Huck Out West Read online

  HUCK OUT WEST

  ROBERT COOVER

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York · London

  For Georges Borchardt, trail boss and fellow outrider

  for close on half a century.

  “He had a dream,” I says, “and it shot him.”

  Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

  CHAPTER I

  UST HOW I found my poor bedeviled self standing over a gulchful of expired trees, staring down the barrel of a prewar flintlock fowler toted by a crazy old cross-eyed prospector bent on dispatching yours truly, Huckleberry Finn, if not off to some other world, at least to the bottom of the mournful gulch below us, is something you ought know about on account of it being a historical moment—or ruther, like that decrepit shotgun pointed at me, a PREhistorical one. I warn’t so afraid of the old buzzard shooting me as I was of that rusty musket going off of its own cantankerousness and fatally abusing us both. Pap used to wave one of them cussed things around, blowed off his big toe with it in a drunk one night, then give me a wrathful hiding afterwards like I’d been the one who done it.

  I’d only went prospecting with Deadwood that day because he wanted company and needed watching after, him being the sort to mosey off and get et by wild bears out of pure unmindfulness. If I’d knowed we’d be a-finding gold, I’d a stayed down in the tepee, because there ain’t much worse can happen to a body than getting rich. All gold is fool’s gold, and I warn’t in that neighborhood on its account. Drawed out by Tom Sawyer’s stories and still here long after he’d upped and gone, I’d spent nigh half my life in the Territories, working one job or t’other. I was sometimes homesick for the Big River, but I mostly got used to the Territories and they got used to me, neither of us giving nor asking much, a way of easing through time that suited me when the world ’lowed it.

  Making camp in Lakota country warn’t legal, but the tribe had took me in a few years ago when I got snakebit and cured me of it, and so I had lived and hunted with them a spell and learnt something of the way they jabbered. It was the Lakota brave Eeteh who found me, all swoll up and near dead of rattler pison. He sucked the pison out and throwed me over my horse and took me to their medicine man, who poulticed me with prickly-pear and poured ammonie down my throat, which was worse’n dying.

  The Lakota was mighty warriors and they did not like white folks like me. I was deathly afraid of them and would a run away if I could a run at all. It was Lakota braves who’d ambushed poor Dan Harper and his fellow troopers and left them so full of arrows they looked like pin-cushions, so I reckoned they was just fattening me up for supper. But in the end they was good to me and I come to find them tolerable friendly, if maybe a bit quick to take a body’s head-hair off. They was heathens like me, though they had some foolish notions on the side they’d got from chawing dead cactus that I could only smile at and chaw along with them.

  I even had a Crow woman for a time, till she couldn’t stand me no more. She had been took during a Lakota raid and was used around some before they give her to me, probably as a joke. Kiwi didn’t have no nose and was at least half as ugly as me, and she was considerable inscrutable, not because she was a native, but due to her being a woman, whose species are by nature beyond my misunderstanding. They also give me a horse, probably a joke like Kiwi because nobody could ride him, but he took me on a grand adventure and I stayed with him the whole time, and we ain’t hardly left each other since.

  Eeteh was having about the same kind of trouble with his tribe as I was having with mine, so him and me got on and we traveled together after that whenever we could. That’s how it was that when the tribe, in their hunt for the disappearing buffalo, ported their lodges up into high Wyoming Territory, not far from the wagon trail where I’d met Dan, I trailed along, even though I knowed it was deathly bad luck to return to where a friend had got murdered. And it was. Because of Eeteh’s turncoat Lakota brother, that ornery fancypants general found me up there again. General Hard Ass is what his soldiers called him, or else General Ringlets for his long curly hair which he lathered with a cinnamon oil that smelt a mile away. He was really only a colonel, but everybody called him general, because he wanted them to. He was on the warpath against the Lakota for what they done to some of his soldier boys and he wanted me to set a trap for him. Maybe I should a done, but I didn’t.

