The Whipping Boy (37 page)

“Well, then, Mr. Crilley, whoever he is, hit the jackpot, because the number after his name was ten.”

Leonard stared at him with a strange, lowering intensity. “John Crilley,” he said quietly.

“That's right. There was a first name on his entry. Who the hell is John Crilley?”

“You told me the boy—Tom—is in Muskogee?”

“Yeah. There's his note,” Jake said, pointing at the table. “It's bad luck we didn't see him when we were there.”

Leonard picked up the note and scanned it again.

“What's on your mind, Leonard? You look like your eyes are going to jump out of your head.”

Leonard again stopped at the window and glanced out. He said with dramatic flatness, “Get your hat, Jake. Let's go.” He was looking down on the street.

Jake got up to look out, when someone came into the hallway below. Without a word, Jake grabbed Leonard by the shoulders and pushed him into the water closet, whispering, “Be quiet.”

There was a vigorous knock on Jake's door.

“Mr. Jaycox. I have a message from Miss King.”

“Put it under the door, please.”

Before he could do anything, the door opened.

T
OM RODE PAST
wind-clashing trees on a rock-scattered road through the Winding Stair. By dark he had made it to Poteau, where he tied the horse in a shed beside McCurtain's General Merchandise and fetched from the saddlebag one of the envelopes full of money. He went inside the store and from the triangular stacks of cans along one wall got a tin of beef and a tin of green beans, took them to the front, and paid for them with one of the bills.

The storekeeper, a friendly, grave man of about Jake's age, didn't act like there was anything remarkable about Tom or his twenty-dollar bill, but the huddle of blizzard refugees who were sitting around the stove stopped talking and watched him. The storekeeper opened the cans and loaned Tom a table knife. Dazed from the cold, Tom walked toward them and sat down on a wooden box. At first he ate quickly, wanting both to vomit and to devour the entire contents of both cans in one swallow. As he knifed down the jellied beef and beans, the others eventually began talking again, in English and in Choctaw that he didn't understand well.

Around the stove were four men and five women. The oldest man had ramrod-straight posture and wore a floppy hat; two younger ones sat slump-backed, staring moodily at the floor. Among the women was a sultry young one wearing a fringed dress, who watched Tom eating. For some reason there were no children here. Two of the women were talking about the pros and cons of metal roofs, which were popular on settlers' dugouts.

Then they all talked about stoves, different models of stoves, cook stove and heating, fondly describing their shapes, sizes, and trim, how large a space they could heat, even the particular qualities of warmth put out by each one. It soon became apparent that none of them currently had a stove. “Twenty years ago was the first time I saw one in a house,” the older man with a floppy hat said wistfully. One of the younger men, with the smooth, beardless face of a full blood, said that when the tribe's land was split up, he was going to sell his acreage and buy the best stove in the catalogue.

“Will you carry it on your back?” Soft Hat asked him.

Full Blood looked puzzled.

“Sell your land and you'll have no place to put your fancy stove,” Soft Hat said.

“I plant in the bottoms.”

“But if somebody else owns that land, you won't be able to plant there no more.”

“We always plant in the bottoms.”

Soft Hat laughed. “But somebody else will
own
the land!”

“What difference does that make?” Full Blood said casually. “Plenty of bottomland.” Soft Hat said something back in Choctaw, and they carried on in that way for a while, talking faster. Tom was reminded that the Choctaw his pals at Bokchito used when they dared to talk Indian was a dim echo of the real thing. He glanced around at the faces of the people here and felt completely unconnected to them. In his state of mind, they seemed like lost wanderers from some distant land. He felt vaguely ashamed—of what, he didn't know.

Looking into the flames of the stove, he remembered the Reverend's picture book with naked savages dancing around fires. Would the Reverend always be in his thoughts, darting around, whispering, judging him? Did killing him only bring him to life? What Tom had read in his file had almost no meaning:
Osi Tamaha . . . Big Tree . . . Apache
. From long ago, he remembered some conversation about Apache from one of the younger boys, and all he could recall was that the very word terrified him. Then there was the old woman with the bathhouse at Durant . . .

