The Whipping Boy

by Speer Morgan

  LaFarge stopped pacing and stared at Tom with big expressive eyes, jaw jutting out, wild hair sticking out in all directions. “They look at me and think, There’s old Bindlestiff, old Copper Nose, he must have finally sprung a leak. That’s how the courthouse crew thinks. He’s prob’ly only tellin half the story, they think. Deacon Miller? White man’s sheriff, high-stakes man, they think. He don’t work for no piss-ant pay, they think. That salesman must owe somebody a right smart amount of money, they think. Missing links!” LaFarge spat. “The descent of man, verified! That’s why I quit this trade.”

  Mr. Haskell came into the room while LaFarge was making his speech. “Hello, Tom. You doin okay?” Mr. Haskell was Tom’s favorite boarder at Mrs. Peltier’s—somebody he felt like he’d known although they hadn’t talked that much.

  “Yes sir. I’m okay.”

  Tom asked Mr. Haskell what had happened, and he calmly related what LaFarge had told him about Jake’s and Sam’s disappearance, while the lawyer continued to pace and mutter.

  LaFarge came over and plopped down, and the three of them sat for a moment in silence. “I can’t believe the way they treated me,” LaFarge said lamely. “Law enforcement in this town is all being paid off. Without exception.”

  “Sheriff’s up for hire,” Mr. Haskell said. “Everybody knows that. I doubt the marshal is.”

  LaFarge glowered at him. “Parker. He’s the only one left.”

  Mr. Haskell looked at him skeptically. “Think I’ll take a quick turn around town and ask around. We’d feel pretty dumb if we found out the two of them were sitting somewhere in a saloon, drinking a beer.”

  Leonard LaFarge waited until Mr. Haskell had shut the door. He looked down at his hands, folded on the table. “Did you go to Muskogee?”

  Tom had prepared for this question. He had thought about it much of the way back, coaching himself in the lies that he hoped would keep him out of trouble, practicing them in his mind. The report of what had happened to Reverend Schoot would take a day or two to get out, but he might as well put a gun to his own head as admit having had any part of it. If he hesitated, or if he acted odd about it, he’d be caught. He had no choice but to lie.

  But in the face of this news about Jake, all of his preparations became insignificant. Ignoring LaFarge’s question, he put on his boots and coat. He went to Jake’s bottom drawer, where Jake kept an old pistol. As he stood up and slipped it into his coat pocket, he noticed a beautiful, lightly dressed buckskin suit with a short fringe lying on top of the dresser.

  “That’s for you,” LaFarge said.

  “What?” Tom said.

  “A gift. Jake bought it for you in Tulsa.”

  While Tom made ready to leave, LaFarge paced back and forth, talking as if to himself: “It was daylight, and they took him right out the front door, which gives me hope. Miller isn’t known for doing his work in front of witnesses.” He looked up and saw that Tom’s hand was on the doorknob. “Wait! Don’t leave. Do you have any idea what they might want to find out from Jake? What they might be looking for?”

  Tom shook his head.

  LaFarge sighed. “This isn’t just about Jake and Samantha King, you know. It involves certain big shots who don’t like people interfering with their plans. They can have you killed and not think twice about it.”

  “I know,” Tom said. “They already killed Joel.”

  “Who’s Joel?”

  Tom went through the door.

  First, Ralph Dekker’s house.

  Through a dark town gone quiet in the falling snow, he rode down Seventh Street. The back door was unlocked, and he walked into a torn-up kitchen. He found a lantern in the corner, and when he lit it he saw that all cabinet doors were open, drawers emptied out and stacked off to the side. In the sitting and dining rooms books had been thrown on the floor, every door was open, couches and chairs sliced up with stuffing pulled out, and in one place several holes were knocked into the wall. The house had been turned inside out. Tom saw Dekker’s family album in the heap of books. For a few minutes he wandered through the rooms. They had searched frantically for something, here and at the store. He remembered how lights had been burning on every floor of the nearly empty store building the other night.

