Return of Little Big Man Read online

  The Return of Little Big Man

  A Novel

  Thomas Berger

  To ROGER DONALD

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  1. Deadwood

  2. Aces and Eights

  3. Bat Masterson

  4. Dodge

  5. Human Beings in the Hoosegow

  6. Schooling the Red Man

  7. Amanda

  8. Buffalo Bill to the Rescue

  9. Tombstone

  10. The Gunfight That Never Happened at the O.K. Corral

  11. Wild West

  12. Little Mrs. Butler

  13. Sitting Bull

  14. Widow Woman

  15. Grandmother England

  16. Her Again

  17. Paris, France

  18. Sitting Bull Again

  19. Life on the Grand River

  20. Death on the Grand

  21. The World’s Fair

  22. Doing Good

  23. Doing Well

  A Biography Of Thomas Berger

  Introduction

  It was always my imprecise but sincere intention, on completing Little Big Man in the spring of 1964 (books went on sale the following October; publishing was speedier in those days) to continue the biography of Jack Crabb, who was supposed to be 111 years old as of 1952, which would make him about thirty-five when the narrative ends with the Battle of the Little Bighorn of 1876.

  From the account of his first three remarkable decades, it would seem unlikely that Jack could settle down thereafter into the sort of life too uneventful to be chronicled. Not to mention that, since he claimed to have participated in many of the experiences of Old Western fact and lore—from covered-wagon migration to the greatest of all battles between whites and Indians (which the latter, uniquely, won)—and supposedly had personal encounters with a cast of frontier celebrities, including Kit Carson, George Armstrong Custer, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, and more, was it not possible—make that probable—that coincidence might have taken him as well to Tombstone, Arizona, just in time for the most famous historical gunfight, that of the OK Corral? Furthermore, Buffalo Bill Cody is hardly mentioned in Little Big Man, though being just the kind of figure (many of whose heroic exploits were fictional inventions of a hack named Ned Buntline) that Jack Crabb could hardly disregard.

  Cody, of course, was most notable for being the impresario who represented America’s West in a lavish show that traveled the United States and went on to conquer Europe. The show included simulated buffalo hunts, shooting blanks at a stampeding herd of live animals hauled by ship across the Atlantic; Annie Oakley’s feats of marksmanship, which were real—with an unerring bullet she once clipped off the glowing tip of a cigarette voluntarily held between the German kaiser’s lips (when, some years later, Wilhelm II was our enemy in World War I, she regretting having been so accurate)—and Cody’s own, which were probably faked, using birdshot; a re-creation of Custer’s disaster, in which authentic Sioux and Cheyenne, some of them veterans of the battle, played themselves; and in the flesh, the one and only Sitting Bull, selling self-portrait photographs.

  All of this would surely be grist for Jack Crabb’s mill, as would the extravaganza of the Chicago World’s Fair in the closing years of the century (Cody’s show was there as well), to which a young Henry Ford turned up as visitor—as, in fact, did Jack’s old unfriendly acquaintance from as far back as the buffalo range in Little Big Man, Wyatt Earp. With such a wealth of possible reference, of which the foregoing remarks indicate but a modest sample, why then did I wait till 1999 to produce a sequel?

