The Whipping Boy by Speer Morgan Page B

sure.”
    The boy looked away from Jake, into his strawberry soda.
    â€œBy the way, you can call me Jake.”
    â€œYes sir.” The boy’s eyelids soon descended, and he fell asleep sitting upright, in mid-chew. Jake had to help him up. He pushed him upstairs.
    A note had been shoved under Jake’s door. Helped to the couch, Tom curled up and went to sleep. His clothes were still wet, but the room was warm enough, and Jake let it be. He walked over to the note on the floor, hesitated, then decided that it was probably from the store, and he didn’t want to see it. Not tonight. He noticed Tom’s face, a little rounder and more like a child’s when he was asleep. But he wasn’t a boy. He was a young man who just didn’t quite know it yet. Jake went in and shut his own door to merciful, private quietness. Finally.
    ***
    At 6:30 the next morning, Jake and Tom were slogging down Rogers Avenue fortified by a good boarding-house breakfast. Mrs. Peltier had judged their patient improved, sleeping soundly and with better color. It was still cloudy but not raining, the streets quiet, horsecars not running. The note Jake had waited until morning to read was somewhat mysterious. It said simply, “Jake, I need to see you as soon as you get back. Ralph Dekker.” A block away from the Dekker building they hit the floodwater, and it was thigh-deep by the time they got to the front door. Directly across the street, the old courthouse jail sat on its privileged hillock a couple of feet above the flood. The last block of Rogers Avenue sloped sharply downhill to the train station, which had completely disappeared, roof, chimney, and all, beneath the flood.
    The sandbagging around the store building was so far under that Jake didn’t even see it until he bumped into it. The front door was open to the water. Around the large front sales room floated sundry items of stock and trash, a couple of spittoons, and one rat swimming for its life, among the carcasses of many others. The sales desk barely stuck out of the water. A worker paddled a johnboat piled with stock from the sports equipment shelves toward the rear of the big room.
    The narrow stairs were busy with haggard, wet men who looked like they’d been at work for hours. Jake and the boy went for the elevator, which was about to go up with three huge boxes of shotgun loads in the middle of the platform. The elevator operator was Edgar Wyatt, a short black man with massive shoulders who pulled and braked the ropes that drove the fifteen-foot-square wall-less platform up and down the unguarded shaft between floors. Jake and the boy clambered onto it from the water. The basement, normally visible through the big space on all sides of the elevator, was a giant vessel of water.
    â€œGet everything out from below?” Jake asked.
    â€œNosuh,” Edgar said. “Been workin since in the night, but the river risin so fast, can’t keep up with it. It start to comin in, got to thundering down this hole. One of the mens almost got washed down.”
    â€œIs Mr. Dekker here?”
    â€œThey all been comin and goin.” He began pulling the ropes. “Some of em on the shippin floor.”
    â€œI’ll just get off there. Could you put this boy to work, Edgar? He can help with carrying.”
    â€œYessuh. Them other two new ones already workin.”
    He pulled the thick up-rope and the mechanism groaned and creaked as they ascended the half-floor to the shipping floor. Murky daylight drifted through the nearly closed big shipping doors that opened onto the railroad spur on the east side. Sitting at the big flat construction table were three salesmen—Jack Peters, Marvin Beele, and Dandy Pruitt—all looking as whipped and gloomy as cur dogs. Ernest Dekker had them in some kind of meeting. Ralph Dekker was nowhere in sight.
    Jake walked off the back side of the elevator, out of their sight, and stood in the shadows by