  If the general asked you to do something and you warn’t of a mind to, you was inviting yourself to your own hanging party, specially if you messed his plans. So I followed Eeteh’s sejestion and busted straight for the Black Hills, where I knowed the general was less than welcome. Hanging was as good as I deserved for the wicked thing I done, it was an out-and-out doublecross, but I was already black with sin, so I seen no reason not to add one more wrongfulness to the list and skaddle out of the hangman’s reach. The Black Hills was sacrid to the Lakota, but Eeteh says the only Great Spirit that could be found there was what was stilled up by an old hermit whisky-maker residing in the Gulch, and that’s where he’d look for me.

  When I rode Ne Tongo into the little hid-away cluster of unpainted broke-down shanties and raggedy tents at the edge of Deadwood Gulch, nigh to cricks too fast and shallow for rafting, but prime for fishing—there was even a patch of sweetly clovered meadow beside the crick for Tongo to graze on—I knowed I was at home. A place I could take my boots off all day long. It was the rainy season, so him and me settled into a comfortable cave in the hills above the crick, shooed the bats away, and waited for Eeteh.

  This was a few seasons back, before everything got so lively, when there warn’t no town, just the Gulch, not no saloons nor churches nor women, nor not no gold, nothing to trouble the peace, only a few hairy old bachelors, one of whom, old Zeb, cooked up home whisky and sold it by the ten-penny glass in his front room which was the only room his dirt-floor shack had, except for a little tack-on shed where he kept his still and yist mash. His shack was the X on the map Eeteh drawed me. Zeb was the only body in the Gulch actuly producing anything, the others mostly living off of hunting and fishing and fruit and the few vegetables they growed or dug up. “Most a these lunkheads ain’t producin’ nothin’ except what drops out their rear ends,” Zeb says.

  Zeb hailed from somewheres further down the Big River from me and Pap. He might not a been all white. He come west with only his old rags, his copper worms and pot, and a dona jugful of his pappy’s yist mash, stirred up in buckets on his pappy’s back porch, a stinking muck Zeb loved so much he called it his mother. Zeb was not a vilent man though he was said to have shot a few fools reckless enough to mess with her, and he kept a fierce mastiff named Abaddon who would chaw a body’s leg off if Zeb give him leave. Zeb was a loner who didn’t hardly talk to no one and then it was most like Abaddon’s growl, but he was proud of his whisky like a fiddler is of his music. He didn’t have no upper teeth, so his white-bearded lower jaw with its yaller teeth poked out under his nose like a cracked plate for it. He limped round like one peg was shorter’n t’other. Zeb’s local clients was mostly luckless prospectors, chasing doubtful dreams like gamblers do, their profession one I’d never took to heart on account of it being such pesky hard work.

  The prospectors warn’t legal nuther, but there warn’t many of them and they was tolerated by the Lakota on account of Zeb’s whisky. They was all crazy about it. They mostly got sold by white traders a rubbagy whisky made out a black chaw, red pepper, ginger, and molasses, but Zeb never done that, and they appreciated it, Eeteh specially. The whole name they give Eeteh meant Falls-on-His-Face, and he always done his best to live up to it. He rode a piebald pinto the tribe give him. It had a peculiar hip wiggle the tribe thought was funny, though it could still outrun most a their other horses. Because of the
pony’s comic walk and pied colors, Eeteh called him Heyokha, which meant Clown, or Thunder Dreamer, in the Lakota tongue.

  When he found me there, he fetched along my buffalo-hide lodge-skins and pipes and what-all else I’d left behind when me and Tongo took to our heels. We cut and trimmed some lodge-poles and hoisted a tepee by the crick, leaving the cave to the bats, and set down to enjoy Zeb’s brew. Eeteh told me the treacherous brother who’d set General Hard Ass on me had got throwed out a the tribe, but that might not a been a good thing, because the rumor was he’d took up scouting for the general.

  Me and Eeteh helped Zeb trade his liquor to the tribe for buffalo meat and for the maize and barley he needed to richen up his whisky mash, as well as for blankets, hides, pelts, rawhide rope, pots and pipes, and other goods to trade with emigrants passing through. Zeb shared the meat with me and Abaddon, and he give me stillage for Tongo. The main occupation in the Gulch was lazing around and stopping by the bar in Zeb’s shack every night, nor else a-jawing with Eeteh down at my tepee, smoking our pipes and sharing a jug. The Gulch was mighty peaceful and about as close as one could get in this world to the Widow Douglas’s fancied Providence.

