Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  “Give him credit, he ain’t got no cards to play but he is playing them out just as they lay on the table.”

  “You got anything to say?” said the sheriff.

  He swallowed and could find nothing at all of interest.

  “You got any regrets, sir? This’d be the time to make ’em, and face the Lord at peace.”

  That inspired him. “Yes,” he said, feeling the tautness loosen just a shred, so that his voice could find words. “Here’s my regret. I regret that I tried to get this one done without killing no human man. I told somebody that’s how I’d do it. And that was a mistake. If I’d done what I knew was the right thing, and shot you boys dead, beginning with them two lunk-head baby shits, and then you, dog man, and you two yassuhing deputies, and finally you, Sheriff—”

  “Big words for a man standing under the tree whar he’d a-going to swing,” said Pepper, spitting a gob out on the dirt.

  “And finally,” said Earl, “I regret for them living dogs, ’cause I know when you boys finish with me, you’re going to liquor up, and sooner or later you going to git on them poor animals like they’s women and—”

  The rope came up, closing up his larynx, and he was off the ground, the world gone to black nothingness, his vision gone, his hearing gone, his feet kicking the breeze. He fought for air but there was none, and the full muscles of his arms and legs kicked and jacked, but only to the effect of opening yet more wounds in his flesh where the unyielding steel bit it. He thought at least he had a son, and by all indications a good one, and he loved his wife and wished he’d been better to her, and he thanked God he’d done his duty in the Marine Corps all them years, and as far as he knew he’d only killed men who were armed and wanting his death, and he’d never raped no one or fought a man who couldn’t defend himself, and he thought of blue Pacific seas and the smudges that became islands when the smoke cleared, and how it felt afterward when you had made it and you had just a little bit of time to feel the joy of surviving a bad one once again, and he realized that was as happy as he had been, and it was a kind of happiness few men had felt.

  He fell to earth.

  He sucked the air.

  He heard shouts.

  He opened his eyes, saw new men had arrived, six or seven of them, and saw a fellow in command screaming at the sheriff. This one was huge: he had shock-white hair and a pinkish skin, and he wore sunglasses and the uniform of some kind of sergeant.

  “Warden wants this boy, Leon, goddammit, and you back off, because you know what the warden wants, I make sure he gets.”

  “Yessir, Bigboy, I do know that,” the sheriff was yammering as he backpedaled. “But you watch him, ’cause he’s a tricky bastard, yes, he is.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he’ll be any trouble,” said Bigboy, and he turned and smiled at Earl, who had collapsed to the earth, retching and breathing raggedly. “You won’t be any trouble now, will you, sir?” he asked, and then hit him hard and flush in the side of the jaw, putting him dead-out cold.

  THREE

  All the Horses of Thebes

  13

  EARL’S brain saw water: he was underwater. Above him, the green surface undulated; he gasped for air and there was none and then he remembered where he was. Tarawa, off Green Beach 1, and the Higgins Boat had tied up on a reef a quarter mile offshore and he was walking the platoon in while the Jap tracers, blue-white, flicked across the surface, and their howitzers and mortars tossed big boomers down and their Nambus cut puffs into the water. The world was liquid and fire, chaos and fear, nothing but, and he tried to hold it together, keep the boys moving, get in toward cover, because there was nothing here for anyone. A moment came when he slipped and went under, with all that equipment, the pack, the Thompson, and the weight just pulled him down in green silence, and he almost quit. He was underwater. Above him, the green surface undulated; he gasped for air but there was none. But he didn’t quit. That wasn’t in him for some reason, and so when he really awoke, he realized he wasn’t in the warm salty Pacific off Green Beach 1, but in some other hellhole. Then he remembered.

