Return of Little Big Man (70 page)

But Amanda was in a funny mood today, and I couldn’t get her going. “I expect you’re right, Jack,” says she, winking her blue eye, “ole Chris was better than most.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Of course,” she says, bumping me with her hip real saucily, which some old biddy seen and scowled at as we strolled out of Manufactures and Liberal Arts onto the lakeshore walk.

“You’re getting mighty fresh, as well,” I noted.

“Someone has to,” said she.

Lake Michigan, as I have pointed out, might as well of been an ocean when you looked at it from the shore. You couldn’t see across it in any direction, and it got real rough in a wind, of which Chicago was seldom without. I looked at today’s whitecaps and said, “I guess when he closes here Cody will want to go back to Europe.” I didn’t know any such fact, as I hadn’t talked to him on the subject, but was saying so now for effect.

“And you’ll be going along,” Amanda said rather than asked.

I scraped my foot a little. “I don’t know about that.”

“Jack,” said she, “I’ve seen you at moments when you could have been killed, and you had more confidence than you’ve ever shown with me.”

“You’re right about that, Amanda.” I was amazed she understood. “It’s probably because I seen a lot of dying and know what to expect. I ain’t, uh, haven’t ever been able to figure you out.”

“You don’t know whether I like you or not,” said she.

“By golly, you’re right again!” I says loud enough so we was stared at again by passersby.

“Well, I do,” said Amanda. “I like you, Jack. I like you a whole lot. I should have told you that before.”

I had quite an elated feeling. “Oh, that’s all right, Amanda, I realize a lady ain’t supposed to speak first—” I stopped, on account of she just had. “That is, I mean—”

“You ought to know by now that I care little about what others, usually men, present company excepted, ordain that women should do. At quite a young age I was married for a short time to that sort of person.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said before I could catch myself.

A gust of wind come off the lake at that point, threatening her hat, which she had to grab, but she was smiling at me.

“Amanda,” I says, “and if this is insulting to you, feel free to—”

“Jack, will you stop pussyfootin’ around?”

She was making fun of me again, but I never minded. In fact I thought it was nice. “Well, what I wanted to ask you is if you would want to get married, again. I mean, to me.”

But now I had gotten it out, I flinched inwardly at how crude I sounded. I hadn’t even said I cared for her. So when she answered as she did, I wasn’t surprised.

“No,” said she.

“Well, at least I got the nerve to say it.” And at that, my own skimmer straw was seized by a sudden violent blast of wind and sent on a whirling flight that ended out in Lake Michigan, where the hat bit into the water with the brim, like the blade of a circular saw, which meant it sunk as quick as my hopes just had.

But when my eyes come back to Amanda, she was still smiling sweetly. “I didn’t say,” said she, “that I wouldn’t live with you.”

Now I was real shocked. “Don’t talk like that, Amanda. It ain’t decent.”

She snorted in derision. “Jack,” she said, “you used to tend bar in a whorehouse!”

“Yeah,” I says, “but they was whores.”

“I played piano in another,” Amanda said, “and didn’t work upstairs, but maybe I was corrupted all the same.”

“No!” I says. “That couldn’t be true.”

“Not the least interesting thing about you,” Amanda noted, “is that while you tend toward cynicism in most other areas of human behavior, you are mawkishly sentimental about women.”

“I thought it was you who was always sticking up for them,” I said, “not wanting them mistreated. Your Ma, way back in Dodge, told me you even believed women should vote.”

She wrinkled her brow to pretend to be irked. “Jack, are you sassing me?”

“Oh, no, Amanda, now don’t you—” At that point I realized she asked that with her tongue in her cheek, and I stopped, but didn’t have nothing better to say than, “Well...”

Amanda was laughing, which made her somewhat less beautiful, her features being more elegant in repose, but also made her less distant. I had begun over these weeks to slowly replace my worship of her with genuine enjoyment of her company, but had not understood that till now.

“It’s true,” I says, “Wild Bill Hickok never lasted long after he finally got married, whereas I heard in Tombstone that none of the Earps ever actually married any of the women they lived with, and Virgil and Allie sure seemed happy, and if the same principle applied to Wyatt and Josie, they are still together after a dozen years.”

“Jack,” Amanda says now, “are you talking to yourself? You’re mumbling.”

“Sorry, I guess I was. Say, maybe we ought to get something to eat instead. What’s your pleasure, the Swedish Restaurant, the Polish Cafe, the Japanese Tea House, or the Clambake? Unless you don’t want to be seen with a man without a hat.”

