Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  Sam carried the thing to the dining room table. Whatever it was, it was solid weight, about three pounds, with no rattle or gurgle in it, no sense of anything cloth or paper. Possibly a paperweight or possibly a set of old books, though it didn’t seem big enough for that.

  He examined it, and nothing surprised him. It was professionally wrapped, with his address typed cleanly on the address label, and the return address denoted the store he knew to be one of New Orleans’s most prosperous.

  He tore the package open, and the brown paper revealed festive colored paper, merry and gay.

  “It is a present,” said Caroline. “Oh, Daddy, open it!”

  “Sweetie, I’m sure it’s just a business gift. Don’t get your hopes up. It isn’t going to be a new doll.”

  “Doll! Doll! Doll!” Terry, his youngest at three, began to cry. She loved presents. She loved dolls and prissy frilly things, and was still a sweet baby, still her daddy’s favorite.

  “Bet it’s a ball glove,” said Billy, who was clearly projecting his own desires on it, for at six all he wanted was a ball glove like his two big brothers’.

  “Billy, it’s a pewter mug from the State Prosecutor’s Association or some such,” Sam said dourly, as he pulled off the wrapped paper, tore off the ribbons, and got the thing free to reveal a white paper box ensnared by a final gold ribbon, which could possibly hold a selection of books or shot glasses or a telescope or pair of binoculars.

  “It’s candy,” Caroline concluded, and she had a formidable sweet tooth, so that would please her immensely. “Chocolate candy, with strawberries inside.”

  “Could be candy, we’ll soon see,” Sam said and pulled the ribbon loose.

  “I bet it’s jelly.”

  “No, it’s a dolly, I know it’s a dolly.”

  “It’s a plastic airplane, betcha. Daddy, hurry. Hurry, Daddy!”

  “Hurry up, please, Daddy!”

  But Daddy couldn’t hurry. Daddy had the ribbon half off the box, and he froze. He froze dead still and his face lost its color and its joy. It was frozen into a mask and he himself seemed frozen in the odd position. He had the ribbon pulled tight, just almost to the breaking point, but he was holding it as if it were the rope to a boat or something in danger of floating away, and with his other hand he kept the package pinned to the table. He could feel an unusual tension in the ribbon, a tension that should not be there. But that alone wasn’t the source of his sudden desperation. It was an odor that seemed to float up from the package, just a trace, but enough to re-create a whole world for him, and that terrified him.

  “Caroline,” he said very carefully, “I want you—”

  “Hurry, Daddy, so I can have a—”

  “Caroline!”

  His voice stunned them.

  “Caroline, honey, get these kids out of here. Get them across the street. Do it now, sweetie, do it now.”

  “Daddy, I—”

  “Sweetie, do what Daddy tells you, and don’t let anybody come in here, do you understand? If Mommy shows up, keep her from coming in. And tell Mrs. Jackson to call the fire department and the police, and please, please, baby, do it right away!”

  46

  THE Whipping House was never quiet now. This is how Bigboy investigated: with the calm, methodical, unemotional application of whip to skin. The speed was supersonic, the devastation cruel and specific. He could open a nick, or a slice or a gash or a hack. He could make the whip tease like a feather or bite like a lion, but he preferred what lay in between, in escalating degrees, increment by increment, with enough downtime and not too much blood loss so that the boy could understand with perfect logic and clarity that which was happening to him, that which would happen and, finally, that there was no other inevitability save the will of the whip man.

  In the Whipping House, the whip man whipped. When a boy passed out, he was cut down, revived, treated tenderly, his wounds dressed, and just when it seemed he was out of his agony and removed to a more benevolent universe, he was hung again, and whipped again, harder, taken farther into pain, but not quite all the way to death.

  Nobody died without talking, for that is the way of a good whip man. The whip man knows. The whip man is brilliant, cunning, and has all the attributes of a chess player or a counterintelligence officer or a gifted businessman. He has an intuition for the psychology of weakness, he can anticipate, he knows just how close to the line he can come each time, and each time he cuts that distance in half. And there is always another half to be achieved, always. He can string you along for hours or days, take you through lifetimes of pain, so that nothing else has ever existed for you, and the only mercy is a dream of death which he is too wise to give you easily.

