The Whipping Boy (34 page)

“Mr. McCann, you ever hear about rock oil in these parts? Digging wells for it.”

“Well, there was some old boys up on Sue Bland's place trying to dig some kind of well. Didn't find nothin. Folks generally said they was crazy.”

“You think they are?”

“Oh, there's oil out there. I know where a few seeps are. I don't know what good the stuff is. Can I sell you somethin today?”

“We're travelin light . . . How much you get for one of those buckskins?”

Mr. McCann and Jake did a little bargaining over a buckskin suit and struck a deal. Jake asked Leonard to put it into his suitcase.

As they jogged through town, Leonard glanced at him furtively. “Perhaps we could stop and replenish my carrying bottle.”

“You can't drink in the morning, Leonard. Not if you're going straight.”

Leonard gazed wistfully as they passed the last shack on the edge of Tulsa that looked like it might have liquor for sale. The mules were still walking, warming up. Jake snapped the reins, eager to get down the road.

Leonard was silent for a while. Then he looked irritably at Jake. “Who told you I was going straight? I certainly said nothing about that.”

The road to Muskogee was over fairly flat country, but this was the lawless borderland between the Creek and Cherokee nations, place of train robberies, stomping ground of the Daltons and their like. Only fools rode through it with an easy mind.

Somewhere in the flatlands above Muskogee, they stopped at a country store to water the mules. There was a rough trough outside holding rainwater, and Grant and Lee took a good drink. The screen door slammed behind Jake, and he walked into a shadowy room with a few plank shelves. An old black man sat behind a long board, staring at him, chewing. At first Jake thought that there was almost nothing for sale, but on the dusty planks here and there between the mouse poison were cans of tomatoes, some melons, turnips, and a few other items. For thirty-five cents he bought a loaf of bread, two cans of milk, and a melon. He tried to engage the proprietor in a conversation, but the old man was close-mouthed. A shotgun stood conspicuously available. He'd probably been robbed. The freedmen—former slaves of Indians, many of them—were the worst hit by the latest outbreak of border lawlessness, and the marshals and tribal lighthorses didn't typically do a whole lot about it. Jake walked out of the gloomy store and pitched a can of condensed milk to Leonard, who looked at it as if it was a dead rat.

“Milk? Don't they have anything healthful to drink in there?”

“How bout a piece of bread, Leonard?”

He took a piece and chewed sulkily at it. Patches of dried thistles encircled the rain barrel. The afternoon wind had picked up. “What a place,” Leonard said, pulling his waistcoat around him. “It looks abandoned. Who's running the store?”

“Old freedman.” Jake split open the watermelon with his knife and offered Leonard a hunk. “Thank God for this year's melon crop.”

On they drove, through the afternoon, and their luck held— no thrown shoes, no broken wheels, no robbers—into Muskogee. It was past dark when they felt their way up the dark streets. Muskogee was much like Tulsa, on the edge of the Creek Nation, a rail and cattle head, but it was older and closer to Fort Smith, and the Creek Agency and Fort Gibson were nearby. It was a goodsized town, with more than fifty businesses, a power plant for electric light, a couple of mills, and a handful of schools. Its streets were washboards, with holes and pits and minor washouts, good for breaking horses' and mules' legs. And Muskogee stank with the best of them tonight, the sulfuric aroma of well water being almost as strong as the smell from the outhouses.

A large part of the downtown had burned down around the first of that year, and Jake went to a hotel where he'd stayed when he last traveled this territory, a boxy two-story building. The hotel was unpainted, dirty, decrepit, with greasy-smelling pillows, but Jake didn't have the spunk to ride around in the dark trying to find something better. It was just a place to lay their heads.

Leonard perked up considerably at the opportunity to go out and get his reward for remaining sober all day. “Shall we celebrate our safe arrival?”

“You're a grown man, Leonard,” Jake said grumpily. “You want to kill yourself with popskull whiskey, go ahead and do it.”

“Well, I certainly don't want to drink in the presence of such Methodist attitudes.”

“I ain't a Methodist,” Jake grumbled. But he decided he could use a drink himself.

