The Whipping Boy (7 page)

The narrow stairs were busy with haggard, wet men who looked like they'd been at work for hours. Jake and the boy went for the elevator, which was about to go up with three huge boxes of shotgun loads in the middle of the platform. The elevator operator was Edgar Wyatt, a short black man with massive shoulders who pulled and braked the ropes that drove the fifteen-foot-square wall-less platform up and down the unguarded shaft between floors. Jake and the boy clambered onto it from the water. The basement, normally visible through the big space on all sides of the elevator, was a giant vessel of water.

“Get everything out from below?” Jake asked.

“Nosuh,” Edgar said. “Been workin since in the night, but the river risin so fast, can't keep up with it. It start to comin in, got to thundering down this hole. One of the mens almost got washed down.”

“Is Mr. Dekker here?”

“They all been comin and goin.” He began pulling the ropes. “Some of em on the shippin floor.”

“I'll just get off there. Could you put this boy to work, Edgar? He can help with carrying.”

“Yessuh. Them other two new ones already workin.”

He pulled the thick up-rope and the mechanism groaned and creaked as they ascended the half-floor to the shipping floor. Murky daylight drifted through the nearly closed big shipping doors that opened onto the railroad spur on the east side. Sitting at the big flat construction table were three salesmen—Jack Peters, Marvin Beele, and Dandy Pruitt—all looking as whipped and gloomy as cur dogs. Ernest Dekker had them in some kind of meeting. Ralph Dekker was nowhere in sight.

Jake walked off the back side of the elevator, out of their sight, and stood in the shadows by the long row of coat hooks. The two Arkansas salesmen weren't there. A short, fat man with a derby hat sat beside the salesmen at the shipping desk. Jake had seen him around before, and believed that he was a lawyer. He was looking straight ahead with eyes dead as fish bait, the stub of a cigar sticking out the middle of his mouth. A heap of papers lay on the desk in front of him. Ernest, freshly shaved and powdered, wearing a dapper sportsman's waistcoat, waved around his black ivory cigarette holder, holding forth about collections. Jake heard snatches: “. . . on them with all fours. Hit em direct, no apologizing. Make it plain and clear, if they don't have cash, we'll take the mortgages . . .”

Jake wondered where the old man was. He heard the elevator descend again, and as it went by he took a glance to see if Mr. Dekker might be on it. No such luck. The salesmen looked pretty uncomfortable. Marvin Beele was churning hard on his quid.

Ernest turned the meeting over to the lawyer, whose tongue flicked out and ran over his lips. His voice was tight, constricted, high, and not clearly audible to Jake . . . real estate property . . . white men can own improvements. These here forms . . . get him to sign . . .” Jake strained to hear as the lawyer held up a printed document and pointed at the bottom of it. After a while, his tongue snaked out and he plugged the cigar back into the middle of his mouth, apparently finished.

Marvin spat over his shoulder in the direction of the open port before asking a question, to which the lawyer answered, “Whatever improvements they got themselves and whatever customers' property mortgages they're holdin.”

Ernest had picked up one of the forms. “. . . doing them a favor . . .”

When Jake heard the elevator coming back up, he hopped onto it. He held up his hand with a warning look so Edgar wouldn't say anything. After they'd glided above the third floor, he asked, “Where'd you last see Mr. Dekker, Edgar? I'm supposed to find him.”

“I took him to the fifth earlier this mornin. Hadn't seen him since.”

“That's where I want to go, then.”

When they got to the top floor, Jake saw Mr. Dekker sitting in a chair by a window on the southwest wall of the building. He picked his way hesitantly between barrels of nails, approaching the old man.

Mr. Dekker looked up and gave a little smile. “Look out there, Jake,” he said, waving toward the window.

It was a strange sight—the confluence of the rivers turned into a vast brown moving plain, with this building at the edge of it and the Indian Nation far, far on the other side. Across Coke Hill, the upper works of the bridge Jake had crossed last night were halfway under the flood, jammed with debris. The new Arkansas River bridge wasn't visible from this window, but Jake reckoned you could probably dangle your feet in the river from it.

