The Return of Little Big Man Read online

  But now when I come into that jail cell and looked down at Wild Hog, I suddenly saw what I had not seen earlier: I thought I could recognize him as one of the boys I had been raised with as a child. We had played together with kid-sized bows and arrows and little toy horses made of wood or clay, and with others we had sat around Old Lodge Skins as he told us the educational stories of great Cheyenne exploits of the past, like the one concerning Little Man, from whose name my own was taken after I had done well in a horse-raiding expedition against the Crow. But two things puzzled me, the first of which was if I knowed him as a young kid, where had he been since then? For I rejoined the band a couple times later on, was with them at the Washita, yet could not recall seeing Wild Hog. Not to mention if we was boys together, how come he now looked so old, whereas I thought of myself as still quite youthful. I put in that last so you can get a laugh out of it. I was considered fairly old for the time myself, being well into the second half of my thirties, with only a year or so left if I was to be as imprudent as Wild Bill and play cards with my back to the door.

  I’ll tell you about dealing with Indians: in some things it’s best to be as direct as possible, like if you’re hungry or cold or have to make water or any natural thing, you just say so. Courtesy does not demand otherwise. But with certain matters, for example time, you don’t just talk freely about it even with family members and intimates, for that can be rude. In trying to figure out why this is true I come up with the idea that time belongs to everybody and everything, and nobody and nothing can lay claim to any part of it exclusively, so if you talk about the past as though there was just one version of it that everybody agrees on, you might be seen as stealing the spirit of others, something which the Cheyenne always had a taboo against. You could shoot a man and while he lay dying rip off his scalp, but if you felt sorry for him under them conditions, you was trying to steal his spirit as well, and that was out of order.

  So whether or not Wild Hog was the grown version of the boy I had knowed, I sure didn’t make the suggestion to him. Instead I squatted down and unwrapped the sugarloaf from the piece of paper around it and presented it to him. I didn’t say it was for everybody, for that too would of been discourteous. Indians instinctively shared everything they ever got, with the exception of whiskey.

  He took the gift, but did not look at either it or me.

  I addressed him in Cheyenne. “I will speak for you whenever you want to say something to the Americans.”

  He flickered his glittering black eyes at me. “Can you tell me why we are here?”

  Nobody had even let them know why they was arrested. “The Kansans,” I says, “are going to put you on trial for murder and taking women against their will.” Wild Hog shrugged inside his red blanket and said nothing, but some of the others muttered. “You don’t have to admit doing these things,” I told him, “whether or not you did them. You cannot be forced to speak against your own interest.”

  “That makes no sense,” says he.

  I tried to explain though I wasn’t no lawyer. “The Americans got that from what happened on the island of the Grandmother, where most of them came from at first. The reason why you cannot talk against yourself is that your enemies might make you do that by torture.” I could see I wasn’t getting nowhere: a Cheyenne had nothing against torture, which seemed only normal to him. “Just take my word for it. It does not matter whether you committed the crimes or not. They must prove you did. You don’t even have to say anything.”

  He frowned, the lines cobwebbing his leathery face. “I have not said anything, nor have these others, but here we are.”

  “The saying something doesn’t have to do with being arrested. It has to do with only the trial, where you go before a judge, one man who is the chief of the affair and maybe also a jury, which is a kind of council of several people who listen to the accusations against you and decide if you’re guilty or not. They might decide you are not guilty, and then you cannot be punished.”

  Wild Hog was still holding the pale loaf of sugar in his brown hand. He shook his head. “You speak the language of the Human Beings very clearly, so the difficulty cannot be in how you are saying it. All my life I have been unable to understand the Americans. I tell you I have come to prefer those who are just bad, because you can predict that everything they tell you is a lie, and unless you kill them first they will take everything from you including your life. But the others are a problem. Why capture a man when later some other people sitting in a council can decide there was no reason to take away his liberty in the first place?”

  “Have a taste of that sugar,” I says to distract him from inquiring further as to what I couldn’t answer. But this was a mistake.

  “It is no gift if you tell me what to do with it. Then it still belongs to you.”

  “I was only trying to be polite,” I says, “as Old Lodge Skins always taught us.” I thought I saw a little glint in his eye, but he made no direct response. Let me explain that what I’m putting into English here is not word-for-word from Cheyenne, where you’d not actually say “polite” but rather more like “the way things ought to be” or “how you ought to act,” but it was true enough that the Cheyenne was courteous people and brung up their children that way, so long as you understand that don’t mean lifting your little finger when sipping from a teacup or patting your lips with a napkin, and there’s nothing against belching when you eat, but unlike some white folks I have known you don’t exchange abuse when breaking bread with others and you don’t insult a visitor in your tepee.

  I went on. “White ways might never make sense to you, but you are in their power now, so you have to do the best you can. Here’s another matter you might not understand: by law they have to provide a man who will speak for you. He is called an attorney. This is another example of what you might think is crazy. Why would the same people who accuse you of doing wrong help you to deny it? There’s a reason, and maybe sometime the Human Beings, especially the young people, can learn about this in school.”

