The Whipping Boy (32 page)

“Didn't come here to git our testicles shot off,” said one of them, looking startled. “Come to git some tail, money's as good as anybody else's.”

Miller slowly aimed the pistol at the general area of their midsections, and they became so frozen with terror that they didn't seem to know what to do, whether to disperse or huddle together even more tightly, trying to hide behind each other. Tom assumed that Miller was just scaring them, that he had no intention of shooting them, but the clerk said sharply, “Let em leave under their own steam. I don't want no more dead men to have to explain.”

They began to retreat, the whole clump moving backwards toward the door, a couple of them wiggling around like they had scorpions in their pants, and then they were all five trying to get out at the same time, none wanting to be last. Miller looked almost disappointed when they finally managed to get out the front door, falling in a great tangle of skinny limbs down the steps, struggling up, and running off. He followed them, two shots rang out, and screams faded into the night.

Tom got up, going for the same door the others had used. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Hack Deneuve on the stairway landing, his dark-ringed eyes fixed on him in surprise.

It wasn't until he was in the street and hurrying back toward the boarding house that Tom felt in his pockets and noticed that they had been cleaned out. He decided it was unimportant, since he'd had less than a dollar in pocket change. Not until later, lying on his couch at Mrs. P's, did he remember the other item he'd been carrying.

***

Tom woke up the next morning with those same haunted eyes fixed on him. Hack stood at the end of his bed, smirking. Tom raised his head slowly off the pillow.

“What'd you run away for?” Hack asked. “Deacon scare you off? Come on, let's get some breakfast.”

Tom didn't say much at first. He got up and did his ablutions, and directly they left the house and walked down Texas Avenue. It was after six, and the streets were waking up, with sweet smells from the large bakery down on the west side permeating the cool air, a milkman rattling by, a barbershop near Garrison Avenue opening, the barber standing outside in his shirtsleeves snapping an apron clean. The first horseless streetcar of the day rolled heavily by, looking less threatening to Tom now that he knew about it.

They went into a café off Garrison with a sign in the front window that said
DEPRESSION DINER: COFFEE AN
' 5
CENTS
. A stranger probably wouldn't have seen anything unusual about Hack, but as they began to talk, Tom noticed remarkable changes in him. In the past, Hack had been quiet and on the slow side; now he acted energetic and nervous. He used to not smile very often, but now he had an almost compulsive grin that continually melted into a little grimace of uncertainty and doubt. His eyes appeared to have gone more deeply into his face, and there were those rings under them, as if he wasn't getting enough sleep. He talked more, and bragged much more—about getting privileged information from important people.

“I knew they were gonna fire you. I hear things before they happen.” Hack smiled with the queer twist at the end. “I know the right people, Tom. I can help you get a job.” Tom acted interested, and Hack rambled on. “With money you can get anything—horses, land—it'll buy anything. Women,” he said, pointing with his thumb in no particular direction. “All they want is your money. They'll do anything for it.”

Tom asked nothing about Deacon Miller, although Hack made little hints about him. Nor did he yet ask Hack anything about Joel. Hack seemed hungry to have a friend, somebody to show off to, but he had something on his mind, too—some purpose, something he was leading up to, and finally he got around to it.

“Hey, I'm taking a trip today. You want to come with me? I'll pay the tickets. I've got an idea that I think you'll like.”

“A trip where?”

“The territory,” Hack said. “Muskogee.”

Tom didn't reply at first.

Hack added quickly, “I'm delivering papers. I've already been there three times.”

Tom chewed the last of his doughnut before he said, “Delivering papers where?”

Hack looked around the sparsely attended café and leaned over the table. “This stuff is secret,” he said. “I can't talk about it. I'm not supposed to know what I'm delivering. Look, why don't you go with me. It won't cost you anything. I'll tell you what's on my mind on the way.”

Tom thought of Jake's telegram. Now was his chance to get answers to some questions. But he had to wonder why Hack was being so friendly all of a sudden, after so long avoiding him around the store.