Mr. Dekker looked distant, wrapped in his own thoughts. Before the takeover by his son, he would have been running all over the store giving everybody hell, and here he was sitting on his backside staring out on the view like an old soldier on the front porch. For a long time he remained silent.

Finally Jake said, “I got back late last night. Saw your note this morning.”

The old man's face clouded a little. “How'd you get back?”

“Last train. Damn engineer took us over that.” He nodded toward the Poteau bridge.

Mr. Dekker smiled again weakly and took a slow breath. “You know, Jake, one of the worst things can happen to a man is to realize he was doing something all wrong just at the minute it's taken out of his hands. Must be why some people get so scared when they're dying.”

Jake sat down on the edge of a bin stuffed full of washboards.

The old man continued to look bemused, as if he was thinking about events that had happened a long time ago. “You may not know this, but Ernest is pretty good pals with some of the young fellows at the bank. They cooked this up together. The bank's having problems right now, that's no secret. But instead of calling in a little debt from all their main accounts, they're calling the whole kit and caboodle off us. Ernest talked to the Young Turks at Mercantile and convinced them our situation was getting worse with me running the store, and he made them a proposition. If they'd put him in charge, he'd guarantee to find a way to meet a good part of our debt.”

Jake was surprised not by the facts but by how plainly Mr. Dekker was describing it. “Can they do that?”

“Well, they did do it, whether they can or not. They'll declare us in default at the end of next month if I don't step down. That's the way they put it to me.”

Jake looked out the window over the flooded river plain, trying to resist his urge to comment. “That's goddamn blackmail.”

“I've been around and around it, Jake, and there's not much I can do. It's a call loan. I visited Shelby White yesterday. He's the head of the Mercantile board, but of course he's on their rope. We've known each other long enough for him to tell me the whole story, anyway.” Mr. Dekker allowed a brief bitterness to color his expression.

“What makes them think Ernest can get water from a dry hole?” Jake said heatedly. “They're just going to take Dekker down. What good'll that do?”

“Depends on how desperate they are for cash. We have the building and stock, and we've got some real estate here and there. If Ernest fails and we go bust, they'll pull a quick twenty or twenty-five thousand from a fire sale off our carcass, which would be that much more cash than they have today. And there'd be another benefit, too. Every debtor in town would have the stuffing scared out of them. Whatever tune the Mercantile called, they'd line up like choirboys to sing it. Although . . .” He shook his head.

“What?”

“It doesn't quite all add up.” Mr. Dekker looked uncertain. “Anyhow, if we owed a lot of different creditors, they couldn't do this. But we don't. Ernest's been working with McMurphy, and I let them concentrate all our suppliers' debts at the bank. They've got us in their pocket, and it's my fault for not watchin the store closer.”

“So he's been planning this?”

“Course he has.”

Jake searched his face for the gall that he himself felt. “Well, what do you think about it?”

Mr. Dekker allowed a melancholy smile. “I guess I could be proud of him. He's takin the risk, all right. You boys don't collect, his future won't look good. Course, neither will yours or mine.”

“Well, if my first effort to collect was any sign, we might as well hang it up.” Jake told him about what had happened with John Blessing.

Mr. Dekker asked a few questions, then sat in another long silence. “Well, now he's got a scheme to collect mortgages at stores where you men can't get cash. The bank's going along with it. He hired some two-dollar lawyer. They're setting up all kind of new arrangements.” Bitterness had edged back into Mr. Dekker's expression, although his tone remained mild. “Well, Jake. I guess there's a time when the old guard passes. It happens different ways, but it always happens.”

“That how you look at it?”

Mr. Dekker pushed up his hat and stared out the window at the devastation of the flood below. “Boy oh boy. How much of that train station's going to be left?”

Jake was extremely vexed by Mr. Dekker not putting up a fight. But it wasn't his business; he was just the hired help around here. “Did you want to see me about something?”

The old man glanced at him. “I wanted to talk to you before you saw Ernest. I know you don't like him, and you'll most likely think about quitting over this business. I wouldn't blame you. But I want to ask you not to, as a favor to me. Ernest doesn't talk much to me. When he's doing something, I'm lucky to find out about it. If you stay on, I'll have somebody in the sales force I can trust to keep me up on what's going on.”

