Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  Earl tried to erase the contaminated image from his brain, but couldn’t. Himself being held down and stripped buck naked while Moon, behind him, had his way. It was a shame he couldn’t live with. It would kill him, that’s all. He feared it, for some reason, deep in his brain, beyond all logic and clarity.

  That would kill me, he knew.

  I’d rather be gut shot and die slow than live with that in my mind.

  He chopped and dug and dug and chopped. The heat and the sun came back. He was in a dream of fear, trying to see only what was before him. It had one salutary effect, and that was that the afternoon seemed to pass more quickly than ever before, and soon enough the twilight was on them, and the cry came down the line, “Convicts, out of the hole and form up.”

  As Earl came out, he saw something new. It was a car.

  It was the first car he’d seen at the prison.

  It was a black Hudson sedan, gleamy and creamy in the twilight. And standing next to it, like a general attended by his staff, was Earl’s main antagonist, Bigboy himself, examining the world through his MacArthur sunglasses. Two minions hung by him; Section Boss, even farther down the line of hierarchy, had dismounted and assumed a submissive position.

  Earl felt Bigboy’s eyes on him through the dark lenses. But he didn’t dwell on it. He simply clambered up the slippery slope, took his hoe to the toolshed where a trustee stacked it, and looked for his exile’s place at the end of the formation.

  But suddenly two men were beside him and a third behind him. In the next second, they collided upon him, his chains were drawn tight, two more added to secure his arms to his body with no clearance whatsoever, and he was dragged in his mincing, humiliating walk before the great man.

  “You still alive, Jack Bogart? You know what?” said Bigboy, “you made me some money. These section guards swore you wouldn’t last a night. You’ve lasted twelve. You’ve killed a man, even if it was only a lowly Negro. You’ve made friends and influenced people. I had money riding on you, and I’ve come out to collect.”

  Whap!

  Someone hit him hard upside the head.

  “You look at Mr. Bigboy when he be talkin’ to you, son. That’s how we do it here.”

  “You are a sight, I will allow, Brother Jack,” Bigboy went on. “Cut and beaten, you still fight on. From what I hear, it only gets worse. Everybody is saying old Moon has special plans for you. Why do I think you aren’t going to enjoy what Moon intends? Seems to me a hero like you can’t lose his dignity, or he’s nothing. That true, Jack Bogart?”

  Whap!

  Another openhanded strike to the back of the skull.

  “Cat got your tongue, boy? Answer the guard sergeant.”

  “My name is Jack Bogash,” Earl said. “It ain’t no Jack Bogart, like that movie fellow. I am a truck driver from—”

  Whap!

  The boys commenced to beat on him, for their amusement, for a few minutes. Even Section Boss, emboldened by Earl’s chains and pain, came over and got a few licks in. One of the blows opened the cut across Earl’s body, and he felt the blood begin to seep out of his shirt.

  “Enough,” said Bigboy. “Get him up and in the back of the car. Jack Bogart, you’re going for a ride.”

  TRAMMELED by his chains and pinned by the beef of guards on either side, and with a sawed-off Winchester pump rammed in his ribs for good measure, Earl rode through the penal farm. Once he even glimpsed the river beyond, pale and flat and broad, like some highway out of town. But soon the vegetation thickened and darkened again, and the tropics took over; they came to a gate.

  “Yes, sir,” said Bigboy in the front seat as the driver ran out to unlock the gate and pivot it open, “you listen hard to what the man is going to say to you. You won’t get another shot at redemption. We don’t sell redemption here. We’re not in the salvation trade. We’re punishers. We make the evil pay for their sins, that’s our specialty, but on account of my deep and abiding affection for heroic types, I have arranged something special for you, along temptation lines. We shall see how tough you are. Pain doesn’t frighten you, Mr. Hero, nor does the fear of death or degradation. We’ll offer you what the devil offered Jesus Christ himself, which is the whole world.”

  He chuckled softly in the fading light.

