Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  But for whatever reason, the man simply had ceased to exist after 1936, at least on paper. Before then, as the mountain of books before him on the table of the reading room testified, he’d been everywhere, stunning the world with the brilliance of his research. He was in the Journal of the American Medical Association four times, he was twice in the New England Journal of Medicine, he was twice in Lancet, the British medical publication, and he was once each in a series of regional medical publications or publications devoted to specific diseases or specialties, such as blood, eyes, upper respiratory, virology and so forth and so on. Judging by the letters his pieces always generated, he was a brilliant researcher.

  And then…silence.

  And this was well before he entered the Army, before whatever happened to him or he happened to in Mississippi.

  Well, it was not quite silence. It was the doctor who disappeared, that is to say, the research physician in desperate small countries the world over. That man vanished. The Dr. Stone everybody knew and loved did not disappear at all; if anything, he had flourished, and if anything, the glory wall in his widow’s apartment only told the half of it.

  In the popular press, he continued to thrive, and the Reader’s Guide yielded citations in the Washington Times-Herald, the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times, P.M., Collier’s and Newsweek. He even got a 1938 spread in Life, where in his pith helmet, with his beautiful wife by his side, he was in the slums of Bangkok in a country called Siam surrounded by beautiful and not so beautiful little yellow people. The story described how he’d advised the Red Cross on a clinic and spent six months there working with the poorest of the poor, the most wretched of the wretched, all in the name of humanity and science. But details were scanty.

  And none of this, moreover, had a thing to do with some installation in the wilds of Maryland about which, in all his learnings, Sam had not uncovered a single thing. What was done at Ft. Dietrich to have them so interested in what was done at Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored)? There was no evidence of a thing.

  Sam had a headache and a dead end.

  He couldn’t call the widow who now hated and despised him, particularly since she’d blurted out her hideous secret (he knew how the human heart worked), and he’d exhaustively worked the War Department, the Medical Corps, the American Medical Association and the American Virology Association, having burned out those bridges, or having them burned out by those industrious boys from HUAC.

  Where could he go?

  He realized he had but one course open, and it was a tedious one. He had to try and find the names of Stone’s 1928 Harvard Medical School graduating class. Then he had to call them. Every one of them. Sooner or later, he’d find one who had known Stone well, or so it seemed. Sooner or later, he’d find one who’d talk. Sooner or later. But he realized there were only a few weeks left till the dark of the moon, so he hoped it would be sooner rather than later.

  He wished he believed in what he was doing a little more fervently.

  42

  THE two men sat at the back table in the dark cavern known as Pablo’s Cantino, in the city of El Paso, another long flight from the last destination.

  Earl watched them. How they ate expressed their deep personalities. One was feisty, quick, full of aggression, hungry for sensation. He devoured his food. To him, life was a picnic of Mexican vittles, a profusion of spices to be sampled for flavor, then devoured. More controlled, the other man sat glumly, picking at his plate, a giant of control and taciturnity; he looked like a minister at an orgy.

  “Fellas,” said Earl.

  “Well, goddamn, Sergeant Swagger, didn’t know you’d be bringing my old friend Bill along,” said the feisty fellow, who was a former border patrol officer named Charlie Hatchison. He was wiry, peppery, loud, and couldn’t sit still. His sharp eyes darted everywhere on constant patrol, and it was a problem for him to keep a smirk off his face, for what one sensed most immediately about Charlie Hatchison was the pleasure he took in being Charlie Hatchison.

  “Bill’s quite a feller,” he went on maniacally, “and if it’s action upcoming, damned if I don’t want to stick close to old Bill, on account he’ll git me through it, right, Bill?” Charlie was a needler. He liked to prick at people. Everybody was a challenge to him, and he was always looking for ways to bring people down a notch or two.

