by Speer Morgan
He found matches in a drawer of the shipping desk and lighted the wick of a lantern, and what he saw—or didn’t see—made him wonder whether its meager light was playing tricks on him.
The shipping room was empty except for a few crates and barrels here and there. Downstairs, he found the main display room to be similarly empty. The long front desk had a single catalogue sitting on it, but there wasn’t much else in an otherwise stripped room. Mystified, Jake walked back up the stairs to the second floor, and from there up another flight, and another, finally to the top, discovering one floor at a time that the building was stock-less.
He walked through the stark void of the store with increasing disbelief. Back downstairs, he went to the sporting goods storeroom, which was also barren of goods. Beneath a wallboard display of the 102 bullets currently for sale by the Winchester Arms Company was the old man’s desk. Several drawers were open and papers hung out, as if someone had rifled through them.
He sat in Ralph’s chair and breathed the vaporous cold, trying to fathom the store’s emptiness.
Across the front room, the big office was locked, but he had a key and let himself in. Lantern held high, he surveyed the place. The air was sour with lingering tobacco smells. In the wastebasket were a few notes that looked like property descriptions. He entered Ernest’s small inner office, made sure the blinds were shut, and set down the lantern on the desk. A standing ashtray was full of the butts of pre-rolled cigarettes. Across the top of the desk was a large sheet of thick paper. It was a map of the Indian Nations and Oklahoma Territory, with ovals and circles drawn in various places, along with tiny squares which generally appeared around towns all over the map. It was a detailed map of the areas that the salesmen had been told to collect. The little squares were apparently places where mortgages had been signed. In a top corner was a series of numbers, crossed out, leading to a final number: 130. The one area where there weren’t a lot of squares was the Choctaw Nation, where Jake himself had been sent to collect. He found a pencil in a drawer and did a quick sketch of the map, roughly copying some of the details.
Putting the pencil back, he noticed a commonplace book in the back of the drawer. He sat still for a second, listening to the building, then pulled it out. On one page was a draft of what appeared to be a telegram.
To: Master’s Hardware, Little Rock:
Am clearing inventory at prices severely reduced below supplier costs. Will sell complete stock. Total supplier cost fifty-three thousand dollars, to be sold at twenty thousand, negotiable to eighteen cash purchase. If interested in buying, please contact me immediately.
Jake looked up. He thought he’d heard a sound somewhere in the building. Quickly, he glanced through the rest of the notebook. Somewhere at the back he found a page that included a short list of names with dollar notations:
Shelby, $4
Bradley, $1
John Crilley, $10
He shut the back door and walked outside, beyond the wagon yard to the place where he’d tethered the brushy-tail. He stood beside her for a minute, listening. Morning was coming to a cloudy and very cold day for this early in winter. He rode to the Main Hotel and asked after Miss King.
The clerk gave him a funny look. “Afraid she’s not here. Miss King is popular this morning. She left earlier. With another gentleman.”
“Another gentleman?” Jake said.
“Two other gentlemen, actually.”
“Did you notice who it was?”
The clerk shook his head. “You’re welcome to leave her a note, sir.”
Jake looked at him, trying to decide whether to push it. “Can you tell me what these gentlemen were dressed like?”
“I wasn’t here. Another clerk mentioned it.”
Jake took a pencil from the desk and wrote a note to her, saying that he was in town now and asking her to see him.
Back at Mrs. Peltier’s, Jake found Leonard still in bed. Almost as soon as Jake shook him, Leonard swung his legs out and put his feet on the floor, as if intending to get right up, but that was as far as he got. Leonard was generally hard to wake up. He had to bitch himself awake in the morning. Today he wiped at his face and stared at the wall and with a sleepwalker’s vacuous expressiveness cursed the one responsible for waking him up. Finally he breathed a theatrical sigh, wiped his face several more times, got up, and padded across the room to the water closet, muttering.
Jake fired up his little gasoline burner, boiled some sheepherder’s coffee, and when Leonard came out he handed him a cup of it without a word. Leonard started drinking, still muttering and knocking, like a boiler trying to get up to steam.
