Return of Little Big Man (2 page)

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.

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.

O
LD 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.