Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  But Sam did not care.

  “Sheriff,” he cried, as he climbed up, “you’d best get your boys onto the river. A Negro boat has overturned some miles down, and there yet may be survivors. You’ll need powerful flashlights, for I fear the light will be gone by the time—”

  “Didn’t you and me reach a agreement, sir? You’s to leave town, and not never come back on no account. And on that bargain, you would not be prosecuted for resisting arrest or generally stirring up the population.”

  “Sir, I am not here to quibble. People’s lives may be at stake. For God’s sake, time’s wasting. Get those boys of yours on to the goddamn water and get them going. This is a river town, surely you have boats. This is not some paltry charge, this is a public safety emergency.”

  “Goddammit, Mister, you must be thick of the skull or water-brained or some such. Didn’t know they growed such knotheads in Arkansas. Heard it was an all right place, though I can see now it produces too many of the daft persuasion.”

  “Sheriff, I insist that—”

  “Mister, I am not sending boys out on that dark river to look for fleeing Negroes. The currents are tricky, the fog comes in and twists things around, and before you know it, you have white men in trouble as much as black ones.”

  “My God, we are talking about human beings!”

  “If they go out there after dark, they know damned well the chance they take.”

  “Sheriff,” a merry deputy called, “bet it’s Jimmy and Glory and them all.”

  “That Jimmy, never was no good,” said another. “That one always be in trouble. Lord, he done got Glory and the chilluns drowned, too.”

  “We’ll ride over and check in the morning.”

  “Sheriff,” Sam implored, “am I to understand you’ll do nothing? Nothing at all. Possibly a child—”

  “Ain’t no children out there, sir. The children are all dead. These people flee their responsibilities and they make plumb fool decisions and take terrible chances, and they pay the price, most of them do. Jimmy owed money, he should have stayed like a man and worked off his debt, ’stead of running off to welch on it.”

  “Sir, I have to tell you: If I don’t see evidence of public safety activity on your part, I will myself make a report to the governor of Mississippi and—”

  “Haw!” laughed one of the deputies, “ain’t that a good one. He’s gonna go to Jackson and tell old Bilbo ’bout a drownded nigger!”

  The others hooted.

  “Sir,” the sheriff said, “tell who you wish whatever you want. In Jackson they consider that we do our job well down here. We handle the uppity niggers, or rather the prison does. We make the state run, and we do our part to keep order, and I’m a proud man because of it. Now I warned you to leave this town.”

  “Mr. Leon,” Lazear suddenly proclaimed, “don’t make us leave now. I don’t know de river in de dark; we end up dead as them nigs.”

  About three different conversations seemed to explode simultaneously: the deputies continued to enjoy the humorous idea of Sam’s audience at the state capital; Lazear enjoined the sheriff to let them stay the night so that he did not have to face the river in the dark; and Sam continued to demand action on the missing family.

  The sheriff finally reached to his holster, pulled out a big revolver, and fired a single shot to quiet them all. Its boom clapped and whanged, rolled and reverberated. Total silence followed as all looked at the large man with the revolver in hand.

  “Y’all, you git back on patrol,” he told his deputies. “Old man, you stay here, moored to that dock. At first light, you be gone, or by God, I’ll make you wish you had. And you, Mr. Lawyer, you git back on that boat, and don’t you come off to step on the dirt of my county ever agin. If you do, I will personally have a knot beaten into your head that will last forever, and you can tell all your fancy Arkansas people, I got this knot in Thebes, Mississip, on account of some drownded niggers. And I don’t care to speak again on this subject, no more, never.”

  “Sheriff, you are making a big mistake.”

  “Jed, you stay down here, make sure these two don’t roam. And make sure they put off with the light. They give you any trouble, you can whip up on them any old way you want. Now I’m going home to get my supper.”

