The Whipping Boy (13 page)

Oh, Lord. Tom sank into the tub until his head was under water, his legs dangling out the other end. He stayed under there awhile until he had to come out for a breath of air. When he did so, she was standing in the lantern light, on his side of the curtain, her wet skin showing through a sheetlike towel, wrapped around her and knotted at the breast. The towel covered her only down to mid-thigh, long legs reaching out. “This is a woman's body,” she said. She was turned a little to the side, and then she moved to face him directly, and he got a little closer to understanding why people took the chance despite the peril. She came and knelt beside him on the slippery clay-packed floor, and one part of his mind was racing while another was gently floating like the flame of the hurricane lamp in the clouds of the steamy little room. He desperately wondered whether he should try to find something to cover himself or whether he should just give up.

“Poor boy, what happened to your back?”

“The mule bit me. It's okay.”

“I mean these scars.”

She eventually reached out and lazily touched him on the chin, gently pushing his mouth closed. Her hand moved to his chest and then down the muscles of his front to his belly. His penis was standing out of the water, and when she reached down and touched it he moaned aloud, no longer capable of worrying what she thought. He gave up. He was completely in her hands. But she wrapped her fingers around it so briefly and with such a light touch and then allowed the hand just to float there in the water beside it, touching it lightly, bumping against it with her knuckles, no more. He wanted to reach out and tear off the sheet wrapped around her.

“You're getting more experienced by the hour,” she said.

Tom contemplated this for the better part of a half-second and said, “Yes.” He nodded, tensing his buttocks so that her floating fingers would touch him.

She knitted her brow and looked directly at him with her green eyes. “Tom, I want to keep traveling with you on to Guthrie.”

Tom closed his eyes.

“Jake knows how business is done here. And he knows so many people. I need to learn from him. I need to learn as much as I can.”

She said other things, but Tom didn't really hear her. He was too busy having a hard-on. In fact, rather than having a hard-on, he was a hard-on from his neck to his knees—hard-buttocked, tense, painfully stiff, a furious electric Presbyterian hard-on of the worst sort, sixteen inches from her casual gaze. She was so cool, as if this sort of thing was as common as a drink of water, the daily stuff of life, while he had become a rending, tumbling roar of emotions. Samantha King seemed unaware of it, and that unawareness was exotic to him, and totally baffling. She said something else that he didn't hear. He barely even heard the sound of her voice through the havoc racing through his body, and he openly moaned.

He was on a plateau. She was looking at him abstractedly. “Tom?” she said. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” he lied, his hips levitated almost out of the water.

She looked at him again with the slow smile. “Poor boy.” Taking his penis firmly in her hand, she moved it up and down, and before she had done so more than five times, it exploded in a pumping fountain of milky fluid halfway to the roof.

***

Stupefied, Tom got out of the tub. His foot caught against the edge of it, splashing water all over the place, and he fell flat on his tailbone in the slippery, rock-hard clay. She had gone on before him, and eventually he stumbled out of the shack, past the old woman at her fire, and walked alone up the street.

 

 

 

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Jake sat awhile on the edge of the bed, remembering who and where he was. Kidneys sore and joints stiff, he gazed at the light coming through the window and realized that he'd slept more than twelve hours. A pillow was on the floor where Tom had apparently slept. Jake hadn't heard the boy come in, but last night he'd been so tired that he wouldn't have heard a locomotive go by his bed.

He found the piece of paper that he'd taken from Miss King's suitcase, and went to the end of the hallway where there was a primitive indoor water closet, really an outhouse on stilts leaning against the outside wall, built above the narrow ravine behind the hotel. It swayed a little as he stepped into it.

Jake sat down gingerly on the cool wood and perused the piece of paper in dim light coming through a hole in the wall. He didn't know whether to ask her what it was all about or just to forget it. It was nothing but a list of scrawled names. At the top were men who worked for Dekker Hardware, including Ernest, Jack Peters, Marvin Beele, and Jake, and below were the names of three others, among whom Jake saw no particular connection except that they were all pretty successful local businessmen. One was the man who owned the big bakery that often yeasted the town's air, another operated a factory that made fancy gift boxes.

