Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

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

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

She lit a coal-oil lamp on a bracket, and I set upon the bed, being there was no place further to go, and in one movement she shucks her dress, hangs it on a hook, and mother-naked, takes a seat upon my knee.

Now I had knowed she was right young, but not until this moment did I realize to what degree. Her flat little bosom, her slender flanks and bony knees: she wasn’t just skinny, she was hardly more than a child, which condition her facial rouge had misrepresented.

I asked how old she was.

“Twenty,” says she.

I leaned back to put some distance between our heads. “Go on,” I says.

“Well, eighteen, then.” She lays further into me and begins to work at my collar.

So I dumps her off and stands up, which a wider man could not have managed, and I don’t see how a man of Hickok’s length could have stood erect under that low ceiling.

I guess she was worried I was about to leave, so she assured me in consternation that she knowed how to do everything and anything, and never had a complaint yet.

I says: “All I require at the moment is the truth about your years. I can’t use nothing more at this time, on account of I believe I picked up a dose the other day, but I’ll be glad to give you the dollar anyway.”

“Dollar?” she cries indignantly, and all thoughts I had of her basically innocent and wistful ways had to change. “You cheap bastard, it costs five times that to let your pants down in this house.”

“Well,” I says, “damn me if I would pay five dollars to top the Queen of Russia.” I was amused by her anger. Them freckles lit up and her hair went redder. She reminded me of someone. “No, indeed,” I goes on, “let alone some skinny kid of fourteen.”

“I’ll be seventeen any day now,” she says. “And you get on out of here with your dollar or I’ll call Harry and have him throw you out.”

I was took by something in this little gal. Still not lust, for I have always preferred them seasoned and sturdy for that purpose. I guess I just liked her spunk.

I says: “All right, I’m good for the fare. But I’ll tell you what I want for it. I just want to sit here long enough so my friend will think I had a good time. You’ll get your money and not have to work for it.”

That was O.K. by her when she saw I meant it and creased her little paw with the cash. In fact, I reckon she liked it a whole lot better: there wasn’t much opportunity in them days to make five dollars by setting.

Now since she had revealed her cockiness once, she didn’t go back to that drab, melancholy style no more, which was merely a role. I have said they tried to offer all types at this place. I reckon she appealed to the hombre who liked to imagine he was laying some little overworked servant girl, maybe an orphan to boot, under the back stairs.

In her true character she was right impudent. She could have put her clothes on now, but she didn’t, just lay back with her hands behind her head and her knees raised in the glare of the kerosene light, and says: “Say, you ain’t got a cigar?”

“Smoke, too, do you?” says I. “My, ain’t you the rough one.” I was needling her for the fun of it. I had to kill some time and didn’t know what else to do. I set down again on the foot of the bed, where there was ample room, for she lay along the length of it but was small and besides had her knees lifted. “I expected,” I says, “to find the K.C. gals more refined and ladylike.”

Well, her green eyes looked as if they started to flash, then suddenly she flung an arm across them and her thin chest commences to quake with sobs. Shortly I felt terrible, and I gathered her up in my arms, setting her on my lap again, and she cried against my shoulder, clutching into me as if it was her last hope upon earth.

“Now, now,” I says, giving her a fatherly kiss into the tangled red curls on the top of her head and patting her bare, bumpy spine, “you tell your troubles to Uncle Jack.”

She snuffles into my neck a bit, and then tells me the following.

“I was born and bred in Salt Lake City to one of the most respectable families there, my Ma being married at fifteen to a famous Mormon leader. You would know the name right off if I was to tell it. Now, outside folks have a funny idea about Mormons on account of the number of wives they take, but I tell you that is the reason why you won’t find a den of iniquity like this in Salt Lake. My Ma was my Pa’s eleventh wife, and you take us girls here at Dolly’s, why, we fight amongst ourselves all the time, but my mothers never did exchange a harsh word with one another. I had fifteen sisters and twenty-one brothers, and we lived in a house that was like a hotel. All we did was work and pray from early in the morning until night.