  The pain was general all over his body, from the rips in his flesh where the dogs had chewed him to the aches in his ribs where the deputies had kicked him. His own blood tasted salty in his mouth and his muscles were throbbing in discomfort; worse still, where his wrists and ankles had cut against the cuffs, he’d opened wounds too, and those flickered hot as fire. But it was his head that hurt the most. As he swam to consciousness, he was aware that something was wrong; it was as if the left side of his head had doubled in size. He opened his eyes and in the left one, the vision was blurred toward blindness. He moved to touch his wound there, but was bound by the chains. Instead, he lowered his head and touched it against his shoulder; it erupted in pain, and he realized the oddness he felt was a swelling. The left side of his head was swollen like some kind of fruit, and his eye was crushed shut. He remembered a fight on the deck of the old U.S.S. Philippine Sea in Shanghai Harbor in 1938, against a Seaman Second named Kowalachik, where each man had battered the hell out of the other for fifteen rounds. He remembered it, but he didn’t recollect if he’d won it or not, and then realized you don’t win a fight that hard, you merely survive.

  Details began to accumulate, and through the buzz and the glare and the pain, he pieced together where he was. That rough jostling: that meant he was in a wagon, being jounced along a country road. The green overhead: the road ran through forest, no, really more like jungle, for it had a Guadalcanal aspect to it of overhanging canopy, and there was tropic vegetation, moisture and heat in the atmosphere. The jinglings and janglings: those were the chains that bound him, hand and foot. He couldn’t move a step, one way or the other.

  They were in jungle. No pine trees anywhere; that meant they were close to that dark river. He rolled over, nobody paying him any mind at all, and saw two guards ahead of him, up top the wagon, driving the team of six horses as they juggled along.

  On either side, the jungle climbed and vaulted; it was like some cathedral of green, dense and hot and steamy.

  He rolled over just a bit, and using his elbow lifted himself until he could see over the rough wood of the wagon. On either side rode three guards on horseback, each with a drill instructor’s flat-brimmed hat low over the eyes, each with a big revolver on his belt, each with a Winchester ’07 .351 self-loader in his scabbard. The guards rode well, men at ease on horseback.

  He turned and craned to see what was ahead.

  Whack!

  Someone smacked him hard in the arm and he leaped back in pain, knowing that two weeks’ worth of bruise had just been laid on him. He looked at a guard who’d leaned down to supply a little discretionary discipline with a billy club. Earl sat back, well away from the wagon’s timbers. As if he’d had a chance to escape anyhow, with all these chains entwining him, and also, he saw now, running through iron rings pounded into the wood, so that he was moored to the wagon no matter what came.

  “You see it soon enough, boy,” said the guard. “And come time, you’ll wish you ain’t never seen it and that them fellows had hung you straight up.”

  And see it now he did: red brick walls, crumbly and ancient, in disrepair, wearing a brass plate kept shiny amid the ruin, where the letters gleamed:

  THEBES STATE PENAL FARM (COLORED)

  “Welcome home, nigger,” said the guard.

  The wagon passed through the brick gates, and Earl saw something else. It had been added recently, crudely welded together, an ironwork arc curving overhead, in the clumsy penmanship of the unlettered, presumably under the direction of a firmer hand exactly certain of the message.

  “WORK WILL SET YOU FREE,” it said, and it had a weird familiarity to Earl, but he could not place it in time or locale.

  Then the ironwork arch was gone and they had progressed into the belly of the beast itself, into Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored).

  He saw a ghastly old plantation house, its columns still soaring and fluted, sp
eaking of a grand old age, but speaking as well of rot and decay, for what had once been jet white was now mottled with brown stain, the taint of algae and corruption, or possibly only moss. It had the look of a ruin, though a curtain flapping in an upstairs window next to the portico suggested some form of provisional habitation, perhaps a more engaged owner would have seen it repainted and restored to a glistening white. Who would leave it so decadent? And why?

  Next to it was a newer structure that had the look of wartime improvisation, a barracks-style military building of one story, low and busy. It looked like some kind of store, for it, not the old house, was the center of activity, and a line of free Negroes waited patiently for admittance. Earl wondered what could be in there so important to these people, lined up in complete obedience, as if the key to their provenance lay therein. And perhaps it did, for a Negro woman stepped out, and someone admitted her replacement; she had sacks suggesting goods or merchandise, and Earl recollected that he had seen no store alive in Thebes from the far trees, his observation point. This must be the only store around.

