by Speer Morgan
Sinti, one of the Indian words covertly used by some of the boys at the academy, meant “snake,” and Chalak was the shortened version of Chalakki okla, “Cherokee,” Tom’s old secret nickname.
“How many times every week?”
Tom tried to shrug it off. “Enough.”
“Yeah, you were one of the lucky ones.” He looked at Tom directly now. “I’m going back, you know.”
Tom at first didn’t understand.
Hack added, “Back to pay the Reverend a little visit. You want to go?”
“I thought we were going to Muskogee.”
“We are, but from Muskogee to Durant is one straight ride south on the Katy Railroad. It’ll be no problem getting there. We can hide in the woods until night. Make our visit. Take a train back to Fort Smith. No one will know we’ve been there. It will be our secret.”
Tom had known that Hack had some reason for inviting him to go along with him, and he’d planned to act receptive, if for nothing else to keep him talking. But he hadn’t expected this. Before he even fully comprehended, his skin started tingling, as if his body grasped what Hack was saying before his mind did. He looked out the window and didn’t reply.
“You remember Motey Campbell? Motey was my friend. I saw the report that the Reverend sent in when he died. He wrote that Motey died of a fever. I thought I’d go crazy because I couldn’t do anything. Hey, now I can do something.” Hack kept making his new, nervous, melting, worried smile.
“How’d you see this report?” Tom asked.
“It was my day of reckoning. A Tuesday, as usual. I went in, and the Reverend left to go to the privy. He told me to wait. I read what was on his desk. ‘Motey Campbell, age thirteen,’ it said. “This unfortunate boy died on the Sabbath, August 19, of a sudden fever. He rests with his Creator.’”
Tingling and jumpy, Tom wanted to get up and walk away, but there was nowhere to go on the moving train except to pace the aisle. The idea of revenge reached out and wrapped its cool fingers around him. Suddenly he and Hack were old friends having an angry, intimate, whispering argument.
“Say it, man, you want to go with me.” Hack poked him in the ribs.
“It’s the past. Just forget it.”
“I say we do him like he did us.”
“There are other ways.”
“What other ways? Name them.”
“We could write letters describing the place. We could send them to the tribe.”
Hack scoffed. “Oh, yeah. That’s a great idea. Two breeds—kids—against the Presbyterian Mission.”
“So what do you want to do, go over there and beat him up? Make his back bleed? You’re crazy.”
Hack smiled. He was trembling a little. “Feel under my coat,” he whispered.
Tom reached out and felt the hard thing under his duster. He was wearing a pistol.
“We’re yellow if we don’t, Tom. Yellow as dandelions.”
Tom completely gave up trying to be the clever detective. “Where is Joel?”
“What does that have to do with it? I told you already. He left is all I know.”
“Edgar said that you had some kind of argument with him.” “Hey, that old nigger doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Think about what I’m saying to you now, man. Don’t change the subject.”
“Tell me about Joel first.”
“I told you all I know. He just went. They fired him, he went. He didn’t tell me where. Look, are you with me?” Something about the turn of Hack’s mouth told Tom that he was lying.
Tom looked out the window. They were nearing the river again. Across its brown surface a fire was raging in the scrubland near the bank, blazing across the water, with three men standing around on a sandbar watching it. The billowing black smoke looked like a ragged beast with its head lifted to the sky, its arms stretching out. Tom wondered if what was always in the back of his mind, the source of his nightmares, was not the fear of going back to Bokchito but the fear of wanting to. Wanting to so badly that he would secretly smolder inside until he walked through the door that he’d so often dreaded, until he looked into the Reverend’s eyes with the Reverend’s own dead-fish expression and declared that there was no outside authority, no way out, because this was his day of reckoning. Finally his.
Revenge is sweet, the old blind soldier had said. Just by thinking about it, Tom could taste it, as vivid and bitter and sweet as the wine that Sam had given him last night. But he remembered Mr. Dekker’s dead eyes and wondered what killing left you with.
