Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

Автор книги: Томас Бергер (Бри(е)джер)

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He viciously bit into his cigar holder. “Looking for a one-hundred-and-eleven-year-old survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn!”

Luckily, at that point one of his flunkies entered the office with dispatches from Hong Kong concerning the hotel my father proceeded to build in that colony, and I was spared further aspersions on my alleged weak-mindedness. My father was nearly eighty years old. He and I had never been close.

Just at the point at which I was about to throw up the game and begin, instead, serious work on my long-deferred monograph on the origins of the Southwestern luminaria(the Christmas lantern comprising a lighted candle in a paper bag filled with sand), projected several years before during my residence in Taos, N.M.-I was just perusing my notes on the subject when I received a curious letter, which looked very much like a hoax.

Deer sir I hurd you was trying to fine me-I reckon its me you was trying to fine on account I never hurd of ennybody else among these here old burned out wrecks at this home who was ever a hero like myself and partipated in the glorus history of the Olden Time Fronteer and new them all Genl Custer, Setting Bull, Wild Bill, that mean man Earp, etc or went through the socalled Little Bighorn fight or Custers Last Stand.

I am being held prisoner here. I am One Hundred and 11 year old and if I had my single action Colt’s I wd shoot my way out but I aint got it. Being your a riter and all I will sell my story for 50 Thousand dollar which I figure to be cheap considering I am probly the last of the oldtimers

Yr Friend

Jack Crabb

The handwriting was vile (though not in the least feeble) and took me all day to decipher; the redaction published here can be described as only probable. The letter was written on a sheet bearing the rubric of the Marville Center for Senior Citizens, which as we have seen had been my first port of call and yielded negative results. The request for fifty thousand dollars suggested the work of a potential confidence man.

Yet the next day found me, at the end of a hundred-mile drive through scattered cloudbursts, maneuvering my Pontiac into one of the spaces marked “Visitors” in the asphalt parking lot at Marville. It was early afternoon. The administrative director looked slightly vexed to see me again, and downright contemptuous when I showed him the letter. He put me in the hands of the chief of the psychiatric section, forthwith: a whey-faced person named Teague, who impassively studied the gnarled calligraphy on my document, sighed, and said: “Yes, I’m afraid that’s one of ours. They occasionally get a letter past us. I am sorry that you were inconvenienced, but be assured this patient is altogether harmless. His suggestion of violence in the last paragraph is fantasy. Besides, he is physically debilitated to the degree that he cannot leave his chair without an attendant’s help, and his apperceptive faculties have degenerated. So have no fear that he can make his way to the city and do you hurt.”

I pointed out to the doctor that Mr. Crabb’s threat, if so it could be called, was directed at the staff of the Marville Center and hardly towards me, but of course he merely smiled compassionately. I am not without experience of these gentry, having done my stint at fifty dollars an hour, twice a week, for several years when I was a decade younger, without the least diminution of my nightmares and migraine headaches.

“Nevertheless,” I added, “I mustinsist on seeing Mr. Crabb. I have just driven a hundred miles and given up a morning that had more profitably been spent with my tax accountant.”

He instantly acquiesced. Members of his profession are very easy to impose one’s will upon, so long as one does so in economic rather than emotional terms.

We went up one flight and walked a good half mile, corridor upon corridor; the psychiatric section was the newest part of Marville, all tile and glass and philodendrons: indeed, it resembled a greenhouse, with here and there a clump of old bald heads like mushrooms among the foliage. We reached a glassed-in balcony full of geraniums. Early December had established itself outside, but by means of the thermostat Marville maintained an internal summer all year round. I was suddenly shocked by a dreadful illusion: in a wheelchair, with its back to us, stood an abominable black bird-the largest turkey buzzard I had ever seen. Through the window it directed a raptorial surveillance on the grounds below, as if in search of lunch, its naked, wrinkled little head trembling ever so slightly.

“Mr. Crabb,” said Dr. Teague to the bird, “you have a visitor. Whatever your feeling towards me, I’m sure that you will be very polite to him.”

The buzzard turned slowly and looked over its sloping shoulder. My horror decreased at the sight of a human face rather than a beak-withered, to be sure, and covered in Mrs. Burr’s wornout oilcloth with many seams, but a face, indeed a furious little face, with eyes as hot and blue as the sky above a mesa.

