Little Big Man Page 19

  Well, I thought, if he thinks he’s going to get the better part of my dollar with them cakes, he is wrong. I wasn’t hungry, anyway, and grew a little resentful that Mrs. Pendrake hadn’t recalled the doctor saying I should go easy on sweets. Feeling sulky, I gazed up to the ceiling of that place and saw my old tormentor, the woman of the saloon picture, printed on it. It must have been the thought of Luke English, for I remembered what he said about the whore at Mrs. Lizzie’s. He no doubt had lied, but I knowed where Mrs. Lizzie’s was, over a saloon at the other end of town, and there was sure whores there, which you could see hanging in the windows, and sometimes if you was a boy my age they would call down: “I’ll grow you up for a dollar.”

  It’d fix Mrs. Pendrake right if I went over there with her dollar. She hadn’t ought to have left me alone, I was thinking. I got up and went to the counter to pay my bill, realizing then that I wouldn’t have a dollar left, for that soda water was a nickel apiece and maybe that skunk would charge for them cakes though I hadn’t ate a one, and yet I was sort of relieved at not having to go to Mrs. Lizzie’s. I was a real mess at that time of my life, never having an idea but it was canceled by the next.

  The skunk, however, wasn’t there; I don’t know where he went, leaving behind an old fellow with a handlebar mustache who allowed my reckoning was already taken care of. So I still had my dollar, which seemed unfortunate when I reached the street, for a great weakness hit me in the hamstrings. I looked up and down for Mrs. Pendrake, wishing I could see her so I wouldn’t have to go no further. There was nothing in the world I wanted so little as a whore at that moment, but I felt it was a challenge once I had got up instead of waiting in the soda-water place.

  Then I saw the tracks of her boots in the slush. I couldn’t tell you what made them distinguishable from the other footprints; I just knowed them, for I was familiar with her every particular. I could smell a room and tell you if she had been in it during the last two days. That’s the one respect in which my senses hadn’t got blunted while living in town. Them tracks went along the walk, down to the corner, took a left, north another block, again a left—I followed them though pretending to be dawdling along like a sappy kid—and when they had took that second left onto a residential street running parallel to and behind the block of shops, I understood she had lied.

  Halfway along the block was an alley that run back to the commercial street. A cart had been through it but lately, pulled by a mule led by a colored man about seventy years of age: an Indian would have knowed the age of the mule as well.

  Anyway, right along this alley had gone Mrs. Pendrake’s little boots, out towards the shops again, except when they come to the back of one of the stores, they turned through a gate, crossed a short yard past the privy, up to a door, and ended.

  I paused at the fence, for here come that colored fellow with his cart again, and sure enough he looked about seventy and was leading a big mule. Negroes was great for talking like Lavender of what secrets is seen in eggs and so on, but I believe the reason why they knowed everything in those days was they was always trucking things through back alleys, cleaning up bedrooms and the like, and you can pick up a lot of dirt that way without even looking for it. He bid me the time of day and went creaking past, and then a black dog begun to growl on the other side of the alley and then hushed.

  There was a minute when the alley was empty and quiet, and I took it to go through the gate on Mrs. P.’s trail. O.K., I reached the door as she had, but what now? It didn’t have no keyhole and anyway probably opened into a dark hall. I put my ear against it and never heard a thing. Suppose I barged in and she was being fitted for a corset? I felt awful at the thought, but at the same time right excited. You have to recall I was fifteen years of age then and not the relic I am today. I am a dirty old man now but in that time I was only a filthy young boy, and I hope it is not so disgusting to you, for you must believe I was never before nor since in that much misery.

  I certainly didn’t barge in. Over to the side of the door was a big woodbox and beyond it a window onto the porch. A person my size could scrooch down next to the one and peer into the other, through a teeny crack in the shutters closed on it, and nobody using the alley were the wiser.

  For all the things I noticed on the route here, it never struck me that I was at the back of the same building in which the soda-water place occupied the front. I saw that, if nothing else, when I staggered on out a couple minutes later and somehow drug myself back home.