  The car purred along a narrow jungle path and soon encountered a strangely tidy building nestled among the loblollies and the palmettos, white and trim, well built along strict government guidelines. It had a very 1943 feel to it; it reminded Earl of the jungle headquarters the Seabees would throw up so efficiently on back islands away from the battle zone, where staff and intelligence matters were considered in comfort.

  Earl was dragged out, further confused by a mechanical hum arising from somewhere. It was the sound of generators, well insulated, churning away, another cue familiar from the Pacific in wartime.

  In he went, to an utter astonishment: coolness.

  The place was air-conditioned.

  The temperature must have been seventy-two degrees. He blinked in low darkness, and the two hulking guards took him down a shiny corridor. Doors off it opened to what appeared to be ward rooms, and one was opened just enough so that he saw a black man in an oxygen tent, clearly close to death. They reached the end of the corridor and an office which, entered, proved to be clean and modern along military lines, with a medicine cabinet, a sink, a shelf of jars, a pile of clean towels, many sterilized packets of either pills or small instruments and an examining table.

  Two men in white coats over otherwise nondescript clothes awaited him.

  “You keep still, Bogart,” the senior guard said. “You let these fellows work on you or I will do some serious thumping on your haid that you will not enjoy one damned bit.”

  Earl was placed on the table. Quickly, the technicians snipped off his foul clothes and washed him with the smoothness of medical orderlies, which he now saw they must be. They were impersonal, efficient, uninterested. They disinfected his wounds, and quickly sewed them up. He winced each time the needle perforated his torn skin, but the two orderlies were not at all put off by his pain.

  Then the hypodermic needle came out. Earl flinched involuntarily as the technician drew some fluid into the shaft of the thing, then walked around, prepped his arm, and slid it in with a sting. Something about the needle was more hurtful than all the beatings he’d gotten.

  “Waste of that fine medicine on this sorry specimen, you ask me,” one of the guards said.

  “No one is asking you, Rufus,” said the orderly snootily, claiming his hierarchical superiority over the fellow, whom Earl knew to be called Clete.

  “Okay, now get lost,” said the other orderly to the guards. “We’ll take him from here.”

  The guards obeyed, angry to be shown up by the two lesser but somehow higher ranking men.

  “Here now, this’ll relax you,” said the technician, and quickly gave Earl another shot.

  “Just a little tranquilizer, sweetie. Keep you calm and collected. Now you just sit here a bit.”

  Earl waited. Whatever it was hit him hard; it softened him, and the world seemed to fall ever so slightly out of focus. He blinked, almost passed out, and felt a great calmness, almost a sleepiness, pour through him.

  “There you are, sunshine,” said the technician, coming back. “My, aren’t we relaxed now. Okay, you come with us now.”

  Though still chained, Earl was wrapped in a cotton bathrobe, and the two men led him through another door. He was trying to track details, but they wouldn’t stay tracked as his mind seemed to slip in and out.

  Was this a hospital? There was a hospital smell somehow, but at the same time he felt no sense of bustle or movement or urgency. That was certainly missing from the hospital sense of the place. He couldn’t figure it out.

  The last door led to a room oddly lit. He sat on a chair and the two orderlies stood by.

  “Doctor will see you shortly, stud boy. You just sit tight now.”

  Earl couldn�
��t sit any other way. He felt himself on the edge of consciousness.

  Earl sat there.

  The door opened and a man slid in, and even through the strange condition of his mind, Earl right away recognized the doctor who had given him the shots after his time in the coffin.

  “Do you want a cigarette, friend?”

  Earl nodded.

  A cigarette was placed in his chained hands, and he put it to his lips. Quickly it was lit, and that first drag was like paradise, biting through his drugged blur.

  “You know, it doesn’t have to be like this,” the man said.

  Earl said nothing.

  “You’re a remarkable man. You’re strong, tough, resilient, heroic. Nobody denies that. But you’re fighting the jungle, and the jungle always wins. Surely you’ve figured that out.”

  Earl knew this to be a fact, but he didn’t acknowledge it. He didn’t say a word.