“Up to the age of fourteen, I guess there wasn’t a purer girl on earth than myself, for I regarded the human body as the holy temple of God and wouldn’t have dared to profane my mind with other than a wholesome thought. I had grown right pretty by then. One day my mothers sent me over next door to borrow some sugar. Now the people that lived there was another Mormon elder named Woodbine and he had only six wives and ten children, and as it happened all the women and younguns was out working in the fields at this moment, only the elder was to home, a man of fifty with a big black beard.

“ ‘Amelia, isn’t it?’ he says as he lets me in. ‘What a pretty girl you have become. The sugar is I believe in the pantry.’ So he goes along with me there, and says: ‘I believe it is on the high shelf. I’ll lift you up.’ Which he does with his huge hands, and that’s all that happened then, except that when he put me down he was purple in the face and breathing hard though I couldn’t have weighed much.

“But a day or so later, my Pa calls me into his presence and informs me that Elder Woodbine would like to take me as his seventh wife. It wasn’t no good to protest, for my Pa had decided on it and I didn’t dare to cross him, so what I done is run away that very night.

“Well,” she says, sobbing at the thought of it, “there have been many times after when I regretted my foolishness, for in these two year since I have seen little but the worst side of the Gentiles, many of them just as whisker-faced as the Elder Woodbine and as old, and some with bodies furry as a bear; whereas instead of a device of pleasure to any man who comes down the road I would have been an honored Mormon wife.”

It could have happened, I reckon, though it was the typical story you could get out of any whore: they always stemmed from good families, by their account. I don’t say I swallowed the entirety of it. The mention of Salt Lake and Mormons, in themselves, would not have take my especial note, though you may recall my Pa’s aim away back to head for Utah, which is why I fell in with the Cheyenne and had all the subsequent adventures.

But while this here Amelia was setting on my lap, jaybird-naked, I noticed a tiny mole she had in the hollow at the base of her neck. Now the peculiarity of this was that my sister Sue Ann, who was thirteen when I last seen her, had a similar mole in that exact spot. I said before that this little harlot reminded me of somebody. But other than for the blemish, it wasn’t my sister, who was fairer and different of feature.

“Say,” I says to Amelia, “I might have some kin in Salt Lake. The last time I seen them, years ago, they intended to go there and become Mormons. You might have heard of them if they made it.”

She pulls her head up and looks at me straight. For all that crying, her eyes was utter dry, but she had succeeded in rubbing away much of the powder and rouge on the lapels of my black coat. She was basically as freckled as me, underneath it all; and her hair was quite reddish.

“What did you say was the name?” she asks, with a shrewd squint.

“I never,” I says, “but if you want to know, it was Crabb. It would be my Ma and my sister Sue Ann, who I reckon might now be more than-well, thirty years of age, and then Margaret, a little younger-”

“Sue Ann,” cries Amelia. “That’s my mother’s name!” She laughs and shakes her hair and starts to cry again, clutching me about the neck.

That was when I finally figured out who she resembled: Myself.

“Then you aremy Uncle Jack!” she says.

“Here now,” says I, “you better get your dress back on.”

CHAPTER 21 My Niece Amelia

I RECKON of all the things that ever happened, this give me the greatest turn, meeting my niece under them conditions. Suppose I had-My flesh crawled to think of it. Would have had to blow my brains out, I expect, for damn me if I ever been a degenerate.

Now the more I looked at her, the more obvious was the relationship: I never cared for the way my beak turned up as if someone pushed me in the face when I was small and it moldable, but you know, I saw the same type of nose on this girl-niece of mine and it looked right cunning. I had a real kin-feeling for her, I expect, right from the first, which is why I picked her from the lineup and also why she did not attract me in the fleshly way.

That is the positive side of the situation. The negative is that she was a whore. There was no getting away from that fact, and it give me a deal of shame. I didn’t know what to do, so said again: “Get on them clothes.” Kindly though, like an uncle, and I reached her dress down from the hook and turned my back while she put it on.

Then I was suddenly embarrassed by my presence in this type of place. Funny, ain’t it, that I should apologize to her? I says: “Amelia, I just want you to know I come here only as a favor to that other fellow.”

“Mr. Hickok?” she asks. “Yes, he is always hereabout.”

I says: “I am going to take you away from all this. Beginning this very minute, you ain’t a crib-girl no more. Why, in a week you will have forgot all your unfortunate experiences, and in six months you’ll be a fine lady.”