  Well, this is a story with a fair number of years and persons in it and I’ve already took a wrong turn and got a-front of myself, so let me go back and tell you about me and loony old Deadwood and his antique musket and that fateful rock with gold in it, and then I’ll try to give out the rest of it. His name was the same as that of the Gulch, but whether he’d got his name first or the Gulch did is in generl disputation. He says his pap, who was a Canuck trapper just passing through, give him his real Christian name which was Edouard, but his mam, who was part Pawnee—Deadwood’s a mongrel, but who ain’t—couldn’t announce it proper. Others say that she changed it a-purpose because she judged that all he had betwixt his ears was like what laid at the bottom of the Gulch, and everybody thought that was comical and it stuck. Which might a gave others the idea of how to name the place, or anyhow that’s how he likes to tell it because he says it gives him first dibs on anything found here, gold or whatsomever.

  Well, now he’d found that glittery yaller rock, which I knowed as soon as I seen it was a powerful bad-luck sign, and he had got it in his mostly empty head that I was going to hire me a slick lawyer and steal his claim. To be sure that wouldn’t happen, he’d raised his gun, took my rifle away, and got ready to shoot me, saying he hoped I was all right with Jayzus and all them other holy folks.

  “Put that consounded thing away, Deadwood,” I says. “You know I ain’t no prospector.”

  “Well, maybe you ain’t and maybe you is, but I cain’t take no resks. I was borned here, ain’t nobody else got rights, everything here is mine.”

  “Did I ever say it warn’t?” Deadwood only shrugged his shoulder bones and cocked the musket. I was in a tight place and knowed I had to conjure up something quick like what Tom Sawyer would a done. “Now listen to me, Deadwood. You can go ahead and shoot, but just so’s you’re not disappointed, I’m bound to tell you that I set that rock there. I been feeling sorry for you being so low-spirited, and I done it to cheer you up. I don’t know if there’s more and I don’t care, but if you shoot me I can’t show you where I found it. You need me, and not only for finding gold. If you didn’t have me around, who else would you have to listen at all your bullwhacky?”

  “Awright then,” he says with a cross-eyed scowl, lowering the gun but keeping it cocked, “show me. And no dad-burned monkey business.”

  At first I couldn’t think where to take him and just set off walking. Then I recollected that old bat cave above the crick where I lived when I first come to the Hills. By luck, him and me was already on the path up to it, and it was fur enough off that I’d have time to ponder my strageties, as Tom called them.

  The way the land humped up here was right peculiar, like something inside had tried to shoulder its way out. Back in school they learned us about the jeanie-logical ages. I didn’t much credit it at the time, though when the widow said it went against the Good Book, I thought there might be something in it. I’d seen things hove up out on the desert, naked things carved by the wind into the strangest shapes, but here the hills was smothered over with wildflowers and big trees and was full of flying and scurrying varmints, with lots of dark damp places that smelt full of secrets. As the climb got steeper, the blackjack pines had trouble hanging on, which accounted for all the mortified trees down below us, though Deadwood says it was a mighty hurry-cane done it. He says the hurry-cane picked him up and hoisted him over into the Wyoming Territory, and what with all the buffalo stampeeds and scalping parties he had to fight his way through, it took him nigh two years and a half to get back from there.

  “It was in here I struck the rock,” I says when we come to the cave.

  “You set right thar en don’t run off,” Deadwood says, thinking my thoughts for me. “Ef you do, I’ll hunt you down’n shoot you, even ef I do find gold in thar.”

  I lit up my stone pipe and sunk back on a granite outcrop, outweighing my choices. I didn’t know where that rock he found come from, but not from inside that cave, where there warn’t nothing but a dirt floor carpeted over with bat droppings, so if I wanted to stay I’d have need of a good story, and he might shoot me anyway just out of exasperation. I could run away—Deadwood’s head didn’t work too good, it’s likely he’d forget to chase after—but I’d have to leave the Gulch just as I’d growed customed to it, and I could knock into that general again out there and wind up like all them misfortunate Santees in Minnysota.

