The Whipping Boy

by Speer Morgan

  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.

  She reached over and put her hands on his shoulders and looked at him sadly. “Are we safe, Tom, are we safe?” She kissed him, an experience they’d previously had only in hurried circumstances. Sitting quietly on the floor, they kissed in a wide-open, vulnerable, urgent kiss. She looked into his eyes and sighed. “You’re a beautiful boy, you know that.”

  “Beautiful?” Tom said numbly. He looked back at her, at the curl of dark hair falling down beside her face, the glow of light on her skin, her green eyes. The set of her face reminded him a little of the faraway look she’d had when she was recovering from her head wound.

  She gazed away toward the light in the other room. “I’m sick of arrogant men, ignorant little roosters prancing around. Trying to impress you. You can’t even like them, you know. It’s impossible.” She started taking off Tom’s shirt, a button at a time. She pulled it partway down. She stood up and took off her own blouse and dress, leaving on only her camisole and underwear. She went around Tom and knelt behind him, touching across his back. “Who did this to you, Tom?” She had asked this same question both times before. “Who made a whipping boy out of you?” Her voice was close to his ear. “You can’t let them do that.”

  Tom didn’t know how to answer her. He had started shivering. He wanted to make love with her and yet was not sure that he could.

  She put her lips on his shoulder and neck. “You have so many scars. Can you feel that?”

  He gritted his teeth as she kissed the scars, and he felt a surge of anger. She reached around his belly with both arms and for a moment rested her chin on his shoulder and her hands in his lap.

  He didn’
t answer her. Her body against his back and her breath on his neck gave him a sense of power, radiating from the whole middle of his body, but her questions about his back terrified him. He felt as if he was crawling around in the most luscious blackberry bush, with big thorns raking across his skin.

  “We don’t have to talk,” she whispered, opening her hands and moving them lightly against his pants. She took them away, and he heard a sound and then, with her naked breasts touching his back, she started to unbutton his pants. “Take your clothes off.” He took his shirt all the way off, and, after some hesitation, his pants, embarrassed at the way his penis popped out so straight and tight. She took off her underpants and stood in front of him. “Take hold of me.”

  He wrapped his hands around her hips and could not believe how velvety soft and full they felt, how the palms of his hand seemed to fit around them so well, his little fingers at the bottom almost reaching underneath.

  Her teeth glinted in the light. “That’s for you, Indian boy.” She lay on the rug beside him. “Feel me. Put your hands all over me.” He happily obliged. “. . . You like those, don’t you. Feel the tips of them. The nipples. Kiss them.”

  He kissed one of them and couldn’t stop, felt it swelling tight in his mouth. She whispered, “Let’s go to the bed.”

  They went into the bedroom. She stood up on her knees and he did likewise, opposite her on the soft mattress, his penis against her belly. She reached down and took hold of it. “This thing is unsafe,” she taunted him. “We need to put it away somewhere . . . Put your fingers inside me.” He reached around behind again and touched the wet place between her legs. “Inside,” she said, no longer whispering. She took his hand and put it against her front, and guided his fingers down the line of her opening, and inside. “There. Right there, umm, yes. Don’t be afraid of me, I won’t break,” she said. She leaned back on her hands, her breasts up as he gently moved his hand where she had put it. Tom was suddenly desperate to get inside her. She leaned forward and nudged him, and he fell down backwards and almost off the end of the bed. Straddling his hips, she took hold of his penis with both hands and bent it back, causing Tom an ecstasy of pain, but as she started to come down on him, she stopped when hot juice snapped out of him, and some went up her front, even hitting her chin. “Ohh,” she said, “my poor little hot boy. You got that stuff on my front.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m going to make you lick it off,” she said, sounding vague, dreamy, half here.

  He felt slightly abashed, but wasn’t well enough versed to know that he was supposed to be ashamed. His penis wilted some and he felt a lessening of the tension to put it inside her. She lay on her back and spread the sticky liquid across her breasts and belly, aimlessly. He did as she suggested, licking her like an animal cleaning another animal, across the globes of her breasts and her belly, and even into the fur, and when he did so she arched her back and moaned and closed her eyes and it seemed less that she was playing with him. She urged his head down further and said breathlessly, “There, Tom, down in there.”

  Tom was less self-conscious at these things than he was in the preliminaries. He was so untutored in even the normal superstitions of sex that here he was more like an animal than a human. The only instruction he’d had was from animals, among whom the licking of genitals wasn’t unusual. He almost liked the salty taste down there, but he definitely liked the way she moaned, which changed as he went on, from comfortable sounding to sounding more like she was in a fever of some kind, or having a scary dream. He raised his head, looked at her, and saw the shine across her skin, the little dampness at her brow, and it was as if he had her in his power. He had forgotten for the moment his own need to put his penis into her. With the tip of his tongue he caressed the little hard marble inside her.