They found a nearby saloon and lined up at the bar. Leonard ordered tequila and looked happy for the first time all day. “You know, I've been thinking about your situation.” He took a sip of tequila and smacked his lips. “It's a losing proposition.”

“You're in a good mood.”

“It's one thing to have your job and your pension snatched from you, another to lay your head on the chopping block.”

Jake scowled at him.

“If Dekker Junior really does know that his father intended to install you in his place, whether he's a killer or not he will certainly be ill disposed toward you. Also, you don't have any authority in the matter of his father's death. You're not a marshal. You're not a relative. Ergo, you should keep your distance.”

“Only authority I've got is the truth.”

Leonard grunted. “That and a nickel might buy you a cup of coffee, but it's short currency against a local big shot. Authority, my friend, consists of one or both of the following items: money and ropes to pull.”

“Well, I've got four hundred dollars in the bank and an old calf rope.”

“The four hundred won't qualify, I'm afraid. And the rope is no good unless it's tied to the private parts of certain local officials, which I assume is not the case.”

Jake again fell to worrying about Tom. All day he'd been worrying about him. Once more he told himself that he shouldn't have sent the telegram. “I'm going to hit the pallet. We have a ways to go yet.”

T
HE MOURNFUL SOUND
of wind going through the four-bit hotel briefly wakened Tom to early morning, and he saw Hack, wearing his duster, sitting on the stick chair looking out the window with his satchel in his lap. Tom didn't see him look inside the satchel, but he had the impression that Hack had just done so. Later, when Tom really did wake up, he was unsure whether this scene had happened or whether it was a short, vivid dream, like an eerily tinted photograph: blood-red sunlight coming through the window, and an expression on Hack's face that was at once baffled and decisive. Whether it had been a dream or not, Hack was now gone from the room, and he'd taken the satchel and everything else that belonged to him.

There was no note from him and no message left with the hotelkeeper.

Tom went outside, and as he walked along the tracks toward the station, he realized that it was nearly noon. He'd never slept this late in his life. Across the track in a muddy field, two little boys flew a red paper kite, and he stood around the tracks awhile, brooding on the playing children, oddly envious of their fun. He felt very uncertain and strange. The sky was such a solid winter grey that Tom doubted this morning's vision of Hack, with its apocalypse of red sunrise.

In the cold greyness of midday, Hack's revenge scheme seemed even more hopeless. Even if he succeeded, he'd be seen by someone and hunted down. Watching the two boys trying to keep the rag-tailed kite up in the gusty wind, it occurred to Tom that Hack might have brought him out here because he secretly hoped that Tom would stop him from his mission.

Whatever his intention was, in fact now Tom was the only one who could stop him. Around a bend in the track he saw a train, about to leave for the south, and he cut across toward the station, wondering if this might be the train Hack was catching. On the station platform a posted schedule showed that this was the second and last southward train for the day. Tom had no money to buy a ticket. He walked along beside the already moving cars, blinking in the coal smoke, his eye on the wide-open door of an unoccupied cattle car.

***

It was over a hundred miles to Durant, and this cold, splintery, dusty, smoky floor was the ultimate test of Tom's ability to sleep on trains. He actually did sleep some, although it kept crossing his mind that he was freezing to death. No one bothered to kick him off at the stops in Eufaula and McAlester. Black smoke covered and settled into his clothes and exposed skin.

In Durant he got off and waited outside the station, shivering, hoping to see Hack, but only one person, an old man, got off here. Whether Hack had arrived on the earlier train Tom had no way of knowing, but now he had to decide. It was about twelve miles to Bokchito, and it would be well into the night before he could walk the distance.

He had come this far.

He walked down the gloomy track toward the Blue River bottoms, trying to brush the black dust from his clothes. The lonely call of a whippoorwill penetrated the dusk. The wind for a while declined to a cold breeze, and the uniform grey sky broke into moving clouds. At the moment of silence before night, he was hungry and cold but somehow beyond those conditions, animated by nerves. He had seen no sign of Hack at all. Walking in deepening shadows into the night forest, he now doubted that Hack really had come down here. He was chasing a fantasy, returning to Bokchito alone.