  Other decayed brick outbuildings stood, some in ruins, some in better repair, all somehow moist in the closeness of the jungle and the overhang of the thick canopy. Beyond that the compound proper, that is, where the convicts must live. He saw a gate and a barbed-wire fence more efficient by far than the crumbled old brick plantation wall. In the distance he could make out barracks, again military-style, presumably the homes of the convicts when they returned from their day’s toil in the farm’s fields. But he saw something else, which struck him as queer: that is, four towers, each a story tall, each with a shed atop and gaps in the shed walls, where men looked out with binoculars. Hard to tell from here, but he was sure from one of the gaps he saw something he knew well: the water-cooling jacket of a Browning .30 caliber machine gun. Four towers? Four Brownings? That would bring considerable firepower to bear on whoever challenged authority here at Thebes Penal Farm, and it did surprise him, for such guns might have been common in big Northern pens like Alcatraz or Sing-Sing, but down here in the backwater South? They didn’t even have any of those at the big penitentiary in Arkansas.

  The wagon headed to one of the outbuildings and pulled up short.

  Goddamn, he thought, we are here, wherever in God’s name here is.

  The guards dismounted and unlimbered the wagon. His chains were freed from the rings that pinned them, and, roughly, he was dragged off toward the door of a two-story brick building, dating from at least a century before, shabby but clean, as if well-maintained by men who feared lickings if they didn’t clean it well. He was pulled indoors.

  “Okay, chief,” someone said, “you cooperate or them bruises you got will seem like Sunday school so far. You catch my drift?”

  Earl said nothing as he was pulled into a room, and a man with a knife appeared, and without any ceremony at all, began to slice away at his clothes.

  “Jesus,” said Earl, as his nakedness was finally revealed.

  “Shut your mouth, boy,” said one of the huskies, and there were no less than five of them for this task.

  “See, he got a tattoo,” another added.

  Someone bent close at the blue ink faded into Earl’s biceps.

  “He’s a Marine. ‘Semper Fi,’ all that good shit. You a war hero, boy?”

  Earl didn’t answer; you can’t talk to some people.

  Then the hose hit him, hard, a jet of screaming water that knocked him backward. Hygiene wasn’t its real purpose, though possibly it did some work to that effect. It beat him badly, pinning him against the floor, and purifying him in a rough way. Finally, it stopped, and he began to shiver in the sudden cold, feeling wilted. No clothes were offered. Naked, he was dragged to his next destination.

  “MY name,” the man said, “is of no importance. I want you to know, however, that I have one. I have a real name, but you’ll never know it.”

  Earl now sat on a wood chair. They wanted him naked, in chains, feeling powerless before this guard sergeant, who was, not to put too fine a word on it, something to see.

  “In case you’re wondering where you are,” said the sergeant, “let me tell you. You are in what is called the Whipping House. This is where I do the business of this institution. It’s ugly work, but it’s necessary. I am very good at it. The convicts know one thing. Well, two things. One is to stay out of the Whipping House. The other is to avoid the anger of Bigboy.”

  It was the man who had rescued him from the hangman’s noose, then knocked him cold with a blow that blew up the left side of his face. Earl looked at him, though he suspected it would be better to keep one’s eyes averted in the presence of this fellow.

  The sergeant went 240 to 260 pounds, but it was not fat; it was muscle. He had to have spent hours hauling dead weights up and down to get bulges like that. He had his sunglasses off, and Earl could look into his little red eyes, bloodshot and weak, clearly his one vulnerability. His skin was pale and would burn in tropical sun as if set aflame, so he wore the hat with the big brim, gloves, and kept his olive green shirt buttoned up to the top. His hair wasn’t blond in the yellow sense, but a new snow’s fresh white.

  “Bigboy. You will become quite familiar with that name,” he said to Earl, “so I would mark it well. Bigboy. It’s a nickname. The men I command call me that. Some of the trustees call me that, our doctor, the colored help who run the jobs in this place, the cooks, what have you. The convicts call me that, but not to my face, for they know the penalty for disrespect. Now, do you know where I got that name?”

  Earl didn’t think the question required an answer, but in the next second, whap, a cosh from another guard in the shadows, slapped hard against his wrist, curling his wrist in pain, almost, but not quite, breaking bone.

