The Whipping Boy (16 page)

Haircut? “No ma'am. I need something for Jake and Sam. I tried to get them some water earlier, but there were pigs—”

“Don't mention those damn things. I don't even want to hear about em.” She waved a hand in disgust. “They're drunkards, every one.” She sighed. “You'd think the least a hog could do would be to stay sober. They eat mash put out behind the whiskey mill over here on the branch. Nighttimes, they hang around the well and go trotting around begging whiskey. People give it to em and think it's funny. I saw one old sow out there knock a man down to get at his open bottle. Saloons selling bottle water are happy to have these hogs around to ruin the well, of course, because they make as much money selling water as whiskey. Which I call immoral.”

Tom appreciated her explanation but felt he needed to do something as soon as possible. “They were sick to their stomachs all afternoon. I never got them any water.”

“That's two things you forgot. You left your team outside, too. I took care of it. You can fetch them at the stable when you need them.”

“Thank you, ma'am. I'm just worried about Sam and J—”

From outside came three more shots, and someone not far away screamed in what sounded like mortal pain. From somewhere else came laughter, casual sounding, as if at a slight joke. “Idiots,” the woman said. She stood up and quickly smoothed out her dress. “One of these days I'm goin back to St. Louis, before one of em shoots me. Come on, I'll take a look-see.”

After she had looked more closely at Jake and Sam, the tiger woman suggested a cure. “Potato,” she said, looking curiously at Sam. “Both of them need to eat a raw potato with a lot of salt on it, then afterwards good drinking water. Old Missouri cure for the pukes.” She delivered this advice in a flat tone, as if reciting something she'd said many times before. Her eyes were fixed on Sam, almost as if she recognized her. There was no food in the hotel, and Tom had to go to one of the joints, looking for potatoes and fresh bottle water. “Careful out there,” she warned, glancing up at him. “They've been at it again tonight.”

The saloons that made up most of the town were spread around, and he found one nearby, a one-room building with no front porch and a floor low to the ground. One step up and he was in a smoky room with a kerosene chandelier suspended from the ceiling, eight or ten tables, mostly empty, wet-smelling sawdust-covered floor, and a piano player dully pounding out the same ragtime sound that he'd heard coming from saloons in Fort Smith. On the wall behind the bar, obscure in the smoke, hung a large picture of a naked woman, reclining on a red couch with her legs intriguingly separated. A man was patrolling around with an ax handle in his hand, and he came over to Tom.

“Got a gun on you?”

“No sir.” He cleared his throat. “Do you have any potatoes?”

The man looked not directly at Tom but just to the side of him, like Tom had seen Indians doing, although this was a very large and ugly white man. Slapping the ax handle in his paw, he said, “Give you five seconds to be out the door, asswipe. I had enough crazy flatheads in here.”

Flush with embarrassment, Tom retreated. Flatheads? Unconsciously he felt the top of his head. He had done something wrong, but there was no time to worry about it. He stumbled through darkness to the next saloon, where another piano player was banging away. Here the naked woman on the wall, while as large as the one in the previous saloon, was standing by a lamp rather than lying on a couch, and striking a pose with her bottom cocked up, looking over her shoulder, hair past her waist. This saloon had more people than the other. Women moved around the room, some of them getting drinks from behind the bar, sitting in laps of card players, lighting cigars with big lucifer matches that they scratched slowly under the tables. Tom noticed that Indian bloods and whites played at separate tables. There was a big man patrolling this saloon, too, and Tom avoided him and went straight to the bartender. No food for sale, he said, but he did have water for fifty cents a bottle. He put a bottle on the bar and Tom drank the entire thing without pausing. Watching him with hooded, impersonal eyes, the bartender seemed to remember something and asked, “You ain't with them from Fort Smith, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Better clear out of here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Go on, git out! Go on! I don't want no more trouble tonight.” Tom backed out of the place, startled, and stood outside listening to the plink-plinking of pianos and the pig noises. He was beginning to wonder if he'd find any potatoes. The next saloon had a porch, which he discovered in the darkness by hitting it, shin-high, and sprawling across it. Not moving until the spasm in his leg receded, he took a minute to think. He was getting nowhere. Apparently he'd never find what he was looking for by just going in and innocently asking for it. He got up, took a deep breath, and entered the saloon. This time he acted less timid. He paid no attention to the naked woman on the wall or anything else about the place. He went right up to the bar and said to a bearded bartender, “I want six potatoes, a little salt, and three bottles of water. I'll pay you three dollars.”