They stopped in Hanson, a raw-looking place with a store and a cotton gin, a cattle yard near the station, where a few stacks of fiber bales and twig crates of chickens sat on the shipping platform. They had a fifteen-minute layover during loading, and they got off the train to stretch their legs, Hack putting his delivery satchel under his arm and walking close beside Tom. Inside the little station they looked at Wanted posters, Hack with an arm dangled around Tom’s shoulders. Bank robbers, train robbers, killers. Tom remained partly under the spell of Hack’s idea, but the sudden chumminess, the way he stayed so near him, got on Tom’s nerves. He was pushing Tom, trying to boss him, giving him that insinuating, melting smile.
Some miners got on the train at Hanson, and their car quickly filled with tobacco smoke. The language they spoke sounded German. At the academy they’d been introduced to several languages: a little French, German, even some Hebrew. Tom had never really understood why the Reverend absolutely forbade any Indian language. Getting caught speaking even single words was as bad as getting caught using obscenities. The boys were beaten for it.
“Did you ever wonder why he didn’t let us talk Indian?” Tom said aloud.
“I don’t wonder at anything he did,” Hack replied.
The train back up to speed, Tom looked out the window at the reds and greys and browns of early winter in the wooded hills. As they crossed a narrow river valley, he could see northeastward all the way to the majestic blue Boston Mountains. The tobacco smoke in the car became intoxicating, and Tom rode along in a partial daze with Hack’s fantasy of revenge riding right along with him. Hack seemed to have become a different person, as if during the last month or two he had walked through a mirror and turned into his own opposite. The old Hack had been gentle, deliberate, and without much apparent guile; the person sitting beside him was threatening, conspiratorial, and full of secrets that he hoarded like gold coins. Tom didn’t need Jake’s advice not to trust him. It came naturally. Yet wrapped all around and among Tom’s mistrust were a thousand strands of intimacy based on their old friendship.
They got off the train at Fort Gibson and took a mule-cart taxi to a fifty-cent hotel at the south edge of Muskogee. It was called the Acme, and in its lobby three shabby, bearded men sat around as if they’d been there for a week without moving. On the counter lay a stack of crudely printed magazines and pamphlets with titles like The Voice of Labor, Industrial Solidarity, and Birth Control Review. “Them go for a dime apiece,” the clerk said with a tobacco-stained smile. “Good readin for bad times, fresh outa Chicago.”
The only furnishings in their little square room were a chair, a slop jar, a tin cuspidor in a corner that was stained amber by innumerable misses, and a low home-built table by the one sagging bed. Wire mesh was nailed over the transom, and a single kerosene lantern provided light.
In the room, right away Hack started acting peculiar. He laid the delivery satchel on the floor by the bed, unstrapped and set his holster on the table, and loaded his pistol. It was a twenty-dollar .45-caliber revolver, of a kind sold by Dekker Hardware. He sat on the bed, opening and closing his hands around the walnut handle, aiming at the wall, pretending to shoot a cockroach that was walking up it.
“Pchou!”
Tom sat down on the chair. “What’s in the satchel?”
Hack lowered the pistol to his lap. “Don’t know. Ain’t supposed to know. Ain’t supposed to look.” He glanced down at the satchel and added, as if it didn’t ma
tter, “It’s for somebody name of Crilley. I’ve come here before, always take it to his house on Sunday.”
“who’s Crilley?”
“Have no idea.” Quickly, Hack raised the pistol at the cockroach. “Pchou!”
“Did Deacon Miller teach you how to shoot?”
“Taught me what I need to know,” Hack said cryptically. He suddenly looked glum. “What do you know about the Deacon?” “I know he tried to kill Jake.”
“I warned you about Jake. He’s out.”
“Did Miller teach you how to kill people?”
Hack peered at him through the gloom, head back, eyelids partly closed. “So you won’t go with me? Are you yellow?” He slowly raised the gun and aimed it at him. “Pchou!”