At a little stream, Tom drank—the first thing he'd put in his stomach that day—and washed some of the soot off his skin. His new shoes were as broken in as they ever would be, but still they cut his ankles, and eventually he took them off, tied them by the shoestrings to a belt loop, and walked barefoot, his feet numbing in the cold. A few miles from his destination, he stopped and with a box of Paris Hotel matches made a fire in one of the tracks and sat close to it. The wind was picking up again. He slowly added sticks, listening to the coyotes and owls. Though Tom feared Bokchito, he felt a mysterious homesickness and kinship with the land itself.

He talked to himself while his feet warmed. “He's probably not here. He was just bragging . . .”

The fire cheered him. He had the thought, now for the second time, that even if he died tonight, he would still have been lucky. Jake was a friend, almost a father. And Sam, he thought, frowning into the flames. Why did thinking of her always make him ache? The attentions of a woman were still new and marvelous, but the better he'd gotten to know Sam, the more uncertain of her he'd become—of her grandness, her freedom, but also her secrets, her unspoken desires, the designs that she couldn't or wouldn't explain. In the hotel room two nights ago, she'd been so angry and melancholy, calling him Indian boy and whipping boy, asking him if he had ever had a mother . . .

In the windblown firelight Tom saw the girl child's photograph from Mr. Dekker's album. He could see it as clearly as if it were there in the flames—her game smile. He wondered if there was some kinship between Samantha and him that made them more like brother and sister than anything else. But then he had all kinds of uncertain feelings running around in him. He felt like his new life and past life were not as utterly separate as he had assumed—that somehow they were both of the same cloth, or were converging.

He looked away from the fire in the direction of Bokchito, and in a flash of blue moonlight he saw the Reverend in his mind's eye. A fierce soldier of God standing amid the smoking, twisted, blown-apart battlefield of human desire. God is compassionless, cold. Our fate is sealed before the moment of birth. Nothing we do matters until or unless we are chosen. Those who aren't chosen—the great majority, even at Bokchito—are not to be encouraged or discouraged. They are merely to be managed, put up with, the sick of soul, the half-alive, shades in the bleak waiting room of the flesh, doomed from their first breath of life to eternal torment.

Nearby in the forest, a bobcat made a sudden unearthly scream that Tom felt on the back of his neck. Staring into the dancing flames of the fire, he thought of another photograph in Mr. Dekker's sitting room, the picture of Dekker as a young man with his family—hawkish, fierce, as purposeful as a hunting animal. Upstairs in his room, slumped in a chair, the old man had looked so very different, his resoluteness crumpled once and for all around the bullet hole in his forehead. He had realized something before he'd died, made some discovery more painful than death.

With sensation warmed back into his feet, Tom found a walking stick, put out his fire, and went on down the narrow road, where the tall bottomland trees rose around him, their limbs clashing in what again was becoming a stiff wind.

It was sometime in the middle of the night when he passed the far fields of the academy farm. Crossing what the children called the big bridge, over the Blue River, he was in a curious state of mind, partly due to the cold. He still had no indication that Hack had been down the road, and for a moment he felt hopeful. Perhaps he could look in a few windows, sleep in the scalding shed, and then quietly disappear tomorrow morning. When he finally approached the great building in the forest, patches of moonlight and darkness were moving across sheds, trees, uncut brush, and all of it was terribly, depressingly the same.

The sight of the academy building took the energy out of him, like a blow to the stomach. He could have lived his entire life without ever coming back here. A tall brick structure as large as something in a city, improbable in this lonely country, grand and desolate and grim, with colonnaded porches on the second and first floors, many chimneys, and one pure decoration: a round, leaded attic window that looked almost like something in a church. One wing of the building had been added at a later date, its brick of a lighter color. Most of the boys' rooms were in this wing, on both floors. The Reverend lived in the old, main part of the building, in three rooms. A few of the saved ones—the flock—lived on the second floor directly above his rooms. For the last hour or so, Tom increasingly had hoped that he wouldn't have to enter the place. With no definite sign of Hack anywhere along the road, he'd hoped that he was on a wild goose chase.