  Bill Jennings was his opposite, lanky and solemn. His face was like a melted puddle of bronze, hardened, then tempered. It never changed expression, not even slightly. It was the dullest face anybody had ever seen. To most men, that epic mug with its message of violence contained was enough. People surrendered to him in legendary numbers, and that exactly was the bone of contention between the two men. Charlie Hatchison, in a life on the border in the twenties and thirties, had killed seventeen men in gunfights, and had savored every one of them. Bill Jennings, an author and renowned fast gun, who’d performed revolver tricks on What’s My Line?, had killed no one. Charlie was not famous, though he’d won the national bull’s-eye competition four times in the thirties, and Bill Jennings was, though he’d never won a thing.

  “Yes, sir,” said Charlie, “see heah, if’n I git in a jam, you know, why I just pull out a copy of Bill’s book Second Place Is No Place, and I look up my situation in the index, flip to the pages listed, and damnation, hellfire and brimstone, it’ll tell me what to do!”

  It was quite a show. Charlie liked being noticed. He expected to be at the center of attention, and when he wasn’t he grew surly and restless.

  Finally, Bill spoke, though quite slowly.

  “Y’all probably think I put that burr up Charlie’s butt. Fact is, he’s born that way. Passing strange, but that’s how it is. Pay him no mind, and he’ll quieten eventually.”

  Charlie laughed.

  “You can’t git Bill’s goat, ’cause he done strangled the goat some years back. You can call him anything and he just looks at you with them dead eyes and you feel the Lord’s presence, beckoning you forward to them pearly gates.”

  It was true. Bill Jennings looked like death in the tall grass, with that lanky frame, those long arms and big hands and that eerie calm, while Charlie looked like a traveling salesman for a snake-oil company.

  “Hell, he is deadly. Why, between us we killed seventeen men,” Charlie laughed.

  “What I am offering the two of you,” said Earl, “is something hard to come by. It’s what you want. It’s the best thing for gunmen, and the world is changing so much it’s going to be gone soon, or at least gone in the way I’m offering it. I’m talking about action.”

  “I will drink to action,” said Charlie, throwing up a tequila and downing it neat. “Gittin’ close to the worm,” he said, indicating the gross object that floated in the bottle.

  “It’s all changing,” said Earl. “If you have to put a man down in the line of duty, you got lawyers and bureaucrats and newspaper reporters barking at you, you got those in the community calling you trigger-happy, you ain’t a hero no more, you’re some kind of outcast. And you got reports. You got endless paperwork and talks with the prosecutors and justifying and interpreting and figuring it all out.”

  “That is true,” said Bill Jennings.

  “Bill, haw!, you wouldn’t know if it was true or not. You done fought more with your face than with your gun hand!”

  Bill’s face remained placid, overly affected by gravity, all its many lines vertical, his eyes dull as mud. If a flicker of distaste flashed through them, only Earl noticed; or maybe it was a trick of light.

  “I never filed no reports on the seventeen I got,” said Charlie. “Some was Mex, and of course you never would bother with paper on them. But even the white boys, like that Perry Jefferson, I done perforated him like a piece of cheese with my Browning 5 with the duck-bill spreader all loaded up with blue whistlers, wooo-eeee, what a mess, but he’s as white as white can be, and nobody gave no two shits about him, ’cause he’s bootlegger trash from Dallas, carrying heavy guns with him ever
which way. Sent him to his maker and was proud of it. Bill, now you tell the hero sergeant here ’bout your best action and the aftermath.”

  Bill ate a tamale.

  “Well,” said Earl, “let me tell you what I have going. Then you decide if you’re in or not.”

  “I’m in,” said Charlie. “Tell you that right now. Bill’s in too, ’cause he don’t never want it said Charlie H. done something he’s afraid to do. His book might not sell no more.”

  “Bill, you’re still serving law enforcement. What I’m setting up is technically against the law.”

  “Never let the law git in the way of a good fight, right, Bill?” said Charlie. “Hell, on the border we’d cross and gun them bad boys who’s gunning for us. It was them or us in them wide-open days, and we’s serving justice first, survival second and the law maybe dead last.”

  “Bill, I—”

  “Hell, just say your piece,” said Bill.