“Boy,” said the old man to Dr. Teague, “I took a slug in the ham once near Rocky Ford and cut it out myself with a bowie and a mirror, and the sight of my hairy behind was a real pleasure alongside of looking at what you carry on top of your neck.”

He spun the chair around. If as a bird he had been large, as a man he was distinctly undersized. His feet were positively minuscule and shod in saddle oxfords, I suppose for the horsy connotation. What I had taken for swarthy plumage was in reality an old swallow-tailed coat, gone black-green with age. The temperature in the solarium was high enough to force a geranium’s bud, yet under his coat the old man wore a stout woolen sweater over a pajama coat of flannel. His trousers were pajama bottoms, and where they rode up his skinny shanks one could see gray long johns making a junction with black stockings.

His voice I have saved till last. Imagine, if you can, the plucking of a guitar the belly of which is filled with cinders: a twangy note that quickly loses its resonance amid harsh siftings.

Dr. Teague smiled with all the compassion of his repressed malice, and introduced us.

Crabb suddenly slipped between his brown gums a set of false teeth that he had been concealing in his hand and bared them at the doctor, snarling: “Git on out of here, you lanky son of a bitch.”

Teague let his eyelids descend in amused tolerance, retracted them, and said: “If it is satisfactory to Mr. Crabb, I see no reason why you cannot talk quietly here with him for half an hour. You might drop by the office on your way out, Mr. Snell.”

Jack Crabb squinted at me briefly, spat out his teeth, and put them away in an inner pocket of the swallowtail. I felt uneasy, knowing that everything depended on my ability to create a rapport between us. As soon as I had distinguished man from buzzard, I believed absolutely that he was everything he claimed to be in the letter. Yet I determined to move with caution.

He again put those remarkably blue eyes on me. I waited, and waited, and let him stare me down.

“You’re a sissy, ain’t you, son?” he said at last, not however unkindly. “Yes sir, a big fat sissy. I bet if I squeezed your arm the impression would stay there for a long time like it was made of tallow. I knowed a fellow looked like you come out West and went among the Kiowa and they tied him up and let the squaws beat him sore with willow sticks. You got my money?”

I realized that the old scout was testing me, and therefore I failed to show I had been offended, as indeed I had not been.

“Why did they do that, Mr. Crabb?”

He grimaced, which involved the total disappearance of his eyes and mouth and most of his nose, only the very end of which protruded like one fingertip of a clenched fist wearing a shabby leather glove.

“An Indian,” he said, “is crazy to figure out how a thing works. Of course, not everything interests him. What don’t, he don’t even see. But they was interested in that sissy, all right, and wanted to see whether he’d cry like a woman if he was beat. He never, though the marks showed on his back like they was flogging a cheese. So they give him presents and left him go. He was a brave man, son, and that’s the point: being a sissy don’t make no difference at all. You got my money?”

“Mr. Crabb,” said I, somewhat relieved by the story though it still seemed obscure to me, “we’ll have to get straight on another point: my means are very modest.”

He replied: “If you ain’t got money, then what have you got, son? Them clothes don’t look like much to me.” He took his cane from the back of the wheelchair, where it had been hanging, and poked me in the midsection; fortunately the tip was covered with a rubber crutch-end and did not hurt, though it left smudges on my beige weskit.

“We’ll discuss that later,” I had the shrewdness to say, finding a wicker chair behind a rubber-plant grove, drawing it into the open, and placing myself in it. “First, I hope you won’t be offended if I check your story for authenticity.”

The statement elicited from him a prolonged dry laugh that sounded like the grating of a carrot. His little yellow head, naked as a foetus and translucent as parchment, fell onto his chest, and my heart gave a great jolt of apprehension: I had discovered him too late; he had fallen dead.

I rushed to the wheelchair and put my hand upon his wrenlike chest, then my ear.… Would that my own heart beat so firm and true! He was merely asleep.