  What I seen through the crack was that proprietor and Mrs. Pendrake. They had their clothes on, but was pressed together. And just as I peeped in, he had bared his big teeth, pulled her high collar down a little, and bit her white neck. I would have broke in and killed him, but for her look of liking it immensely.

  CHAPTER 11 Hopeless

  THANKSGIVING TRANSPIRED during my time of bed-bound illness, and I missed it for that reason. So Christmas was the first white holiday I was to celebrate in more than five years. I had been looking forward to it back in the fall, but by the time it come, I had seen that episode through the shutters and it was ruined for me before it started, like everything else.

  I passed that winter in a blur of pain, but apparently the breaking of my heart sort of fertilized my mind and I did real well at my studies. When I was over the pneumonia Mrs. Pendrake forgot she used to tutor me afternoons and went out more and more. So I got to staying later at the school, where we had a pretty, young teacher to replace the ugly old maid who retired or died or something. I don’t want you to think I got a crush on this new woman. I was finished with that sort of thing for good: I don’t mean love and I don’t mean lust, I mean that half-witted captivity I had imposed on myself as regards Mrs. Pendrake, which come as a result of lack of decision. I had never been able to make up my mind whether she was my mother or my sweetheart, until I looked through the shutter and saw she was neither.

  So if I stayed at school after hours it was because home had become hateful to me and I also took satisfaction in the company of this new teacher from the fact that I had no interest in her aside from what she could impart in the way of learning, for she was bright. Therefore I suppose it was inevitable that once she saw my immunity, so to speak, she got stuck on me, white women being nothing if not contrary. Her name was Helen Berry, and she was only about eighteen. She was real pretty, sort of plumpish with a pug nose. She’d smile at me in class, but when I was there alone with her she’d turn right shy if I looked her in the eye.

  I could have kissed her any time I wanted. Reason I didn’t was the Reverend had really got to me with that talk of sin—in a sort of backhanded way, through his wife getting her neck bit by that cake-eater. I was finished with golden chalices that might get turned into slop jars, just as I had stopped seeing that purple-titted painting. The way I accomplished that was to go right to the slop jars to begin with. By the time I turned sixteen, early in February, I was a regular customer at Mrs. Lizzie’s.

  Confessing I run to the whores was easy alongside of the next admission I got to make regarding my activities that winter, but there ain’t no avoiding it if you want the whole truth. I become a small-sized version of that Kane what run the soda-water place. For one, I got to being a conscious dandy. I had earlier felt uneasy wearing them fancy clothes Mrs. P. had bought me, fur-trimmed and all, but now there was nothing I cherished more than ornate attire.

  In them days kids wore jeans and stuff to school, but the way I got myself up you would have thought I was the headmaster except for my size: fawn-colored pants, dark sack coat, satin vest, and patent-leather shoes. It was all right with Miss Berry, who you know was stuck on me, and if you think I had any trouble with Luke English and his bunch you are wrong. Soon as I started to dress that way and put on the supercilious manner that went with it, that crowd began to suck up to me in the most shameless fashion, with Luke foremost among them.

  Of course that meant the girls of the same age as well, and they got to inviting me to t
heir birthday parties and such, to which I’d come with a smirk and make sarcastic remarks even to their parents as they officiated, and by God if I didn’t hear more than one mother remark favorably on what a gentleman I was directly after I had to my mind insulted her.

  So the winter passed, and Mrs. Pendrake I reckon continued to visit the back of the ice-cream parlor though I never followed her again, on the grounds my heart would never stand it. For I tell you I loved her. If anything, I loved her more than ever after looking through that shutter. I hated her, but I loved her for making me hate her. I was imitating Kane because she loved him. I was running to the whores because I loved her.

  I love her still, for if you know anything about that kind of feeling, you know how close it is connected to hopelessness and thus is about the only thing in civilization that don’t degenerate with time.