“You can't tell anybody you're going,” Hack added. “This has to be totally secret. It's just you and me.”

Tom went back to the boarding house and got a few things together, wrote a note to Jake telling him where he was going, and went to the station early in order to meet the first train coming in from the territory. Again no Jake. Jake might have decided to drive the wagon all the way back, in which case Tom felt a little better about not waiting to meet him.

The train to Muskogee left that afternoon, and Hack showed up wearing a black duster and galluses, looking like a younger version of Deacon Miller, which was both funny to Tom and a bit eerie. He was carrying a soft leather satchel, along with a small suitcase.

They took the Iron Mountain train west into the Cherokee Nation. As they rolled across the flatlands of the Arkansas River Valley, Hack began to talk about Bokchito. His face became heavy, the darkness around his eyes deepening. “How many times did that
sinti
beat you,
Chalak?”

Sinti
, one of the Indian words covertly used by some of the boys at the academy, meant “snake,” and
Chalak
was the shortened version of
Chalakki okla
, “Cherokee,” Tom's old secret nickname.

“How many times every week?”

Tom tried to shrug it off. “Enough.”

“Yeah, you were one of the lucky ones.” He looked at Tom directly now. “I'm going back, you know.”

Tom at first didn't understand.

Hack added, “Back to pay the Reverend a little visit. You want to go?”

“I thought we were going to Muskogee.”

“We are, but from Muskogee to Durant is one straight ride south on the Katy Railroad. It'll be no problem getting there. We can hide in the woods until night. Make our visit. Take a train back to Fort Smith. No one will know we've been there. It will be our secret.”

Tom had known that Hack had some reason for inviting him to go along with him, and he'd planned to act receptive, if for nothing else to keep him talking. But he hadn't expected this. Before he even fully comprehended, his skin started tingling, as if his body grasped what Hack was saying before his mind did. He looked out the window and didn't reply.

“You remember Motey Campbell? Motey was my friend. I saw the report that the Reverend sent in when he died. He wrote that Motey died of a fever. I thought I'd go crazy because I couldn't do anything. Hey, now I can do something.” Hack kept making his new, nervous, melting, worried smile.

“How'd you see this report?” Tom asked.

“It was my day of reckoning. A Tuesday, as usual. I went in, and the Reverend left to go to the privy. He told me to wait. I read what was on his desk. ‘Motey Campbell, age thirteen,' it said. “This unfortunate boy died on the Sabbath, August 19, of a sudden fever. He rests with his Creator.'”

Tingling and jumpy, Tom wanted to get up and walk away, but there was nowhere to go on the moving train except to pace the aisle. The idea of revenge reached out and wrapped its cool fingers around him. Suddenly he and Hack were old friends having an angry, intimate, whispering argument.

“Say it, man, you want to go with me.” Hack poked him in the ribs.

“It's the past. Just forget it.”

“I say we do him like he did us.”

“There are other ways.”

“What other ways? Name them.”

“We could write letters describing the place. We could send them to the tribe.”

Hack scoffed. “Oh, yeah. That's a great idea. Two breeds—kids—against the Presbyterian Mission.”

“So what do you want to do, go over there and beat him up? Make
his
back bleed? You're crazy.”

Hack smiled. He was trembling a little. “Feel under my coat,” he whispered.

Tom reached out and felt the hard thing under his duster. He was wearing a pistol.

“We're yellow if we don't, Tom. Yellow as dandelions.”

Tom completely gave up trying to be the clever detective. “Where is Joel?”

“What does that have to do with it? I told you already. He left is all I know.”

“Edgar said that you had some kind of argument with him.” “Hey, that old nigger doesn't know what he's talking about. Think about what I'm saying to you now, man. Don't change the subject.”

“Tell me about Joel first.”

“I told you all I know. He just went. They fired him, he went. He didn't tell me where. Look, are you with me?” Something about the turn of Hack's mouth told Tom that he was lying.

