Return of Little Big Man (49 page)

The style that seemed to work best was to act at all times like you knew what you was doing and nobody else did. She says that both parts of that was necessary for it to be successful: neglect one, and you left a gap for somebody to ride through and trample you down—the language is mine, but that was her theory, and I expected she was right but thought it too bad a young woman of such refinement had had to become so cynical here in the East.

It seemed to me her flat wasn’t too far from Mrs. Custer’s, though I never was sure where I was in any city, even Manhattan, where north of the Wall Street area the streets was regular as a gridiron. I could find my way across untracked prairie or forest where I had never previously been, but I needed a guide when in New York or London or Chicago, where I was distracted by the presence of so many people, vehicles, and buildings higher than two stories, and when you got traffic, you had a lot of noise: cursing and the cracking of whips, and whether you was on that elevated railway or anywhere in its vicinity, you was made deaf to any other sound. How any human person could stand to live permanently in such a place was beyond me.

I thought the outside of her building was ugly, being covered by a scaffolding of iron fire escapes, but Amanda’s flat was real nice, with bright gaslight and pictures on the walls of the parlor and thick-holstered furniture in green plush.

“This is real comfortable,” I says, instead of complimenting her on the furnishings, which I thought was nicer even than Mrs. Custer’s but I was afraid she might think worse of me if I said something dumb about them.

I was wise not to go further, for she says with disdain, “It is certainly ugly.” It turned out she had rented it in the furnished condition. I guess she didn’t spend much time there, at least not in the sitting room. The surprise to me, though, was she proved to be a good cook, producing as fine a plate of scrambled eggs and ham as I had tasted, and I mean no faint praise in saying as much, for that was a dish I ate a lot at cafes all over the country, and too often it was like a leather glove, but Amanda’s was fluffy as a cloud.

We ate in the kitchen, which was my idea as being more homey, but Amanda with a skillet and wearing a plain apron over her finery was still not in the least domestic—unlike Annie Oakley who was, wherever her and Frank hung their hats, but was also a lousy cook, so though she done a lot of needlework at home, they ate most of their meals out.

Amanda’s coffee weren’t bad either, though I would of preferred it boiled a little longer on account of that was the way I had drank it all my life, cooked down real bitter and then dosed with as much sugar as it would soak up, and I’d spoon out whatever residue was too thick to drip onto my tongue, holding the cup over my mouth. Which I mention, though I never done it in public even in some of the dumps I ate in out West, because it was all I could do to keep from doing it here, so warm did I feel being with Amanda, and while I was aware she was friendlier than I had ever known her, she was a cool customer, I reckon by nature rather than upbringing, for her Ma if you recall was a woman who believed she might even at that late date have a career in singing in a music hall in Dodge City. Her Pa had been a banker who she accused of frequenting the Lone Star harlots. I guess in Dodge he was well-to-do but in New York, where Bill Cody had friends like J. G. Bennett who owned the
Herald
newspaper and sent Stanley to find Livingstone, and Leonard W. Jerome who lived on Madison Square and was grandpa to an energetic, talkative English boy who come to see the Wild West when we was in London, name of Winston Churchill, why Mr. Teasdale wouldn’t of been of so high a place as to warrant the putting on of airs by his daughter. I had to conclude she was just born that way, with a sense of her moral superiority, in which she was by no means alone, for Wyatt Earp was like that, except with him it was for selfish ends, whereas so far as I could see, Amanda had little interest in personal gain or possessions. Later I found out that satin dress didn’t come from any of the fashionable places along the Ladies’ Mile but rather from a cut-rate drygoods shop downtown: it just looked like a million dollars on her.

Since leaving our encampment she hadn’t talked any more about the Indians and had not volunteered any personal details, nor asked after mine, but just offered observations on New York, of which she was a harsh critic for somebody who wasn’t compelled to live there.

