The Whipping Boy (42 page)

Miller walked over, clamped her arm, and shoved her through the door.

The lawyer followed Miller into the hall and spoke hurriedly to him, then came back in. “Let's get it over, Jake. The old man brought a considerable amount of cash money with him from St. Louis on Sunday or Monday last week, and that money is missing. You know where it is. Tell me and we'll let you go, free and clear, no further trouble, long as you keep your nose out of Mr. Dekker's bidness. Despite all the other things you've done to incriminate yourself, that there's all we want from you. It's your ticket.”

Jake could feel the flush in his face. “I'll talk to Ernest.”

“Can you tell him where his money is?”

Jake didn't reply.

The lawyer sighed and shook his head. “I don't expect you to believe it, but I'm the one that's trying to make this easy. I told him I'd try to talk reason with you. The money's his. You know that. He'll have it one way or the other. So let's just git it over and done with.”

“I'll talk to him. Not to you.”

The lawyer stood up. “Like I say, I hope you don't intend to bring him in here and provoke him. I warn you, he's in a mood.”

They tied Jake to a chair and left him, and the longer he sat there without food or the chance to visit the toilet, the ornerier he felt. By the time his bladder had reached its limit, it appeared to be near noon. Eventually he started yelling, “Let me loose, I have to pee!” The skinny one ambled in and started to put a neckerchief around his mouth. “Let me go to the toilet, mister.”

“Do any more yellin and I'll tie them knots so tight your blood won't move.”

Finally the little lawyer reappeared and they took off the gag. “He's coming up. This is your chance. Tell him where he can find his money and we'll cut you loose.”

“I need to go to the toilet.”

“Ain't got time. He's coming now.”

Ernest Dekker was hurriedly talking in the hall as he approached the room. “. . . You tell me. All I know is what's in the telegram. Goddamn these fools!” The door burst open and he flew in as if he'd been shot out of a cannon. Fat Jack Peters was in the hall, but he caught sight of Jake and beat a retreat. Ernest came up close, his face red. He looked angry. “Jaycox, you know what I want.”

Jake looked him in the eye.

“You're pitiful, hiring a whore to do your dirty work. Hiding behind her skirts.”

Jake stared at him for a minute. “If you're referring to Samantha King, she ain't a whore. She's your half-sister.”

“I don't want
any
bullshit from you!” Ernest thundered. “Don't try to fiddle me around! I want to know where that money is. You're a dead goddamn son of a worthless bitch unless you tell me. So is she.”

Jake looked at the lawyer and said, “Samantha King is Ralph Dekker's natural daughter.”

The lawyer winced at this.

“Your father had an affair with a woman named Marguerite King, who lived in St. Louis. She had a child. That woman is your blood half-sister.”

The lawyer was still wincing, watching Ernest, who rolled his shoulders, showed his teeth, and assumed a false calm. For a moment he seemed to drift off into thoughts far away, then he turned his eyes down to Jake.

“Will you tell me where my money is?”

“I knew your father was going to St. Louis to borrow money, but I didn't talk to him after he got home. I was in the territory and had no contact with him. I can get a hundred witnesses to tell you that. I was in Guthrie and Enid.”

“You did talk to him before he left?”

“Yes I did.”

“And you talked him into this little scheme.”

“I didn't talk him into anything. Your father called me and told me what he was going to do.”

“What's that?” Ernest's voice could almost have been mistaken for calm.

“He wanted to pay off the debt, keep the store going.”

“And what else?”

“What else what?”

“What else did you plan besides paying off the debt?”

Jake was tempted to say “He planned to kick you out, Ernest,” but he knew that it would be asking for it. “I need to take a leak. Would you mind letting me go long enough to do that?”

“Listen to me. I've looked on every floor of the store, in every crack. I've taken apart his house. I've got a hundred and fifty thousand acres of land mortgages and land options and I've got to pay for twenty thousand more today, outright. You won't stand in the way. I'm going to make this payment, and I'm going to make it on time. I've got a dozen people hanging by their fingertips. Bankers, investors, important people. And fifteen minutes ago I got a telegram saying that twenty-five hundred dollars that was supposed to be delivered to Muskogee was not delivered, and that the boy who was supposed to deliver it has been found
dead
, and the goddamn money is missing, and the man it was supposed to be delivered to is feeling
very
unfriendly toward me. That makes forty-two thousand five hundred goddamn dollars you've stolen from me.”

