The Whipping Boy (22 page)

The elevator platform arrived, and Edgar walked out of the gloom. “Put that thing away.”

“Keep back, nigger,” Jim said without looking.

Edgar came toward him. Jim turned and slashed the air. Edgar caught his wrist and took the knife and pitched it backwards, through the opening between the elevator and the floor, into the basement. “Pull that again and you be the one git a red necklace.”

“Cut it out,” one of the others said, glancing nervously out the bay. “You'll get us all in trouble.”

Edgar kept an eye on Jim. “Come on, Tom.”

As they glided smoothly upward on the wide platform through the dark shaft, Tom felt a little dizzy. “They's a spell on this place,” Edgar grumbled, pulling the rope. “Ever since the old man left, I don't see nothin but spite and orneriness.”

“He said Hack got Joel in trouble? Is that true?” Tom asked. Edgar continued to work the rope, for a moment not answering. “All I know is the little one was after Hack about somethin.” “After him?”

“Gettin after him about somethin, like he was tryin to get him to do somethin—or not do somethin. They was pretty close-mouth around me, so I don't know what. Next thing I knew, the little one be gone, and Hack had done got in such a hurry all the time that he don't say much. But when it's somethin I can't do nothin about, I don't worry about it. That's my rule. That's the way I keeps food on the table. Better take some of that medicine yourself.”

As they passed the floors on the way up, Tom noticed that the building was more than half empty. They ascended all the way to the fifth floor. “You wouldn't know it by them fools downstairs, but they is work to be done. Roll them nail barrels up to here, all of em . . .”

“What's going on, Edgar? Why's so much stock in the shipping room?” Tom asked.

Edgar shook his head. “Some kind of sale, I don't know.” Edgar looked at him, his expression fierce. “You in the big world now, boy. Got to make a livin. It don't fall down in your lap. Can't be lettin fools pick fights with you. And don't be askin too many durn questions.”

Tom's thoughts, though, lingered on Joel. How or why had Hack gotten Joel fired?

He looked down the long aisle of the upper floor and out the window. Despite so much of the stock being down on the shipping floor, the store's smells were concentrated here on the top floor—excelsior, oil, raw wood, iron. He could see across the river, far into the Nations. A guard with a rifle was walking down the pathway in the jail yard, past the gallows in early morning light. Tom thought about Johnny Pointer, who killed his own friends while they slept. He noticed another smell, pipe tobacco—a big standing ashtray full of burned pipe tobacco. It was the ashtray the old man had used, and it smelled fresh, as if he had been here recently.

***

All day long, Tom kept wondering about Joel.

He spent most of the rest of the day moving things to the shipping floor. The stockroom men acted strange, in bursts working hard loading the rail cars, but then stopping and lurking in edgy groups, playing dominoes and cards, ducking out of sight on the few occasions when front-office men came back. Already about half of the stock in the store had been hauled out, and the rest was on the way. They talked in hushed tones, giving Tom the creepy feeling he was back at the orphanage. Once Tom heard someone downstairs yelling so loudly that it reverberated up the elevator shaft. In early afternoon he was briefly on the main floor, and saw several men hurry into the big office and slam the door while the catalogue salesman, hunched over his newspaper, glanced sourly after them. The regular business of the store seemed to be suspended.

He had a brief encounter with Hack, but he was in a big hurry, rushing out the back door to make a courier delivery somewhere. Tom tried to catch up with him and ask him about what had happened to Joel, but Hack said he didn't have time to talk.

Near quitting time, Tom was straightening cases of screws on the third floor, thinking about Sam, who never quite left his mind, when he heard someone stomping up the staircase. Jack Peters appeared out of the shadows. “Better get downstairs. Boss wants to talk to you.”

In the big office, the bespectacled secretary was poking away at the typing machine on a corner desk. The room was laced with tobacco smoke and the smell of nervous sweat. The short one with the stub cigar in his mouth and the derby hat was sitting by a map, while salesman Marvin Beele sat at another desk, sorting a pile of what looked like the mortgage papers. Jack Peters remained standing by the door. Ernest Dekker paced around the room, dropping ashes, stopping and looking at the map, preoccupied.

Tom had been there a minute before Ernest even seemed to notice him with a brief, sour glance.

