The Return of Little Big Man Read online

  It didn’t take that alienist long to agree. I don’t think he believed any part of the idea except it would get rid of Snell, who made him bitter when he thought of what he had done for the man, which of course was only letting him talk to me, but the doctor belongs to a profession that specializes in doing nothing about anything, taking credit for any success and disclaiming all failure, so this was right up his alley.

  So the fake funeral was held, or rather I should say the real services for a young geezer of only ninety-four, who had been a real person, if not historical like me, but had outlived or been lost sight of by everybody he had been related to. Therefore the only people at the services was other old folks from the home, most of them so senile they never knowed or cared who it was for, but it was something to do: waiting your turn to die is real boring.

  I stayed holed up in the room where they had the TV set and having no wish to peep in on my own funeral, even if it was phony (because at 112 how much longer can it be till the real one?), or laughed at a Western movie on the tube.

  According to Dr. Teague, Snell came to the services and never questioned they was for me, and afterwards he went away and was never seen again though he did call on the telephone from time to time asking if his recording machine turned up. I’m just sorry I told him the earliest part of my story, for there was a lot of interesting stuff in it and I’m too old to go through the whole works again here, with everything else I got to tell. So if you want to hear what really happened at the so-called Battle of the Little Bighorn, go find Snell.*

  Where I’m starting in here is not long after that fight, and just after the death of Old Lodge Skins, the Cheyenne chief who was like a father to me.

  *Editor’s note: The late Ralph Fielding Snell published the reminiscences of Jack Crabb’s early life under the title Little Big Man, in 1964.

  1. Deadwood

  OLD LODGE SKINS WAS the finest man I ever knew, and though I spent years apart from him, I guess it was always in the back of my mind that he would live forever, so that any time I needed to, I could go back and find him and get him to set me straight about things of the spirit, which I have found apply to all people whatever their material ways.

  He killed plenty of his fellow men and scalped them to boot, and took torture, given or received, in stride, but he had what in my experience up to then, and in fact since, was unique: a firm grasp of a lot of fundamentals, and he always knew where his center was, a knowledge which has eluded me for much of my existence.

  I was still in the Indian garb my Cheyenne friends had give me so I wouldn’t be slaughtered on the Greasy Grass battleground, and I had stayed for a spell with Old Lodge Skins’s little band in the Bighorn foothills. Some of the rest of the big encampment which Custer had rashly attacked went north with Sitting Bull after the fight was over, up to Grandmother’s Land, which is what they called Canada, after Queen Victoria, whose image they saw on some medallions presented them in years past by the Canadians.

  I had had my own grievance against Custer, whose attack on the Cheyenne camp on the Washita, years earlier, had resulted in the loss of my Indian wife and child, and thought for a while I’d kill him if I could, but I never got the chance, and now that somebody had done it with no help from me, I both lacked a feeling of satisfaction and a sense of purpose as to what I’d do with the rest of my life.

  I also had my hide to think of. Now that Old Lodge Skins wasn’t there to vouch for me, some of the other Indians, too young to remember my years with the Cheyenne, might get to wondering why I was hiding out amongst them, wearing a breechcloth and leggings, having been too polite for such wonderment while he was alive. Not only do Indians have natural good manners, but they reverence their elders. I was worried now that if I went back to camp and told of the old chief’s death, some of the more excitable individuals might believe I rubbed him out and wanted to take over his power, all ten cents’ worth of his material possessions, and his wives, the latest of whom was quite young and, despite his advanced age, showing a swollen belly.

  But I’d have a better chance there than looking for the U.S. Army dressed as a Cheyenne, and I didn’t have no access to a change of wardrobe at the moment, unless I wanted to ask a warrior to loan me some of the clothes he stripped off the corpses of the Seventh Cavalry. Any white soldiers I encountered in the region would want to know what I was doing there, however I was dressed, and given their state of mind after the Custer defeat, I would of had a hard time convincing them, having lost, at least temporarily, my gift for verbal invention.

