The Whipping Boy

by Speer Morgan

  They bumped against the north bank of the river, and Leonard looked up and sighed. “Tulsa.”

  20

  TOM LEANED against a bent and rusted iron fence, still panting from his single-man race down the avenue between sentinels of street lamps. He had run out on Sam because her questions made him feel trapped and because her life story gave her a past, a flawed and particular and far-reaching whole lifetime of pastness, transmuting her from radiant force and pure mystery into the demarcations of flesh, and the more human and real she was, the farther from her he seemed—like a kid squinting across a wide gulf of experience toward a figure far away. She made him afraid of his own past, too, afraid that it would somehow cohere out of the gloom, that it would be thrust into his hands like a heavy suitcase.

  He wanted to talk to Hack. He had Jake’s telegram in his pocket, asking him to find out what he could about Mr. Dekker’s death. But more than that, Tom wanted to know what had happened to Joel—exactly what had happened—and why Hack had been so actively avoiding him.

  Tom held on to the iron fence in front of this dark rambling clapboard wreck, its sign above the door barely readable through mist blowing up from the river: paris hotel. The fog dampened the sound of a piano coming from the hotel and cloaked the occasional figure who hurried by in obscurity. He didn’t relish going into the big old drooping building, but now was better than tomorrow, when Hack would be working and hard to catch.

  Tom loitered up and down the fence, drumming up his courage, then finally went in, passing into the familiar odor of a dilapidated building, layered with a half-dozen other smells—dry rot and flood and cigar smoke and borax cleaner and strong perfume and the thin suggestion of vomit. A long-haired, skinny night clerk sat dealing out rows of cards to himself beneath a frosted glowing lantern. In the corner of the room a black man in a high white collar was playing the same rinky-tink piano music that Tom had heard coming from saloons everywhere, only his playing was different. Instead of pounding mechanically on the keyboard, this man watched his hands with an expression that was effortless, serene, amused, while his fingers pranced, capered, and spidered across it. Three people besides the clerk were in the lobby. On a couch a large woman bulged out of a ruffled violet dress, vacantly staring, as if she was unaware of the music or anything else, and two young Indian men sat across from her in rumpled duck jackets, one with his eyes shut, the other mumbling to himself. This inert trio was a strange audience for the dazzling music. Tom stood there a moment listening, before walking up to the clerk to ask where Hack Deneuve was staying.

  The clerk looked up from his cards with a smiling mouth and menacing eyes. “Hello there, chief. Wouldn’t just be coming in from the Flint courthouse, would you?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Tom said.

  The clerk was thin to the point of being skeletal, with a large skull on a long stalk of neck. “Money’s good, we don’t care what you are, chief. This town has a dozen good houses in it, and we’re the only one that’ll take bloods. We don’t want no tattoo-skin Comanches, a course. Long as you’re dressed white and look okay. Been real busy here since that strip payment.”

  Tom had read about it in the newspaper: the government last week had distributed two-hundred-dollar payments to Cherokee people for the purchase of the Cherokee Outlet.

  The clerk went back to his cards. “Never did see so many prosperous bloods. They come acrost here lookin for some fun. I tell em all, I say, you want to turn real estate into white nooky, chief, you have done come to the one and only place in this fair city, the Paris Hotel and Society Parlor. So how bout you, young man, what can I do you for? Most of the girls are off tonight because it done finally tailed down from all the strip bidness, but now I think I just might be able to scare up some socializin for you.”

  “Can you just tell me what room Hack Deneuve is in?”

  The clerk instantly became less friendly. “That’d be one-twelve. Not sure I’d be visitin him now if I was you.”

  “Why not?”

  He just shook his head and went back to his card game.

  Tom went down a long cold hallway filled with a fragrance of smoke that wasn’t quite like tobacco. Sounds came through doors and gaps under doors—conversation, somewhere a bed squeaking, and, from a room down the hall, rachitic, wheezing laughter. He was standing by a lamp when a woman appeared in front of him.

