Little Big Man (3 page)

She whooped and performed a crude war dance in the doorway. That person’s energy was astonishing. I dared not protest further, for fear she might take offense and damage the rare headdress, which was almost a century old; already some of the eagle down had been shaken loose and floated about like the seed-carrying parachutes of that woodland plant which bursts to perpetuate its race.

By remaining silent and averting my eyes, I discovered the way to survive Mrs. Burr’s bad taste. Failing to elicit another sound from me, she at last replaced Crazy Horse’s bonnet in the cabinet and came back to the bedroom in what with her passed as a reflective mood.

She seated herself heavily on the radiator cover. “Did I ever tell you when I worked on the staff of the old-folks’ home in Marville?”

A more sensitive person would have taken my murmur as adequate discouragement, but Mrs. Burr was immune to subtlety.

“Seeing them Indin things recalls that to my mind.” She cleared her throat with a disagreeable sound. “There was a dirty old man there, claimed to be a hundred and four years old. I will say he looked every bit of it, I’ll say that for him, nasty old customer, scrawny as a bird and with skin like wornout oilcloth, he couldna been less than ninety even if the other was a dirty lie.”

In trying to reproduce Mrs. Burr’s speech I know I am quixotic: the best I can do is describe it as the vocalization of maximum ill will.

“Anyways, the other thing he claimed to be was a cowboy and Indin-fighter from the olden time. They watch a lot of tellvision up there, old Westerns and such, and he was always saying that’s junk because he went through the real thing. Rotten old bum, used to just ruin it for them other old folk, if they paid him any mind, which they didn’t usually. He had wandering hands, I always used to say, the old devil, and you couldn’t come and tuck the blanket around his ancient legs in the wheelchair without he’d try to get one of them little birdie claws down into your boozum. Say, he had a pinch, too, if you bent over nearby to get a pillow off the floor. Imagine, with a woman of my age, although of course I was younger then, that being seven years ago, and the late Mr. Burr was known to say, when he’d had a few, that I never cut the worst figure. But to get back to the old repperbate at the home, he claimed to be at Custer’s Last Stand, which I happen to know was a durn lie because of having seen a movie of it in which all was killed in some fashion. I always say, the Indin is the only real American when you get right down to it.”

So much for my nurse.
Requiescat in pace
. A week later she left my employ, and it was midway in the following month, I believe, that I read the notice of her fatal accident. I flatter myself that I am not the sadistic bore who so often writes our prefaces and uses them for self-indulgence. I see no reason to take the reader with me on every twist and turn of my search for the individual who proved to be the great frontiersman.

For one thing, as soon as Mrs. Burr saw my interest in the “dirty old man who claimed to be an Indin-fighter,” etc., she led me on a long, squalid, and fruitless chase through the obstacle course of her memory. For another, none of the staff at the institution for the aged at Marville (where I went as soon as my nose had recovered its normal shape) had ever heard of the person in question, whose name Mrs. Burr had rendered as “Papp” or “Stab” or “Tarr.”

Nor did the “cowboy” references ring a bell. And as to the alleged great age of my subject, the physicians laughed in my face; they had never known an inmate to survive past 103. I received the definite impression that they were determined to preserve that record and might give the quietus to any arrogant old codger who tried to better it—like all such institutions they were terribly overcrowded, and the wheelchair traffic was a real terror to pedestrians on the gravel walks.

I was apprised by the state welfare bureau of the existence of similar facilities for the superannuated at the towns of Carvel, Harkinsville, and Bardill. I journeyed to each of them and held many interviews among both staff and aged—some of these would make good stories in themselves: I talked to one oldtimer, who had a bass voice and wore a bathrobe, for half an hour under the impression that she was a man; I even found several gaffers with Western reminiscences, to which they gamely continued to cling after a shrewd question or two exposed the imposture. But no Papp or Stab or Tarr, no 111-year-old survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

I might be asked at this point how I could justify my apparent belief in the veracity of Mrs. Burr’s statement that there was such a man as Papp, or, accepting that, in the authenticity of his story to her? It is true that I am given to acting on impulse, and having the means to do so, I do not apologize for this foible. It is also true that, as might be surmised from the reference to my Indian collection, which is worth thousands of dollars, I have a passion for the Old West. Finally, in my possession is an Extra edition of the
Bismarck Tribune
, Dakota Territory, July 6, 1876, containing the first casualty list for the Custer massacre, and
on that roster are the names of Papp
,
Stab, and Tarr
. They are entered as having been killed, of course, but owing to the mutilation of the bodies, few could be identified with certainty.