  Spring came. It might have been April, for I recall a good deal of rain fell the night before, but the following day was clear and bright and the magnolia tree in the Pendrakes’ front yard had sprung all its pink cups.

  At around two in the afternoon a little scrawny fellow went into the soda-water place, drug that Kane outside to the street, and beat him half to death with a horsewhip.

  No, it wasn’t me. The man what did it was named John Weatherby, who owned a livery stable. He stood about five-five, was bald and forty, and had a sixteen-year-old daughter I knowed slightly. It turned out Kane had knowed this girl too, only in the carnal way, and had give her the start of a family of her very own.

  Kane never tried to defend himself, just covered up his face—I reckon he didn’t want his sneer spoiled—and took his hiding. I understand that frock coat of his was cut to ribbons. I didn’t see the incident myself, but Luke English did and probably lied some in relating it. (Kane might have been yellow, but I can’t see him going down on his knees and sobbing like a child.) I do know Kane shortly married the Weatherby girl, closed up his establishment, and moved to St. Louie. And then within another month or so, about the time she begun to swell, back she come, for he had give her the slip once in the big city.

  “I believe that Kane would of screwed a snake if somebody’d held its head,” Luke observed. “Though I never realized that about him while he was here, didjoo? I wonder who else’s wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters he was—”

  “Who cares,” says I and changed the subject. Luke’s mother and sisters was the ugliest women in town.

  I hankered to see the effects the new development would have on Mrs. P. They wasn’t visible, except she started staying home more in the afternoons again. She was sweetly sad as always, not I think because of this particular disappointment but rather at the general nature of living. I guess it didn’t measure up to what that judge, her Pa, led her to expect, which wouldn’t be the first time a lawyer give somebody a bum steer. Or maybe she did too much reading. She might have been happy with cross-eyes or buck teeth.

  But the kind of fool I was, I went right back to my imaginary romance with her, forgot and forgave, read Mr. Pope again, and so on. I stopped visiting Mrs. Lizzie’s. When the warm weather come, the Reverend suddenly grew aware of me as if I had been absent all winter, and allowed as how we should go fishing again. But by being vague about it until the notion passed from his mind, I managed to elude that. So it was perfect and the month of May. All my life since, May has retained the signification it acquired then though I never spent another in that fashion.

  But along about the first of June, instead of reading on that afternoon, we walked down to the commercial district, Mrs. P. holding my arm, both of us real grand. She had decided I must have a new pair of boots. I already owned four or five, but she said the new bootmaker was an amazing craftsman in leather, hailing from Florence, Italy, and it was almost disgraceful not to wear the product of his hand, now such was available.

  So we went to the shop, which was owned by a flabby-faced individual named Cushing, who rushed up as we entered and all but kissed the floor underneath Mrs. P. The Italian bootmaker was at his bench towards the back, a wiry, dark-complexioned fellow in his middle twenties. He wore a leather jerkin without sleeves and was hairy as an animal on the lower arms, and also I reckon the chest, for where the garment was open at the base of his neck was all curly black.

  Cushing fetches forth a pair of Russia-leather slippers Mrs. Pendrake had ordered earlier, unbeknownst to me. They were cunning little red things, for she had tiny feet. Cushing come almost to the point of slaver here, a woman’s foot in them days being thought almost unbearably sexy.

  “I supervised the dainty work myself,” he says. “You can’t always trust that Eye-talian when it comes to ladies’ items. You see this stitching, madam—”

  Mrs. P. says: “Would you be so good as to deliver them to my house, Mr. Cushing?”

  “Oh?” says he with a finger to the gold tooth of which he was real proud. “Very well, madam, I’ll send the Eye-talian straight off.”

  “You must never do that, Mr. Cushing. I shall require Angelo to take this young gentleman’s measurements for a pair of boots.”

  I figured Angelo would get a hard time when the old bastard got back, and I was sorry, for I liked that Italian right away if for no other reason than he was even more a foreigner in that town than me.

