Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  WAS it only a town of children? Little Negro scamps tracked him from behind the first line of buildings. He could not see them, but he heard them scurrying in the mud, and several times, drawn by flashes of movement, glanced over, but his look drove them back. And if he advanced on them, they scattered.

  Otherwise the town was seemingly deserted. There was no commerce, nor any sidewalk. A few storefronts were abandoned. Mostly the places were cabins, many to his eye as abandoned as the storefronts. Yet still he had a queasy feeling, a sense again of being looked at, inspected. It brought a shiver of discomfort.

  As he climbed the slope from the river, he at last came upon an adult woman. Her eyes were big, her face a ruin. She was swaddled in a dress of many layers and colors, all pulled into one tapestry; her hair was bandannaed tightly to her skull, and she had no teeth at all. She was a Negro mama, a formidable figure in the Negro community, Sam knew. And she didn’t seem insane, but regarded him with only sullen dull hatred.

  “Madam, excuse me, I am looking for a county seat, a municipal building, the sheriff’s department? You could possibly direct me?”

  She responded in a gibberish alien to his ears. Was she still African? Had she not been Americanized?

  “Madam, I do not understand. Could you speak more slowly?”

  He picked out a word or two of English in her mewl, but she grew frustrated with the stupidity on his face, and shooed him away with a dismissive, abrupt gesture, then gathered herself with dignity, pulled her shawl tight about her, and strutted away.

  But she stopped and turned, then pointed down an alley.

  She said something that he deciphered to mean: down that way.

  He walked down it, the mud sucking at his shoes. Here and there a door slammed shut, a window closed, people not seen clearly hastened away. He felt as if he were the plague, Mr. Death himself, with a scythe, behooded, a pale slice of darkness, and all human things fled his presence.

  Then he came to it, or what had been it.

  Fire had claimed it. A blackened stone wall still stood, but the timbers were all scorched and collapsed, and rogue bricks lay about in the weeds of what had once been a public square. No pane of glass remained in the ruin, once upon a time some kind of courthouse building after the proud fashion of the South, with offices and departments and lockups and a garage or stable out back. Scavengers had picked it clean, and moss or other forms of vegetation had begun to claim it for their own.

  So this was why there was no “official” Thebes County, why no letters were answered. It had burned, and perhaps with that the will that claims civilization out of nothingness was somehow finally and permanently broken.

  Now what? he wondered.

  It’s all gone? It burned, most everybody left town, and only a few hopeless cases remain. Those that do must eke out a living somehow from the prison farm yet another mile or so upriver.

  He walked on, not out of purpose but more in the hopes of encountering an inspiration. Then, progressing a bit farther, he noticed a low, rude shack whose door was open, and from whose chimney pipe issued a trail of smoke, thin and white.

  Batting at a fly that suddenly buzzed close to his face, he leaned in to discover something of a public house, though a rude caricature of it. It was empty but for an old man at the bar and an old man behind the bar. No array of liquor stood behind the bartender, only a motley collection of dusty glasses. Beer signs from the twenties dustily festooned the dim room, and dead neon curled on the wall, which could be decoded, with effort, into the names of the commercial brews of many decades past.

  “Say there,” said Sam, “I need some help. Can you direct me?”

  “Ain’t nowheres be directin’, suh,” said the bartender.

  “Well, I’ll be the judge of that. Can you guide me to what succeeded the town hall? Surely there’s still some authority around. Possibly the registrar’s office, the tax collector. Or a police or sheriff’s station. This is the county seat, isn’t it?”

  “Used to be. Not much here no more. Can’t help none. You g’wan, git back to that boat. Ain’t nuffin here you want to know about.”

  “Surely there are sheriff’s deputies.”

  “Dey fine you iffn dey want,” said the other. “Best pray they don’t want you.”

  “Well, isn’t this the limit?” said Sam to nobody.

  “It all burned down ’bout fo’ years back, Mister. Everybody done left.”

  “I saw it. So now there’s nothing?”

  “Only the Farm.”

