Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  It wasn’t quite an affair. No one ever touched, and Connie, who was still quite beautiful, with perfectly formed features, a delicate mouth, and a shock of blond hair, always seemed too perfect to kiss, much less do anything more primal to or with. One didn’t fuck a Connie Longacre; one simply enjoyed the privilege of her company, which was good enough for Sam.

  So what they had was more a comfort, a sense that each would trust the other and that they really were betraying no one in the technical sense, if in the philosophic sense they were madly, endlessly in love and would remain so until they died.

  Thus it was only to Connie that Sam could confess his anguish, which by this time was considerable.

  “Here I sit,” he said, “going to my office, and only God knows what is going on with Earl. Oh, Jesus, I keep lying to Junie and to my wife and to the state police and it is just eating me up.”

  “Sam, did Earl give you a date?”

  “No, that’s the damn thing. He was unconditional. Do not, he said, do not on any account contact the authorities.”

  “Well, he is a very capable man.”

  “Yes, but when he said that, he had no idea what he was up against. He thought it was a corrupt tinhorn sheriff in a dead old country town. I see now that it’s something much bigger, much better protected, much more connected. Maybe even Earl is overmatched.”

  “Sam, the entire Japanese naval infantry didn’t overmatch Earl.”

  “No, you’re right. But—”

  “Sam, Earl has natural gifts. He has a genius for action and force. It’s beyond what normal people have, as we both know it. God decided to give him a great talent, and he has always used it in duty in dangerous places. His instincts would be much better than yours or mine in this situation.”

  “I know. But I just can’t do nothing. I’ve done all the goddamned secondary research I can around here. I either have to go to Jackson and raise hell with the governor or I have to face the fact that I am no damned good.”

  “Sam, I won’t hear you talk that way. You are a great man and you will lead this county to the justice and the peace its people, all its people, deserve. But you have to yield to Earl’s instincts on this one. If he wants it to go a certain way—”

  “It’s just been so long that—”

  “Sam, maybe it’s this. Earl knew if he got captured and he knew people would think about coming to his aid, that hope, that belief, would poison him. It would destroy him. He had to be free of that delusion. He had to know nobody was coming, because only then would he have the freedom to do the necessary as he saw fit. So you should honor his requirements. He knew what he was doing.”

  This had never occurred to Sam, but as he turned it over in his mind, he saw that once again Connie had had an insight into men’s minds that would have evaded him no matter how hard he studied it.

  “Earl can’t rely on anything,” Connie said. “It is death to him to have to rely. He learned to take care of himself the hard way, in that terrible family, with that terrible father, so he prefers to pass through life unaided, trusting only himself for serious matters. That is why heroes are always so tragic, in the end. They are alone.”

  “You may be on to something.”

  “That is his nobility and also his doom. But possibly not this time.”

  “Still,” said Sam, “I just can’t sit here.”

  “Then you must do something productive. You must use this time. You must figure out what Earl would have you do if he were here and in full control of his faculties. In that way, you obey his wishes but you also honor his traditions.”

  Again, the woman had something. Sam stole a sideways glance at her—they were sitting on a park bench in Fort Smith, where they met every Tuesday at 4:00 P.M., for a picnic supper, far from prying eyes and able to enjoy each other, without the pretense of being mated to others.

  Sam now and then had a terrible dream: that she would leave Rance and he would leave Mary, leave it all behind, Arkansas, the families, the expectations, the ambitions, the traditions: just go. Go to Paris or something. Connie dreamed of being a novelist; she could work on a book. He could—well, what? Well, nothing. That was why it would never happen. That was the problem: the only thing he had ever wanted to do was put criminals behind bars and run a county and be a force in the Democratic party.

  “I don’t know what,” Sam finally said. “The government has the files.”

  “The files?”

  “This doctor. He died at the prison in 1945, and it’s classified. That may have something to do with all this, but I don’t know. It’s a dead end.”

  “Hmmm,” she said. “You don’t know where he’s from?”

  “Who?”

  “The doctor.”

  Sam tried to recall.

  “No.”

  “Well, you have his name. He’s a doctor. Presumably a researcher, right? His files may be classified, but he had a life, Sam. A wife, children, a home. He left memories, clues, things of that nature.”

  “How on earth would I—”

  But then he remembered Neal Greenberg.

  “I knew a fellow at Princeton,” he said, “named Neal Greenberg. Very decent guy, very smart. He went on to medical school and he’s now on the staff of the American Medical Association.”

  “And so?”

  “And so, I could call him. I’m guessing there’d be records and that he could find them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, and then I could go investigate him. See his widow if he has a widow, his survivors if he has them. And…”

  He trailed off.

  “It’s not much, is it?” he said.

  “No,” she said, with a wise Connie-smile, “but it’s something.”

  22

  “LET me ’splain how it works,” the section boss said. “You work hard or I beat you with a stick ’til you bleed. You unnerstan’ that?”

  Earl didn’t say a thing.

