The Whipping Boy (15 page)

“So he's an honest man?”

Jake seemed too peeved to talk further about it. She started to say something else, but decided not to.

Later that day, they were hungry and stopped at a farm shack.

“Hello the house!” Jake yelled. A woman eventually peeked around a rough wooden door, and he asked if they could buy some dinner from her.

The lady presented them each with a trencher of bread with lard drippings and something that tasted like scrambled prairie-chicken eggs with pumpkin mashed into it. The house was dark, lighted by a single coal oil lamp, and it had a packed earthen floor. Kerosene had been spilled on the floor to combat fleas, and Tom was not used to the strong smell of it. The kind lady hovered around them, concerned about whether they liked the food. She had given Jake larger portions. They ate off a long single plank in the tiny, dirty, sagging, windowless house. After a lifetime of terrible food, Tom didn't mind it, but Miss King looked less comfortable, and ate only a few bites. Children stood around watching them with luminous eyes.

One of them, a scrawny boy ten years old, sidled toward Tom with a shy smile. “My father ran away,” he said in Choctaw, and to his surprise Tom understood him.

“When?”

“Long time ago,” the boy said. “He went that way.” He pointed up the road in the direction they were headed, still smiling. “He will never come back.”

The lady wouldn't take payment for her hospitality, so Jake gave her a dollar to “buy a gift” for her kids, and they were back on the road. Sam acted a little woozy, as if the food wasn't agreeing with her. Jake, too, began to look under the weather. After a couple of miles they met a farm wagon coming fast the other way, with a man and woman on the seat and all form of possessions tied onto the back. The woman's face, as they rattled and bounced past, looked as if she'd seen a ghost. Just ahead, a group of people were camped in a walnut grove. They were whooping and yelling, the smell of liquor thick in the air. Three young men lurched from the campsite toward them, and Jake said, “Don't slow down, Tom.”

The young men approached the wagon and walked along beside it. “
Na homi! Oka homi!
” they yelled. “
Oka homi!
”

Tom snapped the reins.

“
Oka homi!
” One of them came around in front of the team and stood in the way, smiling stupidly. He took out a knife and held it up in the air. Grant bit at him and actually got a nip of his arm, and he shrieked and moved out of the way, causing his two cohorts to break up in laughter. The young men were ragged, stinking, bleak beneath their hilarity. The one with the knife made an ineffectual swing at them as they passed by.

Sam glanced back at them. “Why were they saying ‘Oklahoma'?”

“‘
Oka homi
,'” Jake said. “Red water. Whiskey. They wanted us to refill their jugs.”

“I don't feel good,” Sam said.

Soon they were passing other travelers on the road, wagons with bony children trooping along behind them, and Jake said that they were probably settlers who'd not found land in the Outlet rush. “My stomach's a little upset, too,” Jake admitted.

As if she'd been waiting for someone else to mention it, Sam got down from the wagon and immediately vomited. She couldn't sit upright, so Tom helped her into the back—Jake and Sam side by side, puckered and sick and ill complexioned.

“Wasn't the food,” Jake said sourly. “That blacksmith gave us bad water. I knew better'n to take it.

Jake was as sick to his stomach as Sam was. They had to stop several times. Tom remained well despite having drunk a lot of the water, and he drove the mules on through the fading afternoon. The animals had gotten tired, and they no longer tried to run through the rough spots in the road. By late afternoon all of them were exhausted and wanted to stop, but they needed drinking water. On top of it all, Tom could not shake the strange feeling that they were being followed. Every time they momentarily stopped, he'd hear a sound behind them, some rustling or shuffling or stepping.

“Turn to Violet Springs,” Jake said grimly. “It's a damn whiskey town, but we don't have any choice.”

