“You remember my old girlfriend Amy Lawrence?” Tom says, and sets the bottle down on the ground beside his cot. “Well, I seen something of her again when I was in St. Pete. Amy ended up marrying Johnny Miller, Gracie’s brother, and after he’d got his virgin tumble, Johnny left her. Him and her pa both headed west on the same wagon train and ain’t neither one never been seen since. Like my pa. Or, well, like you’n me, ain’t it? Adventuring’s more natural to a fellow than homebodying. Amy’s just a ten-dollar whore now, though she don’t call herself that. That’s a heap a money, I know, but she’s worth it. She ain’t so pretty like before, but she’s got some new angles, and she throws in a home-cooked supper with her and her ma, who sleeps in the same room as Amy when she ain’t doing business, and sometimes when she is.”
I says about seeing Becky not so long ago over in Wyoming, and he grunts and says she must a run away again. I seen he don’t care to talk about her, so I asked him, if he was out here all this time, why he didn’t come looking for me, and he says what am I talking about, he ain’t STOPPED doing that since he rode back here with his new law diploma in his mochila, but I didn’t leave no tracks nowheres. He finally reckoned I must a give up and gone back east, so for a while he stopped looking. Then he got wind of me wrangling horses for some general in Abileen and he went inquiring round, but he couldn’t find nobody who’d ever heard a me. “Later, I run into a crazed desert rat in a doggery north a there who was one peculiar fellow. He claimed he knowed God personal and played stud poker with him on Fridays. He recollected somebody called Huckerbelly, but he says that fellow got hanged by the general as a deserter and a godless reprobate, and if he didn’t, he shoulda. It cost me three whiskies to find that out, and it warn’t exactly the news I was scrounging for.”
I says I got in deep trouble with that general and I was still hiding out from him, and Tom says that was plain dumb. “Generals is all ignorant windbags to a man, so full a their stupid selves their eyes get squshed shut to the world around them. Ain’t one a them worth a peck a wormy apples, but they all got power. HANGING power. You got to mollycuddle ’em and get all you can off ’em.”
“It’s too late for mollycuddles. He means to hang me. I’m aiming to run away to Mexico.”
“Mexico! Aw, Hucky, don’t be such a knucklehead! Them cussed greasers is worse’n injuns! They even SMELL worse! That cactus juice they swill makes them crazier’n wild dogs with their tails on fire! And twixt here’n there ain’t nothing but trouble. You can’t get there alone!”
“I was hoping you might go with me.”
“Me!”
“They got mountains of gold down there. And silver.”
“They got gold and silver here. And Mexicans ain’t like injuns, Hucky. Injuns is setting round in sad little half-naked gangs, just hankering to get sivilized at the end of a rope or out the barrel of a gun, but Mexicans is a whole damn country. You’d need an army and a bunch a lives.”
“Well, you can live with folks without trying to whup them.”
“No, you stay here. I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry about the general. I got a way with generals. I can set out an appeal against him. Won’t be easy to win, but the law generly works by who a body knows, and I know everybody. Some day, the calvary’ll go after the Mexicans again, and next time it’ll get done proper. That’s when we’ll go there. Mexico will be just another American territory then, leastways till all the gold’s gone. But first we got to get shut of all these wretchid hoss-tiles.”
“You used to say they was the most wonderfullest, giftedest, hospitablest people in the world.”
“Well, I was still reading books. I’ve growed up since then.”
“What’s made you hate them so?”
“I DON’T hate them, Huck! I ain’t got NOTHING against them. Only, we’re building something grand out here, ocean to ocean, and they’re in the way. Some day, we’ll make statues of them, like they was our own heroes. First, though, we got to kill them all.”
“All this killing, it’s too many for me,” I says. I was getting very sleepy and my eyes was closing. It had been a monstrous long day. I was still worrying, but I’d have to do the rest of it tomorrow.
“Stuff! I don’t know what else humans is GOOD for, Huck,” Tom says, and yawns. “A hundred years from now, you and me’ll both be dead and forgot and people’ll still be killing each other. This is OUR killing time.”
“If it is, everything just don’t seem to mean nothing, that’s all.”
“Don’t nothing MEAN nothing, Huck! How could it? Two and two don’t MEAN four, they only IS four, that’s all. I worked out a long time ago that, no matter what you do or think, you DIE and it’s all wiped away. Your brain rots and your thoughts, wants, loves, hates, simply ain’t no more. Others may borrow your thoughts, but you won’t know that, you’re gone like you never was. What we got is NOW, Huck, and now is forever. Until it ain’t. So, you can’t worry over nothing except putting off the end a your story as long as you can, and finishing it with a bang. Bekase nuffn doan mattuh, as old Jim would say, no SAH!” Tom stubbed out his seegar butt in the ground beside his cot, blowed the lamp out and sunk back into his pillow. “Y’know, Huck, when I first got me some money, I went back to buy old Jim away from them injuns. I felt bad about what we’d done to him. But Jim smiled at me with all his teeth and says he ain’t going. He was become a Cherokee medicine man and had more wives than Sollerman. He says he ain’t never had it so good, and he thanked us for what we done for him.”