The Whipping Boy (30 page)

Tom was suddenly angry. It swarmed into him so abruptly and with such force that it was almost like a blow to his head. Her questions, her seeming casualness, the way she was directing him as she must have directed other men, the tension he always felt in her presence, had felt from the first morning he saw her, the unceasing desire and anticipation, the fact that it was Friday, reckoning day—whatever the causes, his mood turned instantly sour, and he saw himself tearing the hotel room apart, crashing the table into the mirror and kicking over the furniture.

But he didn't, of course. He didn't. He just lay there on the bed staring up at the ceiling, the sudden rage making him feel barren, blank, hopeless.

Remembering.

Not the beatings but being locked in the basement for three or four days at a time with nothing but scraps to eat and bugs crawling over him, while he tried to sleep in that place of endless blackness, where day and night were almost indistinguishable; where, after a while, nothing made sense.

“What is it?” Her face floated close over his.

Tom realized that he didn't trust her. He felt out of his element, like a boy, a child out of place in her fancy hotel room. He had to leave.

“Tom, what is it?”

“I'm sorry,” he said, sitting up on the end of the bed. “I have to go.”

“What did that man do to you, Tom?”

“Nothing!” Again the anger hit him so hard that he wanted to strike out.

“It's a wonder you didn't die from this, you know. Your back's been turned into a sea of scars.”

He held up both hands in front of him as if to fend off blows. “I don't want to talk about it.” He got up and went to the bathroom and put on his clothes. In the bathroom mirror his own face looked as if it belonged to someone else. He had a dizzying urge to make some connection with what he knew, with his past—to talk to Hack or find Joel or someone. Anyone.

He left quickly, out the door and down the hall. Before he knew why, he was running in the middle of the tracks down the broad avenue toward the bridge.

J
AKE WAS LYING AWAKE
in a narrow cot in the first light of Friday morning, after a night of trying to sleep with the news of Mr. Dekker fresh on his mind, when the walls of the Plain Talk Inn began to shake. There was a ripping sound and a tremendous crunch and an unearthly metallic shriek, and he started up from the edge of the cot, tipping it, causing the whole precarious torture device slowly, gracefully, to fall to the floor.
Earthquake?
he wondered, struggling to get up.

When he and Leonard got out into the street, North Enid was in general turmoil, and the talk was running fast and loose. It seemed that the good citizens of Government Enid had caused a train wreck. An engine and twelve cars had been scattered around like toys, throwing out large quantities of wheat, lumber, and pressed oil. It hadn't been a passenger train, but according to rumors flying up and down the streets, at least twenty people had been killed. It later turned out that only two people had been killed, but North Enid wasn't in a mood to be accurate about such things. By the time the sun was all the way up, a crowd was having a spontaneous town meeting in the street, with aroused citizens talking about drafting an army for self-protection against Government Enid. People in Government Enid, rather than sulking around guiltily, were said to be having their own meeting, openly debating what to do next to show their further appreciation to the Rock Island Line.

“These poor fools will think war if an army of Pinkertons shows up,” Leonard commented. The telegraph line had been cut, businesses were closed, and the whole place had gone haywire, with people running around like ants from a burning log. While looking for somebody to hitch a ride with back to Guthrie, Jake and Leonard heard a different version of the wreck from everybody they talked to.

They caught their ride at McKenzie's Livestock Corral, where an anxious meat purveyor was hooking up a team of six horses to a big old drayage wagon, stacked with slaughtered carcasses that he was rushing to Guthrie before they went bad for lack of the daily shipment of ice from Texas. It was the kind of wagon that was often pulled by oxen, open but with high sides on the bed. It could haul ten thousand pounds, and the driver didn't mind having a couple of extra riders, as long as they weren't from Government Enid. Leonard took a seat next to the driver; Jake rode in the back with the carcasses, bouncing and rattling and jerking around with a couple of melting blocks of ice and a growing puddle of meat juices. A thirty-mile-an-hour wind raked down from the northeast.

“Leonard! You want to go with me to Fort Smith?” Jake yelled.