But when I pointed that out, with all respect, she says, “This is where the money is.” Meaning, not in the sense of making a living, which was why Mrs. Custer came there, but rather in getting people to contribute to the Friends of the Red Man, which like Annie with her initials for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Amanda generally shortened to F.R.M. “But we have ferocious competition from every other organization of social betterment.”

“I can’t rightly speak for him,” I says, “but if I know Cody, he will give you a nice contribution. Despite what you think, he ain’t against Indians.”

“How could that be accepted in good conscience?” Amanda asked. “Would it not be like accepting in the fight against Negro slavery funds that had been made by selling cotton picked by slaves?”

She had a real fine mind, no question about it, to come up with such a twist. “I guess you could look at it that way, but you could also see it as turning to the good some of the money which in your opinion is at present going only to a bad cause.”

“Let me clarify the point, Jack. We don’t begrudge the Indians the wages paid by Colonel Cody, or for that matter his earning a personal profit from a business enterprise. The issue here is not about money as such. What is so objectionable about the Wild West show is its presentation of Indians as savage and primitive. Paying them to be so actually makes it worse. Without pay they would not degrade themselves. They would settle down on their acreage and join American society, and educate their children in proper public schools. The Indian will never be civilized until the importance of the tribe is diminished.” She opens her eyes wide. “I know that might sound heartless, but what alternative is there?”

Here was a reverse of the usual, with the woman representing reason and the man, namely me, being the person dominated by feeling, but much as I admired Amanda for strength of character and even suspected deep down she was probably right from the historical point of view, I knowed the tribe was the best thing the fighting Indians had going for them, and if you was ever part of one, like I was during my formative years, and then went on to another way of life, with nobody to rely on but yourself, you tended to be lonely, and I had been white all the time.

But the fact was Amanda and her bunch really was trying to do some good for people who needed a hand, whereas for all my regard for Indians they was benefiting me more than I was them, which happened to have been true since I first hooked up with any, aside from maybe paying for the defense of them Cheyenne charged with murder back in Kansas.

Now you might be able to see from this little account of my meeting with Amanda again what never occurred to me at the time, and that is that my thinking on this subject now, which I previously avoided doing because of its hopelessness, had more to do with my personal infatuation than with sympathy for the red man considered as a cause.

“I don’t want to pry into your private life,” I says while she was pouring me more coffee. “But I was wondering what you done after the Major’s school closed.”

“I went back to Dodge City,” she said in her crispest voice, “where my father’s bank failed because he had embezzled money from it, but before he could be tried he shot himself to death, and my mother died the following year, probably from shame. One of my sisters married a cattle broker and moved to Topeka. The younger one followed a man to San Francisco and has not been heard from since, which means reality fell short of her expectations, otherwise I would have heard from her. I think it’s more likely she’s walking the streets.”

I was sorry I asked, unhappily reminding her of these matters. There was deep feeling behind the slightly resentful yet cool manner Amanda had always displayed since I first met her. She just had the self-control not to advertise it to others. Sometimes she could get too harsh, but maybe that was protection against being weakened by sadness.

It was not good manners to ask a spinster if she ever come close to being married, so I did not do so, though I would of liked to know about that more than anything else. “I’m sure sorry to hear of all the troubles you been through,” I says. “I admit I used to think of you as a rich girl.”

Amanda’s reactions never could be predicted, at least not by me. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose so, relative to the place and time. But all of a sudden I had no source of income but what I could find on my own, and I refused to get married to acquire financial security. I might have taught school, but no local positions were open, and any employment associated with the church was out of the question after my father’s scandal.”

I just wished I had knowed about her difficulties, as I could of helped her out, but on what basis? It sure could not look like she was a kept woman. In case you ain’t reached that conclusion on your own, I might say Amanda was a real difficult person to know how to deal with, especially if you was uneducated and her social inferior.

“Necessity forced me to review the lady’s education to which I had been subjected. I assumed it would be a vain effort to find anything of practical potential, but wonder of wonders”—her eyes sparkled—“I actually found something! I had received years of piano lessons. Of course, that meant Scarlatti and Chopin, but I wasn’t talented enough to give public performances of such music. However, I was sufficiently gifted to play in a saloon.”