For I did suddenly get this idea, standing right there. All my life I had yearned for a bit of class, and I purposed to achieve it in this niece of mine. I was going to put her into one of them schools run by a maiden lady. I had my little roll to start on, and then, from what I gathered from the talk of them who hunted buffalo, there was wealth to be made in that profession. Two to three thousand dollars in a single season from September to March, which most of them would bring here to K.C. and spend over the summer on whiskey and women. Not me. I had an aim, the reclamation of Amelia. I had lost two families in violent circumstances; now I had found the beginnings of another in a house of ill fame.

First, though, we had to get out of that house. I expected some trouble about that, and took my gun out of its holster and put it into my waistband like Hickok had advised. But then I thought, little Amelia might get hit if there is gunplay. Better to buy out. Which is something you can do anywhere among white people.

So I went for my roll-and could not find it, though I had just earlier paid her that five dollars. I was sure I had kept it in my vest.

“Amelia,” I says, “did you see where I put my money?”

Now I have been talking here exclusively about my own reactions. That’s because my niece was apparently thrown into a state of shock by the revelation of our kinship. She had got dumbly into her dress and then stood primping her hair with her fingers, and when I briefly indicated my intention to take her out of there, had received it with a vague smile involving only the mouth. But now she gets a keen expression again and says: “I expect it might have fell out and rolled under the bed.”

So I gets down to take a look, and she pushes the door open quick and offers to run through it, but her old uncle proved more dexterous than she figured. I got her ankle and held on.

“I guess,” I says, “it’ll take you a while to straighten out. Now cough up that roll of mine or I’ll have to shake it out of you.”

She takes it from her hair. She had lifted it while telling the story of her Mormon years and clutching me, during which time she was going through my pockets. I wasn’t angry, considering the associations she had had for two years, poor kid.

We went up a back staircase to her room, and it was hardly an improvement on the crib, and she gathered together a few sorry possessions, powder and stuff, and put it into a cardboard suitcase, and I made her get into a more seemly outfit than that whore dress, and with my hand firmly under her arm, I steered her down and out to the front, in the course of which we passed through the hall again, and now noises come from all the cubicles and the dance floor was crowded with a gathering of men, drunk and disorderly, so that you could see the point in lifting their firearms on the way in, else they’d all killed one another in short order. This was when I seen that big bouncer Harry beating the heads of them three buffalo hunters and pitching them into the street.

Well sir, I pulled Amelia through and into that office near the front door. Dolly was still there though Wild Bill wasn’t. I always remember she was rebraiding the lash of a rawhide riding quirt as we come in. If she swings it at me or Amelia, says I to myself, I’ll put five soft-nosed bullets in her, woman or not.

She looks up, smiles with her mustache, and says: “Enjoy yourself, Short Arm? Whyn’t you go take another, be a sport. Billy won’t be out for a while yet.”

“Looky here, Dolly,” I says, “I’m a-taking this kid along.” I was ashamed to tell of our relationship. I just said: “Don’t try and stop me.”

She tied a knot at the end of that quirt and swung it against her palm. Then says: “Why should I do that? This is Liberty Hall, hoss.” And chuckles hoarsely and in her grand swagger leaves the room and passes through the dancehall crowd towards the rear, them drunks falling away on either side of her as when a big ship comes into the harbor at San Francisco and the smaller craft make way.

I took Amelia to the hotel where I was staying, and the desk clerk started to grin with his bad teeth but I cut him off short by renting her a room next to mine on the second floor, and we went upstairs and I turned down her bed for her, sniffed at the pitcher on the dresser to see if the water was fresh, give her a flannel nightshirt of my own, for she didn’t have no decent sleeping garment, and kissed her goodnight on the forehead.

She had gone through all this right docile, without a word; not, I expect, having yet recovered from the surprise of finding her kin.

I was too excited to sleep much that night. “Amelia Crabb” is what I had wrote down on that hotel register. I didn’t know her Mormon name and did not want to. Nor was I really curious to hear more about her earlier life-not even about her Ma, my sister Sue Ann. I had been too long away from them people of my regular family. It kind of depressed me to think of their life in Salt Lake among the Latter-day Saints, being so foreign to all I knowed. I had asked Amelia, on the way to the hotel, about my own Ma, her granny, and she said she didn’t recall her, so I reckoned she died somehow. I don’t mean I was without feeling, but all I had was now centered in this young girl, and more as to what she would become than what she was at present. Somebody to take care of. And I was going to do a better job than I had in the past. I hadn’t no Indians to worry about here, nor no U.S. Army. I could handle anybody else, even Wild Bill Hickok if it come to that.