  Jed detached himself from his chums and swaggered down. He was a big ol’ boy, with three guns, and cords and leathers and belts everywhere. He looked just dumb enough to take all this seriously, and wouldn’t be convincible elsewise. He’d as soon hit you with the club he carried as listen.

  He spat a wad into the water, where it popped wetly as it hit.

  “Don’t you worry, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ll take care of these boys, you can bet on it.”

  SAM awakened in the dark.

  He had reached his conclusion at last.

  He’d been building toward it for a long piece, fighting its implications, aware that he was troubling with the very stuff of his life, his destiny, his fate.

  But now he knew he could not spend his time in Blue Eye, Arkansas, pretending to represent law and order, while three hundred miles away this chancre perpetuated itself, unseen, unmolested, uncontested.

  He knew: Thebes must fall.

  Somehow, some way, it must fall. In his mind, he sketched out a plan. It was orderly and well founded, almost certain to succeed. He would have to form a committee of well regarded, unassailably moral Southern prosecutors—he knew many of them—and very carefully review and accumulate the evidence. An unassailable report had to be created. Then, carefully, copies of this document must be given to selected press, which would reveal the findings on the day that his committee presented the report to the governor of the state of Mississippi, the speaker of the house in the Mississippi state assembly, Mississippi’s two senators and five congressmen, hell, maybe even, for the publicity value alone, Harry S. Damn Truman himself, or, since all this was some years off, whomsoever bigwigged war general was in the White House.

  It had to be done square and legal, one step at a time, with an eye toward reality, so that the final product had a rightness to it that transcended the seething angers of the South. He wanted the white Southern mill worker and small-patch farmer, the sharecropper, the feed-store clerks, the small-town politicos, the damn women (if they could control their goddamn crying!), the MacWhatevers and the Joneses and the Whites and the O’Whomevers; a new Confederacy, if you would, of the same ol’ boys who marched up Peahawk Ridge or across the wide-open ground at Gettysburg behind the fool Pickett or thrashed and perished in the cornfields of bloody Antietam. They could do it, for they had it within them, if they were ably led; they and they alone could bring Thebes down and make the world a better place.

  But he knew this too: he had to start with a document.

  It was all so much palaver without a piece of evidence, a piece of paper, that made it clear as a bell’s last dying dingdong: this is evil. This is wrong. This must be stopped.

  He had to have something. He knew it, and that there was no way around it.

  He thought: I have to get into that store.

  And then he thought: that is insane. It is in a prison, it is carefully guarded, it will not give up its secrets easy, it is a mile away down a dark and windy forest road that I have never traveled and, top it all, I am no man for breaking and entering. I would get caught, and if caught I would be in deep trouble.

  He thought again: I need someone to help me. I need someone to take the risk, to get me a document.

  Then he remembered the old lady whose chicken coop he’d rented. She spoke a gibberish at first, but as he listened more carefully and got used to the rhythms and strangenesses in her words, he had begun to understand her. It was she who told him about the Store. She must understand the legal underpinnings of Thebes County, the original crime that indebted its citizens to work for little or nothing for the benefit of a bossman who kept his expenses in that way to a minimum while raking off the top, whose iron system of rule by violenc
e lined his own pockets.

  She must have a piece of paper. He remembered now, the weathered old face, the fierce eyes, the watchfulness; why, that old mama was the only one in the town whose spirit remained secretly intact, and Sam knew this to be in accordance with Negro ways, where authority frequently devolved on the sagacity of an old woman, who was smart and just and well-tempered by experience.

  Sam squinted in the dark, and saw that it was near 4:00 A.M. If he could get by that behemoth on the dock, he could get to her house by 4:30 and back again by 5:00, and then he’d have it, something upon which to build. It was how a lawyer worked: go for the paper. Get the paper. Get the evidence. If there was any evidence.

