The Whipping Boy (24 page)

As they walked up the hill, Leonard was suddenly in a bad mood. “One of those mudheads got me broadside.”

“Did you look at those mortgage papers?”

“Yes.” Leonard took a copy of the mortgage transfer agreement out of his pocket and gave it back to Jake. He was wheezing. “Flimsy as it looks, this little document . . . it's clever . . . Sit down a minute, I'm out of wind. My lungs . . . aren't what they used to be. I fear I'm allergic to . . . being pissed on.” They sat down on a bench outside the newspaper office. The cold felt good to Jake after the saloon. There were several shadowy bundles around the land office. It looked like people were sleeping in the yard.

“I've got my breath,” Leonard said. “As to these mortgages, all I can tell you is that . . . normally . . . mortgages on land aren't the most desirable way for a supplier to secure cash debt. Little hunks of real estate aren't very liquid. However, things are different now. There's a lot of scheming going on over real estate, what with all the remaining Indian land up for grabs and all these people pouring in.” His gaunt face turned severe in the dim light of the street. “There are interests, very large interests, turning a greedy eye to this region. Half the Indian domain is worth the attention of big capital, my friend. I assure you.”

“What do you mean?” Jake asked.

“The Indians had a hundred and forty million acres, more or less, before allotment began. They figure that when the Dawes Commission is finished they'll have kept about half that. It's the last big grab, my friend. Seventy million acres is worth the attention of almost anyone.”

“Ernest is asking us to get these mortgages signed on land still owned by Indians, as well as land in the white territory. Is that legal?”

Leonard looked disgusted. “Oh, come now, Jake, don't be naive.”

“What makes it so valuable all of a sudden?”

Leonard pointed back down the hill. “There's your answer. There and in the tent cities. Tens of thousands have been lured here on promises that few of them found. Free land! The place is teeming with land-hungry wretches, ten for every one who gets a quarter section, lured by the publicity of the railroads and banks. If I were an economist, I'd write a treatise on it. Never has a market been created so fast and so unscrupulously. They've come here for free land and now they're talking themselves into leasing it for two dollars an acre per year. This place will be paved by sharecroppers in ten years. I hear them at the land office every day. They're here now, and they're ready to lease at any price.” “One of my customers down south was talking about a syndicate—”

“Yes,” Leonard said darkly. “I've heard that word myself.”

Jake stood there. A picture seemed to be forming, but he still didn't quite get it. “I need to find out more.”

“My best informant on the subject of land dealing has moved to Enid, along with everybody else.”

“Let's go see him. I was going to Enid, anyway.”

“Honest work for honest pay—my lifelong . . . credo,” Leonard wheezed. “But I've heard they're having a civil war up there.”

“It's not that big a deal,” Jake said. “I was up there three or four weeks ago.”

“What exactly do you want to find out?”

“Whatever I can.”

T
OM'S SURVIVAL INSTINCT
told him to tell no one about finding Mr. Dekker, to do nothing, to disappear into the walls. A half-breed, a newcomer to this town, someone who worked for the store and who had gone to Mr. Dekker's house at night—if he went to the authorities, they'd ask him questions and decide that he was a suspicious character, someone who knew more than he was telling. And in fact he did know more. He knew that Ernest Dekker had usurped his father (surely everyone knew this) and that Ernest was taking apart the store. He knew that Jake strongly supported Ralph Dekker and opposed his son, and that someone named Miller had tried to kill Jake. But for Tom to speak of these things would only make him more suspect. Lying low was the only thing he could do. He could not report the death. Someone else would have to find Ralph Dekker.

Jake would surely come when he heard. He hoped that would be soon.

