Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

“Miss Connie, I will.”

  Then Earl made another phone call. It was to Colonel Jenks, the commandant of the Arkansas Highway Patrol and his mentor beyond Sam.

  “Earl, yes?”

  “Colonel, sir, I’ve some leave time due. It’s been on five years straight. Got a private situation I need to deal with. Would certainly appreciate it if you could help.”

  The colonel loved Earl, as did most who knew him, the others being those who only feared him. He knew that if Earl had a situation, Earl would need the time to deal with it. Earl didn’t request things lightly; he was the kind of fool for duty that commanding officers have relied upon for thousands of war-filled years.

  “Earl, I’ll notify personnel. We’ll see to it the county is covered.”

  “Yes, sir. Much obliged.”

  “Earl, you’ve earned it, you know you have.”

  It was true. Earl’s record was embarrassingly without blemish. His problem: he worked too hard, he cared too much, he was too fair and too meticulous in his planning and deportment. It was as if the goddamned medal he had won demanded of him that he be perfect the day long, and by God, perfect the day long he would be, and he would die before letting it down, though of course he never, ever, to any man or woman, talked of it.

  As for Earl, the next part was the difficulty, with Junie. Yet it turned out easier than he expected. He told her he’d be going off for a bit, and he watched as her face fell.

  “You’re going to that war,” she said. “You are a fool for war. You cannot stay out of it.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, “I am not. They do not care for me; I’m too used-up for them these days.” Then he told her he was only going to Mississippi, and only for a few days, and only to look after Sam, who might be in some trouble.

  “Sam? In trouble? Why Earl, Sam could talk the devil himself out of hell.”

  “I know. But maybe Sam run up against something meaner than the devil. Don’t you worry none.”

  He knew he had won; her deeper terror was the anguish he felt about being over here while the Marines were over there, in Korea. She knew he had been writing letters to congressmen and the commandant, and she worried that sooner or later one would be fool enough to let him back in, despite the wounds he’d picked up in the big war. So in a way she was relieved that it was only Mississippi.

  That done, a few travel arrangements needed to be made, and finally he had one last call, though he made it from a pay phone. He called a colleague named Wilbur Forebush, by rank a lieutenant in the Arkansas State Police and by authority director of undercover work, which was becoming necessary, as the crime tendencies grew more sophisticated. He and Wilbur had shared a pleasant few Saturdays in a duck blind over flooded rice fields these past several years.

  He explained what he wanted but not why.

  But Wilbur trusted him.

  “All right, but Earl, if you git in a jam now, you call me. I will come quick for you.”

  “I appreciate it. I just don’t want no tracks back to my family, when I don’t know what’s cooking.”

  “So I understand. I’ll have it couriered down to you. Tomorrow morning okay?”

  “That’s fine.”

  What arrived was a pouch containing a driver’s license, seemingly authentic, in the name of, as it turned out, one Jack Bogash, of Little Rock. Other authenticating documents included a social security card, a heavy equipment operator’s license, and others. There was no Bogash, of course. The documents were high-grade fakes, meant for undercover officers in tough circumstances, and would pass scrutiny in every crime lab except the FBI’s.

  Earl then took the bus to Pascagoula, his belongings, including a .45 from the old days, in a pack under a sleeping roll, and a Winchester ’95 carbine in a scabbard. He dressed in hunter’s rough clothes and high boots, and wore a fedora. No one thought the rifle odd at all, for rifles rode in pickups and saddle scabbards everywhere in the South. On the ride down he studied what maps were available, the best a big color thing that was included in the WPA’s 1938 Guide to the Magnolia State. He scanned it carefully, looking to learn the land and the foliage, committing it carefully to memory.

  He did not stop in Pascagoula, but went farther up the river still by bus until he was the only white person left aboard, to an old, nearly dead lumber town called Benndale close to Greene County. There he picked up some supplies at the general store, then went looking for a hunting guide. Of course it wasn’t hunting season. Hell, he knew that, he was scouting for some rich fellows and wanted to find a place where he could take a deer lease, bring these boys in the fall, git them all fat bucks, pass some green around, and, dammit, everybody’d be better off. He was directed, eventually, to a hardscrabble ol’ boy named McTye, who volunteered to canoe him up the Pascagoula, then up the Leaf. Earl said that sounded fine.