“I wouldn’t like to see you misled by your own enthusiasm,” said Dr. Teague a few minutes later, seated behind his metal desk, on which was mounted a fluorescent lamp supported by a great derricklike structure. “I remember your Mrs. Burr, who was a member of the janitorial staff rather than a nurse. She was discharged, I believe, for supplying certain patients with intoxicants, foremost among them being Jack Crabb. While an occasional draught of something mildly alcoholic might have a favorable physical effect on the aged, assisting in circulation, a strong drink can be very deleterious to an old heart. Not to mention the psychic effects. And I think that Mr. Crabb’s paranoid tendencies are quite apparent even to a layman.”

“But he couldbe a hundred eleven years old. Can you grant me that much, Dr. Teague?” asked I.

Teague smiled. “Curious way you put it, sir. Mr. Crabb is so many years old in reality, and it has nothing to do with what I will grant or you will accept. There are certain techniques by which medical science can determine the approximate age of a man, but those means lose precision as the subject grows older. Thus with a baby-”

I got out my handkerchief just in time to catch a sneeze. I had thought as much: an aftereffect of those wretched geraniums. And my prescribed nose drops were a hundred miles away. My straightened right septum ached; the incision had hardly healed. Yet there was a moral lesson in this eventuality. I remembered Mr. Crabb’s story about the unoffending chap who was beaten by the Indians, and belatedly understood it: each of us, no matter how humble, from day to day finds himself in situations in which he has the choice of acting either heroically or craven. A small elite are picked by fate to crouch on that knoll above the Little Bighorn, and they provide examples for the many commonplace individuals whose challenge is only a flat tire on a deserted road, the insult of a bully at the beach, or a sneezing spell in the absence of one’s nostril spray.

I filled my hand with water at Dr. Teague’s stainless-steel washstand and sniffed some up my nasal passages. It was a stopgap remedy and not very efficacious. I sneezed regularly for the next forty-five minutes, and my nose swelled to the size of a yam, my eyes narrowed to Oriental apertures. Yet my will never wavered.

Dr. Teague’s interest proved to lie exclusively in the subject of money, or more properly, Marville’s general and the psychiatric section’s particular shortage of that supreme good of our culture. Medical science could determine a baby’s age for almost nothing; for an old man it took money. Wheelchairs required money. Attendants like the late Mrs. Burr, not to mention genuine nurses, had to be paid. Even those detestable geraniums apparently strained the budget.

I had never before realized that my father was on intimate terms with a number of state legislators. Whatever Dr. Teague’s proficiency at his own trade or science or swindle, he gave evidence of being a gifted student of politics. The upshot of our little session in his office, in which every item but ourselves seemed to be fabricated of metal, was that I agreed to discuss with Father the advisability of increased appropriations for senior-citizens’ centers. On Dr. Teague’s part, he would, pending receipt of sufficient money to schedule certain chemical and X-ray tests to determine the calcium content of Jack Crabb’s ancient bones, tentatively estimate the old scout’s age to be “ninety plus.”

I doubt whether Crabb in his prime, with his Colt’s Peacemaker, could have done better against Teague. I decided that I could discharge my obligation by writing my father a letter. Whether he acted on its suggestions, I do not know. He never mentioned it on my regular appearances. The zeal of Dr. Teague, of course, and that of the director, his instigator, never flagged during the five months of my almost daily interviews with Jack Crabb. I cannot recall making a trip through the corridors in which I did not encounter one or both. The exchange became habitual: “How does it look, sir?”

“Encouraging, Doctor.”

I have not been back to Marville since the early summer of 1953, at which date they were still asking.

Now a few words on the composition of these memoirs. In their original form they consisted of fifty-seven rolls of tape recorded in Mr. Crabb’s voice. From February to June, 1953, I sat with him every weekday afternoon, operating the machine, encouraging him when his enthusiasm flagged, now and again putting pertinent questions that aided him in clarifying his account, and generally making myself unobtrusively useful.

It was, after all, his book, and I felt peculiarly honored to have rendered it my small services. The locale of these sessions was his tiny bedroom, a cheerless enclosure furnished in gray metal and looking onto an airshaft up which noxious vapors climbed from the kitchen two floors below. The glass-enclosed balcony on which I had first met him would no doubt have been more comfortable but for my allergy to its flora, not to mention the possibilities it afforded for interruption by the other old people and members of the staff.