  “Who are you? You can’t be who you say you are. You’re too motivated, too clever, too experienced, too well trained. Are you some kind of federal agent? FBI, perhaps? Are you military intelligence? Are you something military? What is your interest? Whom do you represent? Why are you here?”

  Earl was silent. He took a puff on the cigarette.

  “You keep fighting. It’s really amazing. You should be studied. I’ve seen heroes before, believe me, and most are ordinary men compelled by circumstances to the incredible. You are heroic every single day. Every single one. Amazing.”

  Earl paid him back in silence.

  “All right,” said the man. “I’m going to give you an out. I’m going to give you hope. You don’t even have to tell us who you are, at least not until you want to, and you will want to, eventually. It’s simple. You come over.”

  Earl said, “Come over?”

  “Yes. You join us. We need good people. I can have you here in a second. You’ll be fed, you’ll sleep in clean sheets, you’ll have a pleasant duty day. It’ll seem all strange at first, even frightening. But you’ll see that what we are doing is very necessary. It’s work of the utmost importance, and it ennobles everyone associated with it. These poor Negro convicts, these ignorant white trash guards, the brutality, the death, the seeming wanton cruelty of Thebes, the shots they get: it’s all justified. It’s all for a higher good for our country and our way of life. You won’t see that at first. But eventually you will. There’ll come a time when you’ll believe. Then we can let you go back to wherever you came from. And you won’t be bitter; you’ll be proud you’ve served your country.”

  Earl drew a last breath on the cigarette, then stubbed it out on the desk.

  “No,” said Earl. “Not a chance. Not a goddamned chance. I may die here, but I won’t be a part of whatever terrible thing you’re up to.”

  “A shame,” said the doctor.

  27

  SAM could not lie. Sam was against lying. All kinds of mischief sprang from lying. It wasn’t merely that it was wrong, but that it felt wrong. A tide of liar’s phlegm overwhelmed your esophagus, your heart popped, your knees trembled. Sam hated lying and liars.

  Sam lied.

  He lied, he lied, he lied.

  He hated himself for it and swore to God if he ever got out of this horrid sewer into which Davis Trugood and the Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored) had dragged him, he would never tell a lie again, not even a social one, like “Honey, you sure look pretty today.”

  But what bothered him more than even that was how well he had lied, how he had learned to lie over the course of this ordeal.

  “Ma’am, I’m afraid I have some very good news and some very bad news,” he had said to the widow Stone. “Your husband, David Stone, M.D., is heir to a not inconsiderable fortune. Ma’am, I’m not yet prepared to divulge financial details, but I would estimate that it is in the seven-figure range.”

  Even Stone’s beautiful widow, smooth and polished and cosmopolitan as she was, gulped slightly at this information.

  “Yes, ma’am. It seems his father had a brother, a rogue in the family you might say, who went off on his own. This man, Daniel Stone, had a rambunctious, tumultuous life, he did indeed. Possibly your husband never mentioned him nor did his father, because I believe some time in the penitentiary was involved.”

  The widow had gasped again.

  “But he died intestate and wealthy, through certain interests in the West involving industries not exactly on the up-and-up. After probate taxes, the estate is, as I say, considerable. Your husband was his last living relative. As heir to his estate, you are therefore the beneficiary.”

  “I see,” said the widow. “But as you can see, I’m quite well off from my own family’s estate. I see no reason whatsoever to enter into a protracted legal engagement to acquire money I don’t have any need for.”

  Ach! Sam hated this! Character! A woman who could not be motivated by greed! Now there was a tough one.

  “But madam,” he said quickly, “think of the money not for you but to in some way commemorate your husband. Think of the David Stone Scholarship for Negroes at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Think of the young doctors that would come out into the world, and how well they would reflect the best of the American Negro, the good they would do, the mercy they would bring to the world and their own people. Now would that not be a testament to the greatness of your husband?”

  It was so amazing. This beautiful woman from the highest circles, with her knowledge of art and beauty, her social connections, her dead husband’s brilliant reputation to sustain her, her many (he assumed) fractious suitors, was biting. Not for some free dough but for the narcissism of Doing Good and Feeling Good: put that before her and she was any tart in a bar looking for a sugar daddy.

