The Whipping Boy (4 page)

Lanterns burned smoky and high around the common room of the OK Hotel. Water was over the floorboards and the old woman waded around, gathering up smaller things. A man carrying a huge wooden display grip with
El Dorado Chemical & Drugs
in sweeping red letters was helping move some of it. There were three others: a white prisoner with loosened leg manacles and two white men with badges. The deputies slouched in the common room, rolling cigarettes and passing a bottle back and forth. The old woman kept fussing at the ones who were helping, as they hauled food safe, tables, dressers, and even some beds out the door and up the hill.

“
Apela!
” She went down the little hall to the first-floor room and pounded on the door. “Wake up! Come out! Hurry.”

Mr. Jaycox appeared, walking as stiffly as a table down the stairs, looking grizzled and grumpy, blinking at the water that covered the floor. “Good God almighty,” he muttered. Soon he was helping Tom muscle a chest of drawers and parts of beds up the slippery hill, dropping things, getting their feet stuck in the mud. The drug salesman and the prisoner—the deputies called him “cedar thief”—continued helping, too, while the two deputy marshals did not.

They bucked the furniture to a building behind John Blessing's General Merchandise. Back at the hotel, the water was more than ankle-deep. Mrs. Oke now was being followed around by the shorter of the deputies, who wanted to get back last night's room fee in payment for the labor of their prisoner. He was a fast-talking, snaky man with two big hogleg guns strapped backwards to his waist.

She had her cash box under her arm but wasn't about to hand back any money. “
Ch sinti!
Go away, you penny pincher!” she said angrily.

Mr. Jaycox picked up a lantern and walked between them. “This place is flooding out.”

The door to the downstairs room opened and out came the woman they had met last night. She wore a high collar and a starched grey skirt, the hem of which floated in the water. It wasn't as if her appearance was unexpected, but to Tom the sight of her was troubling. High-arched eyebrows, green eyes, and dark hair done up in a bun with stray curls down her temples—she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, though he hadn't seen many. He wanted to look away from her but found it impossible to do so. It occurred to him that she was from the city, the big city—an odd thought since, as far as he knew, he had never known anyone from a big city, much less a woman. The one woman he had really known was seventy-some years old and did not speak the same language he did, so they had done little talking. Yet however ill equipped he was to come up with such an opinion, still he thought it: big city.

She looked at both Mr. Jaycox and him with almost a smile. “I hope you're well this morning, Mr. Jaycox,” she said, and while he looked momentarily bemused by this, she glanced around the somber disorder of the room, showing no sign of fear, hiked up her skirt and actually led them out of the hotel.

They all trailed up the hill and stood on the roofed porch of Blessing's store. Cheerless, begrudging, greenish light began filtering through clouds that showed no sign of letting up. Near the train depot, a man in a big-wheeled hack was mired up to the axle, his mare struggling wildly under the continuously booming thunder, and Tom went over and helped him push it out. People all around the village were crawling out of damp nests. A few were trudging back and forth, carrying things up from low-lying houses and buildings.

The young woman and Mrs. Oke, still clutching her cash box, remained on the porch watching the hopeless situation of the hotel, while others went inside and huddled around the stove. The prisoner and two deputies were soon grousing about this and that, the shorter deputy about the widow not refunding his money, the timber thief about having to do all the work.

The taller deputy, who had a woeful, guilty look, seemed mainly concerned about breakfast. “Git no sleep, work all mornin helpin her, you'd think she'd git us somethin . . .”

“
Who
worked all morning?” the timber thief said. “Neither one of you dogberries knows
how
to work.”

Townspeople trailed into the store a few at a time looking for help or consolation, clusters of refugees bringing more household items to the high ground, including bundles of clothes, chairs, broken-down beds, and some animals left outside—chickens, a little herd of goats, some cows. A couple of men wanted to “borrow” chicken wire from the store owner to make a temporary pen on the high ground behind the store, and he gave it to them. People talked quietly about who'd been washed out, who'd lost livestock, and where they could move things. The men made and lighted cigarettes, and the room smelled of sumac, tobacco, wet clothes, and upset nerves.

