Further Adventures of Tom and Huck

Further Adventures of Tom and Huck is set in the living room of Tom’s brownstone townhouse in New York City in 1876.  Tom, very well-dressed, tells a shabbily-dressed Huck how glad he is to see him.  Tom and Becky are married, have a cook, a nanny, a maid, and “a English coachman manservant flunky,” and Becky drinks a lot.  Huck asks for a drink and Tom gives him some Scotch.  Huck tries to drink it down but chokes and spits, saying that the liquor tastes like embalming fluid.  Tom says he made a lot of money during the war.  Huck was shot in the head, held as a prisoner, and has bad dreams.  Tom tries to get Huck to remember a balloon ride they took years earlier to Europe but Huck denies that there ever was a balloon.  Becky enters in a bathrobe and thinks that Huck is a bum.  Tom says he has to go to the sausage factory to check on his “simple-minded half-brother Sid.”  When Huck says he came to New York to kill Tom, Becky offers to pay him.  She says Tom is a monster, a liar, and a cheat, obsessed with money.  As Huck vacillates, Becky offer herself, twice, if Huck kills Tom slowly.  She tries to get Huck’s pants off and they fall onto the sofa as Tom enters.  Huck admits that he came to New York to kill Tom because Tom talked him into enlisting in the Confederate Army and then deserted the first time they heard enemy fire, leaving Huck to be wounded and put in a prison camp while Tom went north and got rich.  Tom says that war is a great place to do business and that it’s the American way.  Huck says that his best friend Jim is dead and, after Becky passes out on the sofa, tells Tom that Jim was killed by a gun that exploded in his face, a gun probably supplied by Tom.  Tom says it was just “good old American business,” but Huck sits on the sofa and cries.  Tom asks him if he remembers when they buried a marble in the hope of digging it up again to recover anything they had lost.  He says that the spell didn’t work, but that he learned that superstition and religion were bullshit, although he still has the notion that somewhere, perhaps in an attic, is everything he has ever lost.  He says that what he misses most is going fishing with Huck.  He wishes his kids were more like Huck and says they are more like Sid.  Becky lifts her head to say they are Sid’s kids, not Tom’s.  Furious, Tom shakes her and starts strangling her but Huck pulls him off and he and Tom fall onto the floor.  Tom says that the country is all about money and that his life isn’t worth “a mouthful of ashes.”  Becky comes back with a large carving knife and chases Tom around the sofa, slashing at him.  Huck tries to intervene; Becky trips, and plunges the knife into Huck’s chest, killing him.  Tom assures Becky that no one is going to know what happened, that Huck is a stranger, a nobody, and they’re going to roll him up in a rug and run him through the sausage machine.  The lights fade as Becky sits beside Tom, who has Huck’s head in his lap, crying as he says that he and Huck had some exciting adventures in that balloon, some good times.