Jake sat down at his table, spread out his copy of the map from Dekker’s office. He thought about what he’d seen at the store. By the time both of them had swallowed a couple of cups of coffee, Leonard had reentered the land of the living and was asking questions. “You say there’s no stock at all?”
“It’s empty as a hull. Stripped. I saw a draft of a telegram to Master’s Hardware in Little Rock. Apparently he sold the whole inventory to them for less than half what it cost.”
Leonard had already read the note Tom had left for Jake, and now he read it again. He eventually got up and began slowly pacing. He stopped and pointed at the 130 in the upper right corner of Jake’s copy of the map.
Jake looked up. “You tell me.”
“How many salesmen are there at Dekker?”
“Eight or nine, counting the front desk.”
“How much total debt do each of you carry.”
“Varies according to how much we turn over. I was carrying over twenty thousand in the northern district, but it averages less than that. Maybe fifteen.”
“So the store’s got over a hundred thousand dollars accounts receivable?”
“Hundred twenty, maybe. Nobody’s paid up this time of the year, even when things are normal. It takes a while for everybody to clear their debts after the crop’s shipped. Some of them wait until the last minute before spring ordering. And of course this year—”
“How much is he transferring these debts at?”
“Twenty-five cents an acre is what he told us.”
Leonard sat down on the bed and stared at Jake. “Then the 130 is how many acres are already signed over.”
Jake raised his eyebrows.
“A hundred thirty thousand acres,” Leonard said, shaking his head. “You have to take this to somebody.”
“What do you mean?”
Leonard held up fingers and enumerated. “Widely respected merchant dead under suspicious circumstances. Son turns wholesaling company into a shell for land scheme. Bankers implicated. A man in town who recently tried to murder you. Solid indications that you are persona non grata. Far be it from me to be a voice of reason, Jake, but either you talk to somebody like Parker or you leave town. There’s no other reasonable choice.”
Jake squinted at the map. “I’m wondering why he dumped all the merchandise. It won’t take the store long to go down with no stock to sell. Word will get around. Customers will start jumping ship.”
Leonard got up and walked over and looked out the window. “You told me he was a gambler. This is his big bet. He doesn’t care about the store. He’s turning it into land.”
“But if he can’t legally own tribal land—?”
“Gus Wall was right about that. The white courts will probably go along with just about anything tied to an actual debt.”
“It ain’t fair to take somebody’s property at twenty-five cents an acre.”
“It’s just a mortgage, Jake, a guarantee of repayment. The debt holder has the full right to buy it back.”
“With what?” Jake said. “Are you saying the government will go along with this?”
“Judge Parker used to try to keep the sooners out, but Congress chopped his district in half. He no longer has authority over there. It’s gone beyond one judge’s ability, anyway.” He looked at Jake. “Did you find anything else this morning
?”
Jake poured another kick of muddy coffee. “I tried to find Sam King. You saw on Tom’s note—”
Leonard nodded.
“Well, she wasn’t there. She disappeared with ‘two gentlemen’ early this morning.”
“I mean at the store, when you were snooping in the office. Did you see anything else there? Anything at all.”
Jake shook his head. “There was somethin in the back of a notebook about Bradley and Shelby. That’s probably Shelby White. Those two are with the Mercantile Bank. And there was a third name—Crilley, I believe.”
Leonard, who’d been combing his long grey hair back with his hand, stopped dead still, his mouth open. “Crilley?”
“It was just the names written out with dollar amounts behind them. It was nothin. One dollar after Bradley, four dollars after White.”
“One dollar means a thousand, Jake. He’s using accounting shorthand.”
“Well, then, Mr. Crilley, whoever he is, hit the jackpot, because the number after his name was ten.”
Leonard stared at him with a strange, lowering intensity. “John Crilley,” he said quietly.
“That’s right. There was a first name on his entry. Who the hell is John Crilley?”