Stab, I at first feared, must be eliminated for the reason that he was an Arikara Indian scout. Had Mrs. Burr’s old man been an Indian surely she would have said so; on the other hand, she did make reference to the oldtimer’s skin: “like wornout oilcloth”; although she neglected to specify the color. Of course, not all Indians are brown—not to mention that none are actually red.

But I have broken my promise not to digress.… It was not beyond the realm of possibility that Papp, say, or Tarr—or even Stab—had survived that terrible carnage and for his own peculiar reasons evaded the notice of the authorities, the journalists, historians, etc., for the next three-quarters of a century—perhaps had amnesia for most of those years—and suddenly chose to reveal himself at a place and time in which he would be disbelieved by his ancient fellows and attendants of the sort of Mrs. Burr. It was not impossible, but, I decided after months of fruitless search, highly unlikely. Besides which, Mrs. Burr herself had last seen the individual in question in 1945. As unreasonable as it might be for a man to live to 104, how much more absurd to survive to 111!

Downright ridiculous, in fact. I made the mistake when calling on my father to collect my monthly stipend—he demanded that regular personal appearance—I made the error of responding honestly to his query: “What are you up to this month, Ralph?”

He viciously bit into his cigar holder.
“Looking for a one-hundred-and-eleven-year-old survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn!”

Luckily, at that point one of his flunkies entered the office with dispatches from Hong Kong concerning the hotel my father proceeded to build in that colony, and I was spared further aspersions on my alleged weak-mindedness. My father was nearly eighty years old. He and I had never been close.

Just at the point at which I was about to throw up the game and begin, instead, serious work on my long-deferred monograph on the origins of the Southwestern
luminaria
(the Christmas lantern comprising a lighted candle in a paper bag filled with sand), projected several years before during my residence in Taos, N.M.—I was just perusing my notes on the subject when I received a curious letter, which looked very much like a hoax.

Deer sir I hurd you was trying to fine me—I reckon its me you was trying to fine on account I never hurd of ennybody else among these here old burned out wrecks at this home who was ever a hero like myself and partipated in the glorus history of the Olden Time Fronteer and new them all Genl Custer, Setting Bull, Wild Bill, that mean man Earp, etc or went through the socalled Little Bighorn fight or Custers Last Stand.

I am being held prisoner here. I am One Hundred and 11 year old and if I had my single action Colt’s I wd shoot my way out but I aint got it. Being your a riter and all I will sell my story for 50 Thousand dollar which I figure to be cheap considering I am probly the last of the oldtimers

Yr Friend
      Jack Crabb

The handwriting was vile (though not in the least feeble) and took me all day to decipher; the redaction published here can be described as only probable. The letter was written on a sheet bearing the rubric of the Marville Center for Senior Citizens, which as we have seen had been my first port of call and yielded negative results. The request for fifty thousand dollars suggested the work of a potential confidence man.

Yet the next day found me, at the end of a hundred-mile drive through scattered cloudbursts, maneuvering my Pontiac into one of the spaces marked “Visitors” in the asphalt parking lot at Marville. It was early afternoon. The administrative director looked slightly vexed to see me again, and downright contemptuous when I showed him the letter. He put me in the hands of the chief of the psychiatric section, forthwith: a whey-faced person named Teague, who impassively studied the gnarled calligraphy on my document, sighed, and said: “Yes, I’m afraid that’s one of ours. They occasionally get a letter past us. I am sorry that you were inconvenienced, but be assured this patient is altogether harmless. His suggestion of violence in the last paragraph is fantasy. Besides, he is physically debilitated to the degree that he cannot leave his chair without an attendant’s help, and his apperceptive faculties have degenerated. So have no fear that he can make his way to the city and do you hurt.”

