Huck Out West(71)

“Is Tom one a the fat boys?”

“He’s around. They say he and some other bandits have partnered up, and they mean to grab it all. He pretends he doesn’t see me. Or maybe he’s not pretending.” She sneezed and rubbed her nose. “I was never able to make out how you two got to be friends. He doesn’t have any others. Just only you.”

“I don’t know nuther. I warn’t nobody, just a dumb leather-headed loafer sleeping on the streets. I never done the things everybody else was doing like church or school. They said I warn’t sivilized. But then Tom took me like a pard. That changed everything. All them stories Tom likes to tell, the Sarah Sod ones with the jeanies? It was like that. So, when he asked me to light out for the Territory with him, there warn’t nothing else I wanted to do. Scouting out here with Tom was the most amazing life I could ever imagine. I wished it would last on forever.”

“But then I come along,” she says. A kind of sadfulness slid across her face, but then she smiled and says, “Scouts is what me and Dorie are now. It’s why I was over in Deadwood Gulch. We’re not scouting for Indians and robbers, though. We’re looking for stupid horny boys with little bags of gold dust around their scrawny sunburnt necks.” She giggled sweetly, just like she always done as a schoolgirl, then sniffed. “When’s the last time you had a bath, Mr. Huckleberry Finn? By looks and smell, I’d judge at least a month or more.”

“It’s been some time. Me and my horse used to wash up regular in the crick, but the horse is gone and the crick shore is full of tetchy gold panners who don’t tolerate nobody stirring things around.”

“I’ll hot up some water.”

“Well . . . I ain’t partial to baths . . .” She was still Tom’s woman. I was thinking about Coyote and Snake Woman, and where all that ended up.

“Come on, we’re like family, Hucky. I got to take CARE of you!” She put a big kettle on the stove and throwed in some wintergreen leaves. Then she took off her frock and hung it on a wall peg. She warn’t so skinny like before and she was adding on a second chin, but she was still lovely and round in her frilly white underclothes. I don’t know what to say, so I says it must be awful, trying to get in and out a them things in a hurry, and she laughs and says she DON’T get in and out, and she showed me how all the main bits opened up with pearl buttons and cloth hinges. I hain’t never seen nothing like it, and says so. She sighed and smiled. “It was my embroidered pantalettes that got Tom so agitated back when we were still in school together,” she says. “He was desperate to get them down and see what was under them, and he begged me to let him do that, but it didn’t seem right. Until we were dying in Injun Joe’s cave, and then he did it without asking. Now get out of those old rags. The water’s near hot.”

I didn’t appear to have no polite choice, so I took my clothes off and crawled into the fancy porcelain tub. “You got the haunches, Hucky, of a wild dog,” she says. “And you got an off complexion all over.” She hung my traps over the back of a chair next the stove to dry them out, asking if I’d been wearing those britches since I come out West. “All that buckskin in the crotch, it’s what makes them smell so pretty.” When I was settled, she poured the heated water over me and put another kettle on. Then she commenced to lather me up with a cotton cloth and a handful a soft soap that stunk like lavender. “You ever been in love, Hucky?”

“Once.”

“Did it make you feel wonderful?”

“I ain’t never been in so much trouble. Had to run away without my boots on.”

“Oh, Hucky, you’re SO romantic! Maybe what you need is to get married.”

“Done that. When I was living with the tribe, I found myself hitched to a native woman without no nose named Kiwi. She learnt me some things, so I warn’t such a dumb fool with a woman, and I felt sorry for her, but I didn’t like her. She didn’t do nothing for my loneliness neither. So when she got fed up and moved out, I reckoned that part was over, I didn’t have to do no more marrying.”

Becky laughed. “You married a squaw!”

“Well, they don’t like to be called that. I had to learn that the hard way. Kiwi had a punch could floor a man.”

“Kiwi. Does that translate to something?”

“Probably. She had a longer name I couldn’t never remember. But they all grinned and snorted when anybody announced it, so I was afeard to ask.”

I told Becky all about them giving me a love potion and what it done to a body and how it somehow worked on the whole tribe at the same time, and she unloosed her little-girl laugh and says, “Are you making this up, Hucky?”

“Maybe.”

Wyndy was banging on the door and calling out my name and damning degenrates and fornycators, but we didn’t pay him no mind. The second kettleful was ready, so Becky poured it over me. “I’m reminded that back home,” she says as she poured, “the locust trees’ll be in bloom.”

“You still think of it like home?”

“Only when I’m away from it.” She set the empty kettle on the back of the stove, peeled out of her underclothes, and snuggled down into the warm water beside me. “Tom has all your treasure money, you know. He talked my pappy out of it, saying he was bringing it out to you. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen it.”