Next day, pretty late, for Amelia had got into the habit in that whorehouse of sleeping through most of the light, we went out and got some clothes and in a dress what buttoned up to the throat and with her face washed clean you’d never have taken that girl for anything but the gentlest-born. She was right pale, but then that made her look all the more respectable, for a lady in them days never let the sun touch her skin.

Then I realized we hadn’t ought to stay at that hotel, which was not buggy or anything, but it was in the rougher part of town, flanked by a couple of saloons, and there was uncouth fellows sitting around the front, spitting tobacco juice all over the floor, and some of them might have knowed Amelia from Dolly’s. So by God if I didn’t go to the swellest place in K.C., with fancy gaslights and plush furniture in the lobby and flunkies in gold-braided outfits, and hire us a combination of connecting bedrooms with a nice parlor between. Must have cost seven-eight dollars a day or more. I don’t recall. I do remember the management was right snooty, but I threw money around like seed and their attitude changed directly.

Amelia herself didn’t do me no harm there, for it is amazing how she took to the new life. I suppose that Mormon upbringing hadn’t been so bad, as a foundation, and then her natural spirit added the rest, along with what she got from ladies’-fashion papers I bought her and the studying she did of the high class of women who resided in the hostelry: Senators’ wives and daughters, and those of Army generals and leaders of commerce. She developed a walk that looked like she was on tiny wheels beneath her long skirts, and when she took a cup of tea her dainty hand was raised like a bird in flight.

And pretty, right pretty she proved to be, with that turned-up nose and little mouth, and her hair was bright as a fall leaf when it had been washed a couple times and set by a professional hairdresser. The men around the hotel was fascinated by her, but discreet and respectable, not gawking nor licking their lips and such, like the kind of louts I always hung out with heretofore.

Well, this was costing me a plenty and within a few days I had peeled so many bills off my roll that it was down to the size of my little finger, with the hotel account still unpaid and growing by the hour, for Amelia was continually ordering things to be sent up to our rooms. And that was as it should be, for I wanted to keep her in seclusion until the genteel way of life become a habit that replaced whoring in the way she thought of herself.

I had been to several schools so far without finding the right one, for various reasons: at some, the withered spinsters in charge looked at me over their pointy noses and says they was full for the next five years; and I’ll tell you this, there was others who reminded me of Dolly.

But I had to get more dinero somewhere. Now the only thing I could figure doing to raise it was to go back over in the Market Square area again and play poker. Them buffalo hunters had real big games every night, generally starting after twelve o’clock, when they returned from the theaters and dance halls, and running into the morning. When I say big, I mean with luck you might walk away from the table at about four-thirty A.M. with two-three hundred dollars. This time was good from my point of view: I could see Amelia safely to bed and then slip out, play all night, get back in before she arose, and nobody the wiser. For I didn’t want her to know her uncle was gambling: that was the sort of life from which I had sworn to protect her.

The first night I was over to Market Square, I run into Wild Bill Hickok. He was sitting in his favorite corner of that saloon where he shot Strawhan’s brother, and when I entered, he waved me over. He was with some others in a poker game and had just won a big pot.

“Hoss,” he says to me, “I have missed you. I never took you for the type of man who would run off with a crib-girl.”

I did not like this reference to Amelia, but to protest against it effectively I would have had to admit she was my kin, and I didn’t want to do that.

“Yes sir,” he goes on, “if you are as mighty a poker player as you are a lover, I’d take it kindly if you would sit in. You,” he points at the man directly across the table, “give him your chair.”

This man looks miserable, but ain’t slow about complying. Now of all people I did not want to play against Wild Bill. For I neglected to say earlier that I intended to cheat. I know there are people who take dishonesty at cards as one of the nastiest sins in the world. I don’t admire it greatly myself, but figured my cause was sufficient to justify it in this circumstance. I guess that’s what everybody says about every type of unscrupulosity employed by himself, but I ain’t preaching morality here, I’m merely recording history, and what happened at that time was I proposed to cheat my opponents to the hilt. Except I never expected to be in a game with Wild Bill Hickok.

