The Whipping Boy (36 page)

Inside the satchel was also a letter, a plain envelope with
John Crilley / Muskogee / I. T
. written neatly on the outside. It was sealed.

He walked up the embankment to the railroad track and stood looking toward the south. Although he'd been traveling northward, he still was not far from Texas. Texas was like a different country, he had heard. People went there and began new lives.
GTT
, they wrote on their cabin doors—gone to Texas. He could go there and start a whole new life. A third life. Find a place and settle in, maybe pass for a white man—a white man with money. He sat on a rock and put his head down, unconsciously running his fingers through his hair. He thought about those evenings when he and Jake came home to Mrs. Peltier's. The good suppers, sitting with the men playing cards, the easy acceptance they'd shown him. The way Jake obviously cared about him. He thought about the danger Jake could be in. And Sam King. Thinking about her weakened and bewildered him.

If he returned to Fort Smith and confessed the truth, he would be hanged. For an instant, he saw Johnny Pointer being dragged to the gallows, begging not to die. Tom sat, hands slowly running through his hair, thinking hard. Had anyone known that he was leaving Fort Smith with Hack? The note he'd left for Jake was the only evidence. If Jake wasn't back yet, he could destroy it.

Stubbornness had made Tom avoid the habit of lying. At Bokchito, the ultimate defiance was to not be a liar. I am not saved, he had always admitted, I am not chosen. But he knew he could lie and keep a straight face about it. If he returned to Fort Smith, he had better be able to.

He went down the embankment, untied his horse, and rode north.

***

Monday morning, well before light, Jake sat on the edge of his bed under a wall lamp, admiring Tom's flawless hand—his gracefully double-backed
D
, sweeping
J
, and evenly inclined letters:

 

Saturday Morning

Dear Jake
,

In case you arrive while I'm gone: I am going to Muskogee with Hack Deneuve. He knows about what has been going on and he may talk to me. Deacon M. is staying in the Paris Hotel. I saw him at the hardware store, too, and believe that he works for them
.

They fired me on Thursday
.

Sam is here, staying at the Main Hotel. She came back from St. Louis to talk to you
.

I'll be back
.

Tom

 

Jake had read the note when they'd arrived last evening, but he'd been almost too exhausted to comprehend it. The last few miles of their day-long trip from Muskogee had consisted of open warfare with Grant and Lee. Fighting with two thirty-year-old mules was worse than fighting two eight-hundred-pound boulders, since these particular mules were not only obstinate almost beyond belief but also they looked at him out of their beady eyes with a hard-edged glint of triumph, as if bragging about it.

Jake had actually begun the day feeling affectionate toward them. They'd acted fine coming out of Muskogee, traveling at a good clip. But around Sallisaw they started getting stiff, and pretty soon it wasn't a matter of their walking at whatever pace they wanted, but absolute, intractable, full-bore balk. It would have been easier to have shot them than what he ended up doing, which was to trudge along beside them with a jerk-line arrangement, pulling and pushing and kicking and carrying on. Leonard was no help, since all he did was sit in the wagon complaining about his stomach. Between the mules and the lawyer, it was a long day.

And here was Tom's note, which let him know that whatever difficulty he'd had getting here might be the least of his troubles.

He had suspected that Deacon Miller was working for Ernest, but seeing it delineated in Tom's clear hand made it unpleasantly plain. But was Miller
openly
working for him?

Yesterday it had been obvious to Jake that Ernest had hired Miller, but the closer he stared it in the face, the more peculiar it looked. Why would a businessman—a businessman with Judge Parker's crossbeam a hundred yards from his front door—hire a killer to stalk an employee? Why not just fire him? This was the wrong side of the river for that kind of behavior.

