Huck Out West(56)

“You recollect how little Tommy Barnes come to your robber gang meeting dressed up like a pirate?” I says. “He had a wire ring in his nose, a birchwood sword, and a paper hat with a skull and crossbones inked on it!”

Tom snorted. “But then the cry-baby wouldn’t prick his dern finger for a blood oath!”

“Ben Rogers said he should oughta walk the plank for that!”

We both laughed, thinking about little Tommy Barnes. Tom drunk from the bottle and passed it across to me. There were wrinkles round his eyes now, and sometimes a kind of sadfulness crept in, even when he was laughing. “Well, Tommy Barnes ain’t no more, Huck. He enlisted into the Union army to get the bonus they was offering, then deserted and volunteered at another recruiting station with a different name for another bonus. He come home to St. Petersburg bragging about that, picking up girls by throwing his extra money round. They pretty soon cleaned him out, though, so he tried to enlist for a third time somewheres else and got caught. They accused him as a deserter and a bounty jumper and shot him with a firing squad.” What I seen in my head was half a dozen leather-headed bullies with field rifles aimed at a little cry-baby in a paper pirate hat who still peed his pants. I felt the jolt of it when they fired and says I was dreadful sorry to hear it and passed the bottle back.

Tom he only laughed again and says that Tommy Barnes was a hero for half the town who thought Yanks and Rebs should both go to hell. He took a long drink from the bottle, and by and by he says, “My old pal Joe Harper, though, he was a genuine hero. The Shucker of Pea Ridge, they called him back in St. Petersburg after he shot a general up there. They made him a corpral major and loadened him down with medals, and then he got killed on Graveyard Road in Vicksburg, leading a ladder assault on a stockade. I allowed all them medals made him slow afoot. I was there when they fetched his body back up the river by steamboat. They raised money in town to make a statue of him. I give them four bits.”

I says that I met up with a young soldier out here with Joe’s family name, and he’s dead, too. All Tom had to say about that was that, if he was dead, he didn’t care to know him, and he handled me the bottle and relit his seegar.

Joe Harper was the boy me and Tom run away with to Jackson’s Island to live the pirate life, and we thought back on that a while. Tom says he still had some cutlesses and a pirate flag that he borrowed from a museum, thinking he might give up the West some day and go to sea like a pirate, and says maybe we could do that together. I says great, let’s go. Jackson’s Island was where I learnt both him and Joe to smoke. It made them dog-sick, and that give me a laugh. But I showed them other things, too. They didn’t know nothing about living in the rough, just like I didn’t know nothing about school and church and all them sivilizing concerns. I done most a the work, but it warn’t LIKE work. I was Finn the Red-Handed, and I ain’t never been happier. Joe and Tom they was running away from home, but I didn’t have no home to run from and none to go back to. I was at home right there on Jackson’s Island. They was looking for buried treasure. For me, the treasure was out a-front of our faces, plain as sun and water. I took a swallow a Tom’s whisky in memory of it and of old Joe Harper. And of Dan Harper, too.

Our stories was all mostly sorrowful ones about old pals dying and I didn’t know if I should tell him about Ben Rogers getting his skull clove in for chasing after a little Cherokee girl. But I did, and Tom he says, “Good for old Ben. Way a chap OUGHT to go, not in some stinking war. I hope he done the little heathen’s privates some serious damage before they massacred him, so’s he never died in vain.” I was going to say what we was doing in the Cherokee Nation in the first place, and about how famous the Missouri Kid’s bandit gang was because I promised Ben I would, but Tom blowed a lungful a seegar smoke up at the tent roof and says, “Ever smoke opyum, Huck?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I had a Chinese lady friend who give me something for my pipe that was mighty relaxing.”

“That was probably it. I mostly only lay with white women as a rule, but one night in Tucson I ain’t got no choice. Half the girls was sick, the other half was already bought and bouncing, and all that was left in the crib was a scrawny old Chinese granny, who was maybe a hundred years old. She drugged me with opyum and sent me down what she says was eight folding paths to heck-stasy. The opyum left a body feeling dead with its spirit floating over it. I was scared, not having no control over whatever was happening next, and sometimes what she done hurt like blazes, but in the end it was most amazing. I ain’t even reached the fourth folding, when I’m geysering like old Yallerstone. She says she learnt the trick from Confusion. Was it like that for you?”

“No, Nookie was more interested in giving me baths.” Even then, laying there in Tom’s tent, I could feel her spidery hands on me. “She spent a considerable time at it and when I asked her what she was doing, she says she was muddytating.”

“Muddytating on what?”

“On my backside, mainly.”

“Hah! Is that all you done?”

“No, but it’s what I most remember.” I also seemed to hear her screams when the bad man come back and grabbed her away. I never actully heard them, I was guiding emigrants out on the trail, I only seen the ruins afterwards, but still they ha’nted me, and they was ha’nting me now.

There warn’t many girls and women in my life. Mostly, I ducked and run. It’s what I told Tom to do, too, but he didn’t pay me no heed. He up and married one. I took another swallow and passed the bottle over and asked about her, and he says Becky wanted babies, so he left her back in St. Pete, doing that. “I got things to do in this world so long’s I’m in it, Huck. Ain’t got time for family. Don’t believe in it. Ain’t it funny how people think they’re creating up something new, when all they’re making is more miserable copies of themselves?”