  He come over from his workbench and took a pattern from my foot. It was then, looking up to smile at Mrs. Pendrake, I saw on her face the same expression she had worn for Kane.

  The difference was that Angelo kept his head down mostly, covered with them tight black curls, and if he glanced at Mrs. P., his face was polite, innocent, and ignorant. Italians have the reputation for hot blood, but he didn’t even seem to be lukewarm. Furthermore, he didn’t have much English. He seemed to know two words: “lady” and “yes,” which he pronounced his own way.

  She said: “Angelo, I am very happy with these slippers. You have made them as if you held my foot while you worked.”

  He answered: “Yayss, leddy.”

  “But,” said she.

  He looked up under his thick eyebrows. “Leddy?”

  “But I think I had rather they were done in blue. Don’t you think blue would become me more?”

  “Yayss?” he asked, all the while applying himself to the pattern of my hoof, and shortly had it done, for he was wondrously deft with his fingers.

  I don’t think he savvied a word she said, but she nevertheless went on about it and he nodded and said the usual and smiled empty and, making a little bow, went back to his bench, where he picked up a piece of hide and sliced out a sole freehand almost in no longer than it takes to tell it.

  Towards Angelo I have never borne any ill will. It’s hard to hate a man on the basis of the one short time you saw him, when he appeared far more interested in leather than he ever could be in Mrs. Pendrake. I was just worn out with the whole business.

  So along about three o’clock next morning, with my lamp turned down low, I put on the most usable clothes I could find, got my money together—I had three-four dollars accumulated—put my scalping knife in my waistband, slipped down the stairs, and left forever.

  Before I went, though, I wrote a little letter, for they had been all of them right nice to me in their fashion, and stuck it where it would be found.

  DEAR REV. AND MRS. PENDRAKE,

  I got to go off now, but it ain’t your fault, for you been mighty kind. The trouble is I don’t think I can ever be civilized like you two. For I can’t get onto your ways, though I know they is the right ones. Please don’t send after me. I promise never to reveal my connection with you so you won’t be disgraced. Give my regards to Lucy and Lavender, who I am grateful towards for their many favors.

  Believe me, your loving “son,”

  JACK

  Now you get the reason why I won’t tell the name of that town, nor the faith of the Reverend’s church, and as far as that goes, those people wasn’t named “Pendrake.”

  It was partly on account of the promise I made
in that note, but mostly because for all the things I done in my life, some of them fairly unrespectable, I never got so low as to speak ill of a lady in public. At least not so’s you could recognize her. The type of fellow who would do that should be shot.

  CHAPTER 12 Going for Gold

  WHAT I HAD IN MIND on leaving the Pendrakes was of course returning to the Cheyenne. God knows I thought enough about it and kept telling myself I was basically an Indian, just as when among Indians I kept seeing how I was really white to the core.

  But when I got to the river’s edge that early morning of my departure, where I figured to take a boat across to the western shore and hit the emigrant trail, I suddenly lost my taste for that venture. I just couldn’t see myself going back to a buffalo robe in Old Lodge Skins’s tepee. I couldn’t stand it at the Pendrakes’ no more, but the answer to my problem didn’t seem to be returning to savagery after that nine or ten months out of it. Being primitive ain’t the easiest thing in the world to get used to if you know better. You get showed a more regular manner of obtaining your grub, for example, and it’s pretty hard to return to a method that ain’t guaranteed.

  I reckon that was one consideration that changed my mind. I was too ignorant to reflect that I ate on schedule with the Pendrakes because I didn’t have to provide the food myself. Then another thing was that in our town you heard a lot about St. Louie, and I figured so long as I was in the same state I ought to see that great city. I could always go west, and I oughtn’t pass up a chance to take in the local sights while I was here.

  So I went east to St. Louie, walking most of the route so as to save my money, which nevertheless had dwindled out by the time I reached the city and the rest of it went for my first meal there, for which they took fifty cents off me, prices being criminal high in St. Louie.