He was trying to make Tom mad, trying to stir him up, but Tom wasn’t going to play his game. “You could get yourself killed, Hack. The Reverend sleeps lightly. He keeps a gun by his bedside. You remember him hunting birds during picking.” His own memory was vivid: at harvest time, the Reverend in the popcorn field making quick, twisting shots with his double-barrel shotgun, dragging two doves at once out of the sky, so close together that they hit the ground almost at the same moment. Every bird season he liked to show off to the boys that way.
Hack sat there fiddling with the gun, looking at him with the ringed, sleepy eyes. Tom was beginning to wonder whether he should even remain here with him. He got the feeling that Hack was trying to get used to handling the gun, but also Tom felt that he was part of what Hack had on his mind—the gun and him together. He didn’t understand the looks Hack was giving him.
“I feel wild sometimes at night,” Hack said suddenly. He twirled the pistol’s cylinder and snapped it shut. “Hey, listen to me. My blood is boilin.”
Tom looked away, uneasy.
“Girls!” Hack said sarcastically, taking off his shirt. He had already taken off his pants. “They’re good for making money. That’s all. Girls, pfft. The Deacon doesn’t waste his time with girls.”
“Does Deacon Miller work for that hotel where you’re staying?”
“Sometimes.”
“Does he work for the store?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“You’re asking me to help you kill somebody. Come on. Talk to me.”
“Why are you askin about the Deacon?” Hack looked at him intently, his face trembling with a ferment of emotions—shame, fear, pride, anger, bitterness, everything bubbling up at once. “The Deacon belongs to no one. He takes what he wants! It’s that simple. He has power, man!” Hack picked the gun up again and held it out. “Here! You want to know what power is? Let me show you something. Take it. Go on. Take it!”
Tom looked at the gun a moment and finally took it.
“Aim it at me. Aim it at my heart.”
Tom hesitated.
“Go on,” Hack said sharply, eyes flashing. “Aim it at me!”
Tom aimed hesitantly, from the waist.
“Now feel it in your hands. It’s loaded. Feel the trigger with your finger. Feel the handle underneath your palm. You can snuff me out for good, Tom, it’s up to you. That’s God. Not some man walking around in a dress two thousand years ago.”
Tom lowered the gun. “Did Miller teach you that?”
Tom could see that his refusal to act impressed bothered Hack. He looked wounded. They talked more, Hack assertive but unconvincing. Their conversation kept ending in bruised perplexity.
When they were readying to go to sleep, Hack started acting agitated again. He had taken off everything but his undershirt. He turned down the wick and got into bed, and immediately rolled over and said, “You know, there’s a way to get satisfaction without girls. I can show you.”
At Bokchito some of the older boys did things to each other at night, but as far as Tom knew, Hack hadn’t been among them. “No,” Tom said quietly. “I’m going to sleep.”
Hack started trying to tickle him and play with his chest. Tom didn’t like this at all and pushed him away. “You’re acting crazy.” Hack jerked up from the bed, snatched the gun from the table, and lay down on his back on top of the blanket. Tom watched as he licked its barrel, slowly, all around. Tom almost laughed, but Hack put the barrel into his mouth, just the tip at first, and to Tom’s amazement, he cocked the pistol and plunged it clear into his throat. Hack’s penis had risen up tight across his belly.
Tom was frozen.
Hack took the gun out. “I can show you something.” He was like a coiled spring. “Look. Hey, you know how that sinti used to beat us? He did it because he liked the way it made him feel. Just to get hot. You want to see? It’s better if you take your clothes off. Hurry.” He waved the gun threateningly toward Tom, eyes dancing crazily. He took the belt from his own pants. “Take em off. Go on!”
Tom was really afraid now, but he knew that he’d better not act that way.
“Come on, man,” Hack taunted. “I’ll shoot you.”
“What is all this with the gun?”
Hack again looked vulnerable and afraid. “Come on,” he pleaded, and held out the belt to Tom.
Tom, sitting on the edge of the bed, took it. “What do you want?”