Jake had thought that Samantha King was an accident in his life, but she'd come from St. Louis with his name on a list. He'd put off asking her about it yesterday, because there was too much else going on. He folded the note back up, figuring he'd better make room for it today. It probably wasn't that important, but he couldn't understand why she hadn't said anything about it.

Back in the room, a basin was already filled with water and there was a small dim mirror for shaving. Brushing up the soap, he glanced out the window and saw more people on the street than usual for a weekday. When he dried off his face, he glanced outside again and noticed Miss King step off the hotel porch and walk up the street.

In the dining room, Tom was sitting in a cane-backed chair reading a newspaper,
The Anti-Monopolist
, with furrowed brow,
BOY TRAMPLED, WORRY DROVE HER TO DEATH, CAPITALIST CLASS USES PINKERTONS
, announced headlines on the first page.

“Had breakfast?”

“
Nosir!
” Tom slapped the newspaper shut and jumped out of his chair onto his feet. His short black hair stuck up off his head in patches, and the clothes Miss King had bought him were as rumpled as if he'd slept in them.

“Didn't mean to startle you.”

When they sat down at a table, Tom was still clutching the newspaper, first putting it in his lap, then onto the floor. Tom acted queer at meals. His posture would get ramrod straight, and before he would speak a single word he always put down his fork and knife. Today he seemed even more self-conscious, if that was possible.

“Get a good night's sleep?” Jake asked him.

“No sir,” Tom said.

Jake almost laughed. He'd noticed before that Tom generally told the truth rather than giving the usual polite answer. It was one of the things he liked about him. “What's on your mind, then?”

Tom didn't seem to know how to answer him, although he looked as if he wanted to.

Breakfast was a poor affair of brown, watery coffee,
pashofa
—meal and stringy meat—with sweetened grape juice poured over it, and some kind of old hard bread. Tom glanced repeatedly toward the door, a worried, almost wild look to his eye.

“Did Miss King tell you what she was doing?”

Tom looked at him and said, in a wondering voice, “What she was doing?”

Jake stopped chewing. “Yeah. I noticed her leaving the hotel.”

“You did?” Tom said, his skin darkening in what looked like a blush.

Jake sighed. “Just eat your breakfast. We have a day ahead.”

The hotel proprietor came in and spilled some more rusty coffee into their cups and cheerfully announced, “They caught Charley Bryant. Brought him in early this mornin. He's over there dying right now.”

“Who's that?”

“Never heard of Blackface Charley Bryant?” The proprietor grinned at Jake disbelievingly, showing off his gold teeth.

“Can't say I have.”

“Robbed the Katy at least four times. Bunch of people are in town just to see him.”

“Four robberies. What is that, a week's worth for the Katy?” Jake said drily. He hadn't liked the Katy when he'd sold the Choctaw Nation, and Dandy Pruitt liked it even less now that he had the territory. Dandy called it a religious railroad: every time you put a customer's order on it, you got down on your knees and prayed that it wouldn't be lost, crushed, or unloaded in Texas.

After breakfast, Tom remained as weird and peaked as before, and Jake wondered what was under his skin. He sent Tom out to get the team ready, and went off by himself to call on the first account.

Bider's, across from the Red Rock, was the biggest merchant in the area. Mr. Bider was a prickly, stingy, complaining little man who'd given Jake hell as a salesman. Now he claimed to be too busy to talk—and in fact there were quite a few ladies coming into the store—so Jake waited. Bider made him wait so long that when he finally did step over for a talk, Jake felt fine about collecting eighty-five dollars as well as some mortgage papers from him.

Tom had finished with the mules and was waiting for Jake outside, and the two of them spent an hour walking around discovering that two other storekeeps had gone out of business. The best Jake could tell, they'd both sold out their merchandise and walked away from their debts. This wouldn't have happened in the Choctaw Nation a few years ago. It wouldn't even have been imaginable.

The fourth storekeeper was Mr. Josephus Bargain, whose store hadn't changed much since Jake was last here, with uncut trees growing close to it, a flock of geese standing around its sagging front porch, dust and darkness inside, and a smell of creosote. Joe was a lanky old catfish of a man, probably half Indian but looking like a Mexican with his droopy, elaborate mustachios, remnants of his years as a cowboy. He wasn't a big general retailer, but he'd always done well with a few items. He owed about four hundred dollars.