  “The Prison Farm, yes. I suppose I shall have to go there.”

  “Don’t nobody go there but gots to go there, suh. In chains. Thems only ones. You don’t want to go there. You best be on ’bout your business.”

  “Then let me ask you this,” he said, and went on about Lincoln Tilson, the retired Negro whose fate he had come down to locate. But as he spoke, he began to sense that his two coconversationalists were growing extremely unhappy. They squirmed as if in minor but persistent pain, and their eyes popped about nervously, as if scanning for interlopers.

  “Don’t know nuffin’ ’bout dat,” said the one.

  “Not a damn thing,” chimed in the other.

  “So the name means nothing to you?”

  “No suh.”

  “All right. Wish I could thank you for your help, but you’ve not been any at all. Don’t you respect white people down here?”

  “Suh, jus’ tryin’ to git by.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  He turned and left, and began the long trek back to the boat. He knew now he had to go to the prison, where surely what records remained were kept, if they were kept at all. It seemed out of another century: the possibility that a man like Lincoln Tilson, a man of accomplishment and property, even by these standards some prosperity, could just disappear off the face of the earth, leaving no trace of paper, no police report, no death certificate, no witnesses, no anything. That was not how you did it.

  Sam’s mind was clearly arranged. He appreciated order above all things, for order was the beginning of all things. Without elemental order there was nothing; it wasn’t a civilization unless undergirded by a system of laws and records, of taxes and tabulations. This down here: it was not right. He felt some fundamental law was being flouted before his very eyes.

  He rounded the corner and began to head down the slope to the river. That’s when he saw the dock, yet several hundred yards before him, and realized that Lazear was gone.

  Goddamn the man!

  But of course: this whole journey was a fiasco from the start, and how could he have trusted an old coot like Lazear? You’d as soon trust a snake in the grass.

  He walked down, hoping that perhaps Lazear had taken the craft out into the deep water for some technical reason or other. But no: the boat, the old man, both were gone. Nothing stirred, nothing moved, behind him the ghost town in the mud, before him the empty river, and nothing around for hundreds of square miles but wilderness and swamp.

  Sam was not the panicky sort. He simply grew grumpier and more obdurate in the face of adversity. He turned, convinced that he should find the first adult he saw and demand explanations. But to his surprise, almost as if awaiting him, the old mama lady stood nearby. How had she approached without his hearing? Was she magical?

  Don’t be a ridiculous fool, he thought. This isn’t mumbo jumbo voodoo hoodoo, it was the blasted, backwater South, up some sewer of a river, where folks had degraded out of loss of contact with an outside world. He was in no danger. Negroes did not attack white people, so he would be all right.

  “Madam, I have in my pocket a crisp ten-dollar bill. Would that be sufficient for a night’s lodging and a simple meal? Unless there’s a hotel, and I suspect there’s not a hotel within a thousand square miles.”

  He held the bill out; she snatched it.

  He followed her.

  THE house was no different from any other, only a bit farther into the woods. It was another dogtrot c
abin, low, dusty, decrepit and tar-paper roofed like the others. A few scrawny pigs grunted and shat in a pen in the front yard, and a mangy dog lay on the porch, or what passed for porch, but was just floorboards under some overhanging warped roof.

  The dog growled.

  She kicked it.

  “Goddamn dog!”

  Off it ran, squealing. It clearly wasn’t her dog, only a dog she allowed to share space with her, and when feeling generous rewarded it for its companionship with a bone or something.

  “Ou’ back. You go where de chickens be.”

  “Why, thank you,” he said, wasting a smile on her, a pointless exercise because she had no empathy in her for him, and was only interested in minimally earning that ten spot.

  He walked ’round back, and there was a low coop, wired off from the rest of the yard, and a few chickens bobbed back and forth as they walked onward.