His thoughts drifted to Samantha King, and he was scalded by a sudden raw desire to see her. He glanced at the young woman in fringe, who was watching the knife he was using to eat with.

He got up and limped around the store, his heels sore and his thighs tender from the long ride. The store had clothes, and he spent the remainder of the twenty-dollar bill on a plain brown pair of cowboy boots and a fur-lined sheepskin coat. He wasn't unhappy about abandoning Sam's ankle-cutting shoes once and for all.

As he was about to leave, the weather refugees were still talking about stoves. “Ain't worth selling your land,” Soft Hat was saying. “You could buy a fine stove for forty dollars, cash.” With no hesitation, as if pulled by invisible strings, Tom reached into his pocket, withdrew the envelope of money, walked over, and gave Full Blood two of the twenty-dollar bills. Seeing the look on Soft Hat's face, Tom gave him the same amount. He went on around to the others, handing forty dollars to each of them. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice was saying that this was the most foolish thing that he could possibly do. After the first two of them had received money, the others waited in dazed silence, as if they were afraid to move.

The young woman in fringe was last, and she gave him a desperate, sudden smile. “Take me with you,” she said.

Tom looked at her a moment and realized that she was serious, but he was too stunned by the whole situation to reply intelligently. He just reached out his hand as if to touch her and said, “Take care, sister. Get your stove.”

The young woman looked as if she was going to faint, which alarmed Tom, and he was turning to go when the storekeeper came out from behind his counter. “Friend, can I have a word with you?” he said. “That weather's dangerous. Do you have to travel?”

Tom nodded.

The storekeeper searched Tom's face. “I had a cousin freeze in a norther.”

Tom shook his head. He wanted to talk but was too wrought up to say much.

The rest of the journey to Fort Smith was over gentle hills south of the Poteau River. Now he was headed away from the wind, but the old road and the train tracks were well covered with snow, and in some places he had to guess his way. He got to the bridge over the Arkansas, where the wind howled and tore at the river below. He had intended to let the horse loose before he came into town, but he'd only die if he did.

Not knowing what else to do, Tom took the horse to the stable that Jake used, got him unsaddled and fed, and turned him loose in the sheltered yard, where in the shadows he saw the outline of a mule. He walked over and there was Grant standing asleep. Tom patted him and rubbed his old hairy chin, unconcerned about being bitten. On the other side of the yard, as far away as possible, was Lee. Tom went over and hugged him around the neck.

Down the alley in Mrs. Peltier's back shed, he put the satchel into the bottom drawer of an old cobweb-covered dresser. He walked straight through the back door and up the stairs, meeting no one on the way. Jake wasn't in his room. He looked around for his note to Jake—the evidence that he'd been with Hack—and wasn't surprised that it was gone.

With a last spasm of energy he managed to pull off his new boots. On the couch in Jake's parlor, finally warm, he lay down and immediately slipped into a half-sleep. Several times he was wakened by comings and goings in the halls. He heard people talking, but remained locked in an unrestful stupor.

A couple of hours later, the door opened and in walked a man carrying a lantern with long grey hair streaming across his shoulders. Disoriented, a little scared, Tom lifted his head from the couch. He recognized the grey-haired man: Leonard LaFarge, Jake's friend he'd met in the land-office yard in Guthrie. He was pale.

“Tom?” he said, walking closer to him with the lantern. “Tom Freshour?”

Tom sat up and put his feet on the floor. “Yessir?”

“
Ecce homo
,” LaFarge said wonderingly, peering intently at him. “You look . . . older.”

***

Tom asked after Jake, and LaFarge immediately began pacing. He told Tom about Jake's and Sam's abduction by Deacon Miller. He then described what had just happened to him. He had been “kicked out by the U.S. commissioner,” he said. “Which makes it unanimous. He was my last hope. No person associated with the law in this town wants to hear about this. All day I've been waiting for people. I saw the sheriff and he fobbed me off. I went to the marshal's office, and they told me they needed proof of something that serious. Proof! I finally went to the U.S. commissioner—I
know
Claude Baines—and what does he say but that in the absence of suspects in custody he has no authority.”

