The Whipping Boy (3 page)

Marvin bobbed his head down and spat.

Then Jake cleared his throat and spoke. Unconsciously, he turned to the old man. “Our customers are behind, but there aren't many holding out on us. About the only kind of paper anybody's got right now are customer IOUs and mortgages. We start hittin em hard now and we'll have a lot of closings.”

Ernest flourished his cigarette. “You men have been complaining so long that you sound like a flock of old soldiers at the courthouse. You ain't collecting debts because you've gotten lazy. You're so spoiled by the boom that you don't know how to take a little slowdown. Mr. Dekker, sitting before you now, sold hardware off the back of a buggy when the only other white peddlers on the road were the kind with kegs in their wagons. He was out there with a buggy full of pots and pans, and not just sellin, he was collecting his debts.”

The old man looked uneasy at being the object of Ernest's oration, but still he said nothing. Jake wished he'd at least speak. Had the bank knocked the wind out of him?

“You, Jaycox. Eighteen months ago you were probably moving stock by the carload down in the Choctaw Nation—”

“I haven't traveled the south route for seven years—”

“You're used to fat times, that's the plain fact! This is your first taste of hardscrabblin, gentlemen, and I don't know whether you're real salesmen or not. We'll just have to see.”

Jake wanted to reply that he was a “real salesman” when Ernest Dekker was still wearing knee britches, and furthermore, Ernest had never been any kind of salesman, so how'd he get to be such an expert? But Mr. Dekker Senior was looking at him with an expression that suggested he stay quiet.

***

On the night train headed over the Kiamichi Mountains, Jake was in a dark mood. His newly hired “courier” sat beside him. After the meeting, Ernest Dekker had taken the new couriers off and talked to them about their new job. Jake had been assigned the biggest of the three, the one called Tom Freshour. He didn't say much and he stared a lot—particularly at females, of whom there happened to be one striking example in their car. To Jake's questions he gave stiffly polite but brief answers. He had a way of dimming his eyes and staring off to discourage conversation. He seemed to Jake tight-strung, sitting upright, almost as if he was at attention, even when dozing.

Jake needed this shavetail following him around like he needed a Chinese footman.

It was raining hard, thunder rattling the windows, as the train crawled up the ridgelike mountain. Today's queer sales meeting had lasted well into the afternoon, and Jake had actually left before it was quite over in order to hightail up to his boarding house, get a travel grip, then rush back to the train station with the young man in tow. At the station people had all been talking furiously about what a nail-curler the hanging had been, but Jake was so preoccupied by what had happened at the store that he hadn't been curious.

Tom Freshour nodded off by the time they reached Talihina, and he slept with a restless, worried look, his head repeatedly jerking upright. He looked to be a half-breed, maybe quarter. The shirt and pants he was wearing were a cheap, thin grade of cotton, his soft-soled shoes had holes in them, and he shivered a little as he sat there nodding. Jake eventually moved to a seat across the aisle so he could spread out.

Couriers! If Ernest had ever been across the river on anything but bird-hunting trips, he might know that no matter how bad the express companies had got, you could always find a way. You could even mail cash, if you had to, by tearing it in two and sending it from two different places. Instead of paying a few dollars, the store would be buying train tickets, which would end up costing a good hunk of whatever money they could collect. Oh, but this was an all-out emergency, Ernest had insisted, and they needed to start making deposits right away.

Equally galling was the fact that Ernest had assigned Jake to collect what they called the south route, the Choctaw Nation, which hadn't been his territory for seven years. He was supposed to immediately collect “at least twenty percent of the account balance” being carried in the district. Ernest was shuffling the salesmen between territories because he thought it would be easier for them to be tough on customers they didn't know so well. Furthermore, the bank suggested that they employ some scheme whereby the men could collect those stores that had no cash by trading the merchandise mortgages that Dekker held on them for the property mortgages that the stores held against their customers; but the bank was “still working on the details.”

That was the point at which Jake begged out to catch the train. He'd go south. He'd try to collect. But heaven help Dekker Wholesale Hardware and Supply. This sudden shift of authority to Ernest was truly strange. Why he should take over, Jake couldn't figure, unless this credit call had just knocked the stuffing out of the old man. Nor did he understand why Ernest appeared to relish it so much and had such a big plan all ready to lay out: couriers, shifted districts, twenty percent collections, mortgage switches—had he made all that up on the spot?