Then too, Mr. Crabb was visibly failing during these months. By March he had taken permanently to his bed. By June, on the final tapes, his voice was hardly audible, though his mind continued vigorous. And on the twenty-third day of that month he greeted me with glazed eyes that did not alter their focus as I crossed the room. The old scout had reached the end of his trail.

After checking out of the motel in which I had resided for five months, I attended the subsequent funeral, at which I expected to be sole mourner, since he had no friends; but in actuality most of the other ambulatory inmates were present, wearing, after the fashion of old people at such functions, expressions of smug satisfaction.

The obsequies were held on June 25, 1953, which happened to be the seventy-seventh anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In death as in life, Jack Crabb seemed to specialize in the art or craft of coincidence.

As to the text: it is faithful to Mr. Crabb’s narration as transcribed literally from the tapes. I have subtracted nothing, and added only the necessary marks of punctuation: when the latter sometimes seem sparse, my motive has been to indicate the breathless rush in which these passages emerged from the speaker. I have made no attempt to reproduce the old scout’s peculiar voice or pronunciation, lest the entire book resemble the letter which he wrote me from Marville.

He was a gifted raconteur and had a keen ear: in no other fashion can I account for certain inconsistencies. You will notice that while the direct narration, in propria persona, is ungrammatical, a cultivated character such as General Custer speaks in the formal style. And Indian discourse in translation appears impeccable as to grammar and syntax. Indeed, in his own speech Mr. Crabb is not always uniform, using “brought” and “brung,” say, or “they was” and “they were,” interchangeably. But listen occasionally to individuals of the lower orders among your acquaintance, your garageman or bootblack-he knows the rules of civilized rhetoric; has not, after all, been living on the moon; can, if he wishes, speak well, and sometimes may if only to elicit a gratuity. It is clear his habitual idiom is a product of the self-indulgent will.

You may question Mr. Crabb’s having in his untutored vocabulary such a word as “apprehension.” But it must be remembered that the frontiersman of yore received his rude culture from many sources: for example, Shakespearean troupes traveled to the farthest outposts; as did ministers of the gospel, with the King James Bible in their saddlebags. Then as we shall read, under Mrs. Pendrake’s tutelage young Jack was exposed to Alexander Pope and no doubt other notable poets as well.

I think you will agree that Mr. Crabb is astonishingly circumspect as to language. Occasional uncouthness, yes. Consider the man, his circumstances and time. But his attitude towards women has an old-fashioned gallantry to it: romantic, sentimental-to be honest, I think it even cloying at times. He may have overdrawn his portrait of Mrs. Pendrake, for example. I suspect she may have been no more than the trollop each of us has encountered now and again in his own passage through life. My own ex-wife, say-but this is Mr. Crabb’s book and not mine.

However, when not giving direct dictation, Jack Crabb, man to man, was probably the foulest-mouthed individual of whom I have ever had experience. He was incapable of speaking one entire sentence that could be uttered word for word from a public platform or quoted in a newspaper. It was “Hand me the _______ microphone, son.… I wonder when that _______ nurse is bringing the _______ lunch.” So I must ask the reader to make his own substitutions when in the course of the narrative Mr. Crabb represents himself as saying to Wyatt Earp, in that famous confrontation down on the buffalo range: “Draw, you goddam Belch, you.” Be assured the idiom was far stronger.

One more note: the word “arse.” Like so many amateur writers-and he thought of his spoken narrative as eventually appearing in letterpress-Mr. Crabb was frequently threatened with loftiness, but this is not a sample of it. No, he believed this term to be the polite locution for the derriere, that which could be pronounced anywhere without offending. You will notice he often puts the other form into the speech of those he regards as particularly boorish.

So much for that. A decade has passed since Jack Crabb spoke into my machine. In the interim my father at last died of natural causes, and thus began a protracted legal battle over the inheritance between myself and an alleged half-brother, illegitimate, who appeared from nowhere. Which should not concern us here, were it not that I subsequently suffered an emotional collapse that rendered me hors de combatfor the better part of ten years. Hence the long delay between this book’s conception and its dissemination.

I have said enough, and now shall relinquish the stage to Jack Crabb. I shall pop back in the briefest Epilogue. But first you must read this remarkable story!