Jake left Tom's note on the table so Leonard could read it when he woke up, went down to the kitchen, and chugged a cup of cold leftover coffee. He hurried up the alley to the wagon yard, where he ignored the mules, who were still off in mule dreamland. He snugged a borrowed saddle onto a brushy-tailed mare that he sometimes used in town, and in the chill last blackness of night rode her at a gallop to the store. He let himself in the back door with his key and walked into the unlit shipping room.

He found matches in a drawer of the shipping desk and lighted the wick of a lantern, and what he saw—or didn't see—made him wonder whether its meager light was playing tricks on him.

The shipping room was empty except for a few crates and barrels here and there. Downstairs, he found the main display room to be similarly empty. The long front desk had a single catalogue sitting on it, but there wasn't much else in an otherwise stripped room. Mystified, Jake walked back up the stairs to the second floor, and from there up another flight, and another, finally to the top, discovering one floor at a time that the building was stock-less.

He walked through the stark void of the store with increasing disbelief. Back downstairs, he went to the sporting goods storeroom, which was also barren of goods. Beneath a wallboard display of the 102 bullets currently for sale by the Winchester Arms Company was the old man's desk. Several drawers were open and papers hung out, as if someone had rifled through them.

He sat in Ralph's chair and breathed the vaporous cold, trying to fathom the store's emptiness.

Across the front room, the big office was locked, but he had a key and let himself in. Lantern held high, he surveyed the place. The air was sour with lingering tobacco smells. In the wastebasket were a few notes that looked like property descriptions. He entered Ernest's small inner office, made sure the blinds were shut, and set down the lantern on the desk. A standing ashtray was full of the butts of pre-rolled cigarettes. Across the top of the desk was a large sheet of thick paper. It was a map of the Indian Nations and Oklahoma Territory, with ovals and circles drawn in various places, along with tiny squares which generally appeared around towns all over the map. It was a detailed map of the areas that the salesmen had been told to collect. The little squares were apparently places where mortgages had been signed. In a top corner was a series of numbers, crossed out, leading to a final number: 130. The one area where there weren't a lot of squares was the Choctaw Nation, where Jake himself had been sent to collect. He found a pencil in a drawer and did a quick sketch of the map, roughly copying some of the details.

Putting the pencil back, he noticed a commonplace book in the back of the drawer. He sat still for a second, listening to the building, then pulled it out. On one page was a draft of what appeared to be a telegram.

 

To: Master's Hardware, Little Rock:

Am clearing inventory at prices severely reduced below supplier costs. Will sell complete stock. Total supplier cost fifty-three thousand dollars, to be sold at twenty thousand, negotiable to eighteen cash purchase. If interested in buying, please contact me immediately
.

 

Jake looked up. He thought he'd heard a sound somewhere in the building. Quickly, he glanced through the rest of the notebook. Somewhere at the back he found a page that included a short list of names with dollar notations:

 

Shelby, $4

Bradley, $1

John Crilley, $10

 

He shut the back door and walked outside, beyond the wagon yard to the place where he'd tethered the brushy-tail. He stood beside her for a minute, listening. Morning was coming to a cloudy and very cold day for this early in winter. He rode to the Main Hotel and asked after Miss King.

The clerk gave him a funny look. “Afraid she's not here. Miss King is popular this morning. She left earlier. With another gentleman.”

“Another gentleman?” Jake said.

“Two other gentlemen, actually.”

“Did you notice who it was?”

The clerk shook his head. “You're welcome to leave her a note, sir.”

Jake looked at him, trying to decide whether to push it. “Can you tell me what these gentlemen were dressed like?”

“I wasn't here. Another clerk mentioned it.”

Jake took a pencil from the desk and wrote a note to her, saying that he was in town now and asking her to see him.

Back at Mrs. Peltier's, Jake found Leonard still in bed. Almost as soon as Jake shook him, Leonard swung his legs out and put his feet on the floor, as if intending to get right up, but that was as far as he got. Leonard was generally hard to wake up. He had to bitch himself awake in the morning. Today he wiped at his face and stared at the wall and with a sleepwalker's vacuous expressiveness cursed the one responsible for waking him up. Finally he breathed a theatrical sigh, wiped his face several more times, got up, and padded across the room to the water closet, muttering.

