Little Big Man Read Online Free Page B

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?”
    He grimaced, which involved the total disappearance of his eyes and mouth and most of his nose, only the very end of which protruded like one fingertip of a clenched fist wearing a shabby leather glove.
    “An Indian,” he said, “is crazy to figure out how a thing works. Of course, not everything interests him. What don’t, he don’t even see. But they was interested in that sissy, all right, and wanted to see whether he’d cry like a woman if he was beat. He never, though the marks showed on his back like they was flogging a cheese. So they give him presents and left him go. He was a brave man, son, and that’s the point: being a sissy don’t make no difference at all. You got my money?”
    “Mr. Crabb,” said I, somewhat relieved by the story though it still seemed obscure to me, “we’ll have to get straight on another point: my means are very modest.”
    He replied: “If you ain’t got money, then what have you got, son? Them clothes don’t look like much to me.” He took his cane from the back of the wheelchair, where it had been hanging, and poked me in the midsection; fortunately the tip was covered with a rubber crutch-end and did not hurt, though it left smudges on my beige weskit.
    “We’ll discuss that later,” I had the shrewdness to say, finding a wicker chair behind a rubber-plant grove, drawing it into the open, and placing myself in it. “First, I hope you won’t be offended if I check your story for authenticity.”
    The statement elicited from him a prolonged dry laugh that sounded like the grating of a carrot. His little yellow head, naked as a foetus and translucent as parchment, fell onto his chest, and my heart gave a great jolt of apprehension: I had discovered