Her eyes squinched up a little. “It’s my father! I saw you talking! He’s been lying to you! He only pretends to be my husband so he can do to me the awful things he does!” I reached inside my shirt to give her back her silk drawers, but she wouldn’t take them. “You PROMISED!” She was still beautiful, but she was more like a cat with its tail up than a pretty girl. She looked like she didn’t know whether to kiss me or claw me. What she done was snatch the drawers from me, slash them with my clasp knife, and throng them on the ground. “YOU SKINNY STRING A PUKE!” she yelled. Her face was twisted up now with fury and disgust and she warn’t so pretty like before. “YOU GODDAM LUMP A CRAVEN GANGREENY MULE SHIT! YOU AIN’T WORTH A WET FART IN A HURRY-CANE!” She ripped her blouse away from her shoulder and throwed my knife down with her tore-up drawers. “HELP! RAPE! MURDER! HELP!”
I yanked up Jackson’s picket and jumped aboard. I could hear the bullwhacker roaring out his wife’s name. As I ripped past the chuck wagon, Jim hollered out and tossed me my rifle. “I’M TERRIBLE SORRY, JIM!” I hollered over my shoulder. There was gunfire, screams, things falling over. “COME BACK HERE!” the bullwhacker bellowed, adding a string of ripe cusswords. “I WANNA TALK TO YOU!” And then his guns went off again.
I could a stayed if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to.
CHAPTER XI
NE NIGHT AFTER I come here to the Gulch, me and Eeteh was out on a ridge, our moccasins off like usual, listening to the katydids and smoking a pipeful of something that was like tobacco but that warn’t tobacco. It was spicier with an extra nudge to it that eased along our talk like the sweet meloncholical way a river flows, following whatever banks it strikes on, pushing this way and then that, and picking up some leaves and tree limbs and other rubbage on the way.
We was passing tales about when we was little, him here in the Hills, me on the Big River. Mostly we talked about all the bad things that happened, and how we sneaked through them best we could. Eeteh says that both of us growed up too early and missed a lot, so really didn’t grow up at all, just only got older. I says that’s probably better’n growing up and Eeteh was of the same opinion. Eeteh spoke passable trading-post American and by then I’d lived for a time with his tribe, so we gabbled away in both languages at the same time, hashing them up agreeably and understanding what we was saying near half the time.
I got to telling again about how me and my friend Tom finally just upped and run away one day without telling no one, and Eeteh says he always wanted to do that, too, but the only friend who thought like him got caught and beheaded by white bounty hunters when he was out fishing. If he busted all on his lonesome into places where mostly white men was camped, they’d shoot him or lock him up, and if he crossed into where other tribes was, he could end up a slave or a human sacrifice. I didn’t know they done that, I says, and he says they did, some did. I sejested we could try Mexico where he’d match right in. I didn’t know nothing about it, but the Mexicans I’d met was mostly thieving rascals, liars and loafers, so we’d be comfortable in their company.
That somehow led us to talking about the generl stupidness and meanness of the whole human race, and what a body was to do to survive amongst the vicious creturs. I guess our jabber was booming along out in the mainstream by then, even if we was still dragging all the old rubbage with us.