The Whipping Boy (19 page)

As if talking to himself, Jake added, “I'd like to send you to Fort Smith, but we'll have to collect some money first. We've just about spent what little we did collect in this durn traveling circus. Be a negative proposition unless we get something done.”

As they walked downtown, Guthrie struck Tom as a real little city, with its brick buildings and straight streets. Everything about it testified to a busyness of the recent past, but unfinished, roofless frameworks of buildings were scattered like raw skeletons all over town, with exposed wood already greyed by the weather, rotting before it was painted. Big-windowed stores offered such things as bright red and green china, lithograph frames, and canopied brass beds but had few customers. Owners and clerks lurked in their own stores, looking guilty and worried, as if they were ashamed of having such fine places with no one visiting them. The more Tom saw of the city, the less inhabited and stranger it seemed.

The one place where there was a crowd was the land office, where men milled around a dusty yard, talking, spitting, watching each other with sharp-eyed glances. They were edgy, desperate, swaggering around the yard telling tales, trying to find out the score or talk up a deal. Wagons trickled in and trickled out, all moving southward with the chill wind. Among the three or four peddlers circulating in the crowd was a tiny Indian woman with a basket. “
Shoooelaces! Shooelaces! Buy laces, you penny pinchers!
” she called out repeatedly.

Tom saw her the same moment Jake did. It was Mrs. Oke, the lady who owned the hotel they'd stayed in the night of the flood. Jake went over to her. “What are you doin clear up here, Mrs. Oke?”

“Hello, Mr. Hardware,” she said simply. “I'm selling shoelaces. You gonna buy some from me?”

Jake reached into his pocket and bought two pair from her. “Do you have a place to stay?”

“Rollin like the tumbleweed,” she said. “An old woman ain't got no family, might as well see how far she can go, hey? I walk this far. You takin care of the handsome young man?”

Tom smiled at her. “I'm glad to see you, Mrs. Oke. How are you?”

“Oh, I'm all broke down and puny, but that's the way of old things. Did the white woman pull through?”

Tom felt a pang like something sharp sticking into his side, and couldn't answer. “She's fine,” Jake said, not elaborating. Jake went on talking with Mrs. Oke, asking her questions and leaning down to hear her answers.

The crowd was getting noisier, with men talking about the land rush in the Cherokee Outlet, complaining about failing to get land, and about cheating, and claims that had to be abandoned, and trying to make it to planting season. The sky had clouded up again today, and winter was in the air.

While Jake talked to Mrs. Oke, a black-bearded man nearby was reciting his tale of the land run to a cluster of people. “. . . Thirst, hell, we was all dry as seeds. I seen a woman fall on the line before the gun went off—fell like a gunnysack off her wagon. Weren't enough land fer all that bunch, and the cowboys was still in there, takin plots before we had a chance. Damn cavalry tooting around, supposed to run em out, but they didn't. Gun went off, we all whooped out, and time you got there, everwhere you come to was stakes already plugged in the ground. I finally found a piece. Got it marked out like they said, two stakes, left my whole bunch guardin it, lit out to the land office there in Enid. There was tents far as you could see, and more lawyers than tics on a hound! Stood in a line fer three days—wasn't exactly a line, neither, more like a big old pushin mob. I finally got to the front and argued with some damn clerk that claimed I had the wrong section, so I give in and hired a goddamn lawyer right there on the spot, paid him near all the money I had, he paid the goddamn clerk, just walked over and made change in that crooked bastard's pocket while he was busy cheating somebody else. Biggest bunch of crooks I ever seen in one place. I went back to my claim with the papers, all right, but stripped bare of money for groceries, which was too expensive to buy anyway. I'm goin back to Texas where I got kinfolk, to hell with free land.”

“Sir, do you still have the claim to this land?” someone among the listeners asked, a man with a high, large forehead, a cleanshaven thin face, and a remarkable mop of curly grey hair that flew out behind him as if he was standing in a headwind.

“Why you ask?”

“Because that land has some value, no matter how poor it is.” “Sold the damn claim fer about what I paid that goddamn lawyer. You a goddamn lawyer?”

“I have been many terrible things in my career, sir—”

Another man, beside him, said, “Uh-oh, here he goes.”