So I played honest for a couple hours and by two o’clock in the morning I was down to my last five dollars. Now I took hold of myself and reflected that little Amelia was all I had in the world. Either I got the money to make a proper woman of her, or we was back where we started, in which case it didn’t matter if I was shot by Wild Bill. I saw I never had a choice in the matter.

Now, Frank Delight who had a crush on Caroline and was a master of games of chance, had showed me several devices that put the odds on the side of the man what employed them. I really had not practiced enough to manage the ace-up-the-sleeve, which the expert can make to appear more swiftly than the eye can follow; and the same weakness applied to the fake shuffle, in my hands. So what I done was to use the mirror-ring. This is an ordinary finger ring that has a good flat surface on it somewhere, highly polished, which will reflect the markings on the cards as you deal them facedown. So that you know what your opponents are holding and can play accordingly.

I had purchased a brass ring and filed down a plane surface for about a quarter-inch on the underside of its good wide band and buffed her up, and she was small enough not to be detected, yet adequate to transmit the information. I hadn’t dared to use it so far, but now when the deal came to me I rubbed my palms on my coat as if to dry off the sweat but in reality polishing up the tiny looking-glass on the inside of my left hand, and started in.

Directly, Wild Bill’s winnings started to dwindle, and I reckon it was five-thirty in the morning when he finally pushed over the last of his pile and with a funny smile says: “Well, friend, if you are as good a lover as you are a gambler …” His voice trails off and he gets up and strides out the saloon door into the morning, showing his back all the way, so you could see he was right upset.

I haven’t mentioned them two other slobs we played with, being they was the kind who figured it a privilege to be beat by Wild Bill. There was a number of flunkies around there who took turns losing to him every night. Now as I was putting away my win-it turned out to be a little over a hundred dollars-these men smirked at me and then each other.

And the one says: “I recall the late Hank French. He also won from Wild Bill at poker.”

I just sneered at them and went out from the nightlong stink of smoke and liquor into the pure morning. You had to keep your face in them days, and it is just as well they was behind me when I seen Hickok waiting in the street outside, his silk hat cocked forward, his golden hair streaming over his shoulders, his fine white hands hooked by the thumbs into his lower vest pockets, with them two pearl handles a-jutting out of both hips. Down the street come a man trundling a handcart, and across the square someone was saddling a mule which was blowing out its belly as they always do so the cinch straps would be loose, and the owner was fixing to kick him in it.

Well sir, I thought, here’s where I get it after all these years of close calls, for Hickok was going to drill me for cheating him, and Amelia would return to whoring, and I had failed again.

But I would not back down to Wild Bill even though in this instance he was right. I don’t know why: I was afraid of him, yet at the same time his presence was a challenge to me.

So I stepped out through the swinging doors onto the porch and says: “You waiting on me?”

He gives me that famous level look for one long, breathless moment, and then he suddenly relaxes and says: “Come on, hoss, let’s get some breakfast.”

It was over our steak and eggs and fried potatoes that Wild Bill says: “Anybody who plays poker as well as you ought to learn to handle a gun.” I don’t know whether he meant it sarcastic or not, nor did I understand his motive in offering to give me his expert instruction free of charge. But I accepted, and that’s what we got to doing every morning after them games: me and Wild Bill would eat and then we’d ride to the edge of town and we’d shoot. And I found that though I had carried a revolver for years and had used it upon occasion, in comparison with Hickok I knowed very little of the weapon.

He talked more of the technical specifics of pistols, holsters, cartridges, etc., but we spent most of our time practicing marksmanship and the fast draw. I gathered that, before he took me along, he come there anyway by himself, for like a fine piano player a gunfighter had to rehearse continually lest he lose the precise touch. Here’s the exercises Wild Bill used to keep his hand in: driving a cork through the neck of a bottle and splitting a bullet on the edge of a dime, both at a range of forty-fifty feet, starting with the guns in his pants. I would hold a silver dollar chest-high, drop it, and before it struck the earth he’d have drawed, fired, and hit the dime so that the soft-lead .45 slug was cut in two equal parts.