  The trip through the bayou was without incident, but then Earl changed plans on the old fella. Instead of heading up the Leaf, he decided to have the boy put him off there, at the juncture of the three rivers, Leaf, Yaxahatchee and Pascagoula. He’d work up the Leaf on foot, looking for a sign, scaling out the terrain. The oldster would come pick him up a week hence.

  “Mister, this here’s dangerous territory,” said the scrunched-up old man, McTye. “There’s bogs and hollows, and hellholes, where the land has fallen and the trees are so thick you maybe get in, but you ain’t getting out. Tricky currents in the water. No one’s quite clear on who’s hereabouts. Might still be some Indians, might be blue-gum niggers whose bite’ll kill you. We got us a dog problem, too. Feral dogs, big as wolves, they travel in packs and can chew a man to bonemeal right fast. They got a prison farm thirty to forty miles away, and they didn’t plan to build it there ’cause the territory was easy traveling.”

  “Well, sir, I am in no hurry to git close to a prison one way or the other. But I am an experienced woods fellow and believe I can hold my own. I ain’t doing my job if I’m just looking at the ground from a canoe. Want to find and map the hellholes, see where I’d put up stands, where the deer paths are, where I might expect some heavy bucks, if this state done growed ’em.”

  “She does, I’ll tell you, eight-points and more, big ’uns. So I can see I’ll not be telling you what’s for. I can see you’re a hardhead. Okay, son, the funeral they be holding be for you, not me. You want to leave me word for your next of kin?”

  “Yes sir, Mr. McTye,” said Earl, and wrote out an address for Jack Bogash in Little Rock. “I will leave this here with you. You come back in a week. If I am here, so much the better. If I am not, then possibly I’ve left in another direction. Don’t you worry none either way, until maybe some weeks hence, if my widow calls the state po-lice. Then you tell ’em where I started in, and if they can find the body, so much the better.”

  “Sir, I hope you know your stuff.”

  “Mister, I do too. But this is what a feller has to do these days to earn a living, and if this pays out, I’ll be a happy dog.”

  The old man spat into the river, left Earl off on the shore of the Leaf, turned around, and in smooth strokes propelled his way back until a bend at last obscured him.

  Alone now in the dark cathedral of the swamp, Earl wasted no time. He unlimbered the rifle, fed four .30-’06 150-grain cartridges into the magazine which, by the peculiarity of the gun, was not a tube under the barrel but a complicated internal spring-loaded well that took some care in the proper fitting of the shells, and jacked the lever to feed a cartridge to the chamber. That done, he lowered the hammer.

  Next, compass: he shot an azimuth due east, meaning to carry him across the promontory between the upper-Y configuration of Leaf and Yaxahatchee and in seven or eight hours good traveling, locate up on the Yax yet still twenty or so miles downriver from Thebes.

  This he did, the pack on his back, a canteen on his belt, the .45 still secured. Though not in combat shape, Earl lived a vigorous life and his body was entirely comfortable in the state of extra effort. He didn’t feel now
as if he were in Japanese territory, so he moved quickly, without a mind toward invisibility, on as straight a line as he could manage. The woods, once the waters had receded, were firm and piney, and it didn’t take long for the heat to soak his shirt and the brim of his fedora. He kept his pace up steady for a good five hours, avoiding hellholes, always returning to his original due east heading. He finally took a quick break for tuna from a can (buried afterward) and a few swigs of water. Then onward. He reached the Yax by dusk, just where it began to widen and straighten for its last twenty-mile plunge through the piney wilderness to Thebes. He spent two hours with his good knife hewing pine boughs, then stripping them, working until well after dark, assembling a raft.

  He slept without a fire, sitting up in his bag, the rifle across his knees, his eyes watching, never asleep enough to be unconscious but nevertheless nourishing his energy.

