Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  “You got to practice. I give you the lock. You practice every night. You got to get the pin out, get it into the lock. You make a ‘H.’ You feel the softness of the tumblers. You get the two on the left, cross over, git the two on the right. Do it blindfolded. Do it at night. When the time comes, you won’t be able to see what’s going on.”

  “I’ll be in a darkened cell?”

  “No. You be at the bottom of the river. You be drowning. You make a mistake, white boy, and the hundred pounds of cement that lock chain to you keep you down there and you be drownded dead in thirty seconds.”

  EARL worked the lock every night in the dark. Out with the pin, a swift movement to the keyhole, no wasted motion, the insertion, then the delicacy of it all: feeling the tension in the tired spring-driven tumblers, trying to duplicate the pressure of a key against them, finding the right progression until at last the thing would pop.

  The first night he never got it open.

  You goddamn worthless scum, he called himself mercilessly the next day.

  The second night he finally felt it move a bit and got close to getting it open.

  The third night it came open by the second hour.

  The fourth night by twenty minutes.

  Only got to get another nineteen minutes and fifty-eight seconds off that time.

  He worked and worked until at last a poke came in the night.

  He slithered to the floorboards and out.

  “You do it?”

  “I got it down to thirty seconds now. We best do this thing soon, else these guards are going to beat me to death. Or Moon will be back.”

  “Moon be back day after tomorrow. He cut you first thing, white boy. Firstest thing. Ain’t no nother possibility ’bout it. He cut you bad and deep, and fuck you bleeding. He want to be fucking you as you pass.”

  “Christ.”

  “You up to killing him first?”

  “It ain’t my style a bit.”

  “You pussy, boy.”

  “Done my share of killing. You don’t know the killing I done. You got no idea. Nobody here does. But if I fight this guy, and even if I whip him, he’s going to hurt me bad, and I can’t do this thing, right?”

  “That’s right. So it’s got to be tomorrow. Now I tell you the rest of it.”

  Earl braced himself.

  “You tell Section Boss tomorrow first thing: You talk to Bigboy. You broken. You tell ’em what they want. Yeah, they gos, gits Bigboy. He drive up in his shiny new Hudson car.”

  “If I tell ’em who I am, they kill me.”

  “I knows. So here’s what it be. When Bigboy drive up, you’ll feel Tangle Eye gittin’ close to you.”

  “Who’s Tangle Eye?”

  “Big yeller convict. One eye go strange. Tangle Eye. A ax man. Best ax man in Mississippi.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You slip down. Tangle Eye, he give yo’ wrist chain a whack right where it clip to the bracelet, right hand. Yo’ hands free. But you hold that chain tight so nobody don’t see it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now come the fun part. You be called up out de hole. You g’wan over to Bigboy, and when he smile at you you pop him hard. You pop him so bad you break out his teeth and his nose. You hit him bad.”

  “That is the fun part. Only problem: it gets me killed.”

  “No, it don’t. It do git you beat. Gits you so beat you wish you dead. But they don’t kill you. They don’t even make you unconscious. They won’t whack yo’ haid. They bang yo’ ribs, yo’ gut, yo’ kidneys, yo’ legs. Have a good ol’ time with them sticks.”

  “This don’t sound like no fun at all.”

  “You want out?”

  “Ain’t there no other way?”

  “This be the only way you beat them dogs. No other way. The dogs run you down if you try to bust out through the bayou or the piney woods. Dogs rip you up right good. So you listen here to the hard part.”

  “Go on.”

  “You got to humiliate Bigboy. Make him so mad he forget hisself. So he kill you just fo’ his own pleasure. This is how they kill at Thebes. They take you to what they call the Drowning House.”

  “Lots of houses at Thebes.”

  “It’s a city of houses, you got that right. At the Drowning House, they chain you to a cement block. It’s locked with that lock you done been working with. Nightfall, they take you out on de river. They likes to hear ’em beg and cry and plead. Makes ’em feel powerful and strong. They gots a special boat. Boat got a door in the side. Git out there, the cement block goes over. You go with it.”