  He rose from his length of blanket on the prow of the boat, and carefully put on his shoes. Though it was warmish, he took his coat, which had been his pillow, and threw it on, to blot out the whiteness of his shirt. Rising craftily, he crept down the length of the boat, and stopped for just a second to listen to the easy sawing of old Lazear’s aged lungs as he snoozed away in the cockpit, in some impossible position that no civilized being could find rest in. But Lazear snored as if lung-shot and producing death rattles, each a mighty shudder through bubbles of phlegm, but otherwise unwakeable.

  Sam made the climb to the dock and discovered that the guardian deputy, of course, had grown bored with the passing of the nighttime hours and had departed for whatever recreation he wanted, probably a willing colored gal in a crib somewhere, for all the deputies had the look of men who’re whup-ass on colored in the daylight and cuddle with it in the night.

  Sam climbed the slope from the riverside area to what amounted to the town’s main drag, not really much of either main or drag, just shuttered storefronts behind which, on either side, lay the dogtrot cabins that made up the domiciles of the place before yielding to the all-encompassing piney woods. He tried to remember. This way or that? It’s not that Thebes was a complex metropolitan zone, with byways and alleys that could lure a man to ruin, or at least get him lost. Still, in the dark, it seemed all different, and the vistas down the few streets were closed off to his eyes. But then he saw the public house where the two bitter old men had been and remembered…no, he didn’t get to the woman’s house until after he’d been there. Why hadn’t he paid attention? It hadn’t seemed important then, but it surely did now.

  At last he thought he had it, as he projected a three-dimensional map of Thebes in his mind. He passed the public house, turned down an alley, walked amid silent cabins. Dogs scuffled and scurried, and occasionally barked, and he heard the slithery, feathery rattlings of chickens twitching in their coops. A pig or two was up, for whatever reason, maybe to shit in the mud or whatever. But of people the place was forlorn and empty.

  It was a balmy Southern night. Above, towers of stars spangled in the pure black sky and a zephyr whispered through the pines, bringing relief from the day’s brutal heat. The smell of the pines was everywhere, bracing and pure, almost medicinal. With the squalor and the despair blocked out by the darkness, Sam could almost convince himself he was in some healthy place, some nonblasphemed ground.

  And then, yes, there it was. That was hers. It was different from the rest, being set farther back, almost in the woods themselves. But he recognized it by its shape and location, and as his eyes adjusted, and he moved just a bit, he made out that coop out back where he’d had the corner suite with the chickens and the disgruntled rooster.

  Sam approached stealthfully. He didn’t want it noted that the white lawyer from the North had visited old granny in the night. It would do old granny no good at all in Thebes County, Mississippi.

  Of course the door was not locked. He slipped in and stood motionless for a bit, waiting for his eyes to adjust yet again, this time to the closer dark of the interior space.

  When at last he could pick out impediments and chart a passage in the dark—say, the doorway into the bedroom to be aimed for, the stove in the middle of the room to be avoided, the rickety furniture not to be knocked asunder—he moved quietly, and slipped into her bedchamber. He was a prince come a-calling.

  No, he was a soldier of the Lord, come to bring righteous vengeance and God’s wrath to Sodom.

  No, he was a scared white man in way too deep and playing with forces he could not even begin to understand.

  He approached the bed, wondering how to waken her without making her scream and alerting the locals and the gendarmerie.

  “Madam,” he whispered, in a low voice.

  There was no response.

  “Grandma? Grandma, wake up, please, it’s me, Mr. Sam, come for a talk.”

  That was louder still, but there was no response.

  He bent to the bed where she lay swaddled and touched her arm, gently as he could, and rocked ever so slowly, crooning, “Mama, Mama, please awaken, Mama.”

  But Mama remained mute.

  He became aware of an odor, and then, through the bedclothes, his fingers sensed damp.

  He recoiled, but had to go forward.

  He turned to the candle next to the bed and found a few stick matches next to it. He struck one on the bedpost, cupping the sudden flare, and brought it to the wick, where it clung, then held fast. Again, he kept his hand cupped around it, to cut down on the light, and brought it to her, and pulled back the bedclothes.