All day Tuesday, he waited for the shock to run through the building: Ralph Dekker has been found dead! But it didn't happen, and by the end of the day he was exhausted by the sheer burden of what he knew, and of waiting. He couldn't tell Hack. He couldn't even tell Edgar, because if he reported it, the authorities would wonder why Tom hadn't. He was stuck with the bad news until somebody else uncovered it.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Jim, the carrot-haired man who'd brandished his knife at Tom the previous day, approached him in the shipping room with a lame smile. “It happened just like I fig-gered. They fired me. Done fired about everybody. I don't give a hoot about this place anyway. I'm moving back to the hills. Decided to clear up my accounts.” He frowned, looking up at Tom with his chin jutted out. “Yessir, I don't mean for you to take it bad, me jumpin you. It weren't your fault.” This sounded like an apology for starting the fight, and Tom had the crazy impulse to tell him about Ralph Dekker.
Go ahead
, something inside him urged,
tell him, tell someone, get rid of this secret;
but common sense prevailed. He wished Jim good luck and left.

He ate supper at the boarding house that evening but was bad company at the table—he knew that he was—and the bachelors sensed his mood and treated him gingerly. He wondered if perhaps he could confess his secret to Mr. Haskell, who was a very decent man, but he didn't think it would be wise. One way or another, Mr. Dekker would soon be found. He just had to keep his mouth shut.

Everything had become muddled, confused, dangerous. The mysterious firing of Joel, the clearing out of the merchandise, the fact that he was supposed to go to Enid but probably shouldn't, since as soon as Jake heard about Mr. Dekker's death he would surely come to town. He was beginning to feel that he had never left his past. He had started a new life, but the past was catching up to him. Here again he had found the mood of Bokchito—secretive, hazardous, people driven by powerful hidden motives. When he heard the yelling from downstairs again, he leaned his head back against the brick wall and thought about the Reverend's fits of temper, which had never seemed quite genuine to Tom. They were intentional displays, tools in his routine of tyranny. Ernest Dekker sounded more desperate.

Tom found newspapers and read them front to back, and they helped take his mind off all these things, and there were a few books in the parlor of the boarding house, which carried him to places far away.

The store emptied of salable goods, leaving less and less real work to do, and as the merchandise disappeared the stockroom men went along with it, fired two and three at a time. He found a hiding place on the fifth floor, near a gas lamp; on Wednesday he spent virtually all day there, reading. He had taken one of Mrs. Peltier's books, a “novel,” which was a long made-up story about a little girl who lost her mother and spent her entire childhood looking for her, barely missing her many times, until page 350, near the book's end, when she found her just in time for the mother to die. In his hiding place behind barrels, leaning against the gritty bricks with the yellow light around him, Tom almost cried at the book's conclusion. It was the first time that he had ever felt this way over the loss of a parent, and it was a made-up story.

All of his reading provided a concentrated dose of information, as well as keeping his mind occupied. From the newspapers he learned that the box in the hotel was a telephone, and he read about the electrical plant in Fort Smith, and about crimes, and he looked at the advertisements, which were full of clues about the world. The other thing he did to keep his mind busy was pay attention to things at the store—the hurried, evasive movements of men in and out of the office, the strangely guilty behavior of the salesmen, the way Ernest seemed to stay in there, and to send out his messages through other parties, usually McMurphy, or through messengers.

When Tom went to work on Thursday, the few remaining workers in the stockroom were alarmed because it was apparent now that all of them were being fired. Three others had just been let off by McMurphy. “Leaves Pat, me, and one other fellow working back here,” Edgar grumbled. “This place like a hainted house.” At the mention of ghosts, Tom thought of Ralph Dekker. Was it possible that his body still hadn't been found?

Late in the afternoon, Tom was about to leave to go home when he saw, across the dark empty showroom, three strangers, wearing pistols, going into the big office. A group of men stood around the front desk, whispering, and he sensed that it had finally happened. He turned and went back up the stairs to the second floor, hoping to be able to listen through a ventilator to what was being said below. Working on this floor, he'd noticed that the typewriting machine and voices could be heard through the black metal grate, which was above a little-used adjoining room behind the big office. Tom wanted to actually hear that Mr. Dekker had been found, but the door between the two rooms was shut and the words were barely audible.

“. . . several days,” he thought he heard. “. . . like he done himself in.”

