The Whipping Boy (26 page)

“And to think that three months ago there was nothing here but the chirp of the cricket, the lonely call of the meadowlark, the distant lowing of cattle,” Leonard said. “Now we have twelve thousand and more of these mudheads camped in the pasture, fighting a civil war over property values.” He took a bottle from his coat pocket and offered the ladies a drink, and they were soon passing it around, to the discomfort of the already uncomfortable German family sitting across the aisle. The Irish contingent, farther up, were joking and shoving and cuffing one another—boys afraid of women but trying to impress them.

Jake stared out the window. As the train curved around the prairie toward South Enid, he saw ahead what looked like a white squarish object close to the railroad track. Very close indeed. “Looks to me like there's . . . something on the track.”

Leonard polished the bright red lipstick off his bottle with a handkerchief and offered Jake a drink, but Jake was looking intently out the window. “There's a house across the track.”

“Across the track?” Leonard forgot the bottle in his hand, squinting out the window. “And a mob beyond it,” he said wonderingly. “By God, there are thousands, and they don't look friendly.” The engineer laid on the whistle but he didn't slow down. “Prepare yourselves,” Leonard announced to the car. “Those clod brains have put a house on the track!”

The German matron, who had a little pinched-up face, suddenly let forth with a thin high scream, unleashing confusion. Jake couldn't believe that the engineer wasn't at least slowing down. The thing across the track was not a shed or an outbuilding but a genuine two-room house, with a damn lot of lumber in it, sitting on two heavy beams.

The train blasted into the house at full throttle and lurched heavily. The Hot Blast stove in the aisle behind them tipped forward, crashing to the floor, its fancy fittings popping off in all directions. Leonard tumbled into the laps of the Texas whores and Jake went the other way, into the German family. The train pushed ahead, slowed, its wheels chewing through lumber, and the mob outside started pelting them with rocks and other stuff—heavy clods of dirt, cow patties both dried and fresh, and chicken heads flew at the car. Windows shattered. Women screamed, particularly the ones under whose dresses Leonard was trying to hide. The Irish boys took to the aisles and energetically fired back, trying to throw rocks and dirt and dung out the windows despite the cramped quarters, in the act breaking more windows and causing more damage. Jake was amazed at how many people had gathered to throw stuff at the train. All of South Enid appeared to have come out, some attacking, others sitting on makeshift chairs around fires, laughing and waving as the train went by, as if it was all just a picnic game.

“We'll be murdered!” Leonard declared from somewhere under a dress.

“If you don't get out from under there, darlin, I'm gonna charge you three dollars.”

“
Meingottinhimmel!
” bellowed the German man, having been hit by a fresh patty.

“Yeiiii!” his wife again screamed.

They finally passed through the body of the mob, and for the remaining distance to the terminal in North Enid, passengers picked glass and dirt and dung off of themselves and out of their hair.

“Ladies, please!” Leonard said, emerging from his sanctuary and getting swatted on the head. “I'm trying to extricate myself. My God, you Texas girls are made for fighting, aren't you? Are there broken limbs? How many casualties have we taken?” He passed around the last of his bottle.

People got off the train at the Rock Island terminal, angry, dirty, excited, some with cuts and bruises. The engine had a window frame hanging around the headlamp. Jake and Leonard went off to a huge tent saloon to get a drink, and others trooped along with them—all of the women from Texas, several of the Russians, and the track gang, one of whose eyes was swollen up big as a coffee cup from being hit by a rock. A cold wind blew through the circus tent saloon, and customers hunched down in their coats and shawls. Leonard raised his drink and toasted, “To the day we learned the meaning of the ‘rock' in Rock Island Line. May this ghastly day never be forgotten!”

“Aye! Hear, hear!” exclaimed the Irish boys, who stood nearby, remaining at a shy distance from the women.

“
I
sure won't,” said the vehement, blushing young woman. “This is my
first
day as a whore, and somebody threw a
chicken
head down my dress. I coulda stayed home and had my
brothers
do that.”

“Don't call yourself that, darlin. Say “professional woman.'”