“No,” Leonard yelled back, holding tightly to the seat. “Much more of this and I'll be in the same condition as your friends back there! I've traveled the entire world, short of the polar extremities—”

“What?” yelled the meat purveyor.

“I've lost a taste for travel! Even Fort Smith seems a great distance.”

“I
need
you, Leonard! I need a lawyer!” Jake yelled as a carcass whanged into his leg.

“Fort Smith is infested by lawyers! Go to any saloon.”

The meat purveyor glanced at him sourly. “You a lawyer?”

“I am, sir.”

The man's grimace deepened and he didn't speak again for the entire trip.

Jake eventually found a way to hold on to the side and not be thrown around so much, but the heavy carcasses couldn't be prevented from shifting and tumbling into his lap. By the time they arrived in Guthrie, near noon, he was battered and bloody, but at least most of the blood wasn't his own.

At the Guthrie stable where he'd left the mules, Jake washed his hands and face and tried to wipe some of the gunk off his clothes. “I'll pay you good money, Leonard. Be my lawyer for one week. I'll pay you fifty dollars.”

“What do you need me for?” Leonard asked, softening.

“I intend to find out what happened to Ralph Dekker. You know the courthouse. You know the law. You know how to find things out. I don't. I wouldn't do anything but get in trouble.”

Leonard looked suspiciously at the mules, who were standing side by side with their eyes closed. “This trip to Fort Smith wouldn't have anything to do with those ancient, malicious-looking animals, would it?”

“Why, those fine animals are veterans of the Civil War. Leonard LaFarge, meet Grant and Lee.”

The mules continued to appear to sleep, although even with their eyes closed they somehow obstructed Jake's efforts to get them into harness. Leonard went off to get his cardboard suitcase and came back still grumbling that he couldn't believe Jake wanted to leave now, after the morning they'd had. Jake got on some less dirty clothes and stuffed the bloody ones into his suitcase.

They embarked early that afternoon for Fort Smith. Grant and Lee had apparently gotten accustomed to the leisure of the stable, and they were uncooperative, lurching between dead slow and breakneck speed. They'd walk for a while, so slowly that Jake was afraid they were about to keel over in the traces, then, pow, as if a gun had gone off next to their ears, they'd take off. His attempts to control their pace had little influence. Yet by late afternoon they were piling down a section-line-road shortcut not far from Tulsa. Tulsa was north of their path, but the route was slightly the lesser of evils.

Jake didn't yet know exactly what he was going to do when he got to Fort Smith, but he was grimly fixed on getting there as fast as possible. One thing on his mind was the telegram he'd sent Tom the night before, right after he'd heard the news from Gus Wall. Today he realized that anybody crazy enough to kill Ralph Dekker wouldn't think twice about doing the same thing to a snoopy half-breed boy. Maybe he should send another message to Tom, telling him just to forget about the whole mess, quit the job, and stay entirely away from the store.

The mules kept him well occupied. He yelled at them and Leonard yelled at him, complaining bitterly about his driving, as they crashed and wobbled down a grooved, cattle-mauled, hard-packed road. “I have a delicate stomach, I have hemorrhoids! Mr. Dekker is already dead, it's no use hurrying. If we cross the river tonight, we'll be at Tulsa. Tulsa on Friday night!”

He'd been complaining all day, and Jake was only half listening to him. “What's wrong with Tulsa? I thought you preferred it.” “Preferred it to what? Slow down, damn your eyes! Watch out for that tree! God's hooks! You're going to break a wheel. You're going to kill us.”

When they could smell the Arkansas River ahead, the mules chose to slow down to a walk.

Leonard was bent over. “Gad, my stomach's going, for certain.”

“Don't worry, Leonard. However much it hurts, there's always worse.”

“I don't need your optimism, I need opium.”

“What good would that do?”

“Opium is an anodyne, an anesthetic, a soporific, and a narcotic. With the help of all of these angels I might survive.”

“You're drinkin too much.”

Leonard gave him a dirty look. “And you have such a tight jaw that you look like you could bite a crowbar in two. Why are you in such a hurry? Why rush to arrive in Tulsa, the pit and abyss of the world? These poor mules will die of heart attacks if you run them any more.”