  In this way, Ephram gave up Milton, and then Milton gave up Robertson. Robertson tried to kill himself by biting on his tongue, piercing it in hopes of drowning in lungs a-burst with his own blood, greedily swallowed to avoid further destruction, but the whip man was too smart, and saved him, for an especially long time on the rack, with the play of lash and light and sweat across the darkness of the night, until ultimately Robertson broke and gave up Theo, who broke fast to give up Broke Tooth, who gave up One Eye, who gave up Elijah.

  It was a pagan scene, with the fires bright, and the sweat shiny on the bodies of the hung man and the whip man in their intimate squalor, and the singing in the air of the lash and the crack as it struck, each crack a detonation in the flesh that transmuted in a nanosecond to the deep brain where pain is registered.

  Bigboy worked Elijah hard, for Elijah was the rare enough hero and would give no man up, and Elijah fought him all through the whip man’s night, filling the Whipping House with pain. But finally Elijah broke. They all broke. There was no other possibility.

  Elijah gave up 22 and 22 gave up Albert, but there was a hitch.

  In the case of Albert, the man was discovered in bed, his throat cut, a straight razor in his hand.

  “He knowed he was next,” said Caleb.

  “No,” said Bigboy. “Someone else knew he was next, and thought to cut the chain off before it led to him. And left the razor there to confuse us. But we will find him.”

  A day was lost in that barracks, as each convict was interrogated by rough means, until at last one Yellow Ed gave up Mr. Clarence, and Mr. Clarence broke and ran, in the old days just exactly the ticket out in the amount of time it took a guard to pump his Winchester ’07 to his shoulder and ship off a .351. But nobody shot Mr. Clarence. The dogs ran him to earth, and he too went off to interrogation. The nights of the Whipping House continued.

  FISH knew he eventually would be found out. Knowing this, he had two choices. The first would be to hand himself into the warden and Bigboy, explain that he was indeed the originator of the phrase “pale horse coming,” and then tell exactly what it meant and why in his foolishness he had told it to but one man. That was his sin: hubris. He had no ability to keep his tongue from wagging, and for that his brothers were paying in flesh.

  He would tell all: about the white boy Bogart’s secret survival, and his pledge to return in the night with men and guns, and pay out retribution in spades.

  But if he did that, Fish knew also that the warden and Bigboy would take specific security precautions against exactly what it was the white boy Bogart had planned. That would doom Bogart’s attempt, that would get Bogart killed. The assault on Thebes would come to nothing; Thebes, like an evil city of the ancient times, would go on and on and on. It was like a Rome, and no force could bring it down except time’s slow track.

  The other course demanded more belief. It was harder. It was hardest of all, because it could be construed by his own self as the cowardly way. That was to say nothing, and let Bigboy work his way through the convict population, hunting the disease of hope, until at last, depending on the courage of those who fell under his lash, it reached himself. This way played for time, and in that time the gamble was the white man Bogart would assemble his forces and smite the evil, wipe them off t
he face of the earth, and that he, Fish, would be here to see it. It was a coward’s way, for the first path surely guaranteed that he would himself get the lash, for even if the warden and Bigboy believed he was telling the truth, they’d take him to the last drop of blood to ascertain if what he said was truth. He would avoid that, but he would live with the screams of the whipped in the Whipping House, that anguish that floated every night damp and heated on the gentle breezes, so that all could hear and all could fear.

  That is, if Bogart the white boy came. For many a man speaks powerfully when full of wrath, and makes great promises of what will come. Yes, and just as many a man forgets his pledge in the light of day after a woman’s soft caress or the numbing blur and comfort of whiskey, or the purr of a satisfied child cuddling with its daddy, and the warmth of a blazing hearth. These things, and a million or so others, will make cowards out of most men, who will not give them up to come back to muddy hell and set things right. They forget quickly, their memories erode, and after all, the men of Thebes were lost already. Maybe the white boy Bogart would be like that. What white boy, after all, would risk his neck to save a passel of niggers? Never happened before, maybe never would after.