“I don't mean this disrespectfully, Mr. Dekker, but Ernest shouldn't be put in charge of the store under any circumstances. I don't care what kind of scheme he's got going. You're just over sixty. There's plenty of time for a real hardware person to learn the ropes.”

He shook his head. “We can't have the bank foreclosing on us December thirty-one. They've cast that die, and they ain't foolin around. Ernest is playing his hand—that's a fact. And he does have his ducks lined up. Only way I could stop it today would be to shut the store, and I've decided not to do that. I'm layin back, Jake.”

“Layin back to fight, or give up?”

Mr. Dekker sighed and gave him a little smile. “Hell of a deal, ain't it? My own son.”

Jake studied him. He hadn't answered the question, but there was something just a bit cagey to his expression. From that small promise—a look in the old man's eye—Jake made his decision. “All right. I won't quit without talking to you first. Unless he fires me.”

“Oh, he won't do that,” the old man said blandly.

A
S THE FLOOD
waxed and waned, everybody in the big building toted merchandise and office records upstairs, then hardly got a breath before it was time to move it all back downstairs. Tom worked much of the time with the other two boys from the academy, Hack Deneuve and Joel Mayes. Hack and Tom had been friends ever since Tom could remember. A few of the academy boys occasionally skipped out on field work and met in the woods to play a war game they called Cherokee and Choctaw, and Tom and Hack would be captains of the opposing sides—Tom always Cherokee. They took on names like Darius and Xerxes, from one of the history books in the Reverend's small library, and they made swords and spears and had pretend battles in the trackless bottomland around Bokchito.

After years of classes, field work, beatings, and near-complete isolation, now they were free, with jobs, launched into the world of men so suddenly that they hardly knew yet how to talk about it. Hack and Joel were staying temporarily with Edgar, the elevator man.

A steam engine was set up to pump out the basement, and for days its steady throbbing through the building seemed to mimic the tension in the place. Ernest Dekker went around ordering workers to move items from every floor to different locations, reshuffling the store's stock, at first away from the flood, then, it seemed to Tom, jamming it all together near the shipping floor. Old Mr. Dekker continued to sit by a window on the top floor, as if he were uninterested in these big changes. “Old man actin queer,” said Edgar Wyatt. “I never seen him so quiet and off to hisself.”

The huge store was dark inside, with jets of gaslight widely spaced along the walls. Sweating, grunting men trundled merchandise that had gotten wet outside to the wagon yard to dry in the sun, then back to the bins and shelves. The academy boys were fascinated by all of it—rows and rows of shiny new grease-smelling plows, scythes, coils of rope and screen wire, cases of stove polish, roof caps and radiators made of planished iron, kitchen machines of every sort, including coffee and spice mills with big flywheels on the side, kraut and meat cutters, sausage stuffers, butter molds with swans and stars on them, large nickeland porcelain-plated water coolers, wooden iceboxes of every size and description, hand-powered machines for washing clothes, fishing tackle, rifles, pistols, tools, wagon and carriage work, hinges, hoses, steam fittings, corrugated roofing, and items whose names Tom didn't know, with only numbers or manufacturers' names on them. In dusty corners of the building he ran his hands over these mysterious things—levers connected to strange devices, heavy machines with cranks, hinged cooking devices with a top and bottom and little squares in them. Tom had not known such a luxury of exotic things existed in the whole world, much less in one building. Hearing the elevator rising or someone coming up the stairs, he hurried away to avoid getting caught by the cigarette-waving boss, who strode around the floors cursing the men, threatening to fire them for slacking. Tom noticed Hack looking at Ernest Dekker with a lost, confused look.

The store was like the orphanage in some ways. It had about as many employees as the orphanage had boys, and the boss was greatly feared, like the Reverend, only he fired you instead of putting you down on the stock and whipping you. Getting fired was worse than getting beaten, Tom figured, because you were cast out into the world. He understood the seriousness of that.