The Whipping Boy (39 page)

“I did everything at least once,” he said. “I was a traveling player, a hobo, a merchant seaman, a day laborer, a pharmacist's assistant, a drug addict. The pharmacist I worked for introduced me to morphine sulphate. Happy dust, they call it. Fashionable women crush a lozenge in a napkin and breathe it like it was delicate perfume.” He pulled together his fingers and made as if smelling it. “I learned to inject it into my bloodstream with a syringe. You push the curved steel horns and shoot it directly into your blood.” His eyelids descended. “Presto, you are in an atmosphere of purest tranquility. Nothing can bother you. But there's a hitch: you must have it constantly. More and more of it. Without it you grow uneasy, flighty, hideously, sleeplessly exhausted. You have chills and sweats. If it's been too long, you feel an incredible drilling agony in your arms and legs.” He gritted his teeth as if in pain, then he glanced down at Tom with a crooked-toothed grin. “Jake hates this story. He thinks I'm exaggerating.

“I wandered to Europe in quest of my elixir. You can buy it there in little cardboard cases, divided into cells, each cell lined with wool, a little glass globule sealed with wax and filled with the drug. I had a black morocco case to carry around everything I needed, needles, spoons, and so forth.” His eyebrows raised, then he set down his cup, unbuttoned and rolled up a sleeve, and showed Tom the scarred inside of his forearm. “I did that all over my body. Sticking myself.”

LaFarge seemed oddly cheerful about his scars. He almost looked amused. Tom was suddenly interested.

“I traveled on to Asia, where they grow the poppy that makes the drug. Trying to get as close as possible to the fountainhead. One evening I was standing alongside a man near the stern of a hundred-ton rusting hulk of a ship in the Indian Ocean. I can remember the smell of hemp cord rising up through the deck. It was sunset, and we were hoping to see the green flash. Do you know what that is?” He looked at Tom.

“No.”

“Just as the sun sinks beneath the sea's horizon, there is sometimes an instantaneous flash of emerald light. But it's very elusive. As many times as I'd looked for it, I'd never seen it. But that evening we actually did, and just after it happened my companion said, ‘As soon as we know, what we know is gone.' He'd been to China, and at the time I thought it was just opium talk.

“‘What we know is gone.' Please, sir, I thought, tell me something new for the price of admission. Strangely, during the next few days I couldn't get his remark out of my mind. It began to dominate my thoughts entirely. I realized that it was my drug habit I was thinking about—eating oblivion, wanting oblivion. I had sacrificed the necessary in hopes of gaining the superfluous. All of my traveling was a trick I was playing on myself, an illusion of adventure, a way to skip across the surface. Standing on the same spot at the stern of the ship a few days later, I understood that I had no choice but to throw my drug kit or myself into the ocean. Otherwise I could travel the entire surface of the earth and see less and less, and know less and less, and hate myself more each day.”

He glanced back at Tom, looking slightly sheepish, holding out his nearly empty cup. “Of course, I still have my vices . . . I can't remember why I'm telling you all this. Did I have a point?”

“Why do you smile about your arms?” Tom asked.

“The scars?” LaFarge narrowed his eyes in mock defiance.
“Why, sir, I'm proud of those. They're the record of my travels, the blue pictorial myth of how far I've traveled. Besides,” he added with a grin, “what else can I do?”

LaFarge looked out the window into the night and took a last sip. The wind was getting through the cracks around the window, causing the flame to waver. He turned, suddenly frowning, looking almost severe. “You know, Jake did talk quite a lot about you, Tom. He said that you were a smart young man who could do what you put your mind to. Jake's language suffers from understatement. You are
not
any young man.” He sighed and looked at Tom almost gloomily. “I believe that you are a most unusual young man.”

Tom blanched.

LaFarge put his cup down on the windowsill. “I'm a pretty good judge of character. I have a knack for it. You are blessed in more than one way, Tom, but particularly on the top story. You are intelligent, alert, unafraid. You don't appear to be hampered by pridefulness, which is the worst blinder of all. I see why Jake feels the way he does about you.” He raised his eyebrows, as if inviting Tom to respond.