  But goddamning himself to hell, Fish decided at long last, after many a bitter and sleepless and scream-filled night, to believe in the white boy. That fellow had something, for sure. Something in the way his eyes blazed with death’s promise, and he took all this righteously, as if personal. He would ride that pale horse back with God’s mighty scythe and cut down the wicked of Thebes. That’s what Fish concluded. It was his only faith.

  So he would give the white boy Bogart another week. He would give him till dark of the moon. Then he would stop the hurting and the dying by taking it on himself. Until that time, he would be hard of heart while yessin’ and shuckin’ and smilin’ and crawlin’ before the white demons. He hoped it earned him one thing: not a dispensation from hell, for he knew that was where he was going, but only the knowledge that certain others would be arriving at that destination first, or at least soon after.

  THROUGH these long nights of screaming, the warden slept soundly. He had taught himself from long practice not to be affected by the grim necessities of power. Power is what it must do, and if it lacks the will to do it, it will not remain power much longer. That is the rule of history, as written by the Romans and the Spanish and the British. He had made peace with it.

  He slept soundly, for he knew that whatever had to be done, he was a truly good man.

  47

  IT seemed to take forever. Sam stood there, trans-fixed, caught up in the utter fragility of it. His fingers, not ideally distributed against the tension of the ribbon, nevertheless held it taut, and with his other hand he pinned the cardboard box flat. He had very little room to move, not without disturbing his hands and somehow altering the tension on the ribbon which, if he had figured this thing out correctly, could release the firing pin of what had to be an M1 Pull Firing Device, or something similar, which would allow the spring-driven striker to plunge forward against whatever primer was in the package, and the whole thing would go ka-boom. End of house. End, more to the point, of Sam.

  He tried to recollect the thing. The M1s were ubiquitous in the war, standard equipment for rigging booby traps in defensive positions, but common to any artillery or mortar unit as well. For if you were in danger of being overrun and didn’t want your guns to fall into enemy hands, you could unscrew the fuse of a shell, screw in the M1, pull out the safety pins (two of them), and run a cord from the big ring at the end of the device to your position under cover. One pull on that ring, and the dance began and ended one second later with that big ka-boom. No guns for the Germans to turn against us, as they were wont to do.

  Sam forced himself to concentrate. In that way, he drove from his imagination the fear and the discomfort. The discomfort, however, was not so easily vanquished. It refused to obey his will and insisted on manifesting itself in the cramps that had begun to spread through his awkwardly splayed fingers, in the itchy sweat catching in his hairline, in the sudden weight of his glasses, which had slipped down his nose and were pinching his nostrils and clotting his breathing, in the needles that had begun to prickle in his feet as the blood collected there, and in the dryness of throat and mouth as his throat grew raspy. It seemed as if the atoms of his clothes were increasing in density and acquiring weight, until they were pressing against his skin and constricting his chest.

  He heard the sirens. He was aware, somewhere, of great activity. It had to be outside, and soon the familiar pulsing red illumination of fire and police department emergency lights came flashing through the windows. If a crowd gathered—as why would it not?—he heard that too, that low human buzz of a species drawn hypnotically to drama, hungry to see and feel another’s tragedy.

  Yet no one appeared.

  He waited and waited. The seconds seemed to liquefy and elongate, like drops falling off a window sill, fighting gravity till the last, until a final gossamer broke and off they plunged, slowly, slowly to obliteration.

  Goddammit, when will they get here?

  When will somebody get here?

  The sweat now ran lazily down his face, irritating under normal circumstances, insanely bothersome under these. He scrunched his brow to stop it, and failed; it cascaded down, and his knees knocked, and his heart thudded.