“I've been a drunkard, a seller of patent medicines, an actor on the less-than-great stage, a seducer of women, a beggar, a taker of drugs, a cynic—and I must concede that it all began with my being a duly empowered barrister at the bar in the state of Kansas. I had the finest law library in Arkansas City, more than a hundred tomes, inherited from my teacher, and I sold them one at a time when I embarked upon a checkered career, the peaks and valleys of which shouldn't be described in mixed company.”

“So you are a lawyer?” asked the puzzled Texan.

“Like all questionable habits, the legal trade has its charms, sir, and I have returned for a comeback. If you should need my services, I offer reasonable rates. I am, as they say, between offices, so ask for me by name, Leonard LaFarge, contesting lawyer.”

The Texan still was puzzled. “Another lawyer's the last damn thing I need.”

Tom noticed that Jake had turned away from Mrs. Oke and was listening to the exchange between the Texan and the lawyer. “Hello, Leonard,” Jake said. “What's going on?”

“Why, Monsieur Jaycox! I haven't seen you in weeks, my man. Have you, too, abandoned our poor village?”

Jake glanced at Tom. “Tom Freshour, meet Leonard LaFarge. And don't listen to a word the old rascal says.”

LaFarge smiled as he shook Tom's hand. He said to Jake, “But your countenance is clouded, my friend. Is the hardware business all that bad? You couldn't be as poor or as sober as I am. Shall we go off to a house of spirits where we can discuss these and other weighty matters?”

“I quit drinking in the daytime, Leonard. But there is something I'd like for you to find out for me.”

“Investigation is my true calling. What do you need to know?”

“Deacon Jim Miller,” Jake said. “I need to know who he's working for.”

Leonard's voice lowered. “Pray tell, why?”

“I want to know what he's doing now, who he's worked for in the past, whatever you can find out about him.”

“I can tell you in a word, Jake. Leave the man alone.”

Jake told him an abbreviated version of what had happened while the lawyer stood quite still, his grey mane of hair blowing in the cold, dusty yard. Tom noticed how quickly LaFarge changed from jovial to serious. “The man's life is hardly an open book. Anything I might find out would be susceptible to rumor.”

“Anything's better than nothing. Just find out what you can.” “At your command. I'll try to have a report for you as early as tonight. Meet me at the Golden Wall.”

Tom followed Jake as he departed from the yard. They walked on through town, past the newspaper building, where printing machines were whacking away, breathing out the sharp smell of ink. A newsboy stood outside selling an issue with a large headline: OPEN WAR IN ENID.

They went to the telegraph office, where Jake sent a telegram to McMurphy at Dekker Hardware Company:

 

NOT MUCH LUCK YET BUT AM SENDING IN CURRENT

COLLECTIONS WILL CONTINUE TOMORROW IN

CHOCTAW DISTRICT JAYCOX

 

Tom glanced down at the note and tried to guess whether it meant that they were going south again. A surge of yearning hit him—all of the longing and feeling about Sam that he had avoided today washed over him at once. He wondered where she was now, whether on a train, and whether she was asleep or awake, or thinking of the scenery going by or of Jake or perhaps of him.

J
AKE HAD NO
intention of going back to the Choctaw district, but until he'd found out a few things, he preferred for Ernest not to know where he was. Ralph Dekker had asked him to go along with Ernest until he got back from his trip, and Jake guessed he'd try to follow instructions. He wanted to send a message to the old man to find out whether he'd returned from St. Louis yet, but it wasn't safe to do it. Ernest cultivated a warm friendship with the delivery boys at the telegraph office. During the flood, Jake had happened out of the building one morning to see Ernest handing one of them a paper-money tip and the boy smiling and scraping like he was talking to the king of England.

Guthrie was—or had been—one of Dekker's few “overlapping towns,” for no logical reason belonging both to Peters and to Jake. Jake decided to call on his five most active customers today, for now shucking the whole funny business of the mortgage transfers. By late afternoon he and Tom had traipsed around and pulled in more than two hundred dollars. He discovered that Pete Crapo (the worst salesman on the staff) had been through town a couple of days earlier, putting pressure on customers to sign the transfers; two had signed, but two others who hadn't given Crapo a dime did give Jake some money on their accounts. This confirmed to him that salesmen ought to be collecting money rather than trying to get mortgages on their customers' property, and they ought to be doing it in their own districts. They should be making steady progress on the debt, not threatening to close people down.