  Indeed the events of recent days had taken the heart out of me. I hadn’t rejoiced at the sight of two hundred dead of my own kind, and there was plenty red men too who had died at the Little Bighorn, having been no enemies of mine. Now Old Lodge Skins was gone. I tell you I could have sat down and cried like a white person, or sung Indian songs of grief and mourning, or maybe both, but I did neither. That part of the world was far too perilous to let sentiment affect your provisions for safety. What I had to do was get out of there pronto, my expressions of bereavement done in silence, in the heart.

  I figured if I could get unharmed down to the new settlements in the Black Hills, I could rejoin white society in a inconspicuous fashion, for people was crowding into that part of Dakota Territory on another of them gold rushes that happened periodically in the West. I had myself participated in that earlier one at Cherry Creek, Colorado, and after a lot of panning, got less gold dust than paid for the equipment, but then made the real discovery: namely, that almost all the money made from gold strikes is by them that sell miners their supplies, liquor, and women, at inflated prices.

  I managed, traveling on foot and mostly by night, after about a month to get down to the mining town of Deadwood in Dakota Territory, undamaged except for being three-quarters starved because food is hard to come by in the dark without the eyes of a catamount, and I had to eat wild turnips and unripe plums and bull-berries still green and hard, along with a lot of bark and weeds. I had no weapon but a real poor knife I had begged off my recent red comrades who despite their big victory was poor as ever, a kind of standard Indian situation.

  I was still wearing the skin shirt, which I might of gotten away with, but not so with the breech-cloth and leggings. Nor did I have sufficient money for the buying of replacements, and the people of them days, in that part of the world, generally wore the same clothes for months at a time, even when sleeping the night, having no extras, so it wouldn’t be easy to swipe anything.

  Deadwood at this time was more or less one long ditch of, depending on the weather, mud or dust, lined on both sides by saloons. They had spared from the axe one or two tall pines like what the Indians used for lodgepoles—another reason the Black Hills was precious land, the plains being treeless—a few stores, a number of harlotries, and a bathhouse.

  I took the lay of the land in the wee hours of the morning, by which time the streets was deserted and even the soiled doves had turned down the lamps in their rooms, else I might of tried to get past the madam (who was always a hard case) and talk one of the girls into extending me a little loan. I’ve had some experience of ladies of pleasure and while they won’t give sexual favors for free, because that’s a professional matter, they are otherwise at least as generous to needy men as are respectable women, maybe more so, having even more reason to look down on the male sex, encountering few customers who are either sober or have bathed in the previous year.

  Then I heard a groan coming from inside the bed of a wagon in the street out front of one of the saloons, not so much parked as abandoned, at an angle and without a horse. There was enough moon by which, if I stood on tiptoe and looked over the side, to see some fellow flopped there, either drunk or dying, in them days both being pretty routine in a gold town.

  I asks, “Partner, what ails you?”

  In response I got a stream of indecent abuse, so apparently he did not require medical treatment. “All right, then, you son of a bitch. I’ll figh
t you,” I says. I didn’t mean it. It was just a test and earned me some more abuse, but this time it was too slurred even to identify the words.

  I boosted myself up into the wagon and proceeded to strip off the drunk’s outer clothes, a wool shirt and a pair of pants that stank worse than anything I ever smelled until his filthy long underwear met the air.

  I drug these garments back up into the high woods back of the town, where I had hid, and soaked them the rest of the night in a cold mountain stream. Next morning they still stank though not as much, and somewhat less as the sun heated up and begun to steam them dry. If they shrunk some as well, all to the good, for I wasn’t so large as him I stole them from. I buried my Indian attire and went down into town again, now dressed at least as good as most of the other people on the main or in fact the only drag in Deadwood.

