The Whipping Boy (12 page)

“Oh?”

Jake took the cigar out of his mouth. “Guthrie may be the capital, but it's been dead lately. Got three or four big hotels already that aren't doing so good. Now, Perry and Enid are a different story. They're crying for hotels. Enid has ten thousand people in it, and the buildings are just coming up. Trouble is, there isn't much cash out there.”

“You seem to know this country well.”

Jake smiled a little. “I've been traveling west of the river for about twenty-five years, but I can't say I know it all that well. Nobody does. Changing too fast. Booms and busts travel like firestorms. When it busts, it really busts. Five years ago I would have thought Guthrie was getting bigger'n Fort Smith. Bigger'n anything. Now it's dead as a sinker doughnut, a lot of people moving north to the good cropland in the Outlet. Down here in the old Choctaw country”—Jake nodded toward the abandoned house—“well, you can see what's happened to that. Civilized Tribes say they want to keep what's left of their land—call it Sequoyah. Keep their own separate state between Oklahoma Territory and Arkansas. I don't know. There's always some kind of mess. Runnin boomers out, then lining them up and runnin them in. Never can tell whether you're on the edge of the future or the ruin of the past. Hell of a place to try to set up a new hotel.”

“Maybe I ought to go in business with you.”

Jake didn't respond, although Tom sensed that he wanted to. Again, an uncomfortable silence.

“Were you ever married?”

Jake laughed incredulously. “Married? Not as far as I remember.”

Tom watched her eyes in the firelight. After a while she said, “I'm not really fixed on hotels. My mother owned one.”

“Oh? I've been to St. Louis a time or two. Maybe I saw it. What hotel was it?”

She hesitated, then said, “The King.”

He thought a minute and shook his head. “Why'd you leave St. Louis for this durn place?”

“I had reasons,” she said quietly, as if to discourage any further talk about it.

Jake threw the cigar into the fire and stood up. “I guess we'd better try to get some sleep.”

They put more sticks onto the fire and tried to find comfortable places on the ground. She took out her suitcase and offered Jake and Tom pieces of her clothing, dresses, to sleep under, which made Jake laugh more strenuously than Tom had ever seen before. Jake turned down the offer, and Tom felt bound to do the same, although it would have been inexpressibly wonderful to sleep with her clothes covering him. “Suit yourselves,” she said. Tom took off his uncomfortable new shoes, collar, and tie, and curled up not more than ten feet from where she was, raising his head a few times and looking at her surreptitiously.

Sometime late in the damp of night, unable to sleep, Tom went up to the two-lane road to take a pee, and while there he had the odd feeling that someone was nearby. He looked off toward the woods and could almost feel the closeness of the academy, as if it were just through the trees. The night smelled the same here as it did at Bokchito—the same oak and ash forest, the same softly calling owls. Tom suddenly fell into complete, heart-pounding wakefulness, and he had the overpowering urge to run, he did not know why, just to run anywhere. He tried to force himself to walk back to their camp spot but veered off through the wet grass, walking faster until he really was running, southward across a field. He ran beyond the ruined house before he tripped and fell on his face and lay there, gulping air.

At Bokchito, many times he had awakened in the night with this impulse to run, almost as compelling as the desire to breathe. This was the first time he'd actually done it, and now there was no longer anything to run from. Realizing that he hadn't said a night prayer, he rolled over and said it on his back, looking at the stars. Walking back to the camp, Tom heard an animal snort and went over to the mules. They were dead asleep, silent except for the heavy whisper of their breathing. Tom raised his head and looked around. The noise had sounded farther away.

When he finally slept, not long before sunrise, he dreamed that Samantha King was riding beside him through smoking red light, as if the sunset had caught fire across the land. A raking, hot wind was blowing in their faces, his heels were on fire, the mules kept disappearing and reappearing in the billowing light, and they were somehow hitched to and pulling the entire Armstrong Academy building, filled with silent boys, the Reverend glaring from the upper balcony like the captain of a ship looking out at sea. In the dream he was very aware of how heavy the building was, and how improbable it was that the mules could keep pulling it.