  He stood for a moment in the sitting room amid the clutter, holding up the lantern, his breath thick in the cold. The house was silent. His eye drifted to the fireplace, and he recalled the dying fire he’d seen here on Monday night. He knelt at the fireplace and held the lantern close to the ashes and probed them with his hand, picking out a little piece of ash and looking at it. He had found what they’d been searching for.

  Rising from his knees, he looked over at the stairs and remembered the terrible look on the old man’s face, sitting in his bedroom.

  Straightaway, Tom rode to the Paris Hotel, where the same skeletal clerk sat at the front desk playing solitaire, with no one else in the lobby. Tom went up to the counter; the clerk glanced at him and went back to his cards.

  “Hello, chief. Colder’n a wood-yard wedge in December out there. I never seen nothin like it this time of year.”

  “I’m looking for Deacon Miller.”

  “Been here before?” the man said to his cards.

  “Yes sir,” Tom said quietly. “One of your employees tried to rob me a few nights ago.”

  The man glanced up again, as if slightly worried by Tom’s quietness. Tom was looking not at him but just off to the side.

  “Do you have any idea where Deacon Miller is?” Tom said again.

  The clerk squirmed irritably and moved his ashtray on the counter so it was between them. “He don’t keep his time with me.” “I’m not asking about his time, I’m asking whether you know where he might be. He has a friend of mine with him.”

  “That boy ain’t with him,” the clerk rushed to say, picking up his cards and shuffling them busily. “He went somewheres else. Earlier.”

  Tom turned his eyes to him now, giving him one of the Reverend’s patented looks: death mask mixed with an incongruous, elusive dash of friendly concern. He said nothing.

  “Besides which, even if I did know where he was, I couldn’t tell you.” His eyes bugged out as he dealt his cards. “Don’t mess with me, chief.”

  Tom leaned across the desk on his elbows and slowly moved the ashtray aside.

  “I’ll call out the dogs on you,” said the clerk.

  Tom pulled out the pistol, cocked it, and aimed it at the clerk’s face. “The dogs are already out.”

  The man shook his head. “Deacon don’t never tell me where he’s goin! All he said was somethin, I heard him say somethin, somethin . . .” He trailed off. “He said somethin about Park Hill. Which I don’t know nothin about. I just heard one of em say it. Park Hill is all I know! Mister, please, if he was to find out I told you—”

  Tom left him babbling at the front desk and headed for the Main Hotel.

  ***

  A lingering sour feeling that somewhere he went wrong. He is plowing into unmerciful cold. He tries to avoid waking up to the wind and noise, but hears something calling. Turns away. Turns away. A bad headache is keeping him company, but a five-pound ball-peen hammer is waiting above the murky trench of sleep. He sees a man who beneath his duster is dressed in a high collar, striped tie, full-length coat, like somebody who might be reading Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper between acts at the opera house, only the look on this man’s face is not casual. . .

  The closer he got to awake, the colder he was. Finally venturing to open an eye, Jake discovered that he was on his belly, with his hands behind and tied to his ankles, his face against splintery planks in a prying, probing, stunning wind. He heard the clacking of wheels and smelled manure, a pile of it two inches from his face, and a plank wall some distance farther. Hog-tied, freezing, he managed to cock his head back and see into a hurricane of eerie grey-green light. The hurricane was dust and hay and dried manure; wind was coming through four-inch gaps in the wall planking. He r
ealized that it was a bull car, a livestock car with stalls, and either it was moving at ninety miles an hour or it was heading into a brutal wind.

  At some distance away through the furious bands of light, he saw Sam. He remembered her name with no difficulty, although a number of other basic matters still floated around in his head, looking for a berth. Like why, exactly, he felt a certain mistrust of her when they were clearly headed toward hell in the same hand-basket. She was sitting with her ankles roped together, her arms tied, and secured to a hitch ring on the wall.