Tom stood up, quickly dried himself off, and went upstairs to Jake's room, where he put on an undershirt and a pair of Jake's pants.

LaFarge followed him. “Jake found a notebook belonging to Ernest Dekker which had a very interesting note in it. The name of a man in Muskogee. It implied that money was given to this man. If I had some confirmation of that note, I could go to Judge Parker. I can't just tell him I saw a name written down. It's not enough.” He shook his head. “I need a witness who can confirm that money was sent to this man.”

Tom said nothing, but he was listening. He realized that LaFarge had been preparing him for this.

LaFarge stared out the window again, sighing. “You know, Judge Parker's a good man, but time has passed him by. He's hanging the wrong people, and I think he knows it. Ten or fifteen years ago, yes, they were the ones. The lawless element. The drunks, the spree killers. But that's not what he should be attending to now. Now it's the sharp operators, the Dekkers with their mortgage schemes. A whole new generation of thieves is loosed upon that poor land.” He glanced back at Tom with a look of distaste. “Twenty-mile-wide grants of real estate to railroads. Walnut trees cut off tribal land. Illegal coal mining. The Dawes Commission. Land syndicates set up by Indian agents. White towns passing laws preempting real estate. It's not the few poor clods robbing trains, it's the men in suits. Blackface Charley Bryant, the Dalton Brothers, bah! They're not even the clowns in this circus. They're hardly even the ants carrying away crumbs.” LaFarge shook his head again. “Parker's got the best of intentions, he truly does, but he's stuck in a rut. He's after the wrong people. And he's too smart a man not to know it.”

He looked at Tom and showed his snaggle teeth in a brief bleak grin. “If we could get Judge Parker's attention, we'd have a better chance of getting Jake out of this. I believe that the best way to get his attention is to convince him that we know for a fact that money was sent, probably by courier”—he raised his eyebrows slightly—“to this man in Muskogee.”

“What man?” Tom said.

LaFarge held up a hand. “Be patient. I'm getting around to it. You should know this first: Judge Parker's district used to include most of what is now the Oklahoma Territory and Indian Nations, as well as a big part of Arkansas. Four years ago the Congress divided his district and created a new federal court in Muskogee. Parker hates the judge who occupies the bench there. He even spoke against him in the newspapers, for which he was roundly criticized and accused of petty jealousy. He thinks the man's questionable.”

“What's his name?”

“John Crilley. Judge John Crilley.”

Without a word, Tom stood up and walked out the door. He didn't stop until he'd gotten to the kitchen steps, where he hesitated a moment and looked back through the dark kitchen into the warm house as if he was leaving it forever. He went out to the shed, got the satchel that he'd hidden in the bottom drawer of the old dresser, and trudged back inside, up the stairs.

He dumped out the bundles of money and the letter in front of Leonard LaFarge and calmly told his story. He lied about how he'd ended up with Hack's satchel, omitting the details of following Hack to Bokchito and what had happened there in the cellar. He said that he woke up in the Muskogee hotel with Hack gone and his satchel left behind. LaFarge questioned him about what he thought had happened to Hack, and Tom said he didn't know but he might have gone south.

Lying didn't have any particular effect on Tom. He experienced no powerful emotions. His heart didn't even beat hard. Lying had no more immediate consequence than telling the truth. Everything else he told the lawyer was true—he just left out the trip to Bokchito. He admitted that on his way back to Fort Smith he'd spent and given away some of the money at a store in Poteau. LaFarge looked worried about that, but when he saw the envelope beneath the pile of money, all his skepticism melted. He picked it up, looking fixedly at the writing:
John Crilley / Muskogee / I.T
.

He held it out and said wonderingly, “God bless us, Tom, this is it. Will you go with me to see Parker?”

There was a quiet knock at the door, and before LaFarge could put away the money, Mr. Haskell opened it and came in, his face reddened by the cold wind. “I haven't got a bead on this place yet. My railroad man is out of town. It'll be tomorrow.” When he noticed the money he looked embarrassed. “What the heck did you do, rob a bank?”