  “I hope not,” says Hog with a stubborn expression only an Indian has the facial bones to make seem like it’s carved in rock. “Already they are learning too little about a man’s proper duties: hunting and fighting.”

  “Things have changed since you and I were boys,” I told him. “Pretty soon there won’t be any game at all, just tame cattle, and as for the fighting, you can see that’s a thing of the past too, because you cannot possibly win in the end.”

  “You can die fighting,” Wild Hog says, “as a man is supposed to.”

  “But I notice you did not.” I put it straight to him. Mind you, I don’t make no secret of my regard for the Cheyenne, but I always try to be honest about serious matters. It goes without saying that winning don’t necessarily make you one hundred percent morally in the right, but neither does losing. On the other hand, putting a man in his place don’t give much satisfaction when he’s a helpless prisoner, wrapped up in a blanket, sitting on the floor of a jail built where within living memory his kind rode free, so I quickly added, “I think you did not die because if you did there would be nobody to look after the women and children, and what kind of world would it be with no Human Beings in it?”

  For the first time he looked at me as if I was a person worth being looked at with any interest at all.

  “Suddenly you speak perfect truth,” said he, but quizzically. “Then you go back to being white again. You have been doing that sort of thing all your life.”

  “Damn,” I says in English, in my shock. “You do know me?” Then caught myself and repeated it in Cheyenne, without the “damn,” which they don’t have.

  “I have seen you since we were children together,” Wild Hog tells me. “It is easy to notice a person with red hair and skin so pale except for the blue spots.” Meaning my freckles, which was more pronounced as a kid. “Nevertheless, despite your appearance, when we were boys I naturally assumed you were a Human Being.”

  As I said, I d
on’t recall seeing him again after he was a child, for I could swear he was not with Old Lodge Skins’s band as a grown-up. I won’t go through what it took to get his story out of him, with the Indian aversion to history as known to whites, as well as the discourtesy of questions that are too nosy, but I finally was able to gather he had been in that big camp on the Washita and seen me at a distance without coming up to talk. I never did find out why his father pulled out of the band when Hog was still a boy, and didn’t ask in case it was for some delicate reason like a quarrel with Old Lodge Skins concerning a woman, maybe his own Ma.

  “I remember you too,” I says, “but only as a child. You were a better rider than I.” I was a keener shot with a bow, but I didn’t add that. “I wish you had spoken with me when you saw me later on.”

  “Why?” he asks, suddenly colder than before, though he hadn’t really warmed up much.

  “It’s good to keep in touch with friends.”

  “You’re not my friend,” said Wild Hog. “Else you would either be dead or sitting here with me in jail. You are a white man, and you have been one all along. As soon as you got big enough to run away from the Human Beings, you did so.”

  “Then why did I come back and marry a woman of the Human Beings and have a child by her and live with the band of Old Lodge Skins and be at the camp on the Washita when the soldiers attacked it?”

  “Don’t expect me to answer such questions,” said Hog, but his frown indicated I had got to him. Indians did a lot of thinking, contrary to what you might suppose from the kind of life they lived, if thinking is the right word for an activity that includes more than reason and might even turn on a dream.

  “The truth is I am of course white of skin, was born of a white mother and father, and lived amongst whites a lot and am doing so now. But I’ve also lived and fought as a Human Being.”

  “You should make up your mind what you are,” Wild Hog says, at last placing the sugarloaf on the floor beside him. “You can’t be both, and I cannot accept as friend a person of the people who have acted so badly towards us.”

  “That’s because you cannot see beyond what you can touch,” I told him, meaning he was deficient in spirit. This is a very serious point to make with an Indian, and he knew it. “The Human Beings killed my father, and not in a real fight but because they went crazy after drinking whiskey. What worse thing can be done to a child than to kill his father? Yet I lived amongst them of my own will as both boy and grown-up.”

  I could see this argument had its effect, but he was a proud man in a degrading situation, and the fact remained that I was of those who had power over him, so I didn’t look for an apology or warm gesture, and dropped the subject to make the point I aimed to.

  “I want to help you, whether you trust me or not. White man’s law has a lot to do with words. The better you understand them, the more power you have to protect yourself. The people who make the laws know that and often therefore write them so they can be understood by nobody but themselves.” But now I was getting into an area that would be incomprehensible to him. The Cheyenne lacked altogether in this feature of a higher civilization by which deceit became an essential part of dealing with your fellow man and the only way you could hold your own was to be as shifty as them you was competing with, namely everybody else.

  “That attorney I mentioned earlier. They have to provide you with one, but he will not be likely to speak your language, and the interpreter they will furnish—because they are supposed to do that too—might do a bad job. You probably know of the trouble Frank Grouard caused for Crazy Horse?”

  “Crazy Horse,” Wild Hog said loftily, “though an Ogallala, had a wife who was a Human Being.”

  Well, I figured he knowed well enough what I was talking about, for Indians without a postal service, telegraph, or a semaphore system—don’t believe them movie smoke signals by which complicated messages was supposed to be sent—always was aware of what pertained to them, I can’t explain how. All I know is with Old Lodge Skins it was through dreams. In any event, I was referring to a mistake made by Grouard, a breed who scouted for the Army, when translating remarks of Crazy Horse to a white officer, which led to Crazy Horse’s death, only with Grouard it was accidental on purpose, for he were a mean man.