  “Aah! Aah!” She was making a strenuous attempt to yell through the gag.

  Jake tried to speak but only a croak came out. He tried to move his hands and they were completely numb from lack of circulation. The only way he could move was to turn on his side and wiggle like an arthritic snake toward her, raking down a considerable distance of splintery, manure-splattered flooring. When he got there, he saw that her face was stiff around the gag. She kept trying to talk through it while he chewed and pulled at the rough hemp knots on her legs until he got them free.

  It took her a minute to stand up, and she was able then to use her fingers to get the gag off, and then to gnaw the ropes on her hands. She was wearing some kind of thin dress jacket over her top, and underneath that, what looked for all the world like a short nightgown, which left a quite long remainder of her wearing nothing at all. By the time she finally got loose and started working on Jake’s ropes, most of what had happened had come back to him. The man at the door had been Deacon Miller, who had tried to talk Jake out of the boarding house and into the buggy, saying that his employer wanted to have a talk with Jake about some missing money. That failing to work, he had aimed his .44-caliber pistol at Jake’s heart and repeated his request. Jake had heard something behind him, and that was all he could remember.

  Sam spoke close to his ear. “We’re gonna freeze, Jake.” After she managed to untie him, Jake stumbled around in the car, getting the feeling in his arms back, trying the door. Grainy hot smoke occasionally raked through, stinging his skin. He found part of a dirty Pullman blanket piled in a corner and took it back to her. She offered to share the blanket, but he realized that it wasn’t going to do the job. One of the stalls next to the front wall had a large pile of piss- and manure-soaked hay with a partly frozen exterior shell. “We’ve got to get under that and squeeze together,” he said. “Keep the blanket on.” They managed to build a nest in the hay and manure pile, tasting and breathing a considerable amount of it in the process. Pushing up against each other, they both shivered in waves. Jake was fully awake now, and he was too mad to freeze.

  “What is this?” Sam shuddered.

  “I think we’re heading into a norther.” In a storm like this, the temperature could drop twenty or thirty degrees within a few minutes, and people sometimes got themselves killed out of sheer confusion. He remembered that Tom was out here somewhere, and it worried him. The two of them pushed their bodies together in as many places as possible under the dung pile.

  “Any idea where we’re going?” he asked numbly.

  “I don’t know. I think we crossed the river.”

  “Didn’t hear them say anything about where they were taking us?”

  “No.”

  “How long we been traveling?”

  “You were already knocked out when they tied you in here,” she said, her teeth chattering. “Then they hit you again. I thought you were dead.”

  “How long?” Jake said gruffly.

  “Maybe two hours. We sat for a while somewhere.”

  “How’d they get you?”

  “Came into my hotel room early this morning while it was still dark. They didn’t say anything. They just came in and hit me.”

  Warming above the frost point, his brain throbbing, Jake reared back and looked at the bloody lump on the side of her head and got even more aggravated. Sneaking into a woman’s room and knocking her out while she was asleep was a pretty low form of behavior.

  She sneezed violently three times, groaned, and pressed right up against him.

  Jake wondered if Miller had put them on a train for the same reason that he’d followed them into Hell’s Fringe—to kill them outside of Parker’s jurisdiction. Miller was too smart to murder respectable-class people in Fort Smith. Only a fool or a drunk would do that. But if someone froze to death somewhere in Indian Territory . . .

  “You have any idea what they’re up to?”

  She didn’t reply. She just lay hard against him, shivering. Even through curtains of head pain, in a pile of manure, Jake, who had been without a woman for a good while, was beginning to experience a certain responsiveness to Sam’s being so thoroughly, physically, all up and down, against him this way, which annoyed him for too many reasons to think about.

  Eventually she seemed to warm up a little. Jake pulled back to see if she was okay. She was staring. He tried to answer his own question. “Maybe they’re taking us out here for some kind of questioning. Miller said something to me about missing money.”