RALPH FIELDING SNELL

CHAPTER 1 A Terrible Mistake

I AM A WHITE MAN and never forgot it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten.

My Pa had been a minister of the gospel in Evansville, Indiana. He didn’t have a regular church, but managed to talk some saloonkeeper into letting him use his place of a Sunday morning for services. This saloon was down by the riverfront and the kind of people would come in there was Ohio River boatmen, Hoosier fourflushers on their way to New Orleans, pickpockets, bullyboys, whores, and suchlike, my Pa’s favorite type of congregation owing to the possibilities it afforded for the improvement of a number of mean skunks.

The first time he come into the saloon and started to preach, that bunch was fixing to lynch him, but he climbed on top of the bar and started to yell and in a minute or two they all shut up and listened. My Pa could handle with his voice any white man that ever lived, though he was only of the middle height and skinny as a pick handle. What he’d do, you see, was to make a person feel guilty of something they never thought of. Distraction was his game. He’d stare with his blazing eyes at some big, rough devil off the boats and shout: “How long’s it been you ain’t seen your old Ma?” Like as not that fellow would scrape his feet and honk his nose in his sleeve, and when my brothers and sisters carried around cleaned-out spittoons for the collection, remember us kindly for our pains.

Pa split the collection with the saloonkeeper, which was part of the reason he was let to use the place. The other part was that the bar stayed open throughout the service. My Pa wasn’t no Puritan. He’d take a shot or three himself right while he was preaching, and was never known to say a word against the drink, or women, or cards, or any of the pleasures. “Every kind of sport has been invented by the Lord and therefore can’t be bad in itself,” he would say. “It’s only bad when the pursuit of it makes a man into a mean skunk who will cuss and spit and chew and never wash his face.” These were the only specific sins I ever heard my Pa mention. He never minded a cigar, but was dead set against chewing tobacco, foul language, and dirt on a person. So long as a man was clean, my Pa didn’t care whether he drank himself to death, gambled away every cent so that his kids starved, or got sick from frequenting low women.

I never suspected it at that time, being just a young boy, but I realize now that my Pa was a lunatic. Whenever he wasn’t raving he would fall into the dumps and barely answer when he was spoke to, and at his meals he was single-minded as an animal in filling his belly. Before he got religion he was a barber, and even afterward he cut the hair of us kids, and I tell you if the spirit come over him at such a time it was indeed a scaring experience: he would holler and jump and like as not take a piece of your neck flesh with his scissor just as soon as he would hair.

My Pa was making out right well in that saloon-although it is true there was a movement afoot among the regular preachers to run him out of town because he was stealing their congregations aside from them middle-aged women who prefer the ordinary kind of Christianity that forbids everything-when he suddenly decided he ought to go to Utah and become a Mormon. Among other things he liked the Mormon idea that a man is entitled to a number of wives. The point is that other than cussing, chewing, etc., my Pa was all for freedom of every type. He wasn’t interested himself in having an additional wife, but liked the principle. That’s why my Ma didn’t mind. She was a tiny little woman with a round, innocent face faintly freckled, and when Pa got too excited on a day when he wasn’t going to preach and work off his steam, she would make him undress and sit in a barrel-half and would scrub his back with a brush, which calmed him down after about fifteen minutes.

Pa took us all to Independence, Missouri, where he bought a wagon and team of ox, and we set out on the California Trail. That was near as I can figure the spring of 1852, but we still run into a number of poor devils going out on the arse-end of the gold rush that started in ’48. Before long we had accumulated a train of seven wagon and two horse, and the others had elected Pa as leader, though he didn’t know no more about crossing the plains than I do about the lingo of the heathen Chinese who in later years was to work sixteen hours a day building the Central Pacific Railroad. But given to shouting the way he was, I think they figured since they couldn’t shut him up, might as well make him boss. Then too, every night stop he would preach around the fire, and they all required that, because like everybody who gives up everything for the sake of one big idea, they periodically lost all of their hopes. I ought to give a sample of my Pa’s preaching, since if we don’t hear from him soon we’ll never get another chance, but it wouldn’t mean much a hundred year away and in a Morris chair or wherever the reader is sitting, when it was originally delivered by evening on the open prairie next a sweetish-smelling fire of dried buffalo dung. It might seem just crazy, without showing any of the real inspiration in it, which was a matter of sound rather than sense, I think, though that may be only because I was a kid at the time. The ironical thing is that my Pa was somewhat like an Indian.