Jake fired up his little gasoline burner, boiled some sheepherder's coffee, and when Leonard came out he handed him a cup of it without a word. Leonard started drinking, still muttering and knocking, like a boiler trying to get up to steam.

Jake sat down at his table, spread out his copy of the map from Dekker's office. He thought about what he'd seen at the store. By the time both of them had swallowed a couple of cups of coffee, Leonard had reentered the land of the living and was asking questions. “You say there's no stock at all?”

“It's empty as a hull. Stripped. I saw a draft of a telegram to Master's Hardware in Little Rock. Apparently he sold the whole inventory to them for less than half what it cost.”

Leonard had already read the note Tom had left for Jake, and now he read it again. He eventually got up and began slowly pacing. He stopped and pointed at the
130
in the upper right corner of Jake's copy of the map.

Jake looked up. “You tell me.”

“How many salesmen are there at Dekker?”

“Eight or nine, counting the front desk.”

“How much total debt do each of you carry.”

“Varies according to how much we turn over. I was carrying over twenty thousand in the northern district, but it averages less than that. Maybe fifteen.”

“So the store's got over a hundred thousand dollars accounts receivable?”

“Hundred twenty, maybe. Nobody's paid up this time of the year, even when things are normal. It takes a while for everybody to clear their debts after the crop's shipped. Some of them wait until the last minute before spring ordering. And of course this year—”

“How much is he transferring these debts at?”

“Twenty-five cents an acre is what he told us.”

Leonard sat down on the bed and stared at Jake. “Then the 130 is how many acres are already signed over.”

Jake raised his eyebrows.

“A hundred thirty
thousand
acres,” Leonard said, shaking his head. “You have to take this to somebody.”

“What do you mean?”

Leonard held up fingers and enumerated. “Widely respected merchant dead under suspicious circumstances. Son turns wholesaling company into a shell for land scheme. Bankers implicated. A man in town who recently tried to murder you. Solid indications that you are persona non grata. Far be it from me to be a voice of reason, Jake, but either you talk to somebody like Parker or you leave town. There's no other reasonable choice.”

Jake squinted at the map. “I'm wondering why he dumped all the merchandise. It won't take the store long to go down with no stock to sell. Word will get around. Customers will start jumping ship.”

Leonard got up and walked over and looked out the window. “You told me he was a gambler. This is his big bet. He doesn't care about the store. He's turning it into land.”

“But if he can't legally own tribal land—?”

“Gus Wall was right about that. The white courts will probably go along with just about anything tied to an actual debt.”

“It ain't fair to take somebody's property at twenty-five cents an acre.”

“It's just a mortgage, Jake, a guarantee of repayment. The debt holder has the full right to buy it back.”

“With what?” Jake said. “Are you saying the government will go along with this?”

“Judge Parker used to try to keep the sooners out, but Congress chopped his district in half. He no longer has authority over there. It's gone beyond one judge's ability, anyway.” He looked at Jake. “Did you find anything else this morning?”

Jake poured another kick of muddy coffee. “I tried to find Sam King. You saw on Tom's note—”

Leonard nodded.

“Well, she wasn't there. She disappeared with ‘two gentlemen' early this morning.”

“I mean at the store, when you were snooping in the office. Did you see anything else there? Anything at all.”

Jake shook his head. “There was somethin in the back of a notebook about Bradley and Shelby. That's probably Shelby White. Those two are with the Mercantile Bank. And there was a third name—Crilley, I believe.”

Leonard, who'd been combing his long grey hair back with his hand, stopped dead still, his mouth open. “Crilley?”

“It was just the names written out with dollar amounts behind them. It was nothin. One dollar after Bradley, four dollars after White.”

“One dollar means a thousand, Jake. He's using accounting shorthand.”