Maybe the first thirty times I tried this, I even missed the length of the board in which the dime was embedded, or tore up the prairie on either side, front and back, of the bottle. But then I got to where I was missing only by about six inches, and consistently to the right of the target, so I adjusted my technique to pull left, and made my first score one morning after we had been going out there only a week. This was with the dime; later I shot the cork through the bottle, too, an easier accomplishment.

But I couldn’t get the sense of merely being the fastest draw or the best shot, with no further purpose to it. Take Wild Bill, the only thing he was suited to be was a peace officer, patrolling the streets of a cowtown in hopes someone would offer him resistance so that he could use his guns on them. He couldn’t even be an outlaw, for suchlike had to be more interested in robbing than gunplay-or in the case of Johnny Jump and his gang, murder and mayhem. Something concrete, that is. But gunfighting was all idea when you got down to it, devoted to testing the proposition: I’m a better man than you. It might have been fair, for size and weight did not enter, and a midget was on the same terms as a giant, when they both held Colt’s. But the question was, what did you establish when you found the better man?

That’s what I got to thinking about, for no sooner had I developed my proficiency than Hickok says: “Of course, firing at bottles is the least part of it. It’s the man-to-man encounter that proves everything. I’ve known champion shots who froze when going against men who hardly knew a butt from a muzzle, and died.”

I was playing poker every night, all night, and needless to say I was winning with my mirror-ring. Now I was not such a fool as to get recklessly overbearing about it. After that first session, I held my earnings down, twenty dollars one night, thirty the next, maybe falling back on the next to as little as fifteen; and if I’d get as high as fifty, then I’d balance it some by maybe losing five-six dollars the following night. In the aggregate I was making a good income, but not so conspicuous as to rouse serious suspicion, though of course any success at a game of chance is apt to be suspect to them off whom it is gained. But I was deft with my ring, and if my opponents looked for anything, it was the obvious tricks like palming cards or stacking the deck, of which I was utterly innocent.

Then I’d take them shooting lessons and afterward go back to our hotel and find little Amelia just arising from her slumbers at around eight o’clock, and I’d pretend I just got up myself and we’d take our morning coffee brought by the help to the sitting room between our bedchambers. It was real nice, and she didn’t seem in the least bored by this new life, as I feared she might be, and I could afford the bills, so the shank of the morning would find us visiting the expensive ladies’ shops where she’d buy more dresses and shoes and hats, and then in the afternoon we’d rent a carriage and ride about or stroll through the parks, and in the early evening we’d take in the genteeler entertainments: piano or violin recitals, dramatic readings, and the like.

In between all this, and the meals we ate, I tried to catch a few winks of sleep; but I didn’t need much in that period. I was twenty-nine years of age, and in the prime of life; had somebody to straighten out, and someone to cheat; was an acquaintance of Wild Bill Hickok; made money, ate and dressed to the hilt.

But the main thing was my fondness for Amelia. I’d have done anything for that girl. She was developing into such a lady that shortly I believe I could have took her back to Dolly’s and nobody would ever have recognized her. It was not just her fine clothes, but she had picked up, from them magazine pictures and watching the respectable women in the better places of K.C. where I took her, the most elegant way of carrying herself. She had a longish, willowy neck to begin with, and now she held her head, with that great pile of red hair cunningly arranged with pins of shell and amber, above it like a wonderful bird’s nest upon a marble pillar.

“Uncle Jack,” she would say, coming to the door of her room as we was fixing to go out, “would you prefer I wore the paletot or the basque or the sacque this evening?” These was all types of women’s coats of that day. Now I didn’t know one from the next, but since I was flattered to be asked, I’d make a choice and she would don it, for her major delight lay in pleasing me. Now you have that attitude on her part, and then you have mine: I found pleasing everything she did, for it was all graceful and sensitive, and her voice, which had been right tinny when at Dolly’s, had turned as pretty as the sound of a spring bubbling out among ferns. I got an immense joy out of just seeing her eat a plate of food. I’ll tell you how refined she was: you couldn’t see her teeth when she chewed, and she was so quiet about spooning up a bowl of soup that if your eyes was closed you’d never know what she was up to.