***

Jake got them up early, when there was just a hint of light in the east. Tom tried to put on his collar and tie, was unable to, and put them into his pocket. The new shoes were painful on his heels, but he assumed this was the price you paid for good hard-leather shoes. The mules refused to wake up and stand together for the harness, and he had to whack and push and pull them, and even after he got them together, they had a way of turning their heads or moving just enough to prevent the harness. Old mule tricks like twisting their ears had no effect on them. Tom finally had to hobble one tight and virtually pick the other up and set him in a different place. When he got the harness on, he noticed to his embarrassment that Miss King was standing there watching him, smiling.

By midday they'd gotten bogged down several times and had to push, had to lay paths of sticks and rocks ahead of the wagon and push it from behind in shin-deep mud, had to move and skirt fallen trees, had to coax and yell at the mules, and a couple of times to backtrack. They had no food, and their only water was from sulfurous, hard-water streams. When they at last rode into Durant, they were as haggard and dirty as gypsies in a rainstorm. Tom was too tired to feel anxious about Durant—about the fact that this was the town, the only town, he had known in his previous life.

Jake got rooms for them in the Red Rock Hotel, where the hotelkeeper was a white man who smiled a lot, showing off four gold teeth. Jake talked him into serving them an early supper. It was cornmeal mush, cold potatoes, and cucumber pickles, which they ate in voracious communal silence. Afterward Jake and Tom sat on the front porch, while Miss King disappeared for a rest. Tom took off his shoes, and Jake smoked an evening cigar, quickly growing heavy-eyed. “I'm turning in early. There's something I need to tell you.”

Tom looked at him through the haze of his own exhaustion.

“If anybody asks you any questions about Dekker Hardware, don't answer them, don't even try to. That includes Miss King. Any kind of questions at all. Now, we ought to be starting out early in the morning. I think we'll keep those useless mules at least until we get to Guthrie.”

Tom was confused but at the moment too inert to ask any questions. Jake got up stiffly and walked into the hotel. Tom's stomach was full, he was glad to have his shoes off, and his body was strangely pleasured by soreness. He remained in the cane chair, looking out at Durant's main street. Students who did well in their recitations were allowed to ride here with the Reverend to do Tuesday shopping—a mixed blessing, since one had to be close to Reverend Schoot all day. Bider's General Merchandise, directly across from where he now sat, was the place where they always bought supplies, and many times Tom had waited outside with the two or three other lucky boys of the week while the Reverend strutted inside to place his orders. The Reverend usually had the three boys stand outside in a line, “at ease,” until he'd made the week's acquisitions, then he would come to the door and allow—order—them to walk up the street to “see the sights.” This stroll up the long block of the dirt street was their reward for good schoolwork. There were seldom very many people in town on Tuesdays besides the few regulars hanging around outside the pool hall, so the sights didn't change much from week to week.

Near sunset, Miss King appeared on the porch, looking sleepy from her nap, and she asked Tom to escort her to a nearby bathhouse. When he got up she took him by his arm. “I see you gave the shoes up.”

“No,” he hurried to say. “I just took them off for a while.”

The pool hall had the usual congregation of squatters and lean-ers. Tom could smell them twenty feet away. He'd been taunted by them just about every time he and the other two boys marched up and down the street in their weekly moment of freedom.

“Eh,
han-shulush!
Where you get
na hollo ahoyo!
” one yelled, and a couple of them snickered aloud, but their tone was different now, envious rather than scornful.

The bathhouse itself—just the sight of it—was an even more direct contact with his past. He was walking toward the box-and-strip shack as he had often done before, and he got the queasy feeling that he was actually walking into his past. The Indian woman who ran the bathhouse had dark, sun-leathered skin. Tom had occasionally spoken to her before, but he expected she did not recognize him this evening. He'd often wondered about her—whether she had a husband or children, how she'd ended up here. The academy boys called her Apache, but they didn't really know anything about her.