“You didn’t,” I says.

“I did,” says she.

“Which one?”

“The Pink Horse.”

Which was pretty much of a whorehouse, pure and simple. I don’t think they had any other entertainment than that battered old jangly piano. Nobody even went there to gamble. I tell you I almost choked at that point, which was easier than saying something.

Amanda had elevated her chin defiantly. “It was an excellent job. In addition to my wages, I got tips, sometimes lavish if the men were drunk enough. The requests were more often than not for songs of a sentimental sort rather than what I would have expected in a place of that kind, but the women who serviced our customers told me many men were sentimental in the bedrooms. Of course, some were brutal. What surprised me most however was the deference with which I was treated by these cowboys. I kept a revolver on top of the piano, and a knife in my clothing, but in my time there I never had cause to use either one. Not only was I never touched, but only rarely was I ever asked if I might be hired for a private performance, and even then it was put so discreetly I could have interpreted it to refer only to music.”

“They was scared of you,” I says.

She shrugged. “Oh, I doubt that.”

“To them kind of fellows anybody with a musical talent is real special. A man in that job is always called the Professor. A fine lady playing the piano would be a wonder.”

I had suspected it but now it was proved: Amanda could walk through a mud puddle not only without getting besmirched but not even being interested in why. So she says, “Be that as it may, it was profitable employment and as honorable as anything else I might have done, perhaps even more than most. I was also given an opportunity thereby to make the acquaintance of prostitutes.”

I hastily says, “Well, there are all kinds,” and hoped to change the subject, being discomforted by the association, Amanda having represented for me that which was exalting, as far as possible from saloons and harlots.

“To try to find,” she went on, “just what attracts men to them.”

“It’s just that they’re there.”

She didn’t take no account of what I had said, but continued. “What I found was that these women for the most part avoided reflecting on their profession in a general way, though being ready enough to give particular experiences in detail.”

Hoping to steer her away from getting into the subject of sex, if that was where she was heading, I says, “Looking at things according to a theory is done only by educated people, on account of only they know how.”

“I can’t say I learned much,” said Amanda, “except that most of these women neither particularly liked or disliked what they did, and that their predominant feeling about men was that they, the men, were foolish, and that they, the women, believed they were in the dominant position because men paid them. There is a great difference between this and the way nonprostitute women look at the issue.”

“Yes,” I says, trying to sound intelligent, “I have found that to be the case, myself.” I was hoping she’d get off the matter. “So when did you get back to the Indian problem?”

“I had not lost my faith in the social gospel,” Amanda said. “The church may have its hypocrites, but its aims are noble. I am no longer religious in the doctrinal sense, if I ever was, but I believe more than ever in working for justice. Ironically, the immediate reason for my returning to the cause was the cleaning up of Dodge City, led by the forces of respectability. The saloons became soda fountains!” She had a way, at least with me, of acting as if I wasn’t present and she was addressing herself, but now I was real pleased by an acknowledgment of my presence by name. “You wouldn’t recognize the town, Jack.”

“It could use the improvement,” I allowed, and I was sincere. I might not of been part of it, but I thought normal life was the right thing for the country. I just wished it didn’t call for the mistreatment of the Indians, but I didn’t have no idea of what was the best way to avoid this. Hiring all of them to perform with B.B.W.W. and the other imitations thereof, like Pawnee Bill’s, now that Cody had proved so successful, might not be possible, but the Indians who
was
hired seemed to like it, which is more than could be said by most who tried what the Government thought up for them.

It wasn’t no use telling this to Amanda, however, who after playing piano in a whorehouse out West, come East to get back to doing good and took up with the people around Philadelphia, mainly church folk, who had an interest in the plight of the red man, and applied pressure to the federal Indian commissioners and Congress till that Dawes Act got passed. Now the same folks, in organizations like this one she had started up in New York, was trying to get the Indians out of show business.