  The man was on a horse, above him, as they stood on the levee at 7:00 in the morning, after a long tramp out. On the one side of them the land had been cleared, and a channel ran through it, irrigating it. On the other, jungle.

  “Now, you think you tough? You beat up some colored boys last night? Well, whoop-tee-do on all that shit. You give me lip and I will beat you with a stick until you dead. You unnerstan’ that?”

  Again, Earl had no remarks for the man, who wore a Stetson and sunglasses, and had a Thompson submachine gun with a drum draped across the front of his saddle, his right hand cupped on the grip. Around that same wrist, on a leather tether, he wore a supple polished stick, maybe eighteen inches long, just long enough to build up some real speed for inflicting painful bruises or breaking bones.

  “You do not want to give me no lip, or I will make it hard on you. Harder than you can imagine.”

  His flat gray eyes ate Earl up. He was just loving this, Earl could tell, as Bigboy had loved it, too.

  “You want to run? Ha! That’s my most favoritist thing. I love it when they run. If I see you, I give you to Mabel Louise. Mabel Louise take you for her own, boy. You understand?”

  He patted Mabel Louise: Mabel Louise was his pet name for the big submachine gun. Earl could see the man had a fondness for the weapon and loved to strike heroic poses with it. He bet when he shit the gun Mabel Louise was not far away.

  “And if you git away before I can let Mabel Louise loose on you, guess who gits you then? You see them hounds?”

  He gestured over his shoulder. A pack of twelve hounds bayed and yapped on chains held by a struggling dog master.

  “Them hounds ain’t like no hounds you ever saw. Them is blue-tick hounds. They be smart and mean. You know what? Ever damned night, I goes to the kennel and beats ’em bad with rawhide soaked in nigger sweat. Yes sir, so they know the smell of a nigger, yes they do, and what they want more than anything is to get them teeths into a black boy and pay him back fo’ all the agony his smell done caused them. So they goddamn hates niggers. A
nd to them anybody working in the hole is a nigger. So you think you gon’ make a break, I’ll let them blue-ticks loose on you. They tear you apart. They like to tear niggers apart, and you just another nigger, you got that?”

  Earl didn’t even look up. The newly drained swamp section beneath the levee spread for a dozen acres or so. A channel had been dredged through it—by hand, no doubt, and Earl didn’t doubt whose hands—so that the water had drained and pumped out and been channeled back to the Yaxahatchee. The land revealed by the water’s fall was muddy still, treacherous and slippery; but worse, it was full of stumps and vines and rocks and the refuse of the swamp, all that had laid under the surface of the black water since time immemorial. It was the special province of the convicts of the Ape House to clear this land.

  “So you git down there,” the section boss said, “and I will be watching you. You git down there and you put your back into it, or goddammit, you will feel my stick upon your flesh.”

  They were not chained together. The footing in the newly drained section was too treacherous for that, and one man falling could bring down a whole line. But they were not free, either. Their legs were loosely chained, with enough play to let them walk in short steps but never enough to let them run, and the chains were forever becoming entangled in the vegetation or the rocks on which they worked. Similarly, their wrists were tethered by a good twelve inches of chain, which gave them the freedom to work, but not much else.

  Meanwhile, five men on horseback patrolled from the sanctity of the levee, each with a Winchester pump gun. At any given moment, considerable firepower could be rained upon the men in the drained section, so rebellion was unthinkable.

  “Men down,” came a cry, and that was the order to commence.

  But the section boss leaned low to him, and muttered something just for him.

  “You know what Bigboy say. You want to be treated like a white man, you come clean. You tell ’em what they wants to know. Otherwise, you just another nigger and I own your bony ass and this is what you got till the world comes to a end.”

  Earl slid en masse with the other convicts down the slick side to the levee, and immediately the mud gripped him. Just walking through it was exhausting.

  Earl saw also that the sick ones, the crazed ones, they were here too. Men on horses nudged them, some chattering madly to themselves, others gripping themselves against a phantom cold, still others so full of anger they could hardly see down into the muddy flat. Earl could hardly stand to watch. Because many of them didn’t know their names, they’d been painted with big numbers, easy for a guard to read from afar.

  “You, white boy,” the section boss sung out, “you git with them other fellows on that there trunk. You lean into it now, or by God I’ll whup the whole goddamn group of you.”

  Earl trudged toward the clot of men who circled a half fallen cyprus tree. They were digging at its roots, chopping at it, hacking away at it with shovels, trying to free it from the mud that insisted so feverishly that it stay put.

  Earl found a spot in the circle, and began to beat at the mud surrounding the tree. His shovel blade didn’t bite deep without a maximum driving effort, and the load it freed, saturated in the water, was achingly heavy. Though he was strong, it took only minutes for his lower back to begin to knot up in pain.

  The sun rose, until it pressed against them with the insistence of a liquid, fierce and miserable. Mosquitoes buzzed around, and he could hear them in his ears as they drew close to feast on him. His sweat ran in torrents down his face. The exhaustion rose up through him and blurred his efforts, making him slow and stupid.

  Someone poked him.

  “Git wif’ da rhythm, white boy. You be messin’ us all up.”

