Joe Harper was the boy me and Tom run away with to Jackson’s Island to live the pirate life, and we thought back on that a while. Tom says he still had some cutlesses and a pirate flag that he borrowed from a museum, thinking he might give up the West some day and go to sea like a pirate, and says maybe we could do that together. I says great, let’s go. Jackson’s Island was where I learnt both him and Joe to smoke. It made them dog-sick, and that give me a laugh. But I showed them other things, too. They didn’t know nothing about living in the rough, just like I didn’t know nothing about school and church and all them sivilizing concerns. I done most a the work, but it warn’t LIKE work. I was Finn the Red-Handed, and I ain’t never been happier. Joe and Tom they was running away from home, but I didn’t have no home to run from and none to go back to. I was at home right there on Jackson’s Island. They was looking for buried treasure. For me, the treasure was out a-front of our faces, plain as sun and water. I took a swallow a Tom’s whisky in memory of it and of old Joe Harper. And of Dan Harper, too.
Our stories was all mostly sorrowful ones about old pals dying and I didn’t know if I should tell him about Ben Rogers getting his skull clove in for chasing after a little Cherokee girl. But I did, and Tom he says, “Good for old Ben. Way a chap OUGHT to go, not in some stinking war. I hope he done the little heathen’s privates some serious damage before they massacred him, so’s he never died in vain.” I was going to say what we was doing in the Cherokee Nation in the first place, and about how famous the Missouri Kid’s bandit gang was because I promised Ben I would, but Tom blowed a lungful a seegar smoke up at the tent roof and says, “Ever smoke opyum, Huck?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I had a Chinese lady friend who give me something for my pipe that was mighty relaxing.”
“That was probably it. I mostly only lay with white women as a rule, but one night in Tucson I ain’t got no choice. Half the girls was sick, the other half was already bought and bouncing, and all that was left in the crib was a scrawny old Chinese granny, who was maybe a hundred years old. She drugged me with opyum and sent me down what she says was eight folding paths to heck-stasy. The opyum left a body feeling dead with its spirit floating over it. I was scared, not having no control over whatever was happening next, and sometimes what she done hurt like blazes, but in the end it was most amazing. I ain’t even reached the fourth folding, when I’m geysering like old Yallerstone. She says she learnt the trick from Confusion. Was it like that for you?”
“No, Nookie was more interested in giving me baths.” Even then, laying there in Tom’s tent, I could feel her spidery hands on me. “She spent a considerable time at it and when I asked her what she was doing, she says she was muddytating.”
“Muddytating on what?”
“On my backside, mainly.”
“Hah! Is that all you done?”
“No, but it’s what I most remember.” I also seemed to hear her screams when the bad man come back and grabbed her away. I never actully heard them, I was guiding emigrants out on the trail, I only seen the ruins afterwards, but still they ha’nted me, and they was ha’nting me now.
There warn’t many girls and women in my life. Mostly, I ducked and run. It’s what I told Tom to do, too, but he didn’t pay me no heed. He up and married one. I took another swallow and passed the bottle over and asked about her, and he says Becky wanted babies, so he left her back in St. Pete, doing that. “I got things to do in this world so long’s I’m in it, Huck. Ain’t got time for family. Don’t believe in it. Ain’t it funny how people think they’re creating up something new, when all they’re making is more miserable copies of themselves?”
“You just a copy?”
“Hope not, but I can’t say. I never knowed my pa and my ma died young. I allow I mostly made myself. I surely ain’t no copy of Aunt Polly!”
We laughed, thinking about his crotchety old Aunt Polly, and the way she’d grab a body by the ear and crack his head with her thimble, though I was also thinking about Eeteh and whatever happened to him when I run the wrong way this morning. Nobody never mentioned him nor the horses all day, so I could hope he was still alive and I might find him again. I so wanted him and Tom to be friends, but Tom still thought about Eeteh’s people like he thought about Injun Joe.