  “Well,” the woman said, looking him over. “Well well well well.” Smiling broadly, with big healthy-looking teeth, she took him by both arms and pulled him firmly into a room. She had black hair, wild on her head, as if she hadn’t combed it after sleeping, and she was wearing the scantiest costume imaginable, scarcely reaching her knees. In the gloom he saw that she was short of stature, neither comely nor uncomely, and that she projected a powerful impression. “Well well well,” she said again, still holding his arms at the shoulders with a tight grip, inspecting him. Tom was alarmed but mesmerized by the woman’s wide eyes. She nodded. “You in the market, honey?” She came up close to him and rubbed across his front with one teasing hand. “Are you?”

  “Am I what? I’m here to see a friend.”

  She began to unhook her top, and in the imperfect light her entire costume seemed to disappear from her magically, and she clamped herself against him with the suddenness of a praying mantis, her sweet-water perfume overwhelmingly strong. Looking down at her bosom, crushed against his chest, Tom’s thoughts began wildly switching this way and that.

  “I came to—”

  “A pure, young, mettlesome Indian man like you must want it bareback. Am I right?” She soon had his shirt off and was taking down his pants.

  “I’m here to see a friend . . . one-twelve,” he repeated unconvincingly. He tried to back away but wasn’t equal to the raw force of her blandishments. She kissed him passionately, wrestled at his clothes, pulling his pants to the floor, and rubbed her body provocatively against him.

  With one hand already around his penis, she said, “Well! What is this sweet oil on you? What’d you do, honey, get all ready for me?”

  She shoved him lightly and he stumbled out of his pants. There he was, standing naked against this wild woman from nowhere, who now walked him backwards until he collapsed onto a bed, where she fell down and kissed him on the mouth, pushing her big tongue into his mouth. Shortly, she got up astraddle him. Tom knew that he could jackknife out of her clutches, but inside himself he was running around in circles, and before long he had begun to get hard. Quickly, and without ceremony or buildup, she raised up and slid it into herself, making a little sound of seeming pleasure. “I do take money,” she said, rising and coming down at first very slowly, keeping him inside her, “but I don’t strictly do it for money, not when they’re like you, honey. Unh, now you’re getting there. I been called crazy, unh, but I love strong young fresh Cherokee Indin men like you. What’s your name?”

  “Tom,” he said, too stunned to ask hers.

  Tom was beginning to enjoy it despite himself. The window was open and wet patches of air snaked into the room. The woman propped herself on the bed with both hands, her hair dangling down around his eyes almost like curtains, her face close to his.

  “I specially like em young and fresh. I was made to give it to young, fresh—yeh, like that, that’s it, now you getting it, mmm, bring it on to me, chief, talk to me.” She spoke loudly and in a disjointed and unconvincing way. “You hung like a Cherokee chief. Are you a chief?”

  “No ma’am. I’m not even a Cherokee.”

  He was beginning to notice what the bed smelled like, when he heard something in the room and looked over and saw a shadowy form in the doorway, apparently just leaving the room.

  “Not a Cherokee?” She arched backwards, thus bending his now perfectly hard penis until he rose up in pain.

  “Ouch! That hurts, ma’am.”

  “Not a Cherokee, did you say? You telling me you didn’t go to Flint courthouse and get payment?” Tom extricated himself and crawled ou
t of the smelly bed, stumbling around looking for his pants, which had been thrown into a corner. Before he had them halfway on, he was pushed headlong out the door, which slammed hard and was locked. Stunned almost beyond embarrassment, he looked both ways in the hall and pulled the pants up. He put out a hand against the wall and stood there a moment, eyes closed.

  He crept past an open door, afraid that someone else would lunge out and grab him. Several people were sitting together inside, passing around a pipe, smoking some pungent substance. “Come in, join us,” said a woman, giving him a come-hither gesture. A fat man with sleepy eyes said, “Nother blood? I ain’t smokin with a damn blood.” The woman still beckoned. “Come on in, stallion.” Tom backed away from the open room and approached 112 at the end of the hall. He started to knock on the door but hesitated when he heard sounds inside. He stood there with his fist suspended, wondering whether what he was hearing through the door were sounds of pain or pleasure. Whatever it was, he decided he couldn’t interrupt it. He backed away, unnerved, and retreated down the hall.

