The Whipping Boy (5 page)

It was Mr. Blessing's account book, hurled out the door with such force that she probably hadn't even seen it.

Mr. Jaycox went to her and knelt down. He yelled at Tom to help him.

“G
ET OUT OF HERE
,” came the hoarse voice from inside the building. “All of you!”

Back against the wall near the front door, a foolish grin on his face, the short deputy yelled, “I'm arresting you for shootin in a post office!”

“I do whatever I want to in my own store,
hatak hata
.”

Blash!

A bullet cut through the rain, and Jake instinctively ducked, dropping the woman back into the mud.

“Boy, she don't look good,” the short deputy said, with the same goofy grin on his face.

The color had quickly left her face, her expression crumpled. The big black ledger lay flopped open by her head with several bullet holes in it. Blessing had shot his own ledger, then hurled it out the door. Jake couldn't see any wounds besides an ugly, deep bruise on her temple. The boy was kneeling next to her in deep mud, his hands held out, not quite touching her.

“Come on,” Jake said. “We better get her out of the street before she drowns.”

“Is she shot?” the short deputy asked, grinning stupidly.

“Listen,” Jake said, “if you keep ragging that man in there, he'll just get madder. He's off on a jag. Leave him alone. Let him cool off.”

“Indin goes off his rocker, there's hell to pay,” the short deputy said, waving one of his .45s toward Jake. “This here is the law's work.” The tall deputy crouched on the other side of the doorway.

Jake scooped up the woman and took her to the storage building behind the store. Mrs. Oke and Tom followed. It was an old dwelling house, stacked haphazardly with merchandise—kitchen cabinets, bundles of clothes, Bibles, mirrors, standing coat hooks, spittoons. The woman's face remained ashen. The heavy binding of the ledger must have hit her right where she lived. Jake again looked for signs of other wounds, but saw none. Mrs. Oke found a horse blanket, wrapped her in it, and sent the boy to get the doctor. Outside, the deputy continued nagging John Blessing.

“Cain't pull a gun in a federal post office, mister.”

“Leave me alone! I have dynamite!”

Jake had remained calm until now, but he found himself standing outside, mad, with his heart pounding hard. It was no wonder people hated the law, when they hired these malletheads and paid them nothing but travel bounties and rewards. He was pacing in and out the door when Tom returned. The one doctor in town had taken a call miles away during the night and wasn't back. Mrs. Oke looked up at Jake and shook her head. “Don't know what to do,” she said quietly. The woman's eyes were drawn up, and Jake knelt and felt her pulse. She had only a small cut on her temple, but beneath it was the deep, spreading bruise.

“Come on out!” the deputy yelled at Mr. Blessing.

Jake cursed under his breath, and was just standing to go outside when a tremendous thud hit the wall. Glass and part of the wooden frame of the window blew out, shards spraying across the floor. The first thought Jake had was that lightning had struck the wall, although the smell coming through the window quickly told him differently.

“Clear the glass off!” he shouted, pointing to the woman. The boy and Mrs. Oke helped brush away the glass and undid the blanket. Mrs. Oke loosened her clothes. Jake went outside the shed. The sulfurous stink of powder dynamite lay thick in the rainy air; part of the store's back wall and roof and all of the windows had been blown out.

Jake was the first one inside the smoking store, and he found what was left of John in a corner. He dragged him out onto the front porch, then went back inside and took a piece of calico off a shelf to put over the storekeeper's face. His tattered, blackened legs stuck out below. The explosion had shredded his trousers into smoking rags hanging off his still-intact galluses. With his hat pulled low over his eyes, Jake knelt by the steaming corpse, dizzy from his own pulse.

The timber thief, who had been sitting against the wall near the front door, continued to sit there, looking stunned but unhurt. The deputies had escaped visible injury, although the one with two guns looked even more unhinged than before. He walked up to the corpse and, to Jake's amazement, pushed it with his toe. “What I told you. The son of a bitch ruint the post office. We'll haul him to Guthrie for the pelt.”

His tall, morose partner glanced at him with wifely recrimination. “Naw, we oughter get out of here.”