The bartender looked at him with a moment's consternation, but when Tom took out three dollars and put it on the bar, he got results. A woman was sent out and soon returned with potatoes. He put them with a salt shaker into his pockets and went outside in the first hint of morning light, clutching the bottles. Squinting through the darkness, he was hurrying toward the hotel when someone came toward him riding what at first looked like a strangely disfigured horse that became more disfigured the closer it came. It passed him at no more than ten feet, and he could not believe what he saw: a man in a bowler hat sitting on what looked like a gigantic fat bird with a tiny head on a hugely long neck. The bird trotted by smartly on two long, thick bird legs, a saddle strapped around its body. Tom was looking over his shoulder at this mirage when he tripped over something and hit the ground, number two for the night.

The pigs were on him out of nowhere. He had no warning, heard no sound—they were merely there, instantly, snuffling at his head and at his pockets with their flat, wet, stinking noses. He scrambled around to get the bottles, and all the way to the hotel they were as close on his heels as a pack of dogs. A couple of them followed him through the door, to the extreme aggravation of the tiger lady. She got a broom and cursed and whacked them toward the door. She finally chased them out and slammed the door, and pointed at him. “Them things have been drunk so long they don't know inside from outside. They come in here again, and I'm going to invite em all to a goddamn barbecue. You git your potatoes?”

“I saw a man outside riding—”

“A bird?” she finished for him. “That's old Bobby Joe Dyer. He's got him a saddle ostrich. Watch out, though, he's been known to kill a man for making fun of that bird. This town is full of the most peculiar people this side of the Barnum and Bailey.”

The lady got a pocketknife from a drawer, and the two of them went upstairs. She gave Tom the knife and told him to peel the potatoes while she woke up Sam and Jake. When they had been gotten awake enough, the lady coaxed them to eat. “Make you feel better right away,” she said in a rough but soothing voice. “I can guarantee the potato cure.” Propped up on the bed, side by side, they took little nibbles at first and after a while had downed a half bottle of water apiece. Tom was surprised at how well it worked. They didn't get sick to their stomachs again. Tom munched on his own salted potato and felt better. The tiger lady was in and out of the room, checking on them, over the couple of hours it took. Tom noticed that she kept exchanging odd looks with Sam. Jake had gone off to the outhouse when the tiger lady finally asked, “Where you from, hon?”

Sam hesitated before saying, “St. Louis.”

The lady sniffed and looked away, one brief gesture that again seemed to Tom like a recognition. She looked out the window into the blue sky, her gaze fixing far away.

J
AKE EVENTUALLY
rallied, got dressed, and went to see about the mules. After parking them beside the building, he squatted against the wall in the sun, gathering his strength for the day. He didn't feel all that poorly considering he'd been poisoned yesterday. His bunkmate appeared to be doing pretty well, too. Earlier this morning, he'd looked over at her and realized that she didn't look at all bad.

Dandy had a couple of customers here they had told Jake to hit, but he didn't intend to spend another hour in this worthless place. McMurphy had told him that this was one of the “preferred areas” for collection, but he'd about had it with customers treating him like he had the typhoid fever, not saying hello or goodbye, committing suicide or trying to poison him. This mortgage-collecting business was strictly for the birds.

Someone rode up to the hotel, and Jake happened to step around the corner of the building just in time to see him go in the front door. If the man had turned his head, he'd have seen Jake.

Yesterday at the river, Tom had pointed out that someone was following them, and this close up Jake realized who he was.

Over the years, he had seen Deacon Jim Miller around the saloons in Fort Smith and heard more stories about him than he cared to recall. Half of what was said about him was Saturday afternoon drunk talk, and Jake disdained both the man and the conversation about him. But here he was, all duded up, strict and tidy, just like you always heard he dressed when he was on a job.