  Through the open door, he heard snatches of conversation from the gathering of people who were smoking. Their tone was clandestine and insinuating in a way that sounded strange to Tom. Later, he would understand that this was the twilight world of prostitutes and drug takers and small-time criminals, with their other language, their intimacies, their cynical, casual, upside-down view of everything from the law to the pleasures of the flesh. Now he understood only that they were people—not ten thousand miles away, not across the world, but people here, all around him—whose beliefs and desires and fears were completely unlike what he and Hack had learned in their previous life. What they believed or cared about Tom didn’t know, but he was sure that if they were standing in the weedy, dusty yard of the Armstrong Academy after Thursday marching practice, listening to the weekly harangue about the terrible justice of God, they would probably not be scared or angry but merely uninterested. He understood a little better why Hack was staying here.

  Tom eventually went back downstairs and sat on a threadbare love seat across from the abundant woman in ruffles. He tried to decide whether to wait or come back. The woman appeared to be as unmindful of him as she was of the piano music or the two others who were here, one of whom was snoring lightly. The clerk glanced suspiciously at him through smoke rising from his ashtray.

  For a while Tom just sat among the little flock of lost souls in the whorehouse parlor, listening to the music coming out of the black man’s fingers, sat there thinking how fast and dangerous the world was.

  He was about to leave when a group of drunk country men came in the door, white men with sunburned faces and big Adam’s apples, walking in a clump of slouching, stumbling, pushing, sideways movement, as if they were one lurching organism with several heads, all talking at once. This single entity of lanky, long-jawed men—there were five of them—was arguing almost continuously, making small threats toward one another that suddenly ballooned into promises of mayhem and murder. They separated, and two of them pulled out pocketknives, crouching as if about to attack, ready to cut each other’s throats. Their chattering died out to baleful silence, the black man playing the piano got up and went softly out a side door, and the desk clerk said, “You men take your fightin outside,” to which there was at first no response, just more slouching, crouching, and knife-waving intimidation, and then one of them said, “Aw, we ain’t got no reason to scrap,” and just as abruptly as they had prepared for battle, they clumped back together in a shoving, chortling, drunken bevy, all beating on the counter and demanding tail. The clerk said there was no one available tonight, and once again they got louder and more argumentative.

  A figure appeared at the top of the stairs, a man of medium height and thinning hair with a large-bore pistol in his hand, whose identity, without his black duster, took Tom a second to register.

  Tom turned his face away, surging with fear, and he thought about running but decided it was better just to sit still and hope that the man didn’t notice him. The two Indians in the parlor departed quickly. The lady in ruffles remained, but she was barely of this world.

  “You gentlemen please leave the premises?” said Deacon Jim Miller to the cluster of men.

  “Ain’t no gentlemen, jist as white as you are, come all the way from Springdale,” they said, all talking at once.

  Miller lifted his pistol and let it drop down, cocking it. “I’m pleased that you’re not listening to me,” he said with no particular emphasis, so quietly in fact that Tom wondered if the men even heard him. “The last time I shot a hillbilly’s testicles off? He put on quite a hoedown.”

  “Didn’t come here to git our testicles shot off,” said one of them, looking startled. “Come to git some tail, money’s as good as anybody else’s.”

  Miller slowly aimed the pistol at the general area of their midsections, and they became so frozen with terror that they didn’t seem to know what to do, whether to disperse or huddle together even more tightly, trying to hide behind each other. Tom assumed that Miller was just scaring them, that he had no intention of shooting them, but the clerk said sharply, “Let em leave under their own steam. I don’t want no more dead men to have to explain.”

  They began to retreat, the whole clump moving backwards toward the door, a couple of them wiggling around like they had scorpions in their pants, and then they were all five trying to get out at the same time, none wanting to be last. Miller looked almost disappointed when they finally managed to get out the front door, falling in a great tangle of skinny limbs down the steps, struggling up, and running off. He followed them, two shots rang out, and screams faded into the night.