McMurphy was the one who finally spoke. “So Jake ain't doin so good.”

It sounded like a statement rather than a question, and Tom didn't respond.

McMurphy looked at Dekker as if waiting for him to say something, but Ernest started pacing again, slowly up and down the room, glancing out the window. He constantly wiggled the cigarette holder, creating a trail of ashes.
Thwap, thwap, thwap, ting
went the typing machine.

“I'm wonderin whether we ought to send somebody else down there, sir,” Peters said. “Hell, I'll go down there.” The fat salesman's tone became innocent sounding when he was addressing Ernest.

McMurphy's eyes followed Ernest. The treasurer had a nose tic, one of his nostrils opening and closing in a little contraction of muscle. “Heard this morning that Shelby got four thousand more acres up around Tulsa,” he commented.

The man in the derby hat asked around his cigar, “Who f'om?”

“Buncha Indians, lost their butts on a big cattle operation.”

The lawyer took out his cigar and scowled at it. “I did hear about it. Creek tribe. They're easy to work, they're so ignor't. Army ordered them to clear all the herds off the Outlet before the land run, and most of em ended up in Tulsa. I hear you can't sell a steer now, can't hardly get em on the train. Say it's one big cattle yard, prices down to nothin, lot of outfits goin broke.”

While this conversation went on, Ernest Dekker continued to pace and smoke. The room was charged with a kind of restiess energy that Tom had never felt before. They all were hanging on Ernest, waiting for him to decide something, but his preoccupation appeared to be total. McMurphy asked, “You want to send Jake a telegram and tell him to get back to the plan?”

Ernest looked at him and nodded.

McMurphy said to the secretary, “Okay Loop, take this down, telegram, general delivery, to W. W. Jaycox, Guthrie. Tell him we want to see twenty signed mortgage transfers from the Choctaw Nation before he steps foot back in here.”

The typist, slouching over his machine, blinked through round spectacles. “Twenty?”

“Remind him about the bounty,” McMurphy added drily. “Maybe that'll get him off the dime.”

The typist put a new piece of paper into the machine and started tap-tapping on it again. Marvin Beele had finished counting and sorting his papers, and he went over and handed them to the lawyer. “Looks like nine hundred acres,” he muttered, chewing fast, glancing toward the door. Tom got the impression Beele was trying to make himself as invisible as possible.

The lawyer plugged his cigar back in and started looking through the papers. “Where are we now?”

“Fort Gibson area,” Beele said, glancing at the pile of maps on the large table.

“Go into the other room for that,” Ernest said. It was the first thing he had said since Tom came in.

The lawyer picked up the map and went into the little adjoining office, with Beele and the treasurer following. Tom could see them through the windowed door, and he noticed that eventually McMurphy took money from a green box and gave it to Marvin Beele, who folded it into his pocket. Peters sidled over toward the door as if trying to hear what was being said in the small office.

Ernest, still pacing, spoke to Peters. “You going out tonight?”

“Yes sir!” the fat salesman said. “Train's at six-thirty, sir. You want me to double up and hit the Choctaw territory? I can bring in fifteen thousand acres down there without even trying.”

Ernest shook his head. “Keep working your territory. We've got enough confusion around here. And get some big fish, Jack. You're making twelve cents now. One hundred twenty dollars per thousand acres. At that rate, you could get up a pretty good bundle.”

When Peters left, only the typist, Tom, and Ernest remained in the room. Suddenly, Dekker stopped pacing in front of Tom. His eyes, Tom saw, were murky and agitated. “What's Jake up to?” He spoke in a voice low enough that the secretary couldn't hear over the sound of his machine.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Jake. What's he up to?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“Has he been talking about me?”

“No sir.”

“Did he get into some kind of scrape out there?”

Tom withdrew into himself in the same way that he'd always done at the academy—watching the skin, looking at the corners of the eyes, at the expansive eyebrows, grey-flecked.

“Answer my question.” The eyes got wider. Ernest seemed to be on the verge of great anger.

From years of experience, Tom had learned that lying just started him playing the inquisitor's game. Truth was the best weapon, lying was the last resort. “Yes,” he said flatly, without the “sir”—going neutral and cold, defying the rules of respect enough to derail his inquisitor.
Thwap, thwap, ting
. Tom felt dizzy, his own partial reflection in a pane of glass like a black shape. Inside him was a peculiar stirring.