  “No,” Earl finally said.

  “No what?”

  Whap! Another blow.

  “No sir!” Earl responded instantly, shivering with the intensity of the hurt.

  “Much better. Anyhow, you might think I got that name because I am big. But that’s not true. For many years I had another name. In those days I wasn’t big. I was weak. I was food. I was free lunch. I was everybody’s favorite target. Are you listening?”

  Insane, Earl thought. The man is clearly out of his head.

  “I was a fat weak boy, with red eyes and white hair, a disorder specifically called oculocutaneous albinism. I had a cute little upturned nose. I grunted when I ate, and sometimes I farted. My hygiene was questionable. So I was called Pigboy. It fits, doesn’t it? Pigboy. My papa called me that, so did my mama and my three brothers. Until I was fifteen years old. So do you think I was happy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, sir. Pigboy was not happy. ‘Pigboy, git your goddamn ass in here, you goddamned worthless piece of pig shit!’ So Pigboy one day in his fifteenth year got himself an ax and he cut Mama and Papa and three brothers up into tiny pieces. The happiest day in Pigboy’s life. This was in another state, far far away, under a different name, but nevertheless, it happened, I can assure you. I escaped. I fled. I remade myself many times and had many adventures and learned to trust myself, and at a certain point, I decided I would never again be weak or frightened. I got myself a job on a railroad, laying track. Five years I laid track, getting bigger and stronger. I discovered the gym. I lifted a million pounds of iron and discovered I had a certain kind of muscle tissue that responded spectacularly to lifting. I worked. I learned. I started fighting. It turned out I was good at it, because I have all that hatred stored up in me, and I like to hurt people and see them bleed. I like to make them cry and teach them they have no chance in the world. So where would such a fellow go? Why, there’s only one place: I joined the Mississippi Bureau of Corrections, where my talents were not only appreciated, but encouraged. Now I am a sergeant and I run this whole goddamned mighty engine of retribution and justice. And my friends call me Bigboy, and every time I hear that, I think of how Pigboy became Bigboy, what it took, how it hurt,
what strength and determination it demanded. I tell you that, convict, so you will understand that you are not dealing with a normal man. You are dealing with a creation of pure will who will do what is necessary to get the job done. You have no rights. You have no recourse. You have no hopes. There is nothing for you anywhere in the universe except that you accept the power of my will, the totality of my domination, the hopelessness of all resistance. I am superior to you physically, morally, mentally and spiritually. If you resist me, I will destroy you and never think of it again. Do you understand?”

  “Sir, I am no convict. I am—”

  Whap!

  The beatings started. They didn’t even ask him any questions, not at first. They just beat him.

  EARL lost contact with the very concept of time. It was neither day nor night, it just was.

  “Name?”

  “I told you, sir.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “Jack. Jack Bogash. Of Little Rock. Unemployed truck driver. Looking for hunting leases, that’s all. Seemed like a start on something new. Some fellows come out of the woods, screaming of being hunted by wild darkies, or maybe Indians, I don’t know. Needed my help. I done helped the old one, for money, and the other fellow, he circled around and—”

  Whap!

  Bigboy himself never struck Earl. Somehow it was beneath him. Another guard or two, shadowy figures that Earl never saw, administered the blows. They used short cudgels and were expert, with flexible wrists and fast hands, and could hit him a blow that hurt exquisitely and forever, yet broke no bones. They were quite practiced in this. They were professional.

  “There was no other man,” Bigboy said, “and it angers me that you think I am stupid. Convict, I am not stupid. No tracks of him, no scent of him that the dogs picked up, nothing. You penetrated the Thebes lock-up, you set up diversionary devices which you had to have improvised, you conked a guard in just such a way that he was knocked cold but not killed, you rescued a man, you led him out over miles and miles of rough territory, you set up several clever traps to confuse the dogs, you circled back and killed three dogs in about two seconds with incredible shooting and knife skills, you closed on two powerful young deputies and outfought them in a matter of seconds. If the second pack of dogs hadn’t arrived, you’d have made it scot-free. This is very impressive work. It’s the work of a trained man, a professional. Who are you?”