  “I hope I have made myself clear,” I says. “I am going to do what I can for you. I’ll listen to everything said by the Americans and tell you about it. I’ll also see that you get a good lawyer. If the authorities want to give you a bad one, I’ll pay for another myself.”

  I was feeling noble in promising as much, not on account of the money but rather with the idea that in view of the local crimes them Cheyenne was accused of, on top of the Custer massacre of recent memory, a white fellow who didn’t want to string them up might run a risk of having the same done to himself.

  Wild Hog brung me down a peg. “Do for yourself what you need to, but do not think that you are doing anything for us.”

  Well, as it happened the one place where there wasn’t no mob when we got there was Dodge, where people had better things to distract them, namely, whiskey, gambling, and whores, and nobody paid any attention to my visits to the Ford County jail to see the Indians while they awaited their trial, though in case they did, in a nasty way, I armed myself with a Peacemaker stuck in my holsterless belt, but run into assistant town marshal Earp while going along Front Street.

  He glares at the weapon and then at me. “You know better than that.”

  I took too long to figure out what he meant, which was the law against carrying a gun inside city limits, and so once again, as he had years before on the buffalo range, he hit me over the head with the barrel of his pistol. But having dodged a little, I wasn’t knocked out this time, only bruised.

  “God damn you, Wyatt,” I says, for we knowed each other by now.

  “God damn you, Jack,” says he, and takes me to the magistrate, where I was fined five dollars for the offense and another five for resisting arrest, of which each one got a cut.

  Another unpleasant incident happened at about this time. I got me a bad ache in one of my teeth so finally had to go to a dentist, something I’d rather be scalped than do, but the doctor turned out to be real good at his job, not exactly painless but he did give me a big slug of whiskey before taking two or three of his own, and turning from his work to cough a lot, proceeded to yank out the bad tooth without giving me more than one sharp twinge.

  After this he poured me another drink, along with another for himself, and him and me shot the breeze for a bit, since no other patients was waiting, and the killing of Miss Dora Hand come into discussion.

  This dentist, amidst more fits of a hacking coughs commented on how big her funeral was, and then he smiles and says, “I guess everybody who ever had her showed up.”

  Owing to that law, I had left my gun at the Lone Star, but I told him I was going to get it and come back and kill him.

  Now, running along the street, I encounter none other than Bat Masterson, and I know it was foolish to appeal to him, but I was all worked up at the time. I hadn’t been able to do nothing to protect Miss Hand from the likes of Jim Kennedy, but by God I could avenge the polluting of her name by some foulmouthed dentist.

  “Bat,” I says, out of breath owing to the state of my feelings plus the running, “I need to borrow your gun pronto.”

  Naturally he asks me why.

  “I ain’t going to let it happen!” I says. “That woman was a saint. I won’t let a coughing, drinking, no-good son of a bitch besmirch her name.” He gets more details out of me, while I get madder. “Miss Dora Hand!” I says. “Just because she were a performing artist on a public stage! That dear lady spent every Sunday in church. I’m going to kill him.”

  Bat pulls on his big mustache, and says carefully, “Now you listen to me, Jack. I’m not going to lend you a gun, and if you get one elsewhere you’ll have to face me first. If you look at that dentist’s shingle you will see the name John Holliday. I don�
��t know where you’ve been living if you haven’t heard of Doc Holliday, but then—and hold on, now!—you don’t even seem to know that the late Miss Hand was not only a fine singer and a regular churchgoer but also did other things in her life. You can’t just put her in one category. For example her real name wasn’t even Dora Hand but Fanny Keenan.”

  As he talked I went from murderous anger into, well, I don’t quite know what state of mind, call it confusion. I wasn’t ready to face up to the fact then that I had been so besotted first by that heavenly voice and sweet look she had onstage and by what she appeared to be when in church, but maybe that was not the whole of her existence. So you can call me at that point anyway a bartender who for a change didn’t know as much as his customers, me who always had quite a high idea of my common sense.

  I hung my head. “I’ve heard of Doc Holliday as a killer,” I says. “I guess I missed the news he was in Dodge, and I never knowed he was a dentist and consumptive as well.”

  Bat sniffed. “I don’t like him, but he’s kept his nose clean since coming to my county, and he’s a good friend of Wyatt’s.”

  So far as friendships went, there was me and Bat’s, which probably saved my life in this case, Holliday being as skilled in taking life with either pistol or blade as he was at pulling teeth, and Bat’s with Wyatt Earp, and Wyatt’s with Holliday. Earp and me didn’t take to each other, nor me and Holliday, who incidentally I never saw again in Dodge but encountered later in Tombstone, as will be told, at which time he had no memory of me whatever. You might think a man suddenly runs out of your office saying he’d be back to shoot you would be memorable, but no doubt such incidents was routine in the life of Doc Holliday, who spent most of his time gambling and killing people and not dentisting.