Indians. Now and again, crossing the Nebraska Territory, following the muddy Platte, we would encounter small bands of Pawnee. Indians was Indians to me and of course as a kid I approved of them generally because they didn’t seem to have a purpose. The ones we saw would always appear coming over the next divide when the train was a quarter mile away, and would mope along on their ponies as if they were going right on past and then suddenly turn when they got alongside and come over to beg food. What they wanted was coffee and would try to get you to stop and brew them a pot, rather than hand out a piece of bacon rind or lump of sugar while rolling. I believe what they preferred even better than the coffee, though, was to bring our progress to a halt. Nothing drives an Indian crazy like regular, monotonous movement. That’s why they not only never invented the wheel, but never even took it up after the white man brought it, as long as they stayed wild, though they were quick enough to grab the horse and the gun and steel knife.

But they really did favor coffee, too, and would sit on their blankets, nodding and saying “How, how” after every sip, and then they chewed the biscuit my Ma would also hand, out, and said “How, how” after every swallow of that as well.

Pa, as you might expect, was much taken with Indians because they did what they pleased, and he always tried to involve them in a philosophical discussion, which was hopeless on account of they didn’t know any English and he didn’t even know sign language. And it is a pity, for as I found out in time to come, there is no one who loves to spout hot air like a redskin.

When the Pawnee were finished they would get up, pick their teeth with their fingers, say “How, how” a couple of times more, climb on their ponies and ride off, with never a word of thanks; but some of them might shake hands, a practice they were just learning from the white man, and as anything an Indian takes up becomes a mania with him, those that did would shake with every individual in the train, man, woman, and child and baby in the cradle; I was only surprised they didn’t grab an ox by the right forefoot.

They never said thanks because it wasn’t in their etiquette at that time, and they had already shown their courtesy with them incessant “how-how’s,” which is to say, “good, good.” You can look the world over without finding anyone more mannerly than an Indian. The point of these visits had somewhat to do with manners, because these fellows were not beggars in the white sense, the kind of degenerates I seen in big cities who had no other means of support. In the Indian code, if you see a stranger you either eat with him or fight him, but more often you eat with him, fighting being too important an enterprise to waste on somebody you hardly know. We all could have run into one of their camps, and they would have had to feed us.

This entertaining kept getting bigger every day, because I figure one Pawnee would tell another, “You ought to go over to that wagon train and get some biscuit and coffee,” and as we traveled with them ox only about two miles an hour when moving, and stopping to brew coffee slowed it down even more, we was in range of the tribe for several weeks. Larger and larger bands would show up, including women and even infants in seats fixed up on lodgepoles trailing behind the horses, the so-called travois. So by the time we reached Cheyenne country, in the southeastern corner of what is now the state of Wyoming, and it started all over again with a new tribe, everybody in the wagons had used up their coffee, making that the principal supply we intended to lay in on the stop at Fort Laramie at the junction of the Laramie and North Platte rivers.

At Laramie, though, they had run out of the beans and did not expect another shipment for a week, that being some years before the railroad. Oddly enough my Pa would have been willing to wait, but the others were hot to get on out to California, being they was already three years behind time.

Jonas Troy was an ex-railway clerk who had come out from Ohio. I remember him as wearing a little fringe of beard and having a skinny wife and one kid, a boy about a year older than me, a very nasty child who tended to kick and bite when we fell out at play and then when you got him back would cry.

“Indins,” said Mr. Troy, “like whiskey even more than coffee, so I heard. Besides, it’s easier to serve. You don’t have to stop rolling, just tip the jug.”

Troy and my Pa at this minute were standing in front of the stores at Laramie that were built into the inside of the stockade wall. Must have been a dozen people passed them during the time they arrived at that decision who could have told them otherwise and saved their lives-trappers, scouts, soldiers, even Indians themselves-but of course they never thought of asking: Troy because he believed in anything thought up by himself and confirmed by my Pa, and Pa because on the basis of his encounters with the Pawnee he figured he knew an Indian to the core.