  I hadn’t ate real food in ever so long, and being that drunk had enormous feet, I hadn’t taken his boots but continued to wear them Cheyenne moccasins that might be questioned by the inevitable people who like to make trouble, especially when the liquor’s flowing. I was in grievous need of funds, now I was amidst whites once more. In an Indian camp I could of walked right in and got my needs met free of charge, no questions asked, except “Where are you going?” and “What do you want?” which, however they were answered, entitled you to the basics. This was true even of an enemy band: if you could get in before you was killed, they had to be hospitable to you, for being a guest outweighed any other identity. It was owing to such practices that they proved at a disadvantage when dealing with people of a superior civilization.

  The wagon where the drunk had been was still in its old position, half blocking the road, but not one person had troubled to move it out of the way, driving their own conveyances through the narrow space left at one side, which meant one-way traffic and a lot of cursing and probably a fight sooner or later, so I put my back into it and rocked the wagon out of the ruts and pushed it to the side of the roadway. I probably wouldn’t of been so public-spirited had I not known some qualms about swiping the owner’s clothes, for I never been a thief except when I had no other choice. I did this even though he wasn’t nowhere in sight.

  But then I heard a groan and climbed up and looked into the wagon box, and there he was, in his long underwear (even filthier by day than in moonlight), squinting in the sun under a dirty hand raised as shade. I had left his boots alongside him after determining they wouldn’t fit me, and he grabbed them now and pulled them over his filthy socks. He licked his lips and rubbed the cactus patch of his beard. He hadn’t yet noticed having no outer clothing.

  Then he discerned me and made a sickly grin. “I beg your pardon, sir,” says he. “I didn’t know it was your wagon. I wasn’t trying to steal it, I swear. If I pissed in it, I swear I will clean it up so you’ll never know. Same for puking or shitting, though if the last-named, it is likely it’s still in my pants.” Only now did he notice what he was wearing or rather what he was not, his grin turning more shamefaced, and he felt around under him, like his clothes might be bunched up there.

  I didn’t feel right, but not so much as to return his shirt and pants, which obviously he didn’t recognize. “Tell you what I’m willing to do,” I says. “I’ll go back to your camp and bring you some articles of clothing.”

  “I wouldn’t think of putting you out further,” says he, crawling to one side and throwing a long leg over. The trapdoor in his long Johns lacked a button or two and, flapping, afforded the sight of his hairy arse. He dropped to the roadway on hands and knees and stayed that way awhile, groaning and blaspheming. “God damn the people who can sell rotgut of that quality. I could never of gotten away with it when I was in the business myself.”

  “Let me help you, partner,” I says. “You go over and sit on that stump, and I’ll go fetch some clothes if you’ll tell me where.”

  He complained again about his entrails, and then he says, “Way it is, I don’t have no clothes but them I was wearing last time I looked but have mislaid since.” With difficulty he got to his feet by a process you might call climbing up himself.

  As his face went past me I peered at him with new interest. His cheeks was smeared with dirt and his eyes was bloodshot. When he grinned all his front teeth was missing. I knew that nose and chin. “Your name wouldn’t be Bill Crabb, would it?”

  Now you might think he’d be surprised, but instead he says with all the confidence in the world, “The very man. My reputation has preceded me. You have me at a disadvantage, sir. Are you an officer of the law?”

  “I’m your brother Jack,” says I.

  Without a change of expression, he leans over and vomits on the toes of his boots. He straightens up, wiping his lips on the sleeves of the long Johns. “You was saying?”

  “I’m Jack. Your brother. Long-lost.”

  It’s a real feat to acquire a haughty expression when you’re in his state, but I swear he did as much. “Hmm,” says he, squinting down that long nose he got from our Pa, whereas mine is snub like our Ma’s. “Anybody can claim anything.”

  “Meaning it’s so great to be related to you somebody would lie about it?” I asks, which would of been insulting to anyone of respect, which could never be said of my brother Bill. “Last time I saw you was years ago down on the buffalo range, where you was selling whiskey dosed with rattlesnake heads. I believe it was a gent named Wyatt Earp saved your hide before the buffalo hunters could string you up.”