“Jack, you got a yella streak where your spine oughta be,” says Amanda, imitating me further, which made it hard to stay serious.

“You gonna keep that up when we’re living together?” I said it lightheartedly, but the idea still shocked me, I admit.

“Probably,” she said, “if it works now.”

“Oh, it works,” I says, “but you oughta be ashamed of yourself.”

“For what?” She was laughing while hanging onto her hat again with one hand, the other fastened tight to me.

“Corrupting my morals,” I says.

You can see Amanda was a real modern woman, advanced beyond her time.

I read in a newspaper that all politics is local, and maybe all discovery comes down to that point as well. Whatever Columbus means to others, pro or con, I’ll always be grateful for the favor he done me: Amanda.

Well, I’m going to tell you about what became of me and her during the best period of my life, what happened with her book, what kind of work I done next and where, for the Fair ended in October of ’93 and while I was technically speaking a middle-aged man, I had lived not quite half my life at that point, so there’s lots left to relate of what still for some time was my competent years, with quite a bit happening, in the world at my disposal, as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth: for example, Tom Edison begun to make moving pictures to be shown in theaters rather than just peep machines, gold was discovered in the Klondike, and Colonel Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders fought in a battle at Santiago de Cuba, not on horseback as you might think but on foot, and took a hill with the name of Kettle and not San Juan. Who would straighten you out on such details but me?

I had some kind of connection with them events and more, and as usual you might hear a somewhat different version from me than from them with axes to grind. All I ever tell is what I seen and heard for myself.

Right now, though, I got to take a nap. If I ever wake up, you sure will hear the rest of my story.

Thomas Louis Berger (b. 1924) is an American novelist best known for his picaresque classic,
Little Big Man
(1964). His other works include
Arthur Rex
(1978),
Neighbors
(1980), and
The Feud
(1983), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Berger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Thomas Charles, a public school business manager, and Mildred (née Bubbe) Berger. Berger grew up in the town of Lockland, Ohio, and one of his first jobs was working at a branch of the public library while in high school. After a brief period in college, Berger enlisted in the army in 1943 and served in Europe during World War II. His experiences with a medical unit in the American occupation zone of postwar Berlin inspired his first novel,
Crazy in Berlin
(1958). This novel introduced protagonist Carlo Reinhart, who would appear in several more novels.

In 1946, Berger reentered college at the University of Cincinnati, earning a bachelor’s degree two years later. In 1948, he moved to New York City and was hired as librarian of the Rand School of Social Science. While enrolled in a writer's workshop at the nearby New School for Social Research, Berger met artist Jeanne Redpath; they married in 1950. He subsequently entered Columbia University as a graduate student in English literature, but left the program after a year and a half without taking a degree. He next worked at the
New York Times Index
; at
Popular Science Monthly
as an associate editor; and, for a decade, as a freelance copy editor for book publishers.

Following the success of Rinehart in Love (1962), Berger was named a Dial Fellow. In 1965, he received the Western Heritage Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for
Little Big Man
 (1964), the success of which allowed him to write full time. In 1970,
Little Big Man
was made into an acclaimed film, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway.

Following his job as
Esquire
’s film critic from 1972 to 1973, Berger became a writer in residence at the University of Kansas in 1974. One year later, he became a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, and went on to lecture at Yale University and the University of California, Davis.

Berger’s work continued to appear on the big screen. His novel
Neighbors
(1980) was adapted for a 1981 film starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. In 1984, his novel
The Feud
(1983) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; in 1988, it too was made into a movie. His thriller
Meeting Evil
 (1992) was adapted as a 2012 film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Luke Wilson.

In 1999, Berger published
The Return of Little Big Man
, a sequel to his literary classic. His most recent novel,
Adventures of the Artificial Woman
, was published in 2004.

Berger lives ten feet from the Hudson River in Rockland County, New York.

In 1966, two years after he wrote
Little Big Man
, Berger stands at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the site of Custer’s last stand in 1876. This was Berger’s first visit to the famous battlefield.

This black-and-white image became the readers’ vision of Berger: dark and esoteric. (Photo courtesy of Gerry Bauer.)

A snapshot of Berger with his friend Zulkifar Ghose, taken in midtown Manhattan in the summer of 1974. (Photo courtesy of Betty Sue Flowers.)