  He imagined that at any second the pin could slip that final millionth of an inch from where it now prevented the striker from plunging, and one hundredth of a second later there would be no Sam, only a crater in the block where Sam used to live.

  At last a door opened.

  “Mr. Sam?” came a timid voice from outside.

  Sam recognized it as Sheriff Harry Debaugh.

  “Harry! Thank God you’re here.”

  “What you got in there, Mr. Sam?”

  “I think it’s a sixty-millimeter mortar shell with a detonating thing screwed into the fuse. Pull it all the way out, it goes off. I started, and, well, anyway, I stopped just as I felt the pressure of a spring. So now I am hung up but good. I can’t move. If I relax, I think it’ll go.”

  “What should we do, Mr. Sam?”

  He didn’t know! He had no idea!

  “Well, call Camp Chaffee and surely they have an explosive ordnance disposal team with equipment. That would be one thing.” Why do I have to think of these things myself? They should be on the way now! “Or try, let’s see, Little Rock would have a bomb squad. Maybe they could get here faster. I don’t think the state police boys up at Fayetteville could get here in time. Harry, I could drop this at any second, goddammit. My hands are cramping up something fierce.”

  “Sam, you hold tight. I’ll make them calls.”

  Another geologic epoch crawled by. One-celled animals evolved into fishes and plants and dinosaurs and then snakes and bugs and dogs and birds and monkeys and finally men came into the picture. Cave-dwellers arrived and departed, and then the Greeks, the Romans, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the terrible nineteenth century with its Civil War, and then, fifty-one full years and two major wars into this one, Harry again piped up.

  “Sam, it’s going to take at least an hour. The Army people have to git together. I’ve rung up state police and they’ll escort ’em in, sirens an’ all, but, dammit, I don’t think it’ll be no sooner.”

  Sam knew he couldn’t last that long. He had another twenty minutes at most before his fingers reached muscle failure, and then the ribbon would slip and it would be over.

  “Sam, you sure? I mean, it could just be a bottle of bourbon.”

  “No! Goddammit, I smelled Cosmoline. In arms depots, small arms and ammo are stored in a penetrating grease called Cosmoline. Its smell sinks into everything. This shell must have been wrapped up in excelsior from the place where it was stored. I smelled it as I was pulling the ribbon. That’s why I stopped.”

  “Sam, you hold on now. No need gittin’ upset.”


  I am one tenth of a second from being blown to smithereens, but I AM NOT UPSET.

  “Listen, Harry. I can’t hold this position much longer. What I need is a cool young volunteer. Someone who can cut the cardboard away so that we can see what we have. Then maybe I can improvise a way to defuse the thing.”

  “Sam, I can’t order no man to—”

  “I said volunteer, dammit!”

  “All right, Sam, hold your water. I’ll ask.”

  Harry disappeared, and again Sam stood alone in the living room. He glanced around as the seconds pulled their long tails by. He could see a wedding picture of himself and his wife on a shelf, he could see a radio, he could see a picture taken at Hot Springs and one in Miami, the whole family, all those kids who would now grow up without a father. He could see plaques from Kiwanis and Rotary and the Masons and the Chamber of Commerce. He could see books from the Book-of-the-Month Club and Life magazines and Time magazines piled up in the magazine rack, but no damn television, as he wouldn’t have one in the house. He could see…he could see his whole damned life and how little it came to, how much nothing it was.

  God, if I get out of this one, I swear I’ll do SOMETHING. Don’t know what, but something.

  He knew who it was from, of course. It could have come from but one source.

  Goddamn them, they got me. I thought I got away clean, but they got me. They reached into Arkansas, into my house, into the bosom of my family, where my children gathered, and they got me and they would have killed them all.

  The bitterness was so intense he almost yanked the ribbon that last quarter inch just to release it. But he didn’t.

  Oh, Lord, he thought, just let me survive this and get my licks in.

  And then Harry was back. Sam sensed him sliding nervously up to the house and lingering there in the lee of the door, breathing hard.