  “What I recall about Earp was it was me who taught him to shoot a sixgun.” Bill had a real annoying chuckle, which started like a hacking cough and ended in a shrill hee-haw. “Shoulda seen him in them days, held a gun like a girl. Didn’t know where the trigger was. And he was yella to the core. Nothin’ I could do about that.”

  “What I want to know is, do you recognize me at all?”

  Bill stared awhile, twisting his lips. “I’ll say this, I can hardly swally, I’m so dry. My memory works better after a drink or three.” He purses his lips and looks real smug. “After five or six I’ll recall anything I’m told to.”

  I was standing apart from him, on account of the stench, and luckily so when he had begun to puke. “I doubt anybody but me would claim kinship with you, Bill. There can’t be much profit in it.” I was sorry I said it as soon as it was out: why assert a connection with a man so you can insult him? But no matter what you said to Bill, he would use it for himself, without doing himself any real good. Funny how that works. Nobody thinks anything of you, so you tell them what they ought to think, and the result is they think even worse. I run into plenty more of that sort in life, but my brother was a notorious example.

  Standing there now on the main street of Deadwood in his underwear, from which his behind was showing, he cocks his chin real superior like and says, “You might wanta get your dirty little paws on my claim. It happens to be the richest hereabout. If I wanted to work that hard, I could take out a bucket of dust every day, nuggets the size of peach stones.”

  “Bill,” I says, “I’m dead broke and without prospects myself,” realizing however that a give-and-take with him would always be useless. “But we’re family, and I’ll give you a hand soon as I’m able, which better be soon, for I haven’t ate in a while. Now, where are you holing up?”

  He takes me down an alleyway between the saloons and around back to where there’s a big overturned, rotting hogshead which he called home. There was some burlap sacks inside and a piece of originally red blanket, on top of which laid a yellow dog who bared his teeth at me until Bill told it I was O.K. The animal then come out and smelled my moccasins, no doubt picking up the scent of Indian dogs, for its tail went rigid for an instant, but finally it wagged its tail and went back into the barrel and laid down in the middle, so that when my brother crawled in he had to push it aside. But I guess its idea was to stay as close to him as possible. Dogs make good friends for the likes of Bill, for they don’t have a critical faculty and also like stuff that stinks.

&n
bsp; “You just stay here awhile,” I says, stating the obvious, “and I’m going to see how the Crabbs can come up in the world,” stating what might seem laughable at that moment. Bill was somewhat older than me though, I figured, still under forty. I doubt he would ever recognize me as the little kid who went off with the Cheyenne, but when you’re in his condition what do you care who your well-wishers are? I had seen Bill a couple times in the years between, selling whiskey to the Indians who hung around some fort and then again in that incident involving Wyatt Earp some time after, but to be fair, he hadn’t never recognized me and I sure didn’t ask him to.

  So leaving my brother where he was, sleeping with his dog—to tell you the truth, it looked real snug in there—I went out to the main street, wearing his clothes, still slightly damp from their overnight soaking. I felt more hopeful than I had in some time, being reunited with Bill, who in better circumstances I would no doubt have avoided any association with. But I decided now to straighten him out, make some money somehow, and acquire a place for us to live. Deadwood seemed as good as any, for it was all new, such as it was, where everybody was starting out more or less from the same level. What I had to do was figure out a profession for myself. Looking along that street, all that immediately come to mind was something connected with whiskey, gambling, and whores. There was plenty room for legitimate business establishments, but to set up a shop you had to be grubstaked to lay in your stock, and credit is mighty hard to come by in a gold-strike area. At the moment I didn’t look much better than Bill had when wearing the same clothing, too big on me besides, and I had not washed a lot on the route down here. I hadn’t shaved in ever so long, either, but the way my whiskers growed I still looked more dirty than bearded to the quick glance I give my visage now and again when kneeling to drink in a stream slow-moving enough to reflect an image.