  So Earl just said it. Said it all, as he had with the others, while Charlie, if he listened at all, paid more attention to setting the worm in the bottle free, and Bill ate another tamale.

  “That’s it,” said Earl. “So now it’s your play.”

  “You know what, Earl,” said Charlie, “truth is I never had much use for your colored folk. That’s how I feel. So don’t look for me to hold no hands and do no holy-rolling. But you’re offering something money can’t buy, and that’s kills. I got me seventeen and figure on notching up my gun a few more times before I pass. So if I don’t got to lollygaggle no niggers, but just do some serious gun work, count me in, like I said.”

  Earl turned to Bill, knowing that the big man had a lot to lose on this job, but was rewarded with a nod, almost imperceptible. Bill of course would remain silent on his motives, his dreams, his aspirations. Palaver wasn’t for him. You’d just have to tell him where and when, and if he said he’d make the party, by God, the party he would make.

  Earl finished with his last details.

  “I’ll give each of you five hundred dollars in cash. With that I want you to finance your travel and your guns. You travel to Tallahassee on September 5 and buy the newspaper. In the personals, there’ll be an ad selling a nineteen thirty-two Ford motorcar for six hundred dollars.”

  “Hell, Earl, nobody pay six hundred dollars for a nineteen thirty-two Ford.”

  “Well, exactly. So you call that number, and I’ll tell you where you come to the next day.”

  “Ah.”

  “You travel separately. You don’t swagger or make friends or buy drinks or let no one buy you drinks. You dress for hunting, not fighting.”

  “Bring our guns?”

  “No. Certainly nothing duty-issued where your serial number is recorded, or anything that can be identified as yours. Also, nothing military. Bring sporting arms only. I’d go to the pawnshop and pick me up a good rifle, say a lever gun, and a pair of .38s or .357s. If you want to shoot .45 or you have an old Luger or something, that’s fine. But don’t bring nothing you’d be afraid to leave in a swamp. Don’t bring Billy the Kid’s Lightning, if you happen to own it.”

  “Hell, I got so many old guns I don’t need to go to no pawnshop. I must have three hundred of the goddamn things,” said Charlie.

  “You travel low-key without no fuss. You’re hunters, traveling to the field. Got that?”

  “Got it.”

  “We’ll be there just a while. Then we’ll move, have our fun, and move out, all in a single night, fast and mean and loud. Then you never talk about this no more. Is that agreed?”

  “It is,” said Charlie, and Bill nodded, again imperceptibly.

  Earl slid the two envelopes over, and each was quietly slipped away.

  “That’s fine.”

  “Y’all drink a toast with me now,” said Charlie.

  “Believe I will,” Bill finally said.

  “I’m on the wagon. I’ll drink this here Coca-Cola, if you don’t mind.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Charlie, throwing himself another shot of tequila, then throwing one to Bill.

  The three glasses came up.

  “Learned this one in France,” said Charlie. “It seems to fit right nice here in Pablo’s. Haw! Vive la guerre, vive la mort, vive le mercenaire!”

  43

  THE warden sent a man to Sheriff Leon Gattis, requesting that worthy’s fastest presence. The sheriff, who’d essentially been created by the warden, came apace.

  He tied his horse at the rail outside the great house within the old brick wall. He tried not to look at the ruin of the Whipping House off in a grove of palmettos and palms, for he knew the purpose of it and it filled him with unease. In fact, the prison itself made him a mite nervous. That WORK MAKES YOU FREE arched over the entrance; what was that? It was familiar somehow, but the sheriff couldn’t place it. Then that place called the Screaming House, off by the river, where the convicts said you went, you screamed, and you never came back again. The sheriff shuddered ever so slightly.

  Also, the Negro women lined up to get into the Store for their week’s ration of food and goods were not a welcoming sight. The women were surly, hang-dog, defeated. They hadn’t the sass of your average colored gal; none of them looked to be much fun in the hay, and that was generally where your nigger gal outshined her white counterpart. These gals looked hungry and scurvy, like someone had just let them down off the rack after applying the cattail ten or twenty times. They had no light in their eyes, no laughter in their primitive souls, though one or two, the sheriff could not help but notice, had nice sets of jugs wobbling loose under their sack dresses.