  When he pulled his body away from hers, she snuggled right up to him again. His frustration returned. This had to be one of the most miserable situations of his life. Lying under a pile of manure with a blind headache, helpless, embarrassed, up against a beautiful young woman.

  “I’m sorry, Sam, I’m truly sorry,” he said crossly.

  “For what?”

  “For getting you involved, and for the discomfort I’m causing you, lying here like this,” he said stiffly.

  “If I could wrap you around me like a blanket, I’d do it,” she said.

  Contemplating this image, Jake kept looking at her, checking on her, afraid she was freezing. His own headache was beginning to do strange things now, making noises, knocking holes in his thoughts.

  After a while—he didn’t know how long—she said, “I have to tell you everything. Before we both get killed. I want you to forgive me.”

  “I forgive you,” he said drowsily.

  “Not until I tell you!”

  He was going out.

  “I was using you, Jake.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I was using you to get to Ralph Dekker.”

  25

  MR. HASKELL, Leonard LaFarge, and Tom sat at the dining table in the boarding house. It was past midnight. LaFarge was drinking something from a coffee cup. Mr. Haskell had just gotten back from making a run on the avenue saloons, where he hadn’t seen or heard anything of Jake. “Dead quiet out there,” he said. “People hiding from the weather.”

  “I have an idea what happened,” Tom said.

  LaFarge’s eyes crinkled in puzzlement.

  Mr. Haskell sniffed and stared, looking slightly pained. He started to say something, but the lawyer beat him to it. “What? Speak. Tell us.”

  “I don’t know for sure, but there’s some lost money,” Tom said.

  Mr. Haskell said, “How’d you find this out?”

  LaFarge held up his hand. “What money, Tom? Do you know?”

  “Ralph Dekker brought money back from St. Louis. Ernest has been searching for it since the police told him his father was dead.”

  The two of them waited for more, but that was all Tom had to say.

  LaFarge’s eyes remained fixed on him.

  “They started going through the store last Thursday or Friday. Now they’ve ransacked Mr. Dekker’s house.”

  The lawyer looked baffled.

  Old Mr. Potts shuffled up to the doorway in his bathrobe and seemed to peek at them over some imaginary barrier. “Why, looky here,” he said in his odd, mild voice. “Tom grew up since the last time I saw him. I like your new coat, Tom. And your stogies. What’s wrong with you? You porely?”

  Mr. Haskell gave Mr. Potts a sour look.

  LaFarge asked Tom, “Any idea where they took them?”

  “A hotel clerk heard something about a place called Park Hill.”

  “Park Hill near Tahlequah? That’s a seminary of som
e kind, isn’t it?”

  “They shut that place down,” Mr. Haskell said, “two, three years ago.”

  There was another silence, and Mr. Potts ventured, “You look like death eatin crackers, boy. Ain’t been drinkin that whiskey, have you? How many years has it been since I seen you? Seems like yesterday.” He looked back and forth between them with his little cracked blue eyes.

  “I know a man who works for the railroad,” Mr. Haskell said. “I’m going to see what I can find out.”

  Mr. Potts followed him down the hall. “What’s wrong, Yankee? Have we lost a man?”

  LaFarge went to the window, cup in hand, and looked out. “What does Samantha King have to do with all this?”

  Tom shook his head, trying to indicate that he didn’t want to talk about her. Questions about Sam made him feel trapped. He didn’t know how far to trust LaFarge.

  “You know her pretty well, I take it,” LaFarge persisted.

  Tom looked down at his boots, amazed at what was pouring through him. Once again he was swamped by images of annihilation—throwing over the table, kicking holes in the wall, running everybody out. It had happened in Sam’s hotel room, in the Reverend’s office, and now again.

  Everything appeared small and distant, even his hand on the table. Coming across the room toward him, the grey-haired lawyer seemed to walk a great distance. “You have to excuse my nosiness, Tom. Jake did tell me quite a lot about you. He was so concerned about you that he nearly jostled out my innards racing across Indian country, trying to get here in a hurry.”