  He hated himself for manipulating her. He hated her for being so malleable. He hated it all.

  “Ma’am, what I need to do is disinter your husband’s body, don’t you see? I need to ascertain beyond doubt that that is indeed him in Green Mount Cemetery, and that you are his legal widow, and with that we can swiftly accomplish the transfer of the funds. Think of the future.”

  And so it was that Sam now stood in the mortuary room of the Smallwood Brothers Funeral Home in downtown Baltimore, where a casket, still caked with dirt, had just arrived. He had the proper authorization, the proper paperwork, everything in its place, every i dotted and t crossed.

  In her apartment the widow awaited his call.

  He was used to death, of course, but not its ceremonies. For him it was a wartime thing, squalid and tragic; or an issue of small-beer west Arkansas murder, where a husband choked his wife blue and bulge-eyed out of rage at an infidelity she had not really committed, or a businessman neatly perforated the liver of his embezzling partner with a nickel-plated .32, or two wild country crackers cut each other dead in a ditch in a drunken waltz of anger and stupidity.

  This was a dark, subdued place, without joy. It felt as if a heavy coating of oil had lubricated every surface, so that friction was impossible. Things moved slowly, with greasy decorum; it was more like a graduation than a mortal inquiry.

  The funeral director supervised; the undertaker executed. It didn’t take long.

  “Mr. Vincent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sir, we have removed the decedent from his inner casket.”

  “Yes. And—”

  “Sir, there appears to be a mix-up.”

  “Of what nature?”

  “There’s a discrepancy between the death certificate and the remains. Would you like to see? It’s only over here.”

  “Frankly, sir, no. I will take on trust a report of your findings.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the funeral director, one of the Smallwoods.

  He was a man used to mortal circumstances, well schooled to represent dignity in the face of crushing grief. His solemnity was unbridgeable, but Sam knew something was up when he saw that dry tongue lick nervously across those dry lips.

  “Sir, according to the death certificate, this is
a forty-three-year-old white male. But the remains are those of a thirty-year-old Negro male. I don’t know what to say.”

  “I don’t either,” Sam said.

  “Worse, he appears to have perished of some grotesque disease. I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like it. Chancres, tumors, limbs eaten away. It is a true horror, sir. I would like to burn it—him—in the next minute or so. The fires are ready.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Sam.

  28

  THE sun blasted down as it usually did, and Fish showed up, as he usually did, with the water wagon drawn by the two old mules in the jingly tack. Earl hardly noticed. He was in a depression so deep and dark he could hardly breathe. He hacked at a stump with his hoe until he heard the call, “Men, out!”

  He was slow clambering out of the hole for his place at the end of the line and a guard gave him a whack with a stick to speed him up.

  “You slower than the niggers now, boy!” he said with a whoop, as he laid the flat of the club hard against Earl’s kidneys, driving him in a spasm of pain to the ground.

  “He used to be white,” sang out Fish. “Haw, boss, now he all nigger. He mo’ nigger than any nigger you got!”

  Earl humbly made it to the rear of the line, wishing he could rub the new bruise with his hand but unable to reach it because of the chain. At a point his eyes lost focus and he went to a knee.

  Whap!

  Another blow. Since he had turned down the mystery fellow in the mystery house, the word had gotten out among the guards. He was fair game. The process would intensify, then intensify some more. They would break him or kill him, and it seemed now not to matter. Maybe Moon would be his killer. Earl was the dead.

  “You stand straight in line, nigger, or you don’t git nothing,” the guard sang. Section Boss, on his horse with Mabel Louise the Thompson gun dangling over the horn on a sling, patrolled back and forth, not far at all from Earl. He was a good horseman, and in a second, if he wished, he could use the power of the beast to crush Earl to nothingness. His closeness was ominous and full of anger. But he said nothing, and Earl didn’t look up at him, for that would merely earn another whack.