  Contrary to the popular opinion of more recent times, on its first appearance in 1964, Little Big Man neither sold well nor attracted the attention of influential critics. The notice published in the New York Times Book Review appeared in the back pages and, like those of its two predecessors and a successor to come (yes, for the first ten years of my career every one of the four novels I produced was slammed in the NYTBR), it was negative. The reviewer in the daily Times wrote a most generous piece, and as I remember, chose Little Big Man as one of his few favorites of the year; but he was widely considered a dismissible philistine by the higher-browed community, which has traditionally found American Indians an ethnic group too quaint to be worthy of concern. The book was ignored by the selection committees for the major literary prizes—despite a heroic effort for the National Book Award by Ralph Ellison, of whose kindness I had been a recipient since Crazy in Berlin. Ralph did, I gather, more or less singlehandedly bully the National Institute of Arts and Letters into granting the novel an award for its literary merit “despite its lack of commercial success”—or words to that effect, to see which in print did not comfort Richard Baron, then publisher of the Dial Press, who had advertised and promoted the book well beyond the call of duty or business. During the ensuing six years, under new management, Dial took the hardback out of print, and Little Big Man was henceforth available only in a mass-market paperback with Dustin Hoffman’s picture on the cover. Arthur Penn had optioned the novel for a movie on its first appearance, cast Hoffman in the lead, and then searched patiently for financing. Though the book had its admirers from the beginning, until the release of the motion picture they constituted little more than a cult of readers of offbeat Westerns. Fans of the traditional Western style were often offended by what seemed to them a relentless mockery of hallowed frontier heroes and traditions. And while continuing to be overlooked in my native land, the novel was being translated throughout the world, and a Hungarian wrote me in fluent English to express bafflement at Jack Crabb’s depiction of Wyatt Earp, “who I always thought was supposed to be a good guy.”

  Arthur’s movie gave the book the boost it had not received on its publication six years earlier. There are always necessarily fundamental differences between a narrative in written language and one expressed primarily in images of light with occasional dialogue, sound effects, and musical accompaniment. When I say that the novel belongs to me and the film to Arthur, Mr. Hoffman, and the other gifted people who made it, I imply no adverse criticism of either version. Where we are one is in the presentation of the American Indian. Chief Dan George’s portrayal of the Cheyenne patriarch Old Lodge Skins is an uncompromising realization of the depiction Jack Crabb gives us in his reminiscences. At great pains to cast the right actor in this role, Arthur considered some renowned Hollywood names, but nobody quite filled the bill until a man hired for one of the subordinate parts asked, “Why don’t you hire a real old Indian?” “I would if I could,” said Arthur, “but I don’t know where to find a real old Indian. Do you?” “Sure,” replied this fellow. “My father.”

  But to return to the Return, I might have written it sooner had I been prompted to do so, but by the time the Little Big Man film reached the screen, I had published two more novels on altogether different themes; written a play that was performed at the Berkshire Theatre Festival (starring Richard Mulligan, the movie’s General Custer, in an altogether different kind of role); lived for a while in London, then in succession in Malibu, the small New York town of Sneden’s Landing, and near Gramercy Park in New York City; and was about to collaborate with director Milos Forman on a screenplay of my Vital Parts (for a movie that was never made). In any event, I did not think about the West for a long time, except in 1966 when my wife and I drove back from California to New York by way of the Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana, which I had previously seen only in my imagination. . . . The fact is that once I have completed a book on a certain theme, I am so exhausted by my obsession with it that I flee elsewhere as if pursued. After writing Crazy in Berlin, I not only never revisited Germany, but also forgot most of
the German I had studied for years. So with the West, I read none of the contemporaneous books on the subject, saw none of the movies, including the prominent Dances with Wolves, and skipped the endless series of reenactments of the fight at the OK Corral.

  And then all of a sudden, as it goes with human life, the year was 1997, almost the end of the century, and I had published more non-Western novels—two of which were made into movies—taught at Yale; lived at a number of places (Maine, Bridgehampton, Grand View-on-Hudson); and turned seventy-three. I was struck by the need to call my own bluff and finally tell what had happened to Little Big Man after Little Big Man. So, as I did with the first installment of Jack Crabb’s narrative, I read forty or fifty studies of the period and then, well oriented, listened to his dictation, which, as if three decades had not intervened, I heard immediately on summoning him up from wherever it is that legendary personages await such a call.