  All of a sudden, whilst I was still studying over my perdicament, Deadwood set to whooping and hollering in the cave. I was afraid he might a found a bear, or a bear found him, and I was on my feet, ready to tear, but he come out a-dancing with a big potato sack. “Looky here, looky here! Better’n gold! Money! Heaps of it! And other stuff, too! Look at this gold fob watch!”

  “I know,” I says, though it was news to me just like the rock was. I warn’t the only body who’d holed out in that cave. “I seen all that. But it warn’t mine, so I only kept the rock. Robbers, I reckon. Better leave it be.”

  “Ef they’re robbers, they’re most prob’bly hanged by now. I say, finders keepers. I’m a-goin’ to buy me a jug from ole Zeb to celybrate. Ef you tote the poke, I’ll ’low you t’come along.”

  CHAPTER II

  O WE DONE that, Deadwood not losing the opportunity at Zeb’s to show off his rock to all the loafers there. How did he find that when nobody else had, they wanted to know. “Cuz I been here since afore time begun,” says he, “and I knowed where it got hid.” They asked him if he’d struck a seam, and he squinted, his eyes closing down on his nose, and says, “Yup, but I ain’t talkin’.” Though of course he warn’t doing nothing else. After a few more swallows from the jug, that lode would be solid gold a mile wide and long and a hundred fathoms deep, but strangers and greenhorns couldn’t see it if they was standing on it. For the price of a jug, he wheedled Zeb out of his raggedy old black vest so’s to have a pocket to plunk the fob watch into. Deadwood says the watch was give him by the owners of the Pacific Rileroad. “I was out thar to show ’em how to spike up them rile things and they gimme it in reckonition.”

  “That must of been that golden spike I heerd tell about,” Zeb says with a wink to the others. “You prob’bly stole that, too.”

  “Maybe. I ain’t sayin’,” Deadwood says, looking mysterious, and they all laughed at that.

  Deadwood couldn’t never resist a good brag. He liked to say he’d helped old Dan’l Boone, who’d got lost, find his way into Missouri, had learnt Jim Bowie how to handle a knife, and when he was just a pup, had went surveying with General Washington. “They credited him, but I done all the dern work.” When I said I thought that gent lived in the last century, he said then maybe it was his younger brother. That lady liar Sarah Sod who Tom was always going on about couldn’t hold a candle to Deadwood.

  The only person co
uld match him lie for lie was my Lakota friend Falls-on-His-Face. Eeteh was mostly a happy loafer like me with a particular hankering for Zeb’s whisky and a generl dispreciation of the harsh ways of his tribe which, to hear Eeteh tell it, was nigh as ugly as the sivilization I’d lit out from. They got a Great Spirit that bullyrags them worse’n Moses and sets down what fundamentals they can and can’t do, mostly can’t. Eeteh says he never paid no attention to none of it, he couldn’t see no advantage about it, and for that he took a power of whalings until Coyote learned him how to act a fool. Everybody laughed at him now, and they was always playing mean jokes on him, but they never whipped him no more.

  You don’t cross Moses and his holy gang without you get a hiding or struck with leppersy, but the Great Spirit hadn’t no choice, he had to live with Coyote and his mischief. It was more fair. I ain’t never seen him, but Eeteh says he has been to hell with the tricksome cretur to gamble with the dead, has helped him build a fire in a river bottom so as to catch cooked fish, and has walked the sky with him. The stars up there, Eeteh says, are like stones in the river and you have to hop from one to the next. It’s scarier than a river, though, because if you slip you fall up into the black night and never stop falling. The tribe don’t know whether to believe him or not, but just like the folks back in St. Petersburg living their own crazy lies, they’re afraid he might be right, and so they give him his space and some attention. Deadwood warn’t so lucky.

  To be sure I couldn’t butt in on his claim, Deadwood left me out of his yarns, which I took as a good thing because I didn’t want no share of the trouble his crowing was bound to land him in. Our old neighbors was used to Deadwood’s stretchers and was mostly too muddled up with Zeb’s brew to be a worry, but rumbustiouser elements been moving into the Gulch who didn’t know him. Some of them was there in Zeb’s shack that night and they was already closing in on Deadwood in their grim friendly way. It looked like getting out might be a sight more harder’n getting in was.