Huck Out West(70)

If the body was dug out, I reckoned I’d put it in a tree in the tribal way. Bodies are set in trees so their souls can fly straight off to the next world without nothing to get in their way. In Eeteh’s Coyote world there ain’t nothing next and no souls neither, only a few comical ghosts, but I’ll do that for him anyhow. We both been good at pretending. I was pretending now, jabbering in a quiet way with Tom and Bear, tolerating Wyndy.

Whilst I walked sorrowing along, heading back crickside because I don’t know where else to go, I passed a small horse-drawed buggy, and the person inside called out, “Huckleberry! Huckleberry FINN! Is that YOU?” It was Becky Thatcher! “Get IN!” she says with a happy laugh and opened the door for me.

She give me a big kiss when I squeezed in and laughed again. There was a pretty smell about her and a most wonderful softness. “Tom ain’t here,” I says.

“I KNOW that, Huckleberry! It’s YOU I want to see! It’s been so LONG!” I asked if she warn’t the person I seen, dressed up so pretty, in that saloon up in Wyoming a few years ago, and she says, “Aw, Hucky, those were my working clothes. I HATE them. Yours are prettier. I LOVE that vest, though it needs a washing. I was still chasing after Tom back then, and I was working that trail, waiting for him to show up on it. I supposed most everybody would, sooner or later. And there was no shortage of customers. Cowboys get lonely.”

When she says the word “lonely,” I felt the hurt of it and my throat thickened up. “You was riding with cowboys?”

“Oh, Huckleberry . . .” She sighed and touched my cheek. “I’d just started up my new profession. Cowboys are mostly only little boys, their pants full of ignorant excitement. If they also got money in their pants, I can generally do something about the excitement, and about their ignorance, too. I GUESS you could call it riding with them.” She laughed and clapped her hand on my leg and I jumped. “Aren’t YOU the ticklish one!” she says with a tittery little laugh. “All right. Let me tell you flat out, Huckleberry. Tom left me in St. Petersburg more’n a dozen years ago when I was six months heavy with our baby. I lost it and, when I stopped crying, I came west looking for him. A girl’s not supposed to DO that, but I did. Sometimes I got close, but it was like he’d always catch wind of me somehow and move on. I ran out of money and hope and finally I met Dorie and started doing what I HAD to do or starve. I was just only coming to work that day when you saw me. I didn’t want Tom to know, and I was afraid he might be with you. If he did turn up, I didn’t know if I’d hug his feet or shoot him.” She sighed. “Now, it don’t matter anymore.” She slumped back in the seat like she was thinking over about what she just said. “So, where’ve YOU been, Huckleberry? Did you come here to the Hills with Tom?”

“No, been here for a time. The Gulch was a most lazy and tolerable place till people like Tom come’n ruined it. Me and a Lakota friend helped an old whisky-maker trade with the tribe and move his goods, and we helped him drink them up, too. I was happy as I ever been. Then a crazy old prospector found a yaller rock and everything changed. Tom he come and saved me from a lynching, but he made a mess out of everything else. Me and my friend was fixing to leave for Mexico or somewheres, anywheres, just so’s we was away from here, but I got sick with the janders. Now, all of a sudden, he’s dead.” I took a deep breath. “Got dynymited.”

“Oh! Last night! I HEARD it!” Her voice was like a sad little girl’s. “Is that his vest? That’s blood on it, isn’t it?”

I don’t never cry. But I was crying.

“Oh, Hucky!” She put her arm around me and kissed me again. She was crying, too. “Look! We’re HERE!” The buggy was stopping. I ain’t even noticed we been moving. “It’s where I live. Come in for some real ’buckles coffee and Dorie’s butterscot cookies.”

Whilst Becky was giving the driver some money, I crawled out and wiped my eyes and seen that Wyndy been following us on horseback. He did not look a happy man. “Tom hired him to watch me,” I says. “He don’t give up easy.” She waved at him and invited him in. He hollers out from a ways off on his horse that, no, Finn’s got to go back to the camp. NOW! Becky shrugged and took my hand and led me in, put the latch on the door.

It was the loveliest place I seen since I come west. There was curtains on the windows and pictures on the walls and a cast-iron stove with a big new-fashioned porcelain tub behind it and soft chairs with crocheted doilies on them like in Tom’s aunt’s house. “Old Dorie likes a homey place,” Becky says, stoking up the fire in the wood stove. She poured water in a painted tin coffee pot and set it on.

“Dorie?”

“Hunky Dorie. She’s my business partner. She fixed up this house for us because of all the fat boys here in Leed, but we’re looking for a bigger place where we can hire in more girls. And the fat boys are too tight with their money. Can you imagine? They want to KEEP it! So, we been to Stonewall to look around, Hillyo, Camp Crook, all the new shantytowns.” When the water was a-biling, she throwed in a handful a coffee and took the pot off the fire. “Today Dorie’s over in a new town on Rapid Crick. There’s a lot of quick money in the Hills right now, but you have to grab it as it goes flying past, and it helps if you’re where it first sets off.” She poured me a cup a thick barefoot coffee through a silver tea strainer, and laid some cookies on a little tin plate with painted flowers on it. It was the best coffee I ever tasted. “For me, these mining shantytowns are too wild and scary,” she says, then thumbed some snuff up her nose. “I’d like to be in a civiler place like Cheyenne or Abileen or even here in Leed, but Hunky Dorie loves excitement and hates the law. She says the law don’t mainly favor the profession. And the miners at least are grateful, while the fat boys think they own you.”