***

Before Sam could really launch into her confession, the train came to an abrupt halt. The door slid open, and there stood Deacon Miller and two pals, looking none too warm themselves. Miller showed some irritation that they had worked free of their ropes, but he also seemed relieved that they hadn't frozen to death. Soon they were inside a little abandoned depot, which was being occupied by a flock of sleeping chickens. Then they were walking through face-stinging snow to a big brick building that stood over the crest of a hill. There was an equally large building nearby that was burned to its rock shell.

Jake knew by sight most of the big older buildings in the Indian Nations and Oklahoma Territory, but he couldn't place where they were. They entered the tall front door. Inside, several fireplaces were roaring, with someone rushing around feeding them, the wind moaning constantly and lanterns wildly flickering, threatening to go out. Jake's brain was about to go out again, too. He heard Miller say something about wanting only one room to guard, and dimly he heard him threaten them against running away, but he remembered nothing at all about walking or being carried upstairs.

He woke up several times during the next few hours, noticing that someone was in a small bed with him, and that they were sharing two thin wool blankets. It was Sam. As they slept, the blizzard moaned around and through the building.

After nightfall, an old woman entered the room, bringing them shredded beef and beans, and two cups of coffee with hickory-nut butter in it—the sweetener called
canuchi
by the Cherokees. They ate in silence, and Sam got up and tried to comb the dirt out of her long hair with her fingers. To Jake's annoyance, they hadn't given her anything to wear. Both of them were still grimy with coal smoke, manure, and hay dust, but for Jake the headache, at least, was subsiding to manageable proportions. One of Miller's apprentices, probably the one who'd hit him on the head—white, maybe twenty years old, grumpy and sullen—was sitting in the hall near the door, and Jake talked to him long enough to learn that his informativeness did not go beyond where the toilet was.

After a while, Sam and Jake were sitting side by side in the bed, propped against the wall, the thin wool blankets over them. The blizzard still raged outside. They were fortunate not to be on the north or west side of the building. There was no stove in the room, but a length of pipe sticking out from a chimney added its own deep wail to the building's orchestra of wind sounds. The room was narrow and had five single metal-framed beds lined along one wall. On the wall opposite the beds there was one small table with a kerosene lantern, and above it hung a picture of a stern, luminous Jesus, providing the room's sole adornment and clue to the identity of this place.

“Looks like a school,” Jake said. “An old school. I don't know. I figure we're in the Cherokee Nation.”

Sam didn't reply.

“Sam, what were you about to tell me before we got off the train?”

She groaned.

“I may've had my eyes open, but I wasn't all there. Did you say that you used me to ‘get to' Ralph?”

She looked over at him sullenly. “He owed my mother money. I came to collect it.”

“Our friend out there is close to the door, so you better talk quiet. You mean that's why you came in the first place?”

She looked at the dirt on her arms and hands. “I can't stand this.”

She sat still awhile, gathering herself. Then she began talking. “It was about the time I was born. Ralph Dekker borrowed money from my mother several times over a period of about five years for his business. She occasionally made private loans to people she trusted. Most of them paid her back. But her hotel defied the law in more than one way, and if someone didn't honor a debt, there was only so far she could go without resorting to those types.” She indicated the door. “She once told me how galled she was by this man down in Fort Smith who'd taken a lot of money from her. He owed her over thirty thousand dollars. She named him and carried on. Ralph Dekker this, Ralph Dekker that. My mother was usually stiff with me, like I was some stranger in her house that she had to put on manners for. About this subject she seemed to let her hair down and talk freely to me. The few times we were together, she never spoke to me about anything relating to business or money, and there she was, all torn up about an old unpaid debt.”

Sam looked away, toward the dark window. It was tapping lightly with crystals of sleet. “I hated her, Jake. But after she died I missed her worse than if she'd kissed me good night every day of my life. Now you explain that.”

Jake felt like he was a long way from explaining anything to this woman. “So you decided to collect an old debt twenty-some years past due? Why?”

She continued to stare toward the window.

“Sam. They want some information out of us, something they think we both know about. Unless they satisfy their curiosity, I'm afraid they'll send us for a walk with their friendly boys, and that's gonna be it. Please, tell me the rest of this.”