LaFarge stopped pacing and stared at Tom with big expressive eyes, jaw jutting out, wild hair sticking out in all directions. “They look at me and think, There's old Bindlestiff, old Copper Nose, he must have finally sprung a leak. That's how the courthouse crew thinks. He's prob'ly only tellin half the story, they think. Deacon Miller? White man's sheriff, high-stakes man, they think. He don't work for no piss-ant pay, they think. That salesman must owe somebody a right smart amount of money, they think. Missing links!” LaFarge spat. “The descent of man, verified! That's why I quit this trade.”

Mr. Haskell came into the room while LaFarge was making his speech. “Hello, Tom. You doin okay?” Mr. Haskell was Tom's favorite boarder at Mrs. Peltier's—somebody he felt like he'd known although they hadn't talked that much.

“Yes sir. I'm okay.”

Tom asked Mr. Haskell what had happened, and he calmly related what LaFarge had told him about Jake's and Sam's disappearance, while the lawyer continued to pace and mutter.

LaFarge came over and plopped down, and the three of them sat for a moment in silence. “I can't believe the way they treated me,” LaFarge said lamely. “Law enforcement in this town is all being paid off. Without exception.”

“Sheriff's up for hire,” Mr. Haskell said. “Everybody knows that. I doubt the marshal is.”

LaFarge glowered at him. “Parker. He's the only one left.”

Mr. Haskell looked at him skeptically. “Think I'll take a quick turn around town and ask around. We'd feel pretty dumb if we found out the two of them were sitting somewhere in a saloon, drinking a beer.”

Leonard LaFarge waited until Mr. Haskell had shut the door. He looked down at his hands, folded on the table. “Did you go to Muskogee?”

Tom had prepared for this question. He had thought about it much of the way back, coaching himself in the lies that he hoped would keep him out of trouble, practicing them in his mind. The report of what had happened to Reverend Schoot would take a day or two to get out, but he might as well put a gun to his own head as admit having had any part of it. If he hesitated, or if he acted odd about it, he'd be caught. He had no choice but to lie.

But in the face of this news about Jake, all of his preparations became insignificant. Ignoring LaFarge's question, he put on his boots and coat. He went to Jake's bottom drawer, where Jake kept an old pistol. As he stood up and slipped it into his coat pocket, he noticed a beautiful, lightly dressed buckskin suit with a short fringe lying on top of the dresser.

“That's for you,” LaFarge said.

“What?” Tom said.

“A gift. Jake bought it for you in Tulsa.”

While Tom made ready to leave, LaFarge paced back and forth, talking as if to himself: “It was daylight, and they took him right out the front door, which gives me hope. Miller isn't known for doing his work in front of witnesses.” He looked up and saw that Tom's hand was on the doorknob. “Wait! Don't leave. Do you have any idea what they might want to find out from Jake? What they might be looking for?”

Tom shook his head.

LaFarge sighed. “This isn't just about Jake and Samantha King, you know. It involves certain big shots who don't like people interfering with their plans. They can have you killed and not think twice about it.”

“I know,” Tom said. “They already killed Joel.”

“Who's Joel?”

Tom went through the door.

First, Ralph Dekker's house.

Through a dark town gone quiet in the falling snow, he rode down Seventh Street. The back door was unlocked, and he walked into a torn-up kitchen. He found a lantern in the corner, and when he lit it he saw that all cabinet doors were open, drawers emptied out and stacked off to the side. In the sitting and dining rooms books had been thrown on the floor, every door was open, couches and chairs sliced up with stuffing pulled out, and in one place several holes were knocked into the wall. The house had been turned inside out. Tom saw Dekker's family album in the heap of books. For a few minutes he wandered through the rooms. They had searched frantically for something, here and at the store. He remembered how lights had been burning on every floor of the nearly empty store building the other night.

He stood for a moment in the sitting room amid the clutter, holding up the lantern, his breath thick in the cold. The house was silent. His eye drifted to the fireplace, and he recalled the dying fire he'd seen here on Monday night. He knelt at the fireplace and held the lantern close to the ashes and probed them with his hand, picking out a little piece of ash and looking at it. He had found what they'd been searching for.