Jake stood up and fixed the short one with a baleful look. “That man has seven sons and about twenty cousins. They'll be showing up here real soon. Lay a finger on his body and you won't know who snuffed the candle.”

This seemed to make some impression on the knucklehead. His partner kept urging that they get out of town, and eventually the two faded away, prisoner in tow, into the storm.

Jake heard the sound of a whistle coming from the south. The night train from Texas had made it through. He went back in the storage room. The woman's color was much better now, but the lump on her temple really was ugly.

Mrs. Oke stood up to Jake, close, with her head down. “My fault.”

“It ain't your fault,” Jake said.

“Carry her to Fort Smith to see the doctor. Please do that, Mr. Hardware. I'm too old, hey?”

The train went by, slowing to a stop at the little platform. Jake didn't have much time to make up his mind. “Come on, kid. I guess we better take her with us. You get her by the feet.”

The woman was limp as a rag, and it wasn't easy toting her to the train. Tom acted het-up, bumbling and confused, and it nearly broke Jake's back getting her through the mud, onto the platform, and into the car. Finally aboard, they laid her across a seat, took the wet horse blanket from around her, and wrapped her in a slightly less wet coat from Jake's valise, not much use when her dress was sopping. He wiped the mud from her face with his handkerchief. The left eye, below her swollen temple, was bloodshot.

As the train got under way, Jake looked down and saw Mrs. Oke standing in the door of the station house, and he pushed up the window and yelled, “Do you know what her name is?”

Mrs. Oke made no sign or response. Shawl wrapped tightly around her head, she gazed in Jake's direction with the implacable blankness of a full blood, as if losing her hotel had returned her to the primitive fate that all these years she'd worked to avoid.

They took off briskly up the hill—only the engine, a mail car, and two passenger cars. This train was the first luck he'd had that day. They made it handily over the fog-enshrouded Kiamichi Mountains, and Jake imagined they'd be in Fort Smith inside of two hours. But down the other side, in the lowlands, the roadbed was covered by water in several places, and they had to slow down.

Across the aisle, Tom looked uneasy. He kept staring at the woman, who had slipped until her head was tilted backwards, her long neck revealed, curly black hair in disarray, mouth slightly open. Her color was a little better.

“Fix her so her head ain't dangling down like that,” Jake said.

The boy didn't seem to hear him.

“Go straighten her up before she hurts her durn neck.”

Tom moved to do so, but he seemed afraid to touch her, and Jake fumed when he had to get up and do it himself. This courier that big shot Dekker had foisted off on him was about as much use as a mule collar hanging around his neck, what with keeping him awake at night, not doing what he was asked, and never saying enough to let you know what was going on in his head. To heck with him. To heck with em all. Jake moved to a seat in the rear of the car, shut his eyes, and tried to take a nap.

E
VERY TIME
Tom looked at her, he couldn't take his eyes away. She was awake some of the time now, rising occasionally, squinting as if she had a severe headache.

The train entered the bottomlands at a crawl. Rain was still coming down in sheets. Tom saw whole endless fields covered in water, with islands of land here and there. Stranded cattle stood up to their bellies, unable to make it to higher ground because of fences or potholes. Farther out, the water looked dead calm, but in places along the train's roadbed it flowed in a riverlike current. When he heard the wheels pushing through water, Tom stuck his head out the window and saw that they were headed into what looked for all the world like a giant, trackless lake planted mysteriously with trees. Lonely clusters of squatters' shacks stood in the flood, surrounded by floating debris of all kinds, and the train had slowed to such a pace that he could see it all—barrels, dead chickens, snakes. On the roof of one shack sat a wet cat with his tail curled up around him, looking down at the water.

Below Talihina, where they were barely moving through the water, a huddle of people on the roadbed flagged down the train. The engineer stopped and they pushed onto the cars—a soggy crowd, mixed breeds and whites, mournful-looking men with the black-scarred faces of coal miners, farmers, women in bonnets with sleeping and crying babies, and fretting, bird-chested, hookworm-skinny children. Farther along, the train ran into another and still another flock, adding more than thirty people in all to their car. The women were lugging tins of beans and tomatoes and bits of this and that—lard buckets full of radishes and potatoes and any other kind of food they could find to take. The men carried saddles, boxes and sacks of clothes, axes, rolled-up screen wire, kerosene lanterns, shotguns.