Jake would send Tom to Fort Smith tonight with the money and mortgage transfers that they'd collected. Tom could find out whether Mr. Dekker had gotten back from St. Louis. Jake's one concern was that he might be sending Tom from the frying pan into the fire. But Fort Smith was surely safer than out here, and it wasn't Tom whom Miller was after.

Off and on all day, Jake had been wondering how much to tell Tom, and he finally decided that since he himself still didn't really know what was going on yet, and since his own arrangement with the old man was still hanging fire, the cleanest approach was just to give Tom instructions and not burden him with too many confidences. Jake already knew that Tom had a good memory; anything he heard once he seemed to effortlessly remember.

They stopped at the Quality Café, a smoky crowded place where a little man by the name of Stub Adder dished out the best twenty-five-cent suppers in Oklahoma Territory. Stub was always attending furiously to his cooking, and he wasn't much for conversation, but he'd once told Jake that he was a “reformed range cook.” He used to work on ranches and on cattle drives, which he claimed had spoiled him because of the way cowboys protected and praised even a tolerably decent cook.

Jake ordered two bowls of Stub's goat stew, cooked with tomatoes, onions, brown sugar, peppers, and whatever else—and he was pleased to see the expression on Tom's face as he tasted it and slipped into a trance of eating. Jake got a kick out of it when the kid enjoyed his food. Tom had been so rigid and skittish at the table when he first came to Mrs. P's that Jake didn't see how the boy could even digest his food. Although he was still stiff at the table, he looked like he might be uncoiling a turn or two.

They had a cup of Arbuckle's coffee and cobbler for dessert, and as they were finishing up, Jake told him how to proceed once he got to Fort Smith. He should be at the store at opening time to deliver the collected money and legal papers to the treasurer, McMurphy. He wanted Tom to keep an eye out for Ralph Dekker but not to ask about whether he was back from St. Louis. “Ask Edgar, maybe, but nobody else. As soon as Mr. Dekker's there, talk to him alone and tell him what happened in Violet Springs. If he has any messages for me, he can send them with you. He may want me to come to town right then. I'll be in Enid, which is north of here in the Outlet. You can tell the old man that, but don't tell Ernest or anybody else. I told them I'd keep traveling in the south, and I'd just as soon they believe it. After you've talked to Mr. Dekker, buy your train ticket at the last minute, straight through to Enid. Meet me there at the Plain Talk Inn. Can you remember all that?”

Tom nodded slowly. “Yes sir,” he said, but he looked confused. “Is Enid where they're having the war?”

Jake laughed. “They're having a little dispute over where to locate the train station. It ain't a war. Don't believe everything you read in newspapers.”

When Jake put him on the train, he repeated, “Enid. Plain Talk Inn.”

***

After Tom was gone, Jake worried a little less about Deacon Miller showing up, but he still felt as restless as popcorn in hot oil. He kept seeing the boy's face through the window as the train took off, imagining that he saw fear in his expression. Was he making a mistake sending him back there? He wandered over to the Christian Boarding Hotel with a newspaper but wasn't able to read.

As a hardware peddler, Jake was hardly the type to attract the attention of high-rent gunmen. Now and again over the years, he'd seen Deacon Miller in saloons, and he always wore the black clothes, and a lot of times he'd have a young aide-de-camp dressed up the same way trooping along with him. People would whisper all kinds of things about him—that he was mean as a scorpion but that he acted so polite about it that one of his many victims was said to have died saying “Thank you, Deacon.” Jake figured such stories to be mostly cock and bull, but whatever his manners were, it was probably true that the man was a professional killer. The question was who he was working for now.

Sam was on his mind, too: her strange offer on the train yesterday, the way she'd gone distinctly cool toward him after he'd turned her down, the way she'd acted last night when Tom and her had been caught by the hotel clerk—not angry or ashamed or even defiant; on the contrary, more annoyed than anything. She was a real woman of the world, unafraid of what others might think, she made that clear.