“My dear young lady,” confided Leonard LaFarge. “If this is your first day, let me warn you away from the profession. My work has allowed me to become acquainted with the lives of numerous ladies of the night trade, and I know that it promises little.”

“Well I
sure
ain't gettin no promises from my mean old daddy and my six brothers! Ever one of em eats off the same plate as
rattlesnakes
.”

Leonard lowered his voice. “You see those young Irishmen over there. You'll not find a better husband than an Irishman. They work hard, worry little, and can be trained to deliver their wages directly to their wives. The one with the swollen eye is an especially brave fellow. Why don't you make his acquaintance, offer him succor.”

“I don't
want
a husband,” she said emphatically, squinting her eyes angrily at Leonard. “Any man from now on tells me what to do has to
pay
me.”

Leonard smiled anxiously. “But there are other ways. I know a woman who owns a restaurant. She makes four times what she could ever make in this line of business.”

“Just who are
you
telling
me
what to do? You sound like some kinda jack preacher.”

Leonard backed off another step. “Have it your way, my dear, but you'll be faced with vagabonds of all manner, with their stinking breath and slovenly behavior. You will sit on a bench against the wall and they will point at you, as though buying a lard hog. High-jackers, cowpunchers, bullwhackers, confidence men, cutthroats, refugees, thieves, saloon swampers—I assure you that after you have dealt with your first hundred, you'll yearn for the sweet company of your six brothers.”

Her truculence melted a little. “What do
you
know about my brothers?”

“Darlin, don't listen to him,” said the older woman, giving Leonard an angry look. “You leave her alone.”

“As you will, madam,” Leonard said.

He and Jake went outside, where hundreds of tents, spreading in every direction, flapped and bulged in the wind. North Enid for the moment seemed unaware of the railroad war. Hammers were pounding away at nails. Stacks of lumber and shingles were scattered through the broad dusty streets. Shielded from the wind by tents and paintless buildings, men huddled around fires, puffing on their pipes. Jake noticed that there were a few more women in town than last month. New signs were up, barbers' poles were in place. In spite of the depression, Enid was taking shape on the wind-blasted plain. They strolled through the burgeoning honk-a-tonk district, where tents and a few makeshift buildings boasted green baize tables and roulette wheels. A medicine man was giving his spiel to two boys and one haggard-looking Indian.

A storekeeper Jake knew saw him and hurried across the street. “Jake, where the hell you been? I want to order some goods.”

“I'll come by when I can.”

“What's going on at Dekker Hardware?”

“Why do you ask?”

“A man named Peters tried to get me to sign my property to em. I told him I deal with W. W. Jaycox.”

“Good for you, Bill. I'd do the same thing.”

“Well, my credit is good. Damnit Jake, you know that. Can you come in today? I'm flat out of stock.”

“Soon. Maybe tomorrow.”

They went to find a room at the Plain Talk Inn, where Leonard promptly went to sleep. Jake bought a bath. Cramped up in a little tub in not particularly warm water, he fell to worrying about Tom—whether he'd made it to Fort Smith, when he'd be able to catch a train out here.

At sunset they got in line at an outdoor food concession, this evening serving baked beans, dove, cucumber pickles, and sauerkraut. Everybody crowded into three bench tables under a tent roof, most of them gossiping about the railroad dispute. There were rumors that the cavalry was on the way. The war in fact was part game, part serious. No one had yet been killed, although the people of “Government Enid” were apparently undertaking ever more desperate acts to get the train to stop at the South station.

After supper, they walked down the well-worn dirt path to South Enid, where Leonard's real estate informant, a man named Gus Wall, kept his office. There was a good deal of commerce between the two Enids despite the conflict. Near a creek they saw, about a hundred yards away, a group of men who were busy doing something to a small railroad bridge—twenty or thirty of them, busy as ants. A couple of men were climbing nearby telegraph poles, working on the wire. A lookout with a rifle noticed Jake and LaFarge, and they hurried on.

Jake had heard of Gus Wall, but hadn't met him. Wall had the reputation for being a sharp operator. Jake hunkered down in his coat. With nightfall the wind was getting cold. “Tell me more about him.”