They had passed into an edge of the Seminole Nation and were now close to the border of Oklahoma Territory. They came to a good-sized river with an untended cable ferry across it. The mules refused to approach it. They had apparently decided they'd done enough work for one day. Tom tried every Indian word he could think of, he whacked them on the nose, he pulled them. Then Jake said, “Get em a drink of the river water,” and Tom did so, by cupping his hands and bringing up a little, first to one, then the other. The mules liked the water very much, but rather than going on down to the ferry they just stood there, waiting for him to bring more handfuls. He had to stand in front of them with drinks, successively closer to the river, until it was right under their nose, and finally in a rush they clattered onto the ferry, where there was a watering trough nailed onto the planks. Tom started to drink a handful of the river water himself and Jake stopped him. “Don't you drink it. They run cows up the Canadian.”

Tom turned a big winding gear that pulled the log-and-plank raft on its cable across the river, rippling dark under the purple sky. In the middle of the river Sam said in a calm but strange voice, “I have a terrible headache.” Just as they hit the other side, Tom saw someone arriving at the opposite bank, but it was too dark to tell anything about him.

“That man has been following us all day,” Tom said.

Jake glanced toward him and only grunted.

As they approached Violet Springs, Tom heard piano sounds somewhere in the distance, and headed in their direction. It was almost dark when he came to the cluster of buildings that seemed to form the center of town. There was no main street, just buildings and shacks facing different directions. Pianos seemed to be playing in almost every lighted place, and voices drifted from here and there. Tom found what looked like a town well, but it was surrounded by mud, and when he got down and approached it, he made out dark shapes all around. It was a pig wallow. One of the pigs got to its feet, came over, and started nuzzling and pushing at Tom's leg. Its grunting breath smelled alcoholic, and it appeared to be begging for something.

“This water's no good,” Tom said. “There's a herd of pigs here.”

“Get us a bed,” Jake said out of the darkness. “You can't be very choosy. This is a rough place.”

Tom felt his way to the nearest lighted building, a saloon. A man leaning against the wall outside—the first person he talked to—directed them to a nearby hotel, and when Tom inquired about a doctor, the man said that he was one himself. He would get his bag and come over as soon as possible. Luck seemed to be with them.

***

A group of women were sitting around the hotel's parlor, smoking cigarillos, some drinking out of stemmed glasses, and Tom thought it must be a place where the people who worked in the saloons stayed. The woman who ran the hotel wore a single purple plume in her hair and a low-cut, tightly fitting, tiger-striped dress that came all the way up to her knees. The other women, younger, were in costumes with their breasts pushed up almost out of them; one woman had a white pet rabbit in her lap. The room was a mist of perfume. A man who looked like a ranch hand was staggering around among them like a grasshopper jumping against the walls of a can, raising his front lip, showing his teeth, laughing in a high whinny. He sounded like he had a cold, as well as being drunk. “Now, why won't you give ol Pede some free onion? No money, so what. Trade you this sombitch fer one little hunk of happy valley.” He pulled out a six-shooter and aimed it loosely at one of the women, laughing the goofy, high-lipped laugh. She sat very still and quiet, watching him, the white rabbit panting in her lap. The woman who ran the desk walked over and touched his elbow. “Time for you to leave, honey. Go on. Come back when you ain't so drunk.” She had a gravelly, authoritative voice.

He thrust his jaw out at her like a young boy. “Whadif I doan wanna?”

“Well, hon, I have a shotgun behind this counter, and the last person that give me trouble I had to shoot and feed to the pigs. Now, you wouldn't want me to do that to you, would you?”

The man eventually ricocheted out the door, his pistol still dangling from his hand.

Tom told the desk lady that his companions were sick.

She gave him a look. “What kind of sick?” She questioned him closely, and only after Tom convinced her that they didn't have something catching did she take his money. “Fever season's mostly over, but I've got to be careful,” she said. “I'm running a hospital around here, much sickness as I have to deal with.”

Tom helped Jake and Sam up to the room. First he helped Jake up the stairs, but Sam was completely out, and he had to carry her like a baby. The tiger-skin lady watched curiously as he lifted Sam, who was pale, her hair all loose and hanging down. Aware of his own clumsiness, Tom went up the steps extremely carefully. With Jake taking up most of the bed, and already asleep, he had to put her on the very edge of it, go around and try to pull Jake over, then run back around and push her a little farther, until he'd managed to get her safely berthed.