The young woman from the hotel stood beside Mrs. Oke on the porch; a moment earlier she had come inside and looked around. Tom noticed that no one spoke to her. The deputies and the timber thief quit quarreling and watched her in a sullen, walleyed way.

The short deputy poked Tom in the shoulder and said, with a dirty-toothed grin, “Like to git a little of that?”

“I beg your pardon?” Tom said.

“Oh ho! Listen to that, Wayne. We have an educated one here. He's so smart he don't know what I'm talking about.”

“Tom,” Mr. Jaycox said sharply, “could you come over here, please.” He was sitting on a box back from the fire. He motioned Tom to sit next to him, then said quietly, “You probably ought to keep away from them.”

“Yes sir.”

After a moment he said, “Tom, did you talk to that young woman?”

“No I didn't, sir.”

The salesman looked puzzled. “I don't think I know her. I guess Mrs. Oke must have mentioned my name to her.”

“Yes sir.”

“You can call me Jake if you'd like.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Mr. Jaycox looked around the store and sighed.

Grim-faced, with mud to their knees, two more families from low-lying houses showed up, bringing things with them, and the store was now littered with wet furniture, wet bundles of clothes, wet and dismal people of all ages. Drips plinked down and buckets were accidentally knocked over on the floor.

Mr. Jaycox spoke so no one but Tom could hear him. “Looks like John Blessing's down to bartering pumpkins and sweet corn. This place is as sparse as a hillbilly's teeth. When I sold goods here, he was getting to be one of the best general merchants in the Nation.” Jake shook his head. “Today ain't the time for collecting. Not with what's going on here.”

Tom watched the owner. He had dark bags under his eyes. When he sold something he didn't ask for cash; he just wrote the figures in his big account book, larger in size than the “book of sins” kept by Reverend Schoot but with the same thick black cover. In all the confusion of traffic, people were asking the storekeeper for loans of this and that, help, or advice. He tried to accommodate them, but he looked debilitated and strained. Nervously, fussily, he checked the buckets he'd set around the room to catch drips.

A thin, wavering cry came from the porch, and everyone in the room fell quiet—statues in a dimly lit room marbled with smoke. Several of them moved at once, crowding out to the front porch, and Tom followed, just in time to see the hotel they had slept in last night jolt and shudder and be swept away by the flood. The old woman cried out again—a thin, high, eerily familiar sound. The big building pivoted sideways and headed ponderously downstream on its foundation of logs, floating for some distance like a ship before doing a slow, staggering dip, tipping over and starting to break apart. Another building nearby was being shaken and torn by the force of the current. The warehouse next to the hotel had already collapsed into the river, and the downslope half of Tuskahoma appeared to be pretty much gone. Mrs. Oke's cry cut through the rain.

Tom was standing painfully close to the young woman, who gave off a heat that he could feel through the wet air. She turned and looked at him—slowly, actually raking her eyes up across him—and he backpedaled a step, tripped over a boot scraper, and fell hard on his tailbone. Humiliated, he got up quickly.

Mr. Jaycox came over. “I think we're going to have to call this trip a bust and try to catch a train back. The bridges are either going to be under water or blocked by ballast trains pretty soon. We'd be floating around out here till the cows come home. I'm just going to say hello to John Blessing. Come over and meet him.”

Tom saw the young woman move a step, as if about to speak to Mr. Jaycox, but he didn't notice her.

The owner was behind his counter, wet and grim. He was a stout man, at least half-blood, with a scar cut deeply into his chin. When they walked over, Blessing stayed behind his counter, looking unfriendly. “What are you doin here, sellin rowboats?” Blessing said without preface, swallowing his words off short, as if they tasted bad in his mouth.

Mr. Jaycox held out a hand to shake, and Blessing barely touched it. “No sir. This is still Dandy's territory.”

“You travelin Guthrie?”

“Guthrie and north of there,” Mr. Jaycox said.

“Makin a lot of money in the white settlements?”

“Not lately.”

“That's where all the money is. Sure ain't down here.”