  —Thomas Berger, 2012

  Prologue

  MY NAME IS JACK Crabb, and in the middle of the last century I come West with my people in a covered wagon, at age ten went off with and was reared by Cheyenne Indians, given the name of Little Big Man, learned to speak their language, ride, hunt, steal ponies, and make war, and, in part of my mind, to think like them, and in my teen years was captured by the U.S. Cavalry and went on to have many adventures and personal acquaintanceship with notables of the day and place like General George A. Custer, James B. “Wild Bill” Hickok, Wyatt Earp, and many others, surviving Custer’s fight at the Little Bighorn River, which the Indians called the Greasy Grass.

  Now I already give a detailed account of these and other episodes of my early life to a fellow name of Ralph Fielding Snell, who come to the old folks’ home back a few months, or years—when you’re old as me such distinctions don’t matter much; I happen to have just turned 112. Yeah, I don’t believe it either, but I’m the one that’s got to live with the fact.

  Snell brought along his recording machine and asked me to talk into it everything I could recall from the old days. My reason for agreeing with this was, pure and simple, I expected to make a buck or two on it, having been on my uppers, so to say, for the previous several decades, owing to the grievous lack of opportunities for a person of my years to make money.

  I took a figure out of the air, because when you don’t have any funds it is hard to calculate on the basis of—which by the way is a mode of thinking that Indians don’t use and don’t understand whereas whites can’t do without it. The sum I come up with for giving my story to this fellow was fifty thousand dollars, which depending on your station in life, and the age, might be a tidy amount or mere pocket change if you was Snell’s Dad, according to his son anyway, who claimed to be a victim of the old man’s stinginess but apparently never considered trying to earn a penny on his own—until he begun to get big ideas of how much we, me and him, would make once our story went on the market if only for what happened at Custer’s Last Stand as told by the only white survivor, somebody there wasn’t ever supposed to be.

  “Why, fifty big ones”—as he said, pursing his lips in that way people have when using a slang expression they ordinarily don’t but hope will make you think they got your best interests at heart—“why, Jack, we might make as much as that for one personal appearance! Uniqueness, Jack, always commands the highest price, and not just in this country of ours but as a principle of Western civilization. A premium is always put on one of a kind, and you, my friend, are that.”

  My mistake was in saying one word to him before we made a firm financial arrangement, either in my preferred form of cash on the barrelhead or at least a written agreement which covered the expected earnings from such use as he would make of the account of my adventures. I went on and on, yapping into the recording machine and in turn hearing his talk of ever bigger rewards, until by God I even finished the entire Little Bighorn fight, and suddenly I was struck by the feeling that the son of a bitch intended to squeeze me dry of every incident in my entire long life before beginning his book or books, newspaper or magazine versions, movies, lecture series, and the rest of the plans he had for “us,” or paying me one red cent.

  Now, I had taken Snell as somebody with the character of a chicken feather, but he turned out to be amazingly willful when I finally told him I wouldn’t do no more talking. He begged, he howled, he moaned, he once even wept real tears, and when none of that worked, he turned ugly, which in his case meant bringing up the matter of lawsuits, because according to him though neither of us ever signed anything written on paper, what I had spoke onto the tapes constituted a so-called oral contract recognized by any court in the land. Now, starting as a little kid I survived every peril life had to offer, but I tell you there’s one kind of menace that paralyzes me with fear. I mean a lawyer. I would say more, but one might get hold of this tape and sue me for my comment and of course win, because the lawyers who invented the system made sure of one fact above all: the judges too would be lawyers.

  You might think Snell had me by the short ones at this point, but I have hung on through the years by means of more than dumb luck. I’m naturally devious, so much so that had I been born and bred in other circumstances I would probably have become... a lawyer. In no time at all, I come up with the perfect scheme to get Snell out of my life: my death.

  I mean, a fake one. In the first place, he always figured, at my age, my days was close-numbered, which is why he worked me so hard, trying to get everything down on the tapes before I croaked. All I would have to do to pull off such a stunt is get the people that run the home to back it up, and that was easier than you might think, for the reason that Snell had been able to spend so much time with me, in defiance of the ordinary rules all such institutions have against the inmates doing anything but eat, sleep, dump, and die long before they’re old as me, was that Snell was supposed to persuade his Dad, this influential man, to find more funds for the place. I know for a fact that that hadn’t yet happened, and from what Snell made known to me about his father’s opinion of his pursuits, I was pretty sure it would never occur.