“Gus Wall's biography will have to be written on asbestos paper,” Leonard said. “He could swallow nails and spit out corkscrews. But he knows what's going on.” Leonard stopped. “This has to be it.”

Against the crimson sky stood a clapboard shack with
GENERAL LAND DEVELOPMENT
painted in large white letters on its side. A lamp was lit in the shack. They opened the door into a little room, unfurnished except for one small table in a corner and three ladderback chairs. Sitting at the table reading a newspaper was a short, stout man, as ugly as galvanized sin, with a several-day-old beard like dirt on his face and a nose like a failed potato hanging down over his mouth. A pistol lay on the table in front of him, and he glanced up quickly when they came in, as if deciding whether he needed to use the gun or not. His welcome was tepid, but Leonard hurried to break out a new pint bottle of labeled whiskey, which lightened Wall's mood somewhat. He found three tin cups.

Leonard tasted the whiskey and smiled benignly. “They almost killed us today coming in on the train. How'd this railroad dispute come about, Gus?”

Wall looked at the whiskey in his cup. “Rock Island struck a deal with some Cherokees, had em take their allotments near the track where North Enid is now. Soon as the Indians got clear title to the land, the railroad bought it right back so's they could speculate in prices. But the federals—secretary of the interior—got riled, told em no town site could be built within three miles of an allotment, and that wasn't the location of the town site up there, no way, this here's where it was.” He pointed at his table. “Been at it ever since, fightin over which it'll be. We tried everything we could to get the train to stop here. Bunch of us got together and passed a law makin it illegal for a train comin through Government Enid not to stop. That didn't do no good, since it's hard to arrest the son of a bitch when he's going fifty mile an hour. So the government stepped in and told the railroad they had to pick up the mail here, they didn't have no choice. Railroad said okay, built a damn mail tree. Mail hangs in a sack, arm sticks out of the express car and grabs it, breaks the sack and spills it all over the goddamn ground most of the time, but they claim they're pickin it up.”

Leonard rolled whiskey around in his mouth and swallowed. “Who'll win this conflict?”

“Government's gonna win,” said Gus Wall, with a hint of a smile. “That's why I'm here instead of up there. You staying here or North?”

“North.”

“If you walked trackside this evenin, you seen what they're doin. Can't get the son of a bitch to stop any other way, so they'll try a little more track modification. See if that bluffs em out.” Wall looked up. “Course, I don't have nothin to do with it, but I figure the old boys that run this railroad up in Chicago will tell the government to go to hell until they start losin some money on the deal. It don't take too many derailed trains to amount to a good sight of money.”

They had another shot of whiskey and talked, the wind whistling around the tiny shack, and Wall eventually asked Leonard what brought them.

“Jake has a couple of general questions about the real estate game.” Leonard looked at Jake. “Jake, you want to do the talking?”

Jake had already decided his only chance of getting any answers was to go straight to the point, whether it was risky or not, so he didn't hesitate. “I work for a wholesaler who's trying to turn our customers' debts into land mortgages, both here in Oklahoma Territory and in the land that still belongs to the Indians.”

“I know it.”

Jake glanced at Leonard.

“Dekker Hardware?” Gus Wall said.

“How'd you know?”

“Some of your customers around here been tellin me about it. Mentioned your name as the regular salesman. Said another fellow was up here trying to get em to sign the mortgages. Some of em gettin pretty agitated about it.”

Jake wasn't really surprised. Word traveled fast in a town that was still being built. “Have you seen those particular mortgage papers?”

Wall shook his head. “Nosir, I haven't, but I've heard them described.”

“Do you think they're legal for real estate in the Indian territories?”

“Legal?” Wall smiled. “You askin me?”

“Just askin your opinion.”

“You ought to answer that one,” Wall said, looking at Leonard. “Ain't you the lawyer?”

Leonard fiddled with his cup. “It's against federal law for whites to hold or transfer land held by the tribes. I assume that after the tribes are broken up, the government'll try to restrict transfer of allotted land for a period of time—say a few years.”