Jake gazed at the sleeping boy and simmered. He would have no pension to look forward to if the store went down. How the store could stay solvent under Ernest Dekker he didn't know. As they approached the high point in the Kiamichi, rain had turned to hail, chunking into the side of the car like rocks.

To make his mood worse, Jake had the extremely vexing thought—he didn't believe it, but it occurred to him—that he could be wrong. It was true that the accounts had been getting further behind every month and a business couldn't subsist forever on its reserves, panic or no panic. It was also true that however strange the plan was, at least it stood up to the problem. Whether he was acting like a fool or not, Ernest was at least acting. All these thoughts were irksome.

The storm was beating against the south side of the train with a vengeance. It was a real deluge. A window up the aisle was cracked open, and hail bounced off the transom into the car. As the train clattered slowly down the mountain, he wondered about the full-blood villages out there in the storm, hid off in the hills, little gatherings of leaky, fleabag huts without fireplaces or outhouses. The full bloods fed themselves by hunting, scratching gardens out of poor hill soil, and collecting government money. Back when he'd covered this territory, Jake had tried to sell hardware in a couple of full-blood towns, but the pickings were slim with no stores to speak of, just a few blacksmiths.

Yet the Choctaw and Cherokee were the “rich” tribes, and fortunes in cotton had been built forty years ago down this way and on the Red River. When Jake had traveled this district, there were still a handful of Choctaw growers trying to keep up the old plantation style, with house servants and fancy carriages. But that kind of thing had generally gone the way of the cotton market. In 1894 “cotton farmer” was another way to say poor folk.

On lower ground, the hail gave way to rain, and they crept into Tuskahoma, past the capitol, a two-story brick building with a mansard roof, lighted in the downpour by brilliant trees of lightning.

Jake noticed Tom Freshour was awake, and looking disconcerted. “Capitol of the Choctaw Nation,” Jake said across the aisle. “Ever see that before?”

“No sir,” the boy said, blinking his eyes dully.

“The legislature meets there,” Jake said.

“Yes sir.”

Talkative devil.

Tuskahoma town consisted of a stunted row of false-front buildings on one side of the track, and across from it, down near the bank of the Kiamichi River, some older buildings including a blacksmith shop, a warehouse, and a hotel. Farms were strewn in no particular order on the surrounding hills, most of them with a few acres of valley cropland. The only person Jake was supposed to collect from here was John Blessing, but there was no way he could see him tonight.

Stepping off the car, Jake headed straight into the station house. The agent was gone. A gasoline stove sat hissing on the counter, and around the room were stacked crates, bales of new barbed wire, a saddle, and a case of saw blades from Dekker Hardware that was being leaked on through the roof. Jake shoved it out of the drip. When he turned around, the woman in their car Tom had been watching was standing there.

“Hello,” she said, smiling.

Jake was too surprised to smile back. “Hello.”

Tom Freshour took one look at her and turned away.

“Do you know where I could find a good hotel?”

“I know where a hotel is. Wouldn't necessarily call it good, ma'am.” He hesitated a minute longer, not looking forward to getting soaking wet. The OK Hotel was where he'd always stayed when he traveled this route, and he hoped it was still in operation.

They headed across the muddy street, down the hillside through blowing, cold sheets of rain. The OK was still there, and Mrs. Oke, the gnarled root of a woman who owned the hotel, was up busying around taking care of leaks, stuffing cracks, taking up rag rugs, and glancing nervously out the windows.

“Awful wet out there,” Jake said, setting down his grip.

“Black as a pocket,” Mrs. Oke said.

“How have you been doing?”

“Oh, I'm all broke down and puny,” she said, looking up at him with a glitter in her rheumy eyes. She was littler than ever—probably weighed all of eighty pounds. “Ain't me I'm worried about tonight, it's that river.”

Jake signed his name to the register. “You remember me?”

“Course I do. You're Mr. Hardware. This your family?”