  Breakfast, before dawn, was another can of tuna fish, followed by a can of cold tomato soup, the cans again buried. By the duck hunter’s hour, he was on his fragile craft, poling his way along the shore, never venturing to the center, ready to dip into shore at the first sign of disturbance.

  He reached what he felt must be Thebes well before dark, having pulled off the river only once, when the powerful churning of engines far off indicated a heavy craft; it was the weekly Mississippi Bureau of Prisons boat, a steam-driven thirty-five-footer, with its supplies and its cargo of human woe, a few more unfortunates destined for the penal farm. He studied the craft through his binoculars, noting nothing peculiar about it except a large white box with an odd insignia of red triangles arranged around a red dot, where a red cross would be if the box contained medical supplies. He’d never seen such a thing; he recorded it in his notebook, and having done so, promptly consigned it to his subconscious, forgetting it totally at his functional brain level.

  Earl laid up across from the town, watching and waiting.

  It became clear soon enough that there had to be some sort of station on that side of the river, near enough to the town for the officers to run their patrols, and they were aggressive enough and changed horses enough to suggest that they were close by.

  And Earl could guess where it would be. To the northwest, equidistant between the town and the still unseen Thebes Penal Farm for Colored.

  Earl knew it was there; he could tell by the barking of the dogs.

  9

  THE dogs.

  At least they weren’t free-roaming. Instead, they were kenneled at the back of the wire compound, and the deputies were so complacent that they didn’t patrol the perimeter with them or any such thing, or keep a night watch, or any true security measures. That’s how atop the world they felt. The deputies were like kings of everything, these boys, atop their horses, with their chained dogs, easy, confident masters of the universe of piney woods and bayou and cowed Negroes.

  Earl studied the kennels: there he saw blue-tick hounds, low, slobbery, sinewy barking and sniffing machines. There were twenty or so of them, and they gamboled and played in their pen, but if they were put on his trail, he knew they’d be remorseless. It was the dog way.

  Earl feared dogs. On Tarawa, the Twenty-eighth Marine War-Dog teams had sent their animals into blown-out bunkers in search of live Japs. The dogs’ noses were so much finer than humans’, they could pick out the smell of the living from the dead, and when they found a wounded man, they’d tear him up bad, usually to death. They’d drag them out of the bunkers or pillboxes, swarming and yapping and biting, and you could see the Jap, bled out, sometimes concussed, the poor man fighting against them on some kind of general principle of survival but without much energy. As much as Earl hated the Japanese, he hadn’t enjoyed seeing that; the packs of dogs ripping at the wounded man, usually by this time awash in blood that made the dogs even more insane. Meanwhile, their handlers, by nature brutal, urged the animals on, laughing at the spectacle. The dogs snapped and chewed, or they hung on and shook and twisted and pulled. No man, not even a Jap soldier, should die like that, torn to pieces by dogs as sport. Earl bet that after the war, those dogs had been destroyed. You couldn’t have a dog like that in a civilian world, a dog encouraged to the furthest extremes of its savagery. Yes, they were our dogs, but still: he shuddered. Some things were too much.

  These dogs looked the same. They were beautiful and sleek, but they’d been corrupted by men and nourished toward specialized forms of violence. In a way, they represented all the evil that men could wreak on the world, impressed upon the innocence of a dumb, brute animal. He saw that in the kennel where it was the rule of the pack, a rough-and-tumble world of tooth and fang. A big blue seemed to run the place, and he kept the young dogs away with the strength of glare and intensity. Just like in the human world. That’s why Earl never wanted any part of a pack. Meanwhile, an old man who worked the dogs looked more dog than human; he was more an ambassador to the dog world from the human race than a full human himself. The other deputies kept apart from him. He’d be the master of hounds; he’d be the one tracking Earl if it came to that.

  Earl found the compound at dawn by simply following the horse tracks. It was a rude building, made of logs, more cavalry outpost than anything. For these boys practiced their trade from horseback, and held their whole operation together from a horse, with a dog or two on chains.