Jake tried to relax his jaw. “They run when they want to and walk when they want to. I don't have anything to do with it.”

“Well, you're conveying to them a general sense of urgency. Are you worried about that shavetail Tom Freshour? Is that why you're trying to kill us?”

Jake glanced at him, surprised that he knew, since he'd said nothing about it. “Last night I sent Tom a telegram asking him to find out what he could about Mr. Dekker. Now I'm thinking it wasn't such a good idea.”

“Well, you can't do anything about it in the middle of the prairie.”

It was late in the day as they approached the river—the sun just down, the wind almost still, a dippered moon rising in an azure sky.

“Don't worry about the boy, Jake. I detected in him a certain hardness.”

“Hard-on, more likely.”

“Oh? Is he rooty for the heiress?”

Jake raised his eyebrows in assent.

“Is the feeling reciprocal?”

“Appears to be,” Jake said.

“Oh? Is this something that you actually witnessed? Come now. Tell me the good parts.”

Jake told him a shortened version of what had happened at the Christian Boarding Hotel, which delighted him so much that he appeared to forget about his stomachache.

“How old is Tom?”

“Too damn young for her.”

“Do you fear that she'll merely use him for a handy stud and cast him off?”

Jake didn't answer.

Leonard sighed. “There are worse fates, you know.”

“This woman came to Fort Smith on a train with a list of people that included me, then stuck to both Tom and me like a bedbug ever since.”

“But particularly to Tom,” Leonard said innocently.

Jake looked at him irritably. He was going tense again, preparing for the fight he assumed the mules would give him at the river. To his relief, they pulled right through the mud onto the planked barge, as if it had never occurred to them to act balky at water. The ferryman, a gruff young white man, emerged from a lean-to near the river. He poled them across, floating quietly downstream. Jake and Leonard sat on the back of the wagon.

“You know, Leonard, I worked for that mean old devil for nearly twenty-five years.”

“And you don't think he killed himself.”

“There's something I haven't told you.”

“Uh-oh.”

Jake told him about Mr. Dekker's plan to retake control of the store and put him in charge.

Leonard took out his bottle and uncorked it. “
Now
I understand your grief. Ralph held the keys to your advancement, from lowly salesman to prime minister of the hardware store. And from such heights, yet unsavored, art thou cast down.” He quickly raised and lowered his bushy eyebrows. “Have a slug and assuage thy well-earned grief.” Jake shook his head and Leonard took a delicate sip. “It is possible that the old man did himself in, you know. Maybe he failed to find the necessary finances in St. Louis and decided a pox on it all. He wouldn't be the first strong man who broke because he couldn't bend.”

Gazing out across the smooth, darkening river, Jake shook his head. “He wasn't a person to kill himself.”

“That's what they always say.” Leonard took the last taste of whiskey from his bottle and pitched it into the river.

“I just wonder why Deacon Miller followed me into the Fringe and tried to kill me. Miller's a hired gun. He doesn't do it for sport. Who paid him?”

“You've got this all figured out, I can tell by your tone,” Leonard said drily. “You figure Ernest Dekker is the responsible party for all of it.”

“Look at it this way: The old man wants to make me boss. Maybe Ernest finds that out somehow and decides to pay a visit to Deacon Miller. Meanwhile, the old man goes to St. Louis to get money, and he comes back to town. Maybe he has money with him, maybe not—we don't know. But next thing you know, he's dead. Somebody tries to kill me, then somebody does kill him. Seems to me that there might be a trail to that scent.”

Leonard glanced at the ferry operator and said in an undertone, “Speaking of scents, I wish the breeze was blowing the other direction. Between the mules and Charon here . . . Tell me about the sheriff in Fort Smith. The new one.”

Jake shrugged. “He's tight with Ernest. Big horse-track gambler.”

“What about Judge Parker?”

Jake looked puzzled.

“For argument's sake, let's say you're right and Dekker Junior is the guilty party. You do realize that it isn't a good idea for you to go barreling into town playing lone Pinkerton. A man like that has more than one way to cook your goose.”