  She had been smashed all to hell and gone. Her skull had the shocking aspect of deflation, for its integrity was breached mightily. Whatever oozed from it oozed black onto the bedclothes. Her eyes were distorted by the trauma done to her skull, and one had a bad eight-ball hemorrhage to it. It was too cool for the flies, but by midmorning they’d be here in waves.

  He had been to murder scenes too many times before, so he did not panic, but a breath of air passed with a hiss from his lips.

  Jesus Christ, he thought. Who could—

  The flashlights from the window came on, several of them. Then, from the other side too. Men moved swiftly toward him, and he heard the creaking of leather boots and belts.

  “Mister, you in plumb bad deep dark trouble now,” said Sheriff Leon Gattis. “Boys, git this Yankee cuffed. We done caught us a murderer.”

  TWO

  Earl’s Journey

  8

  EARL called the town up through blur by focusing his binoculars, and watched as it swarmed into clarity. What he saw was of no surprise in the piney woods, a slatternly place in the mud, with its ruined waterfront, its closed sawmill ruin off to one side, and the residential zone, its warren of jumbled cabins, and the listless people who populated it.

  He saw also the men on horses, six, seven, then eight of them on the big steeds, in the dark uniforms, lords and masters, rulers of all. He watched them thunder through the town when it so moved them, and could read terror in those they stopped to talk to. There were no easy encounters in Thebes; all confrontations were charged and difficult.

  Earl therefore set out to do what he knew he absolutely must. He set out to draw a map.

  He was across the river, possibly one hundred yards from the town, and he lay there, hour by hour, his binoculars focused, his handwriting steady and clear, the lines growing in his notebook. He noted also the times of the mounted patrols, the officers involved, the routes they took. He noticed the officers themselves, the fat ones, the quick ones, the mean ones. He wrote it all down.

  He watched early in the morning as the Negro ladies all left. These, Earl guessed, were the prison cooks and seamstresses and whatnot, who picked up after the white men who ran the prison and, Earl also knew, provided comforts as they were needed. He knew at night men on horses would stop at certain houses in the town, enter, then leave an hour or so later. He didn’t care to speculate on the drama of favor and fury that took place inside the cabins; down here, it was an ancient pattern, and maybe that’s why so many of the children who roamed the wild streets during the day had a yellowish cast to them.

  Earl’s approach had been different than Sam’s. Earl was no lawyer like Sam; he pr
esumed, as Sam had not, the existence of no set rules of order and regulation, no rational system that would entertain inquiry with fairness and due deliberation and cough up, ultimately, a response, rational and complete. Earl was a policeman, but not really; he was still a Marine in his mind, and any territory was enemy territory until he knew otherwise. He acted deliberately and decisively.

  For example, on the day that he and Sam agreed upon as the last day by which Sam could be expected back, Earl called Sam’s wife and made his inquiry.

  “No, Earl, I haven’t heard a thing. I’ve begun to worry. Should I contact the authorities?”

  Earl thought not, for who knew by what compass the authorities in swamp-water Mississippi steered?

  “Did he tell you so?”

  “He said no such thing about it.”

  “Then, Mary, I’d wait. You know how Sam hates a fuss.”

  “Earl, it’s been long enough. What he had to do oughtn’t to have taken this long.”

  “Well, ma’am, these little towns, you just can’t tell how they operate. As I understand, it’s swamp country and communication might be tricky.”

  He then called Sam’s other closest friend, Connie Longacre. Earl knew the two had a private relationship, though its nature was neither clear to him nor curious to him.

  “Miss Connie?”

  “Earl, have you heard from Sam? I’ve begun to worry.”

  “No, ma’am. I thought possibly you had. You know how that man enjoys a good talk.”

  “Not a word, Earl, strange on its face for Sam. Earl, what should—”

  “I will do something.”

  “Earl, I—”