  Earl thought about this. He remembered the long walk in on Tarawa, with the Jap tracers skating over the surface of the water and the pack on his back dragging him down. He shuddered involuntarily at the horror of the memory.

  “You in the water. You got yo’ thirty seconds. You get that lock off. Oh, one thing. I forgot to ask. You can swim, can’t you? White boys swim good, I hears. I can swim good, ’cause I raised on the Mississip. Hey, why you think they call me Fish?”

  “I can swim okay. Ain’t no Johnny Weissmuller.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, that Tar—. Never mind. Yeah, I can swim.”

  “You can’t come to de surface fast, and break it and suck in the air. You gots to swim away underwater, come to the surface slow, be gentle when you gits to it. Otherwise they hear you, ’cept they havin’ too much fun to notice usually. You swim in, real slow and quiet. Follow them to their shore, ’cause otherwise you be real mixed up. You swim to the wrong shore, I can’t help you none. Got it?”

  “Where do I go?”

  “Swim upriver maybe quarter mile. Look for a flash. That’ll be me with a old carbide lamp. You come ashore there. You rest up couple of days, I’ll set you free with a compass. It’s a straight run to the tracks twenty-five miles out, you hops a freight and back you go. I got some money fo’ you. No dogs trackin’ you, no mens with guns and trigger fingers all twitchy-like, nothin’. They think you daid. They seen you go into the dark river. They don’t know nothing. You home free. They never come after you. You got that life of yours back and you do wif it whatever you want.”

  Earl could think of nothing to say.

  “But even if we get that far, then you gots them two promises. You make them, or I swim you back out there and chain you to that rock again.”

  31

  SAM got back in a mood of near suicidal grief. So much for that adventure. His peregrinations in Baltimore had destroyed the serenity of a good woman and he had learned almost nothing of use. Dutifully, he typed out a report and sent it off to Davis Trugood, along with a careful, thorough accounting of all expenses.

  He called Connie, was bucked up by her to a small degree; he went to one of his son’s baseball practices where the boy did well, and that buoyed him even more. But it all went away late in the afternoon, and not even a powerful bourbon could destroy the sense of a life wasted, a friend betrayed, all control slipping away from him.

  He finally made his decision. At 10:00 A.M. the next day, he would call Colonel Jenks, the commandant of the Arkansas State Highway Patrol, and tell him everything. It was time at last to get official convening authorities involved in the situation, and if there were anything that could be done, it would be done. Then he would call Junie Swagger, whom he now avoided like a disease. He would tell her, own up to his idiotic responsibility for all this, and tell her that he was trying to obey Earl’s mandates, but now too long had passed, and it was time to get this thing settled.

  He awoke with a sense of mission, showered, shaved, put on his suit and tie, had breakfast with his wife and two of the boys and two of the girls, and went downtown to his little office. He climbed the steps and sat at the phone. He could not make himself call at 10:00 A.M., but by 10:15 he had screwed up the ambition. He reached for the phone, set it before him, and—

  It rang.

  He let it ring a bit, then picked it up.

  “Sam Vincent.”


  “Sam, it’s Melvin Jeffries.”

  Mel was the pharmacist in town. Sam had once declined to prosecute one of his children on a fool shoplifting charge, for which Mel had been eternally grateful. That boy, if Sam recalled correctly, was now up at Fayetteville, doing well.

  “Mel, what can I do for you?”

  “Well, Sam, nothing at all. I just thought you should know a couple of fellows were here.”

  Sam paused.

  From Mississippi?

  His breath dried to a little spurt.

  “Which fellows?”

  “G-men.”

  “G-men?” Sam said.

  “Yes, sir. They had all sorts of questions ’bout you.”

  “FBI agents?”

  “I think so, Sam. At least that was the impression I had, even if they didn’t say. Men in suits, with badges, carrying guns.”