I pointed out to the doctor that Mr. Crabb’s threat, if so it could be called, was directed at the staff of the Marville Center and hardly towards me, but of course he merely smiled compassionately. I am not without experience of these gentry, having done my stint at fifty dollars an hour, twice a week, for several years when I was a decade younger, without the least diminution of my nightmares and migraine headaches.

“Nevertheless,” I added, “I
must
insist on seeing Mr. Crabb. I have just driven a hundred miles and given up a morning that had more profitably been spent with my tax accountant.”

He instantly acquiesced. Members of his profession are very easy to impose one’s will upon, so long as one does so in economic rather than emotional terms.

We went up one flight and walked a good half mile, corridor upon corridor; the psychiatric section was the newest part of Marville, all tile and glass and philodendrons: indeed, it resembled a greenhouse, with here and there a clump of old bald heads like mushrooms among the foliage. We reached a glassed-in balcony full of geraniums. Early December had established itself outside, but by means of the thermostat Marville maintained an internal summer all year round. I was suddenly shocked by a dreadful illusion: in a wheelchair, with its back to us, stood an abominable black bird—the largest turkey buzzard I had ever seen. Through the window it directed a raptorial surveillance on the grounds below, as if in search of lunch, its naked, wrinkled little head trembling ever so slightly.

“Mr. Crabb,” said Dr. Teague to the bird, “you have a visitor. Whatever your feeling towards me, I’m sure that you will be very polite to him.”

The buzzard turned slowly and looked over its sloping shoulder. My horror decreased at the sight of a human face rather than a beak—withered, to be sure, and covered in Mrs. Burr’s wornout oilcloth with many seams, but a face, indeed a furious little face, with eyes as hot and blue as the sky above a mesa.

“Boy,” said the old man to Dr. Teague, “I took a slug in the ham once near Rocky Ford and cut it out myself with a bowie and a mirror, and the sight of my hairy behind was a real pleasure alongside of looking at what you carry on top of your neck.”

He spun the chair around. If as a bird he had been large, as a man he was distinctly undersized. His feet were positively minuscule and shod in saddle oxfords, I suppose for the horsy connotation. What I had taken for swarthy plumage was in reality an old swallowtailed coat, gone black-green with age. The temperature in the solarium was high enough to force a geranium’s bud, yet under his coat the old man wore a stout woolen sweater over a pajama coat of flannel. His trousers were pajama bottoms, and where they rode up his skinny shanks one could see gray long johns making a junction with black stockings.

His voice I have saved till last. Imagine, if you can, the plucking of a guitar the belly of which is filled with cinders: a twangy note that quickly loses its resonance amid harsh siftings.

Dr. Teague smiled with all the compassion of his repressed malice, and introduced us.

Crabb suddenly slipped between his brown gums a set of false teeth that he had been concealing in his hand and bared them at the doctor, snarling: “Git on out of here, you lanky son of a bitch.”

Teague let his eyelids descend in amused tolerance, retracted them, and said: “If it is satisfactory to Mr. Crabb, I see no reason why you cannot talk quietly here with him for half an hour. You might drop by the office on your way out, Mr. Snell.”

Jack Crabb squinted at me briefly, spat out his teeth, and put them away in an inner pocket of the swallowtail. I felt uneasy, knowing that everything depended on my ability to create a rapport between us. As soon as I had distinguished man from buzzard, I believed absolutely that he was everything he claimed to be in the letter. Yet I determined to move with caution.

He again put those remarkably blue eyes on me. I waited, and waited, and let him stare me down.

“You’re a sissy, ain’t you, son?” he said at last, not however unkindly. “Yes sir, a big fat sissy. I bet if I squeezed your arm the impression would stay there for a long time like it was made of tallow. I knowed a fellow looked like you come out West and went among the Kiowa and they tied him up and let the squaws beat him sore with willow sticks. You got my money?”

I realized that the old scout was testing me, and therefore I failed to show I had been offended, as indeed I had not been.

“Why did they do that, Mr. Crabb?”