“What kind of scrape?”

“Somebody shot at him.”

“Shot at him,” Ernest said sarcastically. “Who?”

“I don't know,” Tom said.

“He okay?” Ernest asked.

“He's fine,” Tom said.

“Jake's been having all kinda problems. I don't like my men getting reputations.”

Tom didn't reply.

“And he left Guthrie to go back collecting?”

Tom barely nodded. Volunteer no information. Answer only what you have to.

“That friend of yours, Joel,” Ernest Dekker said. “We had to get rid of him. That was a real shame.”

Tom said nothing. His hackles were up now. The situation felt all too familiar.

“Had high hopes for that boy.”

Tom said nothing.

“I can tell you're smart. They trained you boys right. You can do real well with me or you can do real poorly.” He pulled back and narrowed his eyes. “What kinda Indian are you?”

“I don't know.”

“Aren't all of you Choctaws?”

“I have no information about my parents.” Tom's face had gone hot.

Ernest Dekker looked at him disdainfully. “You talk fancier than a white boy, but I'm not sure you've got the hustle this other one has.” He was about to add something else when Marvin Beele came out of the small office in a hurry. Beele hesitated, as if he wanted to speak to Dekker, but changed his mind and left the room.

Hack appeared at the door. He looked startled to see Tom here. He glanced back and forth between Dekker and Tom. The treasurer came out of the office and saw Hack and held out an envelope to him. “Take this to Bradley.” Hack was quickly gone.

“Finished with that telegram yet?” Ernest asked the secretary.

“Just finished.”

Ernest Dekker sighed and said to Tom, “Run that to the Main Hotel telegrapher.” He took a nickel out of his pocket and put it on the edge of a desk. “That's for you.”

In twilight, Tom walked up the avenue. He was in a tumble of thoughts, with the mood of the big office still overhanging him.
We had to get rid of him
kept echoing through his mind. He was worried, too, about the message he was supposed to telegraph Jake. If he sent it to Enid instead of Guthrie, Jake would probably get it, but then what? Would Jake leave Enid, canceling the plan for them to meet there? Maybe he should wait and take the message to him, and that way not lose touch.

Walking along the tracks in the middle of the avenue, Tom heard a loud rumble and looked up to see the single headlamp of a trolley approaching him like a giant eye. He saw no animals pulling the trolley. There was an odd humming sound in the air, coming from the overhead cable that ran down the street. The only trolleys he'd ever seen were pulled by animals. Electrical trolleys were another hole in Tom's acquaintance with the world. He knew that electricity somehow propelled dots and dashes through the telegraph, and lighted bulbs, but he had no idea that it could propel streetcars. Fort Smith's Trolley and Generating Company had been out of commission for almost a year due to financial problems—long enough for it to have died back as a subject of conversation. But it had reopened that morning and was running maintenance checks. Electrical power was dawning on this town in a lurching, lights-on, lights-off fashion that caused many to regard it as a questionable gimmick whose main purpose was to fleece investors.

As the trolley thundered by, sparks of fire rained down all around him, and for some reason he looked up at the front of the Main Hotel, where a few people had come to windows to look out. In a window high up, a woman briefly appeared who looked almost like Sam.

The lobby floor of the Main was another first for Tom, with its little white octagonal tiles that crunched under his feet. The lobby was luxuriously appointed with gas chandeliers, Persian rugs, Corinthian columns, and platoons of leather rocking chairs, occupied at this hour only by a couple of lounging newspaper readers. A Western Union sign hung above the desk.

He stalled, sitting down in one of the leather chairs, picking up a newspaper to read, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
,
DISORDER IN RUSSIA
read the left column;
ARMY OF UNEMPLOYED
read the right. He looked at advertisements for women's clothes, and his thoughts drifted off to the woman he'd seen in the window. She could not really have been Sam, but all day he'd been thinking of her, seeing and feeling and smelling her the way she'd been at the bathhouse and in bed with him, the way in bed she'd crawled on him, the smoothness of her thighs, the grandeur of her buttocks, the way she spread her legs around him . . .