  Then he felt it. It was something deep and unknowable by the ways in which his mind worked, but somehow nevertheless nurturing. The men had fallen into a syncopation, not planned but brilliantly improvised, finding a way of coming up and coming down in concert that enabled each man to deposit his pain in the will of the collective and thereby, strangely, alleviate it just enough to survive it.

  Whang-chop, whang-chop, whang-chop.

  The shovel rode up like an ax, found equipoise in the air, then descended with a bomb’s inevitability, exploding into the mud, sending spatters everywhere, but you were so immersed in the rhapsody of it you didn’t feel it, and you didn’t feel it when with one foot you just drove the blade in that much deeper, and then there was a pause, perfectly timed, and the mud was lifted out, not with the small of the back but from the thrust of the thighs, and a glob of earth came free and was tossed.

  Whang-chop, whang-chop.

  At a certain moment, and without a leader so directing, a thinner man ceased his shoveling and began to slither his way up the bent trunk, his weight adding on. He bounced up and down.

  “Damn, she goin’,” came a cry, and exactly as that cry called out, the little man’s weight was enough to send the tree toppling forward, its roots now pulled naked and grasping from their bed of swamp bottom.

  The men didn’t pause to watch what happened next. A squad of specialists with axes would now alight on the fallen tree and hack it to pieces, and then another would pull the wood over to the levee and haul it up, piece by piece, ’til a wagon would come by and it could be loaded on that and carted away for burning.

  But there was no time to consider the process. In their own rhythm and by internal communications to which Earl was not alert, they moved to another giant obstruction, this time a stump of an oak rather than a tree itself, and began to struggle again. There was a sense of prehistoric hunting to it, and it made Earl think of some picture he’d seen in a book somewhere in a past that was the other side of the Marine Corps and the war in the Pacific and so hardly real at all: but the picture, in some kind of child’s book, showed men clustered around the flanks of some great hairy elephant beast caught in a pit, and they were stabbing at it with spears made of sticks and chipped stones. So it was with the men of the Ape House and this great oak stump; they circled it and tried to kill it and it defied them by not dying, and the more they struck it and dug at its roots, the more it resisted them. The battle was well fought, for the purchase on the ground was hard, and each man fell in his ordeal a dozen times and slammed knees into the knobs of root or cut themselves against its rough skin, or, as in Earl’s case especially, felt their hands pucker with blisters against the raw hardness of the shovel.

  On and on it went, without reference to time or temperature, though one passed slowly and the other rose fiercely. Nothing, really, had been as bad as this, not the coffin, not Iwo, not Tarawa in the water, not Guadalcanal the two nights of the great human wave attacks, not the screaming fury of his father as he beat him. For those things at least constituted in themselves, by their very structure, the possibility of ending. He would die or survive, he would grow old and leave, whatever. Not with this: this was just it forever, the torment of the crushing physical labor without help under the watch of the men with sunglasses and guns and no pity at all.

  “Now you know what a nigger feel, white boy,” somebody muttered at him. “You gots to be crazy to do this shit you got a choice. Us, we ain’ got no choice.”

  “You shut up,” someone else said. “Moon catch you talkin’ to the white boy, he skin you.”

  And now and then Earl’s prickly sensitivities for such things picked up the heaviness of eyes upon him. He looked up, then, risking the syncopation of the shovel rhythm, and thought once he caught a glimpse of the great Moon staring at him from among the ax-wielders, but then he lost him, as he had to get back on the rhythm.

  A thousand years passed, or possibly a million. But at a point in time when Earl thought he’d die from it, he heard some new phenomenon of sound—jingling, shuffling, bells and animals linked together—and looked up to the levee where his supervisors watched, and there discovered a man arriving in a wagon pulled by two homely, wretched old mules.

  The man was scrawny, with one o
f those ageless black faces that had seen so much woe and survived so much it could have watched life on earth for anywhere between forty and seventy years.

  “Fish here, boys,” the man sang from his wagon, “old goddamn Fish come to you.”

  No signal was needed. The arrival of Fish meant some sort of lunch break, and the men turned from their labor and sloughed through the sludge to the levee and began the hard, slick climb upward, each helping the men around him, though no one helped Earl, and he didn’t get up till nearly everyone else did, which put him last in the line that formed at the end of the wagon.

  As they filed by, each man took a swig of water from a tin cup chained to a water can, then dropped it and reached as Fish handed each what appeared to be a piece of biscuit dipped in gravy or grease of some kind, which they took over to the edge of the levee and consumed in repose, if only for a few minutes. That was lunch, but it struck Earl as something of a feast.

  But when he got there, Fish looked at him coldly.

  “This here the line for colored,” he said.

  The guards, who’d dismounted and were eating better fare, laughed. Some of the convicts laughed.

  “You go find the white line, boy,” said Fish.

  “Come on, old man,” said Earl. “I am hungry.”

  Earl grabbed the cup and brought it to the spigot, but Fish tilted the water can, and it fell to the ground with a thump, its fluid spilling out in the dust.