“Mr. Dekker, uh—” The lawyer tried to interrupt him.

“Do you understand me, Mr. Salesman? I am not in a mood to be
fiddled
around. I want you to tell me
where
that money is. If you don't, I'll get it out of that woman. I don't care if she's the lost sister of Jesus Christ.” Ernest put his face down close to Jake's. “You were making deals with my father, you son of a bitch. Slippin around behind my back. And then you killed him, or had him killed.”

“I think we ought to stick to the subject, sir,” said the lawyer. Dekker looked at him with disdain, then back at Jake. “Our lawyer here thinks that you won't tell me where the money is if I tell you that I know you killed my father. He thinks that'll make you realize that you're so far up shit's creek that it's no use talkin. I think, though, that we better get down to the nut cuttin. Either you or somebody hired by you did it.”

Jake was about to give up on his bladder. Even if they let him loose, he'd never make it down the hall.

“Now tell me where the money is, or the remainder of your life will be real unpleasant, Mr. Salesman.”

“Oops,” Jake said, cutting loose. “Now looky there, you scared the piss out of me.”

“Teach him some manners,” Dekker said, and was gone from the room.

T
OM WATCHED
the whitened landscape go by through a little barred window in the caboose. It was declining toward dusk, but with the blizzard passed, the air was warming.

Mr. Haskell's friend who worked for the railroad had gotten Tom, Leonard LaFarge, and Mr. Haskell onto a freight train headed for Tahlequah. Starting out across the river, the lawyer filled Mr. Haskell in on a few of the details—the land scheme, the attempt to bribe a Muskogee judge—none of which surprised the old veteran much. They sat around a coal stove at the back of the caboose, Tom with the pistol that he scarcely knew how to shoot, Mr. Haskell with his bird-hunting shotgun, and LaFarge unarmed.

“Where's your gun?” Mr. Haskell asked the lawyer.

“My tongue is my weapon, sir.”

“Paying these boys a social call, you ought to be carrying the difference.”

“In my case, the difference is here.” LaFarge tapped his head. “In the old brain box.”

Tom spoke over the clacking of the rails, his own voice sounding strange to him, as if it was someone else's. “I know where Ralph Dekker's money is.”

“You what?” LaFarge said. “For pity's sake, Tom! Then we should have brought it!”

“It's in the fireplace at the old man's house. Burned up.”

LaFarge rubbed his stomach and stared. “Burned up? As in gone, evaporated? How do you know?”

“I went to his house. Stacks of hundred-dollar bills were put on burning logs. You can read the ashes.”

LaFarge stared at him. “Who'd burn up that kind of money? Are you sure?”

Tom shook his head.

“Anything else you haven't mentioned? Do you know how this happened? I mean, since you know everything else.”

Tom looked out the little window again. That was all he wanted to say. “The money's burned. They can see it for themselves. I don't know how it happened.”

Gazing across the snow-covered land, Tom thought about Sam. Sam had been on his mind without cease from the first minute he met her, a steady, burning presence—she who had made herself an orphan, who had drifted and then taken her fate into her hands.

They were passing rows of squatters' shacks and dugouts near the rail line. In places along the blackened rails the snow had melted, and at one point a single young child sat playing on an ash and coke pile, staring at the train as it roared by not twenty feet away. Tom wondered about the boys at Bokchito—whether the mission would send another principal, or whether they'd let the academy fall into the dust, where it belonged.

“Tom!”

He looked at the lawyer. He hadn't been listening.

“That's all you know?”

He nodded.

A brakeman was riding with them in the caboose, at the moment lying asleep on a bench, and Tom realized that this was the first time a train hadn't made him sleepy. As they slowed, the brakeman woke up as quickly as a cat and without even glancing out said, “Okay boys, you got Park Hill coming around the bend. You goin huntin?”