Mr. Jaycox, buffeted by people jamming themselves and their belongings into the seats and aisle around him, had apparently given up trying to take a nap. The sodden throng gave up a fearsome ammonia-smelling fog of bodies, kid pee, vegetables, and who knows what else. After the third bunch had scrambled on board, Tom noticed that the woman was sitting halfway up, looking around in bewilderment at the crowd. She was awake but dazed. A short, rough-looking man shoved her upright and sat next to her, and she gazed at him in woozy astonishment.

“Get your hands off of me,” she said, pushing him back.

“What the hell?” he sputtered.

“You smell bad,” she said.

“Why—”

Mr. Jaycox got up and elbowed toward her. “She has a head wound. She's injured.”

“She'll git a wound all right, talkin to me like that,” the man snarled. “No got-damn woman—”

“You smell like a skunk,” she stated; Tom could hear her plainly despite the hubbub. Face pallid, hair tangled and wet, one eye bloodshot, she looked wild as a wounded mustang. Mr. Jaycox eventually managed to bring her up with Tom and him, although by the time he got there, someone had already stolen his seat, and there was more confusion getting the man out, and getting her, Tom, and himself settled into two seats—the boy squashed against the window, her in the middle, and Mr. Jaycox on the aisle. She seemed to have very little idea where she was or what was happening. Brief fits of talking came up and passed, but her expression was forlorn. She muttered things neither of them could understand. Being awake seemed to tire her out; soon her head lolled onto Tom's shoulder, and she fell into a delirious, worried sleep.

Her blouse undone at the top by Mrs. Oke, white unmentionables visible, muddy clothes in disarray, she went from cold and stiff to feverish and limber, then back to cold. With her pushing against him in the seat, Tom felt his tool of generation (as Reverend Schoot called it) rising up hard as a stick in his wet pants. At the Armstrong Academy, his tool never got him into anything but trouble. When it went off in dreams, it was deceptively pleasant at the moment, but when cots were examined and evidence was found, it was worth between ten and fifteen lashes, depending on the Reverend's mood. Tom tried to avoid this by masturbation. He abused himself despite the fact that it was bad for him, made his brain heavy and dull, caused exhaustion of the nerves, weakened memory, bad posture, narrow-chestedness, flabby muscles, consumption, paralysis, heart disease, and in some cases suicide. It was bad for him, but he did it only to avoid the nightly emissions. Most of the older boys at the orphanage had a dim grasp of the primitive facts about human reproduction, but it was taboo as a subject of jokes or conversation. The Reverend had his spies among the boys, and you had to be very careful about what you said.

He squirmed in the seat in an effort to get farther from the woman, but there was no place to go. She was touching him in several places, her head leaning onto his shoulder, hair in his neck, and her arm down loosely at her side, hand against his leg.

Suddenly she pulled her head up and announced, “I have to go-”

Tom looked out the window, as if he hadn't heard her.

“I was afraid this would happen,” Mr. Jaycox said. “Help me, Tom.”

They got her up and pressed her through to the back of the car. The water closet had run over, but several desperate people were nevertheless waiting to use it. She moaned as they pushed through the crowd. The train kept stopping entirely so the engineer could assess the depth of water ahead, and Mr. Jaycox said, “Tom, we're going to have to take a chance here. Make way, please.” They propelled her out the door and down the steps. It was nearly dark, and there wasn't a dry spot of land anywhere within reach, and lightning was still cracking as if the storm had just started. The track was a good hand's depth below the surface. They were standing in a lake. To Tom's dismay, Mr. Jaycox advised her to relieve herself right there.

After some confusion, she had in fact drawn down her scanties and was dangling from their grasp, one on each side, south pole nearly touching the water, but she did not do her business. “Don't have much time, ma'am. This train's gonna start back up,” Mr. Jaycox said. She looked out to the side, puzzled at what must have seemed in her delirium like an endless expanse of brown water. Four or five little boys hung out the window, watching with interest.