  “What did they want to know?”

  He waited: all about your adventures in Mississippi? How you were an escaped prisoner from Thebes County. How they think you killed a woman. How your friend, Earl, came down there and you got him killed. How you violated the law and—

  “Well, Sam, mainly it was your politics.”

  “What? My politics?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why, I’m a Democrat like everybody else here in Arkansas. Why would they have to know my politics? I ran for the Democratic party. I hope to run for the Democratic party again in a year or so. I’ve been a Democrat my whole life. What business is my party affiliation to the federal government?”

  “Not them kind of politics, Sam. More like, were you ‘suspicious’ or anything. You have any strange ‘suspicious’ ideas about politics? Were you sympathetic of unions? Did you listen to the Negro jazz music or classical music? What magazines you buy? What books you read? What was your sentiments about the Soviet Union? Did you ever speak favorably about Mr. Stalin? Were you upset we went to the aid of the Koreans? Did you speak agin’ the atom bomb. Did you think it was a shame we didn’t share that secret with our Russian allies? What was your opinion of communists in the pictures or on the radio? Seemed like they thought you were a red, is what I gathered.”

  Sam realized: they were investigators from the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  “Well, what did you tell them?”

  “You’s a true blue American war hero and went after criminals hard as hell and kept the order and represented the state and that you had good judgment and character, but also a heart and a sense of discretion. You know how highly we think of you in this house, Sam, after what you did for Harrison.”

  “It’s not right that they’re asking these questions,” Sam said.

  “No, Sam, it ain’t. But they’re all over town this morning. I thought you should know.”

  “I see. Thank you so much, Mel. How’s Harrison doing, by the way?”

  “He’s fine, Sam. He just pledged SAE.”

  “Well, that’s terrific.”

  “You have a good day, Mr. Sam.”

  “I will,” said Sam. He put down the phone, shaken. HUAC? Now how the hell? What the hell? Was it that somebody in Mississippi had complained? Or was it that—

  The phone rang again.

  This time it was Mary Fine, who ran Fine’s Dry Cleaning. The same story: two government men, questions about politics, insinuations about a radical unreliability, stern, judgmental demeanors, disappointment. Something like that could ruin a fellow with public ambitions in a hurry.

  Then it was the barber, the newspaper editor, and finally Harley Bean, the county Democratic chairman, who was also the mayor and the undertaker to most of Polk County.

  “Sam, what the hell is goin’ on? You must be the least red fella I ever heard tell of. Unless you consider sending Willis Beaudine up to Tucker for diddling that nigger gal.”

  “Some would say that’s pretty red,” said Sam.

  “Well, Sam, I can’t tell you your business, but if you’re red I’m going to suggest we surrender to the commies, as they’ve already gotten too far.”

  “Well, Harley, you know I’m not red.”

  “Well, what is this all about?”

  “They haven’t reached me yet. Sure as hell, that’s what they’re here for.”

  “Well, Sam, you know I’d go to bat for you in any ball game in America. But when the FBI—”

  “Did they say they was FBI?”

  “Hmmm, Sam, now as I recollect I am not certain. I did have that impression, however. They just flashed badges and government IDs and on they went.”

  “I don’t think they’re FBI. I think they’re House investigators. That means they’re not bonded police agents, and if they’re carrying concealed weapons they are doing so in violation of the laws of Arkansas.”

  “Well, Sam, nobody pays much attention to that law, anyhow. They certainly act like FBI. I’d get to the bottom of this, I was you. You know we have big plans to get you back in the prosecutor’s office.”

  “Thank you, Harley.”

  Sam knew this was because he was a good prosecutor and a good Democrat, though the meaning of the second was in contravention to the meaning of the first; good Democrat meant he’d just naturally look in other directions when certain county contracts were let. That was the system. Sam accepted it because he knew he couldn’t change it, and his willingness not to change it meant the party would elect him wholeheartedly, to make up for the nastiness of his loss to reformer Febus Bookins, who mainly used the office to reform his own bank account. Sam would never have done anything so crude; everybody knew he didn’t care about money, but only about something called the law and something else called justice.