  She sat up and pushed him again. “Lie down. I’m going to show you something now.” She held his penis, not moving, just holding it in the warmth of her hand, closing her eyes as if she was willing it to go hard again, and then lightly moving it as it went tighter. He didn’t have the same helpless urgency as before, and she got up and crawled on top of him, enveloping him, her breasts squeezed up tight across his chest, and she kissed his mouth. Again he felt the strange shiver of her melancholy. “I can’t let you do it. It’s too big.” She was using the vague teasing voice again, at once urgent and feigned, but then quickly she raised her hips and pushed it into herself. It felt warm and tight but not stunningly different until she began to move, rising and coming down, and this he liked very much. Her hair dangled down across his face, and he took hold of her buttocks and even felt down where his penis went into her.

  He was quite sure that this wasn’t a dream, only the thought drifted through his mind that he had been here before in a dream. Holding her bottom in his hands as she raised and slid down his shaft was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Her flesh seemed to loosen in his hand. I can die now, he thought. She chewed on his ear, making little noises that sounded almost but not quite like noises of frustration. She held herself up on her hands, her hair coming down around him in a shroud, and he put his hands on her breasts. Her mouth was open, panting, her upper lip coming away slightly so he could see her top front teeth glinting in the light. He began to push gently upward as she came down, causing her again to exhale with each thrust. A trickle of sweat slid between her breasts. He was amazed at how easy he felt, how casual, as if he had done this a thousand times before.

  She pulled him over and soon he was lying in the cradle of her legs, propped on his elbows so he wouldn’t crush her, and she laughed at his careful motions at first. “Come,” she said. “Come on, Indian boy, you can do better than that.” Somewhat irritated at her taunting, he pulled back and came into her more firmly, and she grabbed his buttocks with both hands and let them ride up and down. “Come on,” she said, slowly turning her head from one side to the other, eyes closed. “Come on, my big Indian boy. Do away with me.”

  Questions, from the most trivial to very large ones, flashed through Tom’s mind even as these wondrous events were occurring. Why did she call him that? She moved her legs up so that they crossed in the air, above his ass, and one of her fingers wandered into his anus. This both excited and frightened him, and now he did wonder: Is everything allowed? Absolutely everything? In the back of his mind was the fear that the door would suddenly open and the outside world would catch them at this. Deacon Miller drifted in, his face looking up through the ventilator, the thin black hair, the longish nose. For some reason, Tom saw the Reverend’s face, too, the way it would always flush when he beat you with his belts or his riding whips, the way he breathed a certain way, heavy and regular—so heavy that at times it seemed like the whole room would fill with his breathing.

  She was looking up at him with her eyes wide, as if in fear. “Oh,” she said. And he was alarmed and almost stopped, and she said, “No, don’t, you got me now, you got me,” and she grabbed him by the neck and pulled him down and kissed him long and hard and yet somehow gently, moving her tongue around inside his mouth as he rocked back and forth on her. At the instant before his ejaculation, she turned her head to the side with an expression of terrible pain. “Oh God!” she said, sounding both angry and hurt, and then she repeated it, “Oh God!”

  His ejaculation into her was a scary tumbling eruption of pleasure. When he pulled out of her and fell beside her on the bed, he heard himself laugh, but then again, without apparent reason, he felt the starburst of anger he’d felt moments before, only more strongly.

  “Tom?”

  He stared at her and had the strange sensation that they were both lost and drifting.

  “Oh Tom,” she said mournfully.

  Sometime later she sprawled across him. “You got me,” she murmured again, and soon fell asleep, dead weight across him, breasts crushed against him. One flesh.

  ***

  Before the earliest stirrings of morning, Tom turned and looked at the window
curtain, which had ruffled slightly. He’d left the window cracked open so that he could hear outside. He had been having a very confused nightmare in which the Reverend was trying to kiss him. The Reverend had taken off Tom’s clothes, taken down his shirt. The white curtain stirred again.

  17

  ON THURSDAY, Jake rode the train with Leonard LaFarge to Enid, hoping to visit a man there who Leonard said knew the real estate game.

  The ride from Guthrie to Enid wasn’t far in miles, but at Leonard’s request they took the train instead of using the wagon—west thirty miles to Kingfisher, where they had to catch another train that was crowded and uncomfortable. The passenger cars were remarkably shabby, with mud, dents, and scrapes outside, bullet holes, broken windows, and aisles as dirty as a public street, stacked with luggage. All seats were taken in the four passenger cars, and they were forced to stand. Thousands of would-be settlers were still roaming around the newly opened territory, trying to find affordable pieces of land to lease before the worst of winter set in. Sharing their car were a group of Russians, a pack of young sunburned Irishmen who’d been on a track gang in Texas, one severely clean, straight-postured, black-clad German family, probably from Pennsylvania, and, sitting right across from them, seven prostitutes in brightly colored décolleté glory, their sharp perfume doing battle with other, less sweet smells in the packed car. As they traveled into the low, rolling Cherokee Outlet, the smoke of prairie fires wafted in the windows—fires set by settlers making early preparations for spring plowing, or flushing out rogue cattle herders who were still occupying Outlet lands.

  Leonard and Jake stood at the back of the car, surrounded by sacks and boxes of household items jammed into filthy aisles, including a new “B” Hot Blast #7 that towered behind them, a huge stove with fancy nickel foot rails, capped off by a nickel swing top that looked like a horseracing trophy. Jake could see by the wired-on tag that the stove had been furnished by Master’s Hardware in Little Rock—which in more normal times might have concerned him.