Miss King paid her. The woman heated water on an open fire that was smoldering out back, and ushered them into a tiny room with two corrugated metal tubs separated by a ragged piece of canvas thrown over a line. She carried in buckets of heated water and said peremptorily, “Take off,” and when Tom hesitated—he hadn't thought he'd be taking a bath, too—she grabbed the top button of his shirt and tugged at it. “Take off!” She had a broad, flat, ageless face, high cheekbones, and fierce black eyes.

She waved the back of her hand at him and pushed through the canvas, he quickly stripped down and got into the tub, and she brought in more buckets of the hot, milky, pungent water, pouring it into his tub, then into Miss King's on the other side of the canvas, then she disappeared for a while, leaving them alone in the steamy shack. The only sound was the slight lapping of water. Light coming through a small, yellow-papered window reddened in the winter sunset. The Indian woman came in and lit a kerosene lantern on Tom's side, and another on Miss King's. The smell was sweet to Tom. Miss King sighed, and he glanced through a triangular tear in the canvas and saw her in the lantern-lit steam from the breasts up.

He leaned his head back and looked at the roof. He had the peculiar image of himself exploding out of the tub, going clear through the roof of the shack.

“Tom?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“How old do you think I am.”

“I don't know.”

“Make a guess.”

He swallowed. “Well . . . twenty-five years old.”

“I'm twenty-three.”

He wasn't sure how to respond to this revelation.

“Will you stop calling me ‘ma'am'?”

“Yes ma'am—I mean yes.”

The Indian woman came into Miss King's side and started washing her with strong-smelling soap. Tom heard her groan with pleasure and again looked through the tattered canvas. Twenty-three? She lay back in the tub as she was being thoroughly soaped up on the shoulders, breasts, and down her stomach. His penis had risen and broken through the surface of the milky water and gone tight against his stomach, and when the washerwoman came through the canvas, he scooted down to hide it under the water.

She took him firmly by the shoulders and pushed him forward in the tub, then started rubbing his back with a big bar of lye soap, across his shoulders and up his neck, then downward, making vigorous small strokes over his muscles and the little ridges of scars on his back. Finishing at the top of his buttocks, she again took him by both shoulders and pushed him back against the sloped tub. He quickly pulled up his knees. She splashed water on his face, then moved from there on downward, to his chest and stomach. She washed all the way down, knocking against his hard penis and taking no more notice of it than anything else. She then turned to his feet, and beginning with his toes worked up his legs and across his thighs and around his buttocks and genitals, even briefly the length of his penis, washing it! Still holding it, she turned her implacable, knowing black eyes on him for a moment, and gave him just the shadow of a look, almost a smile.

That was all. She was gone.

A woman had taken hold of his hard penis. He lay there in the steam, not even wanting to peek through the canvas, he felt so strange. And she had recognized him.

“Jake doesn't like me,” Miss King sighed.

Tom breathed the mist. He couldn't think what to say. There was something at once calming and exciting about her lazy tone. The entire central part of his body was tingling with anticipation.

“Tom?”

“What?”

“Do you know why Jake doesn't like me?”

“No!” Tom said. “He likes you fine.”

“How's your bath?” she asked.

“Very good.”

“Tom, did you know that you're a handsome young man?”

He stared at the slow, curling flame of the hurricane lamp.

“You're not very experienced with women, are you?” she said.

Experienced? With women? He knew that women and men mated in a way similar to the animals, they “knew” each other, and he had read and been told that it carried great peril when done for the wrong reasons, or too often, or not in the right way, and could cause the loss of ambition, the plague of alcohol, destruction of nerve cells, and other calamities—even, according to the first book of the Bible, the direct intervention of a wrathful God. But the precise details of how men and women went about “knowing” each other, or indeed why they did it at all when it involved such awful menace, he didn't fully understand.

“Tom?”

“What?”

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever seen a woman's body?”