  “Home, sweet home,” he said to nobody except his own ironic sense of humor, then ducked into the place. All the rooms were occupied, and the innkeeper, an orange rooster, raised a ruckus, but Sam, sensing himself to be the superior creature, stamped his foot hard, and gobble-gobbled as he did for his youngest children at Thanksgiving and the bull bird flustered noisily off in a cloud of indignant feathers and squawks.

  Sam took the best bedroom, that being a corner where the straw looked cleanest and driest, and sat himself down.

  Dark was falling.

  He wanted, before the light was gone, to write out an account of his day for his employer. He filled his Schaeffer from a little Scripp bottle in his briefcase. Then he set to work on his trusty yellow legal pad, soon losing contact with the real world.

  He didn’t hear her when she entered.

  “Here,” she finally said. “Sompin’ eat.”

  “What? Oh, yes, of course.”

  It was a foil pie plate, her finest china, filled with steaming white beans in some sort of gravy, and a chunk of pan bread. She had a cup of hot coffee with it and utensils that turned out to be clean and shiny.

  “Thank you, madam,” he said. “You keep a fine homestead.”

  “Ain’t my home,” she said. “Used to be. Ain’t no more.”

  “It isn’t your home?”

  “It be the Store’s.”

  “The Store?”

  “The Farm Store. Onliest store dese parts. Da store own everything.”

  “Oh, you must be mistaken. If the Store is part of the state government, it can’t loan funds against property, calculate interest, and foreclose, not without court hearings and court-appointed attorneys. There are laws to prevent such things.”

  “Da Store be the law here. Dat’s all. You eat up them beans. Tomorrow you go about your bidness. I could git in trouble wif dem. Dey don’t like no outsiders. You won’t say I told you nuffin?”

  “Of course not.”

  After that, she had nothing left to say, and he scraped the last of the beans off the plate. She took it, and left silently. He saw her heading back to her cabin, stooped and hunched, broken with woe.

  Lord, I cannot wait to put this place behind me.

  He made his plans. He’d clean up tomorrow as best he could given the circumstances, then go to the Store or the office of the Farm, where all power seemed concentrated. He would get to the bottom of this or know why.

  Once he’d taken off his shoes and his hat and at last his tie, and folded his jacket into a little package that would do for a pillow, it didn’t take long for him to fall asleep. For all its scratchiness, the straw was warm and dry. His roommates cooed quietly on their nests, and even the rooster seemed at last to accept him; it realized he was no threat when it came to fertilizing the hens.

  He slept easily; he was, after all, near exhaustion. The dreams he had were dead literal, without that kind of logic-free surrealism that fills most sleepers’ minds. In Sam’s dreams, the world made the same sense it made in reality; the same laws, from gravity to probate, still obtained; reason trumped emotion and the steady, inexorable fairness of the system proved out in the end, as it always did. Sometimes he wished he had a livelier subconscious, but there was nothing that could be done with such a defect.

  He was not dreaming when they woke him. He was in dark, black nothingness; the light in his eyes had the quality of pain and confusion. He sat up, bolt awake, aware of shapes, the smell of horses, the sense of movement all ’round him.

  Three flashlights had him nailed.

  “Say, what on earth is—” he began to bluster, but before he could get it out, somebody hit him with a wooden billy club across the shoulder. The pain was fearsome, and he bent double, his spirit initially shattered by it. His hand flew to the welt.

  “Jesus!” he screamed.

  “Git him, boys.”

  “Goddamn, don’t let him squirm away.”

  “Luther, if he fights, whop him agin!”

  “You want another goddamn taste, Mister? By God, I will skull you next goddamn time.”

  They were on him. He felt himself pinned, turned, then cuffed.

  “That’s it. Bring him out now.”

  He was dragged out. There were three deputies, husky boys, used to using muscle against flesh, who shoved him along, their lights beaming in his face, blinding him. The cuffs enraged him. He had never been handcuffed in his life.

  “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing! I am an attorney-at-law, for God’s sake, you have no right at all to—”

  Another blow lit up his other arm and he stumbled to the earth in the agony of it.

  “That ought to shut him up,” said the man on horseback, who was in command. “Load him in the meat wagon and let’s go.”