Tom looked out the window. They were nearing the river again. Across its brown surface a fire was raging in the scrubland near the bank, blazing across the water, with three men standing around on a sandbar watching it. The billowing black smoke looked like a ragged beast with its head lifted to the sky, its arms stretching out. Tom wondered if what was always in the back of his mind, the source of his nightmares, was not the fear of going back to Bokchito but the fear of wanting to. Wanting to so badly that he would secretly smolder inside until he walked through the door that he'd so often dreaded, until he looked into the Reverend's eyes with the Reverend's own dead-fish expression and declared that there was no outside authority, no way out, because this was
his
day of reckoning. Finally
his
.

Revenge is sweet, the old blind soldier had said. Just by thinking about it, Tom could taste it, as vivid and bitter and sweet as the wine that Sam had given him last night. But he remembered Mr. Dekker's dead eyes and wondered what killing left you with.

They stopped in Hanson, a raw-looking place with a store and a cotton gin, a cattle yard near the station, where a few stacks of fiber bales and twig crates of chickens sat on the shipping platform. They had a fifteen-minute layover during loading, and they got off the train to stretch their legs, Hack putting his delivery satchel under his arm and walking close beside Tom. Inside the little station they looked at Wanted posters, Hack with an arm dangled around Tom's shoulders. Bank robbers, train robbers, killers. Tom remained partly under the spell of Hack's idea, but the sudden chumminess, the way he stayed so near him, got on Tom's nerves. He was pushing Tom, trying to boss him, giving him that insinuating, melting smile.

Some miners got on the train at Hanson, and their car quickly filled with tobacco smoke. The language they spoke sounded German. At the academy they'd been introduced to several languages: a little French, German, even some Hebrew. Tom had never really understood why the Reverend absolutely forbade any Indian language. Getting caught speaking even single words was as bad as getting caught using obscenities. The boys were beaten for it.

“Did you ever wonder why he didn't let us talk Indian?” Tom said aloud.

“I don't wonder at anything he did,” Hack replied.

The train back up to speed, Tom looked out the window at the reds and greys and browns of early winter in the wooded hills. As they crossed a narrow river valley, he could see northeastward all the way to the majestic blue Boston Mountains. The tobacco smoke in the car became intoxicating, and Tom rode along in a partial daze with Hack's fantasy of revenge riding right along with him. Hack seemed to have become a different person, as if during the last month or two he had walked through a mirror and turned into his own opposite. The old Hack had been gentle, deliberate, and without much apparent guile; the person sitting beside him was threatening, conspiratorial, and full of secrets that he hoarded like gold coins. Tom didn't need Jake's advice not to trust him. It came naturally. Yet wrapped all around and among Tom's mistrust were a thousand strands of intimacy based on their old friendship.

They got off the train at Fort Gibson and took a mule-cart taxi to a fifty-cent hotel at the south edge of Muskogee. It was called the Acme, and in its lobby three shabby, bearded men sat around as if they'd been there for a week without moving. On the counter lay a stack of crudely printed magazines and pamphlets with titles like
The Voice of Labor, Industrial Solidarity
, and
Birth Control Review
. “Them go for a dime apiece,” the clerk said with a tobacco-stained smile. “Good readin for bad times, fresh outa Chicago.”

The only furnishings in their little square room were a chair, a slop jar, a tin cuspidor in a corner that was stained amber by innumerable misses, and a low home-built table by the one sagging bed. Wire mesh was nailed over the transom, and a single kerosene lantern provided light.

In the room, right away Hack started acting peculiar. He laid the delivery satchel on the floor by the bed, unstrapped and set his holster on the table, and loaded his pistol. It was a twenty-dollar .45-caliber revolver, of a kind sold by Dekker Hardware. He sat on the bed, opening and closing his hands around the walnut handle, aiming at the wall, pretending to shoot a cockroach that was walking up it.

“
Pchou!
”

Tom sat down on the chair. “What's in the satchel?”

Hack lowered the pistol to his lap. “Don't know. Ain't supposed to know. Ain't supposed to look.” He glanced down at the satchel and added, as if it didn't matter, “It's for somebody name of Crilley. I've come here before, always take it to his house on Sunday.”