“No ma'am, I'm a bachelor. This is Tom. He's a new hand. And this lady's looking for a hotel.”

She winked at Jake. “That boy's too handsome for the hardware business, hey?” She collected their fifty cents, lighted a hurricane lantern, then leaned toward Jake and said in hushed tones, “Got some deputies here tonight with a prisoner. Penny pinchers! Worried me to death tryin to get my price down.” She took up the lantern and led them upstairs to a one-bed room, made a pallet on the floor for Tom, and got a couple of pans for leaks that were coming through the roof. A layer of old thin shakes was the only thing between them and the weather. Mrs. Oke left them to take care of the woman.

Jake decided that the weather was too terrible for him to go to the outhouse, so he peed out the window and the boy followed suit. “Don't get your pecker wet,” Jake said.

Tom looked wary. “I won't, sir.”

Jake took off his sopping clothes and put on his spare long johns. It occurred to him that the boy had no dry clothes, in fact no luggage at all. Having lived by himself, mostly in boarding houses, for thirty years, Jake wasn't accustomed to worrying about somebody else's domestic needs, but he dug out an undershirt and a pair of pants from his valise and offered them. Tom looked at the clothes, then at Jake, with the same unvarnished blankness, at first making no effort to take them.

“You want something dry?”

He took them, but instead of putting them on, laid them beside his pallet.

Jake shut down the wick and settled into the shuck mattress. The boy quickly knelt by the flickering window and said the Lord's Prayer aloud, so hurriedly that it sounded like nine or ten long words: “. . . for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory for everamen.”

It was a thunder-rattled night, with fat raindrops unrelievedly beating on the roof, and Jake remained in a fitful state, smelling the bedbug-repelling kerosene soaked into the bedsteads, listening to the drip pans, worrying about how in the Sam Hill he was going to collect money from any of these stores. Jake remembered the Panic of '73, and this one was worse. In '73, he'd still been young enough not to worry, as long as his belly didn't get too empty. Still, he remembered how lucky he'd felt not to have a family to feed.

Through the night he fretted and tossed. Sometime before the first paleness of day, a thunderbolt shook the walls, and he rolled over and saw the boy at the window, outlined in a sky walking with fire. He had taken off his wet shirt, and in the lightning Jake saw a thick network of scars on his back. A good-sized kid. Tall. Maybe sixteen, hard to tell. Jake wondered about him in a dreamy kind of way—where he'd come from, how he'd been orphaned. He looked again through half-shut eyes and noticed that the boy turned toward him, stepped quietly over the pallet, now came swiftly toward the bed and was suddenly there above him. A dim fear went through Jake's mind, but he was just at the cusp of sleep. A boy with that many scars on his back could be a rotten apple. But he lay momentarily frozen between indecision and plain sleepiness, and before he had made up his mind to sit up, the boy stole away. Soon Jake tumbled headlong into a brief sleep full of vivid dreams.

Only to be waked up by banging and yelling, after what seemed like less than an hour. He put his feet on the floor—the boy wasn't in the room—and he walked over to the window. The sun wasn't up yet, but he saw in lantern reflection out a window what the boy had been watching.

The Kiamichi had become a river sure enough, out of its banks and roaring, and the hotel was sitting in the edge of it. A chicken house floated by, crowned by one forlorn leghorn. The door to the room swung open and Mrs. Oke poked her head in.

“Movin out!” she croaked. “Need help!”

F
OR TOM FRESHOUR
the last twenty-four hours had been like a dream—the long walk from the orphanage at Bokchito to Durant, the train ride from there to Fort Smith, and the hanging, then going into a big old building and standing before a roomful of nervous, chewing men, and being given a job, and told that he would never return to the academy, just like that. And again a train into the territory, and staying the night in an atticlike room with a salesman named Mr. W. W. “Jake” Jaycox while it rained without end. The whole world outside the Armstrong Academy was like a dream, only more sudden, more amazing, more full of strangeness. And this morning Tom's shivering and the gnawing hunger in his belly felt very real, but slogging up the cold, rain-swept hill carrying furniture seemed both real and dreaming—the real of the cold against his skin in the fantastic dreamy unendingness of the rain.