  So: a kennel, a stable, and a main house, all log, all secure behind a high barbed-wire fence in the piney woods. And of course, no Negroes allowed near. Maybe the dogs had been trained to smell Negroes. The main house had the lock-up attached; that’s where Sam had to be, or else he was up the road in the penal farm itself, and if he was there, there’d be no getting him out without a division of Marines. Earl watched from deep in the trees, saw well-fed, confident men locked in routine. Patrols, lots of organized activity. Boss man was a big fellow he heard someone call Sheriff Leon, to whom all others deferred. He was sure Sam was here, because Sheriff Leon checked in to the lock-up, and it seemed to be the point of a lot of energy.

  Earl knew he had to get in. He studied on the place, trying to figure out a way.

  It had to do with the wind, he knew. The wind might carry his scent. If the dogs picked it up, they’d throw up a fit; that might agitate the deputies, and once agitated, they might begin to nose around. They’d let the dogs out to hunt him, and the dogs would find him, and that would be that. He’d be taken and he’d be in with Sam. What good would that do?

  Earl patiently charted the breezes on the first night. He learned it was most still between 5:00 A.M. and 6:00, just before the dawn. He knew he had to come in on the other side of the compound from the dogs, and that he had to move slowly. If he sweated, the dogs would smell it; their noses were so much better, and they were creatures of pattern, used to things being just so and prone to acting up when they weren’t.

  At the same time as he exhibited a hunter’s patience, Earl was himself becoming increasingly disturbed. It’s one thing when deputies live with families, and go on duty and off, and when off go back to a civilian world, be with their kids and wives, go to church or the movies. But these boys weren’t like that. Instead, they were kept living out here in the woods, isolated, in uniforms that sparked fear and mystery, behind wire and protected by dogs. They were more like a conquering army in an occupied territory than police officers.

  And they were young, too. Somehow, they were paid enough to put up with the dormitory-style living far off in the woods, and the constant discipline of the military. So there was some money behind this, certainly more than could be justified by the paltry ruin that was Thebes County, a town locked in mud living off a penal installation upriver still a mile or so.

  Earl didn’t like it. The dogs, the horses, the guns, the fear of the townspeople, Sam locked up way out here. He didn’t like it one bit.

  EARL scrubbed himself in a cold-water stream until he shivered, then put on the last of his clean underwear. He would sweat some, though it was cold, but still he’d leave less man smell that w
ay.

  He slithered to the wire at 4:30, and watched. In the lock-up, a candle burned, meaning someone had night duty, but Earl bet he was asleep. The big log house was before him, between him and the dogs. Earl had patted dark mud against his face, as he’d done in the Marines with burnt cork, and stripped to his dungarees and a dark shirt. Getting through the fence was tough, and the barbs cut him in a dozen places, shallowly, but enough to sting like hell and leave a tiny blood track. Easier to simply cut the wire; but if he cut it they’d notice it the next day.

  Earl lay inside the wire, waiting. He was unarmed, except for a K-bar knife, black-bladed and leather-gripped, which he might use in a pinch on a dog. But no dogs howled or barked, no one called. He lay still for the longest time. Then he stood, and walked.

  He walked nonchalantly. He didn’t sneak or dash or evade. If anyone should see him from the house, he looked like he belonged. He walked across the yard to the house, waiting every second for a challenge, but it never came. These boys felt secure in their place.

  He skittered around the house to the lock-up, and peeked in; he could see a deputy asleep at the desk, the fire in the stove having burned low, and beyond three cells in the back, two open, one locked. That’s where Sam would be. But Earl didn’t enter. Instead, he crawled around, past the door to the back, then found purchase at a window and gutter and swung his way up, as silently as he could. Again, no challenge came. He eased to his haunches, then to his feet, and staying at the edges eased around until he thought he was over the locked cell.

  Going prone again, he pulled the knife, and quickly set at cutting through the roof. He figured—rightly—that the roof would be the weakest part, unreachable as it was to the prisoners. It was old, rotted wood, the shingles soft, the tar holding them down softer, and digging assiduously, he quickly opened a seam in the roof, chopped through the wood, and at last got a bit of an opening. He could see down at Sam, sleeping restlessly on his cot.