“You do it to me,” he said. “You’ll see. You don’t have to take off your clothes if you don’t want to.” Hack got down on his knees by the bed and took off his undershirt and, now stark naked, knelt there in the light of the lantern, still with an erection so tight that Tom could almost feel it himself. Across his scarred back were fresh red and purple stripes. Somebody had beaten him recently.
In the lantern light in the dank little room, looking into Hack’s upturned, beseeching eyes, Tom understood something now: Hack wanted to turn white into black, east into west, pain into pleasure, men into women; he wanted to escape his past by returning to it with a vengeance. Tom dropped the belt onto the floor in front of him. “I just want to know what happened to Joel.”
Hack smiled with the bitter twist at the edge of his mouth. “Will you go with me to Bokchito if I tell you?”
Tom leaned forward and put his face close to his old friend’s and said quietly, “We’re different now, Hack.”
“I’m going back to Bokchito, Chalak, that’s how we’re different. You can go with me or not.”
“Is Joel dead?”
Hack’s new, worldly smartness leaked out of his expression. He looked away. Eventually he sat down on his haunches and crossed his hands over his nakedness. A train was coming into town from the south, and as it went by they didn’t talk. When the clattering and squealing brakes had subsided into silence, Hack said, “He gave out information. Somebody got him to talk, maybe the same person who killed old man Dekker. Somebody killed the old man and stole something from him, some paper, money, I don’t know. Now they’re tearing up the damn store looking for whatever was stolen. They started Thursday night turning it upside down.” “What do you mean, Joel gave out information?”
“A courier can’t give out information, man. He broke the rule. He knew what he was doing. These men don’t play around. What they’re doing is a lot bigger than a barrel of nails and a roll of barbed wire, man. A lot bigger. They’re going to own half of the Indian Territory.”
“Did they kill Joel, that’s what I’m asking you.”
“It was none of my business, man. I don’t know.”
“Did Deacon Miller do it?”
“Look, I’m his boy. I belong to him. I’m learning from him. I’m learning what I have to. You better learn something, too. Because you didn’t learn nothin from Reverend Schoot,” he added vehemently. “Nothin! How to eat pig food. Sit on your butt all day reading Latin verbs. Latin! How to be some kind of useless, fake white man, which is worse than a nigger. Take that to the bank and see what you get for it.”
With black anger in his heart, Tom rose, went over to the window, and stared into the night. “Joel only used to be a friend of yours. Is that it?”
When he turned back, Hack was standing up, putting his p
ants back on. “You think you’re so righteous. Well, you’re dead if you go back to Fort Smith. You were dumb enough to have that telegram in your pocket at the hotel. They took it to the Deacon. I was there when they gave it to him.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Your salesman friend is out, man, he’s gone, he’s scheming against the boss. And since you had that telegram in your pocket, so are you. You can’t go back.”
“So they’re going to do him like they did Joel?”
Hack looked weary, but he opened his eyes wide at Tom, flashing anger. “Joel was weak! He was dead anyway. He was already crazy. He was shaking all the time, he was having bad dreams, he was seeing things. He talked all the time about Bokchito. Man, he was dead!”
“Who’d he give information to?”
“Whatever happened, he did it to himself. I’ve had enough of this.”
They had little else to say to each other. Hack sank onto the bed and curled into a ball. After a while Tom, completely exhausted, lay down beside him, back turned, and silently said the Lord’s Prayer over and over, waiting for sleep to come.
21
TULSA HADN’T BEEN quite as bad as Leonard feared. During the night, they heard only a few shots, at some distance from the hotel, although the sound of bawling cattle was loud from every direction. Large herds had been driven to all nearby railheads to clear out the Outlet before the land run, so the town was temporarily bustling. Exhausted from his lack of sleep the previous night and from driving all day Friday, Jake did sleep that night. It was Leonard’s turn to suffer. At breakfast he looked pallid.
“I’m not long for this world, my friend.”
“Life of sin, Leonard.”
“And I suppose you’re going to finish me off by driving the way you did yesterday.”
“Have some breakfast. You’ll feel better.”