“Might say that,” LaFarge said.

“Watch out about gettin too close to the old seminary,” the brakeman warned. “Can't tell what might be goin on up there.”

“Why?”

“Some of the Indins in Tahlequah still use that place now and again for their little what you might call whoopie camp, if you know what I mean. There ain't no regular passenger service to Park Hill, so the boys down at the station make arrangements, just like you done, gettin rides for girls. Some of em come out of the Paris Hotel, they say. I wouldn't know about that. But I do know I have done rode this glory wagon with twenty of em packed in here tight as a tin of sardines.”

“That must be very painful for a Christian man,” LaFarge said.

“I tell you what. Cause even a old Christian man to get red in the comb.”

“So certain Cherokee politicians keep the old seminary building as an out-of-town whorehouse.”

“Well, it ain't no church-meetin place and ain't no stomp dance. This here's hard drinkin and plain foolishness.”

The three of them got off in slush, a hundred yards from what looked like an abandoned station, and walked toward it as the train pulled on. They crept inside the old station, which currently was being used as a chicken house. The chickens were roosting. From the station they could see, over a hill, the tops of a couple of multistoried rock buildings, one of which appeared to be burned out.

Mr. Haskell looked out the window at the back of the station. “Smoke's coming from the chimneys. I guess we're in the right place.”

LaFarge got out his bottle of Dr. Poole's Stomach Relief and drank it slowly, making faces between nips. “Park Hill,” he said. “The Cherokee Female Seminary. Isn't this where they put out the Cherokee newspaper?”

“Yep,” said Mr. Haskell, finding a place not covered by chicken droppings to sit on. “Printed in Cherokee.”

In Cherokee?
Tom wondered to himself.
You could print in Cherokee?

LaFarge held up his bottle to see what was left. He took a final couple of nips, screwed on the top, and set the medicine bottle down carefully.

“So you think they're here doing bidness with Cherokee politicians?” Mr. Haskell asked.

LaFarge looked vague. “They're doing something nefarious. I don't know what. And they're doing it outside Judge Parker's jurisdiction.”

The old soldier looked sour. “Well, how do we handle it?”

“You two stay under cover—here, I guess. I'll go in and talk to them. If I don't come out within half an hour, it'll be up to you.” “Go up that hill and you'll be like a hen at a mass meeting of coyotes,” said Mr. Haskell. “We could wait until later tonight. Scout the place out. Maybe sneak in.”

LaFarge shook his head. “We have to talk to them. I think I can get their attention.”

“How?”

“Don't worry. I think I can do it.”

Mr. Haskell looked skeptical. “You're the brains, I guess.” LaFarge was at the door. He turned and said with aplomb, “Give me a half hour.” He smiled and headed out.

Tom watched through the back window as the lawyer trudged up the hill. Mr. Haskell stood next to him, shaking his head. “That man's crazy as a professor with nine degrees, but I like him.” He looked at his watch, cracked open his shotgun, and put two shells into it.

Tom suddenly became very aware of surfaces in the darkening ten-by-ten room—Mr. Haskell dressed in a boiled shirt, grey waistcoat, blue overcoat, and a comfortable hat that was turned up a bit. Tom was wearing the buckskin suit and his new coat. It was quiet except for the lulling sounds of the chickens. Tom picked one of them up and she didn't stir. Even though she was asleep, her feet quivered. Her little comb had fallen over her head like a pretty red hat, and the shine of her feathers reflected the last light coming through a broken front window. When he was very young, Tom used to play among the chickens at Bokchito whenever he could. Chickens were the closest thing he'd had to pets, and he still had an affection for them.

Mr. Haskell leaned against a wall. “Reminds me of the Wilderness.”

“The Wilderness?”

“Eighteen and sixty-four. First of May.” Mr. Haskell pushed the upturned brim of his hat higher and stared at the chicken.

It took Tom a second to realize what he was talking about. Haskell had a reputation for never telling war stories, presumably because he was a Yankee and outnumbered at the boarding house.