The hotel continued to be busy with people going in and out, up and down the single flight of stairs to the six-room corridor. Men shuffled through the halls after the costumed women, and Tom finally began to realize what kind of hotel this was. He had heard such places named: a den of prostitution, a house of ill fame, a palace of sin. He was aware, broadly, what a prostitute was: someone who gave her body to be fouled by male lust. After almost two weeks of being in the grip of male lust, Tom now had a better idea of what it was, and he understood why men went to such places. Indeed, all he had to do was look at Sam on the bed—even in her bedraggled, dirty, half-dead state—and it made him think of the unbelievable occurrences of last night. He paced the small room, and looked out the window. Where was the doctor?

He was about to go out and search when the doctor arrived, a skinny, baggy-eyed man who kept sighing and scratching himself and adjusting his hat. He appeared to be uninterested in examining Jake or Sam. He didn't even ask any questions about them.

“My prices are good,” said the doctor, looking at him with yellow eyes. “Two hangover treatments usually cost you four dollars. I'm givin it to you for three.”

“They don't have hangovers, sir,” Tom said. “They drank bad water.”

“Same difference,” the doctor said. “If you want a treatment, too, I'll add it for only a dollar and fifty cent.”

“I'm not sick,” Tom said.

“Never can tell when a tone-up will help. I treat a lot of these girls right here in this hotel. You ask them about my medicine.” The doctor's kit was strangely simple. All he carried in it was a little bottle of white powder, a flask of water, a small, flat pan in which he cooked up the powder with water, and a large syringe and needle. Tom had had a smallpox vaccination, but this was a much bigger needle. He paced back and forth by the window while the doctor cooked the medicine over the lantern—scraggly beard and wild eyebrows weird in the yellow light, casting a large shadow on the wall behind. As he approached Sam's arm with the syringe, Tom suddenly put himself in the way, his heart crashing in his chest. “What kind of doctor are you?”

Holding the needle up, the man narrowed his eyes at him. “Why you asking me that now?”

“I want to know,” Tom said.

“They call me Dr. Pain. There used to be eight of us in this town. Now there's only five, and I'm the best. I got people coming all the way from Guthrie fer my treatments.”

“I don't want you to do that.”

“You'll have to move out of the way. I got other people to see.”

“No sir,” Tom said. “I want you to leave here.”

“I've done got the medicine cooked up. I can't waste it.”

Tom was not calm. All he could think was to stop the man. “Go away!” he said, taking a step closer. “Don't touch them.”

Scowling at him, the man went over to the room's single chair and sat down, rolled up a cuff, and stuck the needle into his own leg, slowly pushing in the syringe. As he was leaving, he snarled through his beard, “Somebody's in town looking fer you people. I might just have to let him know where you're at.”

Tom stood around the room wondering what to do. Both Sam and Jake remained asleep, but neither of them looked good. Sam's skin was blanched and shiny. Jake was restless, and he kept tossing and toiling around in the bed, threatening to knock Sam onto the floor. They needed something. It was a noisy place—Tom kept hearing laughter, what sounded like moving furniture, and occasional yelling. He was overwhelmed by an urge to go to sleep. He had done this all wrong. He sank down on the floor and leaned against the wall for a moment's rest and fell asleep.

He dreamed that he was floating under warm green water, able to see through it for some distance. Ahead of him, he saw a cross-shaped thing and swam toward it. As he approached, it kept disappearing, sometimes reappearing on the left, sometimes the right, but ever closer, until suddenly it—she—was right before him with her arms out, her hair floating wildly out from her head, her body naked and vividly white in the green water, her eyes open and fixed on him . . .

***

Popping noises. Gunshots, Tom realized as he came awake. His eyes blinked open and fixed on a lamp wick, almost burned down. He stood up, at first disoriented. How long had he slept? Sam and Jake were still on the bed. The hotel had fallen quiet. He hurried down the stairs. The tiger woman who'd rented them their room was still in the parlor, alone now, with her feet propped up on a chair. The plume had fallen from her hair onto the couch.

She yawned and stretched. “You must be a hot-blooded young man getting up in the middle of the night. Want a haircut?”