  5

  IT smelled of pines. The odor actually was not unpleasant; it was brisk, somehow clean, and pine needles, like tufts of feathers, light brown and fluffy, lay everywhere.

  But it was still a prison.

  Sam’s arms were both swollen, and when he clumsily peeled away the clothes he wore, he saw two purplish-yellow bruises inscribed diagonally across each biceps, as if laid there by an expert. One was not harder than the other. In fact, they were mirror images. No bones were broken, no skin cut, just the rotted oblong tracing exactly the impact of the billy club upon his upper arms, each delivered with the same force, at the same angle, to the same debilitating effect. Sam’s arms were numb, and his hands too un-feeling to grab a thing. He could make but the crudest of movements. When he had to pee in the bucket in the corner, undoing his trouser buttons was a nightmare, but he would not let these men do it for him, if they would, which was questionable.

  He knew he had been beaten by an expert. Someone who had beaten men before, had thought critically about it, had done much thorough research, and knew where to hit, how to hit, how hard to hit, and what marks the blows would leave, which, after a week or so, would be nothing at all. Without photographic evidence, it would only be his word against a deputy’s in some benighted Mississippi courtroom, in front of some hick judge who thought Arkansas was next to New York, New York, the home of communism.

  His head ached. His temper surged, fighting through the pain.

  It was some kind of cell in the woods, and he had a sensation of the piney woods outside, for he could hear the whisper of needles rustling against each other in the dull breeze.

  He said again to the bars and whoever lurked down the corridor, “I DEMAND to see the sheriff. You have no right or legal authority to hold me. You should be horsewhipped for your violations of the law.”

  But no one bothered to answer, except that once a loutish deputy had slipped a tray with more beans, some slices of dry, salty ham, and a piece of buttered bread on the plate, as well as a cup of coffee.

  Was he in the prison?

  Was this Thebes, where uppity niggers were sent to rot?

  He didn’t think so. There was instead a sense of desolation about this place, the stillness of the woods, the occasional chirping of birds. The window was too high to see out of
, and he could see nothing down the hall. His arms hurt, his head hurt, his dignity hurt, but what hurt even more was his sense of the system corrupted. It cut to the core of the way his mind worked. People were not treated like this, especially people like him, which is to say white people of means and education. The system made no sense if it didn’t protect him, and it needed to be adjusted.

  “Goddammit, you boys will pay!” he screamed, to nobody in particular, and to no sign that anybody heard him.

  At last—it had to be midafternoon, fourteen or fifteen full hours after his capture—two guards came for him.

  “You put your hands behind yourself so’s we can cuff you down now,” said the one.

  “And goddammit, be fast about it, Sheriff ain’t got all day, goddammit.”

  “Who do you think—”

  “I think you gimme lip, I’ll lay another swat on you, Dad, and you won’t like it a dadgum bit.”

  So this was the fellow who had hit him: maybe twenty-five, blunt of nose and hair close-cropped, eyes dull as are most bullies’, a lot of beef behind him, his size the source of his confidence.

  “G’wan, hurry, Mister, I ain’t here to wait on your dadgum mood.”

  At last Sam obliged, turning so that they could cuff him, a security measure that was, in a civilized state like Arkansas, reserved for the most violent and unpredictable of men in the penal system, known murderers and thugs who could go off on a rampage at no provocation at all. It was for dealing with berserkers.

  Once they had him secured, they unlocked the cell and took control of him, one on each arm, and walked him down the wood corridor, then into a small interrogation room.

  They sat him down, and, as per too many crime movies and more police stations than Sam cared to count, a bright light came into his eyes.

  The door opened.

  A large man entered, behind the light so that Sam could not see details, but he made out a dark uniform, black or brown, head to toe, with a beige tie tight against his bulgy neck, and a blazing silver star badge on his left breast. He wore a Sam Browne belt, shined up, and carried a heavy revolver in a flapped holster, his trousers pressed and lean, down to cowboy boots also shiny and pointed.