  The worst was that night. One of his children, Tommy, eleven, came home in tears. He had been called out of class by two mean Yankees in suits, who’d questioned him about his father. They had scared him seriously, as they’d meant to, and the boy was shaken over it.

  “There, there, Tommy,” he said to the child, cradling him tenderly, “it’s all a misunderstanding. Those men didn’t mean any harm, and they’ll be going away soon. I promise.” That made the boy feel better, but not Sam, who went to bed in a purple rage and awoke the next day in a black rage. He hit his law books for two hours, made several calls, then sat back.

  They finally arrived at the office at around eleven.

  He was polite. He let them in.

  “Sir, we’re federal investigators, examining a case of national security.”

  They showed him credentials, which he did not examine carefully. They had badges and bulges under their coats, where shoulder holsters concealed revolvers.

  They wore suits, hats and one wore glasses. They were big men, presumably ex-cops of some sort, from some Northern city. They were used to having their way, their badge frightening people into compliance. Detectives worked that way, good and bad.

  “Now, what is this about, fellows?” Sam asked, being a good sport about it all.

  “Well, now, sir, we’re pleased you’re cooperating with us. You’d be surprised how much hostility we run into. We’ve just got a few little matters to clear up, then we’ll be back on our way to Washington. These are troubling times, you know. You’d be surprised where your enemies turn up, and how they wheedle their ways into high places.”

  “I do believe you, gents. You can count on me for cooperation, yes, sir.”

  “Mr. Vincent, let’s see, you were—” and he summed up Sam’s life pretty succinctly.

  They wanted to impress on him how much they knew about him already, what tiny corners and cracks of his life they’d already shined their light upon.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “You’ve certainly been looking into me right thoroughly, I can tell. If the FBI thinks it’s that important, I’m surely going to help out. Is this serious?”

  “Well, Mr. Vincent, your name has come up in certain inquiries. Certain possibilities have been raised, may I say. We just want to discount them.”

  “Certainl
y. How can I assist you?”

  “Well, sir, it seems you’ve been in Washington lately, and you’ve raised questions about a top secret project in the nineteen forties in Mississippi. It’s not the sort of thing—”

  “You folks from the FBI don’t miss much, do you?”

  “No, sir, we don’t,” said the other.

  “Now, could you tell us why you have an interest in a highly secret government circumstance? I mean, it’s a little out of the way for an Arkansas prosecutor.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sam, “I will be happy to answer that question. I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding or any doubt about my loyalty. No, sir, I’d have thought winning a Bronze Star in the war would pretty much be it as far as proof of loyalty goes, but I guess you boys don’t care much about that.”

  “Sir, your military record is not at issue. We have a national security mandate to—”

  Sam lifted the newspaper off his desk.

  There was a tape recorder, and it was recording.

  “Would you speak a little louder, sir. I want to make sure I get this for the trial.”

  Little pause.

  The two men looked at each other.

  “It would be better for you if you cooperate, Mr. Vincent.”

  “See, that’s what I’s just about to say to you, sir. Isn’t that a laugh? You thought you were investigating me. Here it turns out I’m investigating you!”

  “Mr. Vincent, where the hell do you think you are—”

  “Impersonating a federal officer. That’s two to five. First offense, the judge’d probably let you off with a warning, except I know all the judges, and I can guarantee you they won’t.”

  “Look, here, Vincent, this—”

  “I got you on tape acknowledging you’re an FBI agent. But you aren’t. You’ve been calling yourself federal investigators. You aren’t even that. You’re staff assistants at HUAC in D.C. You have no police powers, no right or authority to represent yourself as such, and no right to carry concealed firearms in this state. That’s another two to five. Again, if you have friends, it could go away. But in Polk County, see, here’s the funny thing, I’m the one with the friends.”