is all. Ya gotta make it for yerself, ain’t no one else going to do it for ya.”

  I refused to have anything to do selling drink to the Indians. Weren’t the bad men in the Dimes always running whisky and guns to the Indians? However, the night before I had gone with him to take a bottle of gin to Billy Baker the Boy Giant.

  Billy Baker was what they called a curio in the sideshow, along with Chemah and Pearl, the Johnson midgets, the Long-haired Lady and Prince Oskazuma, the Kaffir Warrior, although he was no African prince, just a dressed-up Negro from New Orleans who spoke French. The curios didn’t really do anything, they were there to be looked at, but the sideshow also had performers—a fire-eater, a sword-swallower, a juggler, Ogla the Snake Enchantress, mind readers, glassblowers, and a Japanese Magician. Benny told me that he’d heard how Buffalo Bill hated sideshows but when he hooked up with James Barnum, the circus man stuck him with having it.

  The barkers shouted how Billy Baker was eight foot tall, and although they could lie about the time of day when you were looking at your watch and tell you black was white, I reckon eight feet was close to what he was. You could see why they didn’t want him leaving the showgrounds. He would have frightened the locals half to death. He frightened me, and more than half. Billy wasn’t just tall, he was thick looking. A large, heavy head with thick nose and lips, a jaw like a coal scuttle, heavy ridges above eyes which were so deep-set you could hardly make them out. He had sausage fingers, dinner-plate hands. Had to have everything made special—pants, shirts, shoes. There was nothing that fit Billy Baker, not even his voice. Whispery sweet, like a soft foghorn a long way off. He must have had a lot of good stories to tell, but the one thing the Boy Giant was not big on was talking. He never said anything to us except “Thanks” and made it real plain he had nothing to add to that.

  The gin bottle disappeared in his hand and he stood there with a numb look behind his eyes waiting for us to go so he could get to his drinking. He got through a bottle of gin a day, which was good for Benny at a dime for each delivery.

  “You trying to slice this off, boy?” the doctor said. “Maybe someone died on you over there in the tipis?”

  I didn’t know what the doctor was saying until later when Charlie told me that the Lakota cut off a finger when someone close, like a father, dies. It was a proper way to mourn, he said. Reciting Kaddish took longer, almost a year one way and another, but it wasn’t so tough on the fingers. I prayed hard for Sunset Buffalo Dreamer staying healthy.

  The doctor sewed up my thumb and Mike shepherded me back to the mess tent. I hadn’t hurt myself bad enough to stop me peeling potatoes. Somewhere Hyman Budnitsky was laughing and buying sponge cakes by the wagonload.

  12

  It was the end of June, a steamy hot Sunday afternoon in Altoona or Harrisburg or some such town in Pennsylvania. I was sitting in the shade out behind our tipi with Sunset Buffalo Dreamer, Charlie, Bent Nose, and two or three others. They were chewing the fat, bragging about how brave they had been when they were young, arguing about the world. And like the world turning they always came back to the same spot—me.

  I counted coup on the dead Crow before the others had got off their horses, signed Sunset Buffalo Dreamer. Red Feather would tell you the same if he were alive.

  “What good is coup to us now?” asked Bent Nose, who refused to sign, as the signing was done solely for my benefit. “There are no more warriors. There will be no more warriors.”

  What is a Lakota if he is not a warrior, if he does not count coup? returned Sunset Buffalo Dreamer in sign.

  “What is a Lakota without the buffalo?” asked Laughing Spear, who had never looked like he might smile.

  “Without the hunting grounds?” added Bent Nose.

  “A Lakota is a Lakota!” declared Sunset Buffalo Dreamer hotly, abandoning the sign language.

  “And Little Cut-Penis?” shot back Bent Nose, who by getting Sunset Buffalo Dreamer to speak felt he had won a victory. “What is he?”

  Bent Nose had completed the circle back to me. I was getting used to it. After two months I was also getting used to life with the Show, although now and again homesickness would creep up, especially when Bent Nose got on to my not being a Lakota.

  Sitting on the wooden boards doing the necessary, trying not to let the latrine stink push up my nose, I would suddenly remember the clean water closet at home. Private, with a brass lock on the door, warm and smelling of lavender water.
That would start off a whole train of memories one after the other and all of them good.

  But what ate at me more than thinking about Eighth Avenue, was what was going to happen when the Show went into winter quarters and everyone headed for their regular homes. In New York I didn’t have to worry about things like that. I had a secure future mapped out for me. I hadn’t liked it much but it had been dependable.

  I suppose a future is what rich people force on their children. Other people’s kids have to get by one day at a time, chopping and changing as the wind blows them. I wasn’t rich anymore and so I didn’t have a future.

  Benny, on the other hand, at least had a plan for his. It wasn’t exactly a plan, more like this big idea he carried around in his head for getting rich. When the other boys made a nickel it never burned a hole in their pockets only because it never made it that far. A cigar, a glass of beer, a stick of candy from the butcher. Not Benny. He put his nickels away and smoked other people’s butts.

  “When I get me enough stashed I’ll light out for Idaho,” he told me. “My aunt had a sister went out there. Used to write regular. Gonna be my big chance, Mouse. The land of oppor-tun-nity is callin’. Diggin’ for gold! Ain’t gonna be a damn coffee boy all my life! Shit no!”

  Here in Boise, it seems that finally I’ve got myself a future, for all the good it’s going to do me, which is no damn good at all. Back then the choices were less final but just as complicated.

  I was only with the Show to keep the Indians from running out on him, so I couldn’t see Buffalo Bill letting Sunset Buffalo Dreamer take me back to the Pine Ridge Reservation, and as much as I liked the old man I didn’t want to go anyway. I’d only be stuck there listening to stories about the past, being reminded by Bent Nose or someone like him that I wasn’t a Lakota, and waiting around to see how Sunset Buffalo Dreamer’s vision turned out. The old man was bound to die on me anyway. Then I’d be left with no vision father and no little finger. That didn’t amount to much of a future at all. Besides, the Indians didn’t have a future like white people. They were caught in a circle which was getting smaller and smaller, while the white people were sitting up behind that smoke-puffing Union Pacific locomotive heading straight out West. That’s what Charlie Pinto Face told me and I suppose it’s true enough.