“. . . don't believe it,” said a second voice. Ernest's?

The reply was quiet and careful sounding, but Tom could only hear “. . . place tore up . . . couldn't find a note . . .”

Both voices were muffled and echoing, and Tom had a hard time understanding them. He lay flat on the grating, looked down, and there to his surprise was Hack, standing with his back against the wall with a slightly pleading expression. Someone else was in the little room, a man in a black suit, and he stood with his ear against the shut door, listening to the conversation in the big office. Tom couldn't see who it was, but when the man turned, there, very close, floating in the scarce light below, was the face of Deacon Jim Miller. Tom felt ice on his spine, and involuntarily jerked away. The face took on an inquisitive look, as if hearing something, then looked directly upward, squinting toward the grate. Tom moved out of sight, but he could hear Miller walking out the door of the room toward the stairs.

He got up and hid behind a bin. Miller appeared at the top of the stairway and began moving slowly down the aisle toward the grating. Tom waited until he had passed and then slipped down the stairs, walking on his toes.

He knew that the back door was locked; the only way out was through the showroom, past the gathering of men around the sales desk. Two of them Tom had seen Monday evening when he was looking through the office window. Both had neatly trimmed beards, wore stiff collars and watch chains dangling from their vests.

“Hey!” Mr. McMurphy called out. “You. I need to talk to you.”

Tom wanted to run but didn't. He made himself walk up to McMurphy, who was the only one among the nervous group of men paying him any attention. The others were watching the big office, talking in undertones about the constables.

“Is Jake back in town yet?” McMurphy asked sternly.

“No,” Tom said.

“You sure?”

“Yes,” Tom said.

McMurphy looked at him a minute, then said, “Well, we're cutting down the men in the back, and I'm going to have to let you off.”

Tom didn't reply. Any minute, Miller was going to come back down the stairs.

“Here's your pay for four days this week.” He put four dollars on the desk, and Tom thanked him, picked it up, and headed for the front doors.

Tom supposed he should feel bad about being fired, but he didn't. In fact, he was so relieved to be out of the store that when he got back to the boarding house, he felt too giddy even to eat dinner. He slipped down to the parlor and found a morning paper and took it back to Jake's room. But he couldn't concentrate, even on reading; he couldn't get Hack's expression and Miller's dead-fish eyes off his mind. At least they had finally found Mr. Dekker. Tom had thought that once the news was out, his own sense of urgency would go away, but he felt trapped in the room, restless and moody. He went out and walked down to visit the mule at the cane press. It was soothing to watch the grizzled docile animal plodding in his circle. The old black man who fed cane into the press didn't seem to mind Tom. After a while, he went back to the boarding house and paced in the room, and then lay down and tried to go to sleep.

***

He heard someone at the door, a slight shuffle and hesitation, and looked up just in time to see it open and a dark shape slip into the room. He rolled out of bed and did the only thing he could think to do—he lunged across the darkness and tackled the form before it got far from the door, hitting it in the middle and knocking it down.

Before they hit the floor he knew who it was. “I'm sorry! Oh, I'm so sorry.”

“Knocked . . . the . . . breath out of me,” Sam said.

He crawled up to her face and said again, “I'm very sorry.” He touched her cheek, her shoulders and arms, only to confirm she was really here, in the flesh. “Why didn't you—?”

She sat there getting her breath back.

He went and turned up the gas in Jake's room and left the door open, soft light entering the room. Her face was somehow different, and he was afraid he'd really hurt her. She remained sitting and he sat with her, and they talked in whispers.

“Is Jake here?”

“No, he's in Enid. But I think he'll be back soon. Maybe tomorrow. Do you know what happened?”

She nodded. “I read the newspaper about Ralph Dekker.”

They sat knee to knee. Tom told her about getting fired and seeing Deacon Miller. He asked if she'd just arrived, and she said that she'd been in town a couple of days. “I wish I'd known you were here,” she said, glancing worriedly into the other room.