  Tom got up, going for the same door the others had used. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Hack Deneuve on the stairway landing, his dark-ringed eyes fixed on him in surprise.

  It wasn’t until he was in the street and hurrying back toward the boarding house that Tom felt in his pockets and noticed that they had been cleaned out. He decided it was unimportant, since he’d had less than a dollar in pocket change. Not until later, lying on his couch at Mrs. P’s, did he remember the other item he’d been carrying.

  ***

  Tom woke up the next morning with those same haunted eyes fixed on him. Hack stood at the end of his bed, smirking. Tom raised his head slowly off the pillow.

  “What’d you run away for?” Hack asked. “Deacon scare you off? Come on, let’s get some breakfast.”

  Tom didn’t say much at first. He got up and did his ablutions, and directly they left the house and walked down Texas Avenue. It was after six, and the streets were waking up, with sweet smells from the large bakery down on the west side permeating the cool air, a milkman rattling by, a barbershop near Garrison Avenue opening, the barber standing outside in his shirtsleeves snapping an apron clean. The first horseless streetcar of the day rolled heavily by, looking less threatening to Tom now that he knew about it.

  They went into a café off Garrison with a sign in the front window that said DEPRESSION DINER: COFFEE AN’ 5 CENTS. A stranger probably wouldn’t have seen anything unusual about Hack, but as they began to talk, Tom noticed remarkable changes in him. In the past, Hack had been quiet and on the slow side; now he acted energetic and nervous. He used to not smile very often, but now he had an almost compulsive grin that continually melted into a little grimace of uncertainty and doubt. His eyes appeared to have gone more deeply into his face, and there were those rings under them, as if he wasn’t getting enough sleep. He talked more, and bragged much more—about getting privileged information from important people.

  “I knew they were gonna fire you. I hear things before they happen.” Hack smiled with the queer twist at the end. “I know the right people, Tom. I can help you get a job.” Tom acted interested, and Hack rambled on. “With money you can get anything—horses, land—it’ll buy anything. Women,” he said, pointing with his thumb in no particular direction. “All they want is your money. They’ll do a
nything for it.”

  Tom asked nothing about Deacon Miller, although Hack made little hints about him. Nor did he yet ask Hack anything about Joel. Hack seemed hungry to have a friend, somebody to show off to, but he had something on his mind, too—some purpose, something he was leading up to, and finally he got around to it.

  “Hey, I’m taking a trip today. You want to come with me? I’ll pay the tickets. I’ve got an idea that I think you’ll like.”

  “A trip where?”

  “The territory,” Hack said. “Muskogee.”

  Tom didn’t reply at first.

  Hack added quickly, “I’m delivering papers. I’ve already been there three times.”

  Tom chewed the last of his doughnut before he said, “Delivering papers where?”

  Hack looked around the sparsely attended café and leaned over the table. “This stuff is secret,” he said. “I can’t talk about it. I’m not supposed to know what I’m delivering. Look, why don’t you go with me. It won’t cost you anything. I’ll tell you what’s on my mind on the way.”

  Tom thought of Jake’s telegram. Now was his chance to get answers to some questions. But he had to wonder why Hack was being so friendly all of a sudden, after so long avoiding him around the store.

  “You can’t tell anybody you’re going,” Hack added. “This has to be totally secret. It’s just you and me.”

  Tom went back to the boarding house and got a few things together, wrote a note to Jake telling him where he was going, and went to the station early in order to meet the first train coming in from the territory. Again no Jake. Jake might have decided to drive the wagon all the way back, in which case Tom felt a little better about not waiting to meet him.

  The train to Muskogee left that afternoon, and Hack showed up wearing a black duster and galluses, looking like a younger version of Deacon Miller, which was both funny to Tom and a bit eerie. He was carrying a soft leather satchel, along with a small suitcase.

  They took the Iron Mountain train west into the Cherokee Nation. As they rolled across the flatlands of the Arkansas River Valley, Hack began to talk about Bokchito. His face became heavy, the darkness around his eyes deepening. “How many times did that sinti beat you, Chalak?”