“You told me the boy—Tom—is in Muskogee?”
“Yeah. There’s his note,” Jake said, pointing at the table. “It’s bad luck we didn’t see him when we were there.”
Leonard picked up the note and scanned it again.
“What’s on your mind, Leonard? You look like your eyes are going to jump out of your head.”
Leonard again stopped at the window and glanced out. He said with dramatic flatness, “Get your hat, Jake. Let’s go.” He was looking down on the street.
Jake got up to look out, when someone came into the hallway below. Without a word, Jake grabbed Leonard by the shoulders and pushed him into the water closet, whispering, “Be quiet.”
There was a vigorous knock on Jake’s door.
“Mr. Jaycox. I have a message from Miss King.”
“Put it under the door, please.”
Before he could do anything, the door opened.
24
TOM RODE PAST wind-clashing trees on a rock-scattered road through the Winding Stair. By dark he had made it to Poteau, where he tied the horse in a shed beside McCurtain’s General Merchandise and fetched from the saddlebag one of the envelopes full of money. He went inside the store and from the triangular stacks of cans along one wall got a tin of beef and a tin of green beans, took them to the front, and paid for them with one of the bills.
The storekeeper, a friendly, grave man of about Jake’s age, didn’t act like there was anything remarkable about Tom or his twenty-dollar bill, but the huddle of blizzard refugees who were sitting around the stove stopped talking and watched him. The storekeeper opened the cans and loaned Tom a table knife. Dazed from the cold, Tom walked toward them and sat down on a wooden box. At first he ate quickly, wanting both to vomit and to devour the entire contents of both cans in one swallow. As he knifed down the jellied beef and beans, the others eventually began talking again, in English and in Choctaw that he didn’t understand well.
Around the stove were four men and five women. The oldest man had ramrod-straight posture and wore a floppy hat; two younger ones sat slump-backed, staring moodily at the floor. Among the women was a sultry young one wearing a fringed dress, who watched Tom eating. For some reason there were no children here. Two of the women were talking about the pros and cons of metal roofs, which were popular on settlers’ dugouts.
Then they all talked about stoves, different models of stoves, cook stove and heating, fondly describing their shapes, sizes, and trim, how large a space they could heat, even the particular qualities of warmth put out by each one. It soon became apparent that none of them currently had a stove. “Twenty years ago was the first time I saw one in a house,” the older man with a floppy hat said wistfully. One of the younger men, with the smooth, beardless face of a full blood, said that when the tribe’s land was split up, he was going to sell his acreage and buy the best stove in the catalogue.
“Will you carry it on your back?” Soft Hat asked him.
Full Blood looked puzzled.
“Sell your land and you’ll have no place to put your fancy stove,” Soft Hat said.
“I plant in the bottoms.”
“But if somebody else owns that land, you won’t be able to plant there no more.”
“We always plant in the bottoms.”
Soft Hat laughed. “But somebody else will own the land!”
“What difference does that make?” Full Blood said casually. “Plenty of bottomland.” Soft Hat said something back in Choctaw, and they carried on in that way for a while, talking faster. Tom was reminded that the Choctaw his pals at Bokchito used when they dared to talk Indian was a dim echo of the real thing. He glanced around at the faces of the people here and felt completely unconnected to them. In his state of mind, they seemed like lost wanderers from some distant land. He felt vaguely ashamed—of what, he didn’t know.
Looking into the flames of the stove, he remembered the Reverend’s picture book with naked savages dancing around fires. Would the Reverend always be in his thoughts, darting around, whispering, judging him? Did killing him only bring him to life? What Tom had read in his file had almost no meaning: Osi Tamaha . . . Big Tree . . . Apache. From long ago, he remembered some conversation about Apache from one of the younger boys, and all he could recall was that the very word terrified him. Then there was the old woman with the bathhouse at Durant . . .
His thoughts drifted to Samantha King, and he was scalded by a sudden raw desire to see her. He glanced at the young woman in fringe, who was watching the knife he was using to eat with.