“Ain't you dead yet?” Jake said, smiling. For some mysterious reason Joe had always loved to be kidded about mortality.

He looked up with no trace of an expression except in the glittering of his eyes. “Why, you son of a bitch, I'll go to your funeral! Who's the boy?” After the introductions, Tom retreated to look around the store while Joe continued his task—dipping ropes in a barrel of some kind of preservative and stiffener. Joe was the only store owner Jake knew who made quite a good trade selling lariats. Jake had talked with cowboys as far away as the Outlet who claimed to buy their lariats from Joe Bargain.

“Wanta know my secret?”

“Yeah. What is that stuff, kerosene? Creosote?”

“Ain't talking about my formula,” Joe said, tying off the ends of another length. “I'm talking about the secret to a long life.” “Guess I'd like to know that, too.”

Joe glanced at him and over toward the boy, and announced, “Always wear plenty of clothes.”

“That's it?”

“That's the main part of it. Some people believe drinking water'll do it. Water out here'll kill you. Never drink it. Damn stuff'll eat out your insides.”

“Last time I was by here, you told me to drink a glass of sarsaparilla every day. Still believe that?”

“Well, that does help the heart,” Joe said thoughtfully. “There's a lot to it when you get down to the fine details.”

The glitter dimmed from the old storekeeper's eyes when Jake sat down and told him briefly about the crisis at the store and read the mortgage transfer agreement. “I don't personally care if you sign over any property or not, Joe. I'm just delivering the message. Ernest Dekker told me to inform stores that he'd foreclose on the merchandise if they didn't pay up or sign.”

“That what he said?”

“Afraid he did.”

“Who the hell is Ernest Dekker? Ralph die?”

“Ralph didn't die. Ernest is his son, and he's taking over the store.”

“Well, if he does die, send me a telegram. Ralph and me have a bet on who's going to call on the other one's widow.”

“Afraid you won't win that one. Mrs. Dekker's been dead—”

“Yeah. I used to read the Dearly Departeds out of Fort Smith . . . She was from St. Louis, wasn't she?”

“Mrs. Dekker? I believe she was from South Carolina.”

“Oh, well,” Joe mused, playing with his mustache, “must have been somebody else.” He went silent for a minute. “You know, Ralph was fool enough to set me up in business. He give me credit and a loan for a building when I didn't have so much as a stick to put it against.” Joe stared into his fumey barrel, quiet a moment, then burst out, “It's the goddang politicians! I've been at the back end of three thousand head of cattle that smell better'n what they're doing in Muskogee.”

“You talking about Senator Dawes's commission?”

“That's right. Dawes. Indian Nations are done with, Jake. They're sellin the land, stealing it, every last goddang acre. Already took half of it.”

“I hear this idea of keeping a separate state for the Five Tribes might catch on.”

Joe snorted. “They're whistling through their assholes about that. Senator Dawes wants the land and he'll get it.”

“Government's giving good money for it. Maybe it's not a bad deal, with everybody being so broke. I know some Cherokees who'll be glad to be holding a couple hundred dollars from the sale of the Outlet. Particularly the younger ones.”

“Yeah, I remember being young and stupid, too.” Joe looked up from the barrel and squinted at Jake intently. “Certain parties ain't even waiting for the senator to do his work, you know. I had the Choctaw agent come by here the other day asking if I wanted to lease my little piece of bottomland.”

Jake thought about that a minute. He'd heard of big leases from the tribes, but never from individuals. “For range?”

“This ain't rangeland, it's cropland. For a ‘consortium,' he called it.” Joe stood up and quickly coiled the length of rope and hung it on the wall. “I asked him who's in this consortium. Said he couldn't put names to the principals. Said that was confidential. I told him I don't do bidness with somebody won't tell me their names. Fifteen cent an acre, ten-year lease, including minerals, with the right to buy it—that's what he wanted. Told me that my land-use warrant wasn't no kind of deed anyway, and I'd be lucky to get that. I'd better take what I could get.”