  A trustee, old nigra-style, admitted the sheriff, who stomped his boots clean before entering the great house. Inside, he hit that same wall of ancient smell: dust, rot, the damp cool of mildew, a significant temperature reduction, the whole thing out of a South that only existed in the movies and there with no exactness to it. Daylight at least meant there was no need for candles or lanterns, which turned the place even ghostlier. The old trustee, moving as if his spine were fused into a solid pole and each step a pain, took him to the warden’s office, knocked, opened and admitted him.

  There the great man sat, alone at his desk, working hard. He held up a hand in pause, as if to suggest his concentration was so mighty it could not be breached, and thereby held the sheriff frozen at the door. A big clock ticktocked as the second hand loafed along. Books, portraits of old gentlemen of fine breeding, Southern pastoral scenes in oil, a rack of fine rifles, the state flag of Mississippi all filled the place with color and detail.

  Finally, with a flourish, the warden finished up whatever it was he was writing with a fountain pen, pressed a roller across the pages to dry the ink, then carefully removed the document to a desk drawer and permitted himself to look up.

  “Why, Sheriff Leon, how kind of you to join me upon such short notice.”

  There was no chance in hell that the sheriff would not obey a summons immediately, but it was the warden’s preference to proceed by the old Southern ways of politeness. He was a polite man, as if he believed that politeness, chivalry, the rules of society, were all that separated him and his kind from the niggers.

  “Yes, sir, it is my pleasure.”

  “Do sit down. Join me in a glass of sherry?”

  “Sir, may I be frank?”

  “Of course, Sheriff Leon.”

  “Sherry would not be to my likin’. My people never had no sherry, and so I never grew a taste for it.”

  “I have some fine sour mash bourbon.”

  “Sir, that would make this old dog a happy dog indeed.”

  “And I’ll join you, Leon, if you don’t mind.”

  “Yes, sir. I’d be proud if you would.”

  The ceremony of the drinks, quite elaborate, unfolded, and in a few minutes each man had returned to his respective seat, though now each was armed with two fingers of neat brown fluid.

  “That is a fine batch,” said the sheriff, after a taste.

 
“It is indeed,” said the warden.

  “Now, how may I be of assistance?”

  “I have read your report over and over, Leon, about the Arkansas lawyer who escaped.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You recommended that the situation be looked into?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In my wisdom, I thought it wise to let sleeping dogs lie. That is to say, my thought was that as he had not seen our institution he only had a confused picture of what he would have dismissed as ‘typical Southern methods,’ unlikely to bestir the world at large. There was furthermore the issue of the fellow involved with him, whom we felt we had to learn more about. Alas, he is no longer with us.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, Leon, that was my judgment. Leon, it was the wrong judgment. I am not averse to acknowledging my failures. You were right, Leon, I was wrong.”

  “Sir, you ain’t hardly ever wrong about nothing. You done got this county and your prison set up just fine, and we all the better off fo’ it, with good jobs, money in the bank, bread and vittles on the table, and a solid future. You have done things down here that have—”

  The warden let Leon lick his boots for several moments, though he didn’t much enjoy it. But finally, when the fellow was done groveling, he continued.

  “Now, Leon, I will tell you very confidentially that something is astir among the convicts. They are muttering about a deliverance. In their primitive minds, God is gathering the righteous to strike, riding in on a pale horse of retribution. Do you know a thing about it?”

  “No, sir. Not a thing.”

  “Of course not. I do not believe this has a thing to do with that lawyer. I cannot in my mind work out a chain which would in some way not merely involve him, but more to the point, permit the knowledge of his engagement to return here and boil up my black wards. It doesn’t make sense at all, does it?”

  “No, sir, it don’t. But—”

  “Yes?”