He got up and limped around the store, his heels sore and his thighs tender from the long ride. The store had clothes, and he spent the remainder of the twenty-dollar bill on a plain brown pair of cowboy boots and a fur-lined sheepskin coat. He wasn’t unhappy about abandoning Sam’s ankle-cutting shoes once and for all.
As he was about to leave, the weather refugees were still talking about stoves. “Ain’t worth selling your land,” Soft Hat was saying. “You could buy a fine stove for forty dollars, cash.” With no hesitation, as if pulled by invisible strings, Tom reached into his pocket, withdrew the envelope of money, walked over, and gave Full Blood two of the twenty-dollar bills. Seeing the look on Soft Hat’s face, Tom gave him the same amount. He went on around to the others, handing forty dollars to each of them. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice was saying that this was the most foolish thing that he could possibly do. After the first two of them had received money, the others waited in dazed silence, as if they were afraid to move.
The young woman in fringe was last, and she gave him a desperate, sudden smile. “Take me with you,” she said.
Tom looked at her a moment and realized that she was serious, but he was too stunned by the whole situation to reply intelligently. He just reached out his hand as if to touch her and said, “Take care, sister. Get your stove.”
The young woman looked as if she was going to faint, which alarmed Tom, and he was turning to go when the storekeeper came out from behind his counter. “Friend, can I have a word with you?” he said. “That weather’s dangerous. Do you have to travel?”
Tom nodded.
The storekeeper searched Tom’s face. “I had a cousin freeze in a norther.”
Tom shook his head. He wanted to talk but was too wrought up to say much.
The rest of the journey to Fort Smith was over gentle hills south of the Poteau River. Now he was headed away from the wind, but the old road and the train tracks were well covered with snow, and in some places he had to guess his way. He got to the bridge over the Arkansas, where the wind howled and tore at the river below. He had intended to let the horse loose before he came into town, but he’d only die if he did.
Not knowing what else to do
, Tom took the horse to the stable that Jake used, got him unsaddled and fed, and turned him loose in the sheltered yard, where in the shadows he saw the outline of a mule. He walked over and there was Grant standing asleep. Tom patted him and rubbed his old hairy chin, unconcerned about being bitten. On the other side of the yard, as far away as possible, was Lee. Tom went over and hugged him around the neck.
Down the alley in Mrs. Peltier’s back shed, he put the satchel into the bottom drawer of an old cobweb-covered dresser. He walked straight through the back door and up the stairs, meeting no one on the way. Jake wasn’t in his room. He looked around for his note to Jake—the evidence that he’d been with Hack—and wasn’t surprised that it was gone.
With a last spasm of energy he managed to pull off his new boots. On the couch in Jake’s parlor, finally warm, he lay down and immediately slipped into a half-sleep. Several times he was wakened by comings and goings in the halls. He heard people talking, but remained locked in an unrestful stupor.
A couple of hours later, the door opened and in walked a man carrying a lantern with long grey hair streaming across his shoulders. Disoriented, a little scared, Tom lifted his head from the couch. He recognized the grey-haired man: Leonard LaFarge, Jake’s friend he’d met in the land-office yard in Guthrie. He was pale.
“Tom?” he said, walking closer to him with the lantern. “Tom Freshour?”
Tom sat up and put his feet on the floor. “Yessir?”
“Ecce homo,” LaFarge said wonderingly, peering intently at him. “You look . . . older.”
***
Tom asked after Jake, and LaFarge immediately began pacing. He told Tom about Jake’s and Sam’s abduction by Deacon Miller. He then described what had just happened to him. He had been “kicked out by the U.S. commissioner,” he said. “Which makes it unanimous. He was my last hope. No person associated with the law in this town wants to hear about this. All day I’ve been waiting for people. I saw the sheriff and he fobbed me off. I went to the marshal’s office, and they told me they needed proof of something that serious. Proof! I finally went to the U.S. commissioner—I know Claude Baines—and what does he say but that in the absence of suspects in custody he has no authority.”