And he had been following them.

Jake went to a side window, glanced in, and saw that the madam, still standing at her desk, looked like her plug had been pulled, and the floozie with the rabbit had put her face into her hands. Jake started thinking real hard. He had no gun. He had a couple of old guns back home but generally avoided them except for occasional hunting—which some called peculiar for a salesman in the territory. Deacon Jim Miller used a gun with as much reticence as most men used a toothpick.

He talked in a high, tight voice that Jake could hear through the open window. “Somebody I need to talk to? Name of Jaycox? Would you happen to know where he is?”

Miller stood there, utterly still. A surge of anger shot through Jake like electricity out of a dynamo, the feeling of outrage and disbelief that he'd experienced before only on those few occasions when his life had been threatened.

Jake saw a bush of hard-dried burrs next to the hotel and picked a couple of them. Pushing up the saddle and blanket on Deacon Miller's horse, he put the burrs under them. The horse didn't like that at all and, almost before Jake could untie him, started stirring and snorting and bucking. Pretty soon he was going in a circle, swapping ends, and as the burrs dug in deeper he began to sure enough buck, pump-handling all over the street, causing the drunk pigs that lay around the well to squeal wildly and scatter in all directions.

Jake watched through the window until Miller had gone out the door to catch his horse, and he went inside, fast, to collect Samantha and Tom. Everyone was frozen in a whore-parlor tableau. The floozie on the loveseat still had her face in her hands. The only thing moving was her rabbit's nose. The madam, pale as a dish, said, “You better get out of here, cowboy.”

Jake went in and took the stairs three at a time, rushed down the hall to the room, and got Tom and Samantha. “Come on down and out the back door.” He got Samantha's suitcase and pulled out the five-shot revolver that he knew was in it. Tom was still wordless. The three of them hurried back down and went out the back. “You drive better'n me,” Jake told Tom. “Head for the river crossing.”

The mules were amazingly cooperative. At a near trot, they made it to the crossing inside of ten minutes, where their luck held: the ferry was on this side of the river. The man who operated the ferry, a debauched-looking breed who was leaning back on a jury-rigged chair smoking a big hand-rolled cigarillo, was on the job today. He raised an eyebrow but didn't stand up. “Three people, two heavy mule, one wagon. Cost you eighty-five cent.”

The ferry was hardly ten yards into the river when Jake saw Miller coming, not in any particular hurry, ambling down to the river edge on the now unburred horse. “I have a message for you,” he said in his odd, tight voice. “Best come back over here.”

“Get in the water behind the raft,” Jake said to Tom and Samantha. They didn't do so, of course, and he pushed Samantha overboard. He waved his arm then at Tom, and he went over, too, and they both came up sputtering, grabbing hold of the side. Jake checked the cylinder on Samantha's Smith & Wesson.

“I hope you're ready to use that,” Jim Miller said with a dirty smile. His high voice carried menacingly, easily, across the slow-moving river. He took out his gun and pulled off one shot that skipped off the top of the water with a whine. “Ferryman!” he shouted. “Bring em back. Right now or you're in serious!”

The ferryman started turning the crank to take them back.

Jake took a couple of steps toward him with the gun trained on his gut. The ferryman stepped backwards and fell into the river. He immediately began swimming away.

The next shot from Miller went through the back of the wagon and wooden seat. Jake crouched down behind the wheel and pulled off two rounds, knowing it was hopeless with a three-inch barrel on a wobbly platform. Miller didn't look worried as he slid off his saddle. Trying not to show too much of himself, Jake went for the crank on the winding gear and turned it, pulling them across on the cable.

They were just past halfway when Miller unhurriedly got down in the sand with a little rise in front of him. Jake was a sitting duck, but the next shot was for Tom, so close that Jake at first thought he was hit. “Both of you get around behind the ferry,” Jake shouted.

As Tom and Samantha pulled their way around the side of the raft, Miller shot again and the mules started rearing and pushing this way and that. They couldn't fall off the front because of the big, fixed watering trough, but if they pushed backwards hard enough, they would go into the water.