  I made my case to the fellow in charge of the section where they kept me, man name of Teague, who was by profession a doctor specializing in mental matters, what I prefer to call by the old term, alienist, because they tend to find things normal that are actually weird, and vice versa, and probably that is the reason why they are so easy to lie to.

  “Boy,” says I, and if you think he ever took offense at being so addressed you would be wrong because, after money, Teague’s great concern in life was age, and not in the sense of the inmates in the old-folks’ home but rather his own, given his interest in the young girl volunteers who helped out at the home after school, he being in his late forties, with a spoiled daughter gone off to college and a wife sneering at him with little mean eyes from a picture mounted on his desk. “Boy,” I says, “you just listen to me for once. I been trying to tell my story around here for years, and nobody including you believed me, then this fellow Snell shows up and does. That’s what’s important about him. What’s crap is that he’s ever going to do anything for me or you. You just get hold of his Daddy and ask if he ever heard of you or your enterprise. And if the son promises to give you a cut out of what he does to market my life, ask him to sign a paper to that effect.”

  In fact Teague after years of scoffing had give me more respect when Snell begun to come regularly to interview me, so he didn’t reject out of hand what I said now. Also, he tended to put a lot more weight in talk of profit than he ever did to the mental affairs that was supposedly his chief stock in trade.

  I went on. “Whereas you give me a little help with a certain matter, and I’ll be glad to cut you in on the money I intend to make on that story of mine.”

  Teague’s specialty was to appear to be cogitating on what he was told, though I believe that was seldom actually the case, him thinking instead of his own concerns, but this time he showed some real interest, pointy little chin twitching and some
vitality coming into his usually ditchwater eyes.

  “Jack,” says he, dit-dit-dahing on his desktop with a silver pen, “it might astonish you to know I’m not necessarily in disagreement with you, in at least a general, exploratory sort of way. As it happens, becoming somewhat impatient as the months went by, I finally took the trouble to try to get in touch directly with Mr. Armbruster C. Snell, father to our own man, and have been spectacularly unsuccessful. The nearest I could get, by phone or letter, was to a secretary who finally, after some bad-taste banter and outright rudeness, offered to send me an application for a grant from the so-called Snell Foundation, which I might say, after long experience in fund-raising, I had never otherwise heard of, and having since received the application and the accompanying brochure, I understand why. Many of the projects supported seem to be in studies that really don’t sound scientifically legitimate: research, by continent, in the effects of cold water on the scrotum, for example. ‘The Role of Urolagnia in Social Change.’ The masturbatory practices of zoo-born Old World monkeys as compared with those of teenage boys in southeastern Iowa.” Teague stopped for a derisive sniff. “In any event, my own application was rejected by return mail.”

  “Then you get what I’m talking about.”

  “What I get,” said he, pointing his pen at me, “is that we have nothing to expect from the Snells, but that you are projecting for your own unaided efforts some profit, which, if it appears, you may be willing to share with us. What I haven’t heard is what you ask of me in return for this theoretical reward.”

  Notice that, like Snell, he was big on “we’s” and “us’s” when talking of what advantage might come to him, but used “me” and “I” with regard to his own responsibilities.

  I explained my plan, which was this: next time one of the other old coots in the place went under, and if he didn’t have no living relatives to show up, why Teague could just tell Snell it was me, and clue in a nurse or two to refer to the stiff in the closed coffin as Old Jack. He’d never have to look at Ralph Fielding Snell again. Meanwhile, I’d steal and hide the recording machine Snell left behind between sessions, and soon as he was out of the picture I’d start in on my recollections again and sell them and give Teague his cut.