Mr. Jaycox smiled and shook his head. “Most of the money in Oklahoma Territory stays on the keno tables, John. Half the people in Guthrie moved out a couple of weeks ago for the Outlet rush.”

“The free land,” Blessing said sarcastically. “They'll have ours soon.”

“Meet Tom Freshour, John. He just came on with us.”

Blessing looked morosely toward the door. “So Dekker is hiring Indian boys to sell hardware? Must be in a bad way.”

Mr. Jaycox looked taken aback. “Well now, John, that's a heck of a thing to say.”

The storekeeper looked suspicious. “You ain't here to collect money from me, are you?”

“I'm just stopping off to say hello. I'll talk to you later.”

“But that's what you're here for, isn't it,” Blessing demanded.

“I'm not going to pester you, John. You've been a good customer for a long time, and I can see what's goin on here today—”

This apparently was the wrong thing to say, because Blessing gritted his teeth and slammed his fist onto his account book so hard the glass cases rattled. “So you
are
here to dun me!”

Mr. Jaycox appeared startled at his sudden fury.

“What you wanta do, confiscate my stock, eh? Let me tell you something. You can have it!” He shoved a heavy sack across the counter, hitting the salesman in the leg, scattering tenpenny nails all over the floor. A rope tree with coils of different-sized manila sat on his counter, and he picked up the end close to him and with a powerful spasmodic contraction of his shoulders flipped it toward them. It hit the floor next to Mr. Jaycox's boot.

“Damnation, John—”

“Wanta shut me down, eh? Take my store. Ya can have it! Debtsandall!” He again pounded the accounts book. “Take—eh, eh!” He seemed breathless, his head bobbing and eyes blinking in a slow, strange way. “Ya can have it!” He pointed at the account book.

Stepping backwards, the store owner bumped into his medicine shelf, reached into a box, and pulled out a pistol. It looked like the old wartime cap-and-ball revolver that Tom had seen the Reverend use. “Take it!” he shouted, the scar on his chin livid. He waggled the pistol at them.

Remarkably fast, the crowded store was emptying of people. Blessing remained behind his counter, eyes narrow, with the pistol aimed at Mr. Jaycox.

“Tom, we better be leaving.” He put a hand on Tom's shoulder and Tom did what he did, backpedaling slowly until they had made it onto the porch.

“Take the damn thing!” John Blessing roared.

***

The first thing Tom noticed outside was that the young woman in the grey skirt and Mrs. Oke had apparently gone down the hill to get something, because now they were starting back up the hill. The two deputies remained, peeking through the front window, talking about the store owner, who was threatening now to kill himself and anybody who came in the door.

“It's against regulations to pull a gun in a post office,” said the short one with two pistols.

“Naw, now—” said the tall one.

“This here's a goddamn post office, ain't it? He can't kill hisself in there. If he's breaking postal regulations, we haul him to Guthrie. It's a good hunderd fifty miles, times six cents, plus the federal bounty. That's real money, mister.”

The arrested man, sitting down against the wall, snorted, “He's a Indin. He can commit suicide anyplace he wants to.”

“You're wrong there, cedar thief,” the short deputy said. “He can't do it in a post office. It don't make no difference what kind of Indin he is.”

“How in the hell are you going to
git
to Guthrie?” the cedar thief said vehemently. “Rivers are floodin, and you're too
cheap
to buy a ticket even if the trains was runnin, you and your damn six cent a mile! Besides which, I ain't goin two hunderd mile across the damn country chained to some son of a bitch that's tryin to kill hisself!”

“I don't know,” the tall deputy said worriedly. “I think we oughter leave . . .”

Peering intently through the rain, Tom saw Mrs. Oke with the young woman beside her carrying a suitcase, struggling toward the porch, sinking up to her shins in the street. Mrs. Oke held a little box of knickknacks. The woman stepped onto the porch first, and Mr. Jaycox was moving to warn her away when four or five shots came off so fast that Tom hardly had time to flinch. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed something coming through the door, a large black thing, flying like a saw blade cut loose from its axle, and the woman was knocked back off the porch into the mud, quick as a steer hit in the head with a sledgehammer.