Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  “Of course. I understand that. That is how you think. That is fine. I accept that. Only it cannot stand as is.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I will do that part.”

  Earl squinted.

  “I don’t think that’s so good an idea, Mr. Trugood. You yourself said you’re best behind a desk. Now suddenly you want to be up there where there’s lead flying all over the place and things can get messy. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and I guarantee you that’ll happen. Some of these boys may catch one, and I may even catch one. I don’t want you catching one. You didn’t sign up for that kind of work.”

  “Believe me, Sergeant, I am no hero. I will do nothing heroic. I have no intention of going in harm’s way. I’ll retreat happily to my desk and wait for a call from you telling me all’s well. But I must get a craft up there, something big enough to take all who want to escape away in the morning.”

  “If you take a craft up there, you will tip off the boys at Thebes exactly what we’ve got cooking in our little pot. So there would be no point in going. So why go at all? You can’t have it two ways. You go in hard and trust what comes will be better, or you don’t go in. That I know.”

  “Seemingly immutable, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “So I thought it out. I thought it out, and I came up with something. You’ve heard of the Trojan Horse?”

  It touched something in Earl from long ago. Couldn’t quite get it straight, but sure enough he had it filed away for future usage back there among the point of impact of a .30–06 with a quarter value wind drift and the proper way to regulate the rate of fire on the gas pipe under a Browning Automatic Rifle barrel.

  “Some old thing. Some big wooden horse, raiders was inside. The boys in the city, they thought it was a gift. Now me, I’d have burned it right there on the plain. That’s how a sergeant thinks. But them boys brought it in, and that night the raiders slipped out and started slitting throats.”

  “That’s it exactly.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to have a horse built, though.”

  “No, sir. Not at all.”

  “What will you build then?”

  “I’ve worked this out neatly. It’ll be a barge full of prefabricated housing materials. To build a church. A minister is starting up a flock for the lost Negroes of the swamp. Now the boys won’t like that, but they won’t quite know what to do. What they don’t know is that anyone will see that the beams and the steeples and the roofing triangles can be quickly assembled into rafts. That way, there’s an escape.”

  Earl considered. He didn’t like it. But then, he wasn’t paying for it, so in a sense it didn’t matter what he didn’t like.

  “You sound so set I can’t see much point in trying to talk you out of it. I have to tell you, in the morning, my boys ain’t going to be hanging around to help folks put rafts together out of church parts. Our plan stays the same. We hit hard and burn the place and shoot any and all armed men. We free the prisoners, we blow the levee, and we’re out of there at first light. My men ain’t the kind to be helping old ladies get aboard rafts. You understand that?”

  “Totally. It is time the Negro race learned to fend for itself. Surely someone among them will grasp the possibility. I’ll simply have the barge towed upriver, moored, and the boatman will leave. I’m simply providing an opportunity. It helps me sleep the night.”

  “Then if it don’t have nothing to do with my people, you will do what you have to do.”

  “Good, Earl. You understand that.”

  “I do.”

  “So I will be off. I have to get to Pascagoula, set all this up. That is all.”

  Earl didn’t like it a bit. Any little thing out of the norm would send the Thebes boys out scurrying. All they had to do was put more men on night patrol, erect the smallest little fortifications, set up flare patterns or wire, and the whole thing got shaky.

  “You go ahead then.”

  “Earl, I have to say one thing. I’m very proud of what we’re doing. It’s the right thing. I’m so glad you found men who would fight for this cause.”

  “Sir, you put that out of your mind. These boys ain’t fighting for no cause at all. Most of ’em don’t care much for the Negroes, if they thought about it a bit, which I doubt they done. They’re doing it because it’s their nature. They’re gunmen. Some have been in it, some haven’t, but they’ve all got to go to the dark valley one time or one more time and see what kind of fellows they are. That’s all they care about. They ain’t no Holy Rollers. They’re bitter, tough old birds, and if you make ’em into something they ain’t, you will be powerfully disappointed.”

  “I expect all righteous armies are like that.”

  “Wouldn’t know about that, sir. To me, armies are just men doing what they think is right and proper, for whatever reason.”

  “So be it.”

  He shook Earl’s hand, and walked off.

  Earl went back to the porch and watched him go away.

  Finally, it was time.

  He opened up the telegram from Sam, held it in his hand for a second before unfolding it.

  Hope you’re with me, Mr. Sam. Lord, I hope you’re with me.

  It said:

  UP 73. STOP. CORRECT FOR WIND 15 RIGHT. STOP. FIRE FOR EFFECT. STOP. SAM.

  Earl smiled. For whatever reason, Sam had come around. That meant but one thing: blow them off the face of the earth.

  Dark of the moon, Earl thought, I will do just that.

  49

  FINALLY, Moon.

  Of course, Moon.

  Who but Moon?

  Moon was given up by Charles who was given up by Noah who was given up by Vonzell who was given up by Roosevelt who was given up by Titus who was given up by Raymond who was given up by George Washington Carver who was given up by Orpheus who was given up by Three Finger.

  “You must be prepared for Moon, Sergeant Bigboy,” the warden counseled. Yes, Moon was different than the rest, and Moon demanded special consideration, so Bigboy had gone to the world’s greatest authority on the male Negro miscreant, classification, behavior, psychology and complexity: the warden, who knew everything about them.

  “Moon is a monster, and he is a hero,” the warden lectured. “Moon is all the nobility of the Negro race, its courage, its endurance, its cleverness, its strength, its physicality. Yet he is also all its flaws, its seething, never vanquished anger, its innocence about the complex, its inability to concentrate on one goal, its refusal to put today’s small pleasures aside for next year’s bigger payoff, its ready will to violence of no point, its omnivorous sexual hunger above all else, its insane refusal to consider consequences. Moon is all these things and more.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bigboy, awed as always at the man’s wisdom.

  “You’ve seen the records,” said the warden. “Moon has been a pimp, a gambler, a boxer, a confidence man. He has beaten men to death for money, and he ran a string of high yellers in Jackson. He has had money. He has drunken wine and bubbly champagne. He has won immense amounts betting on the ponies. He has had fine clothes, an automobile, an army of go-fers and factotums. He has raped, pillaged, burned, pirated, done evil by violence, cut men to death with knives. And all before he was twenty-two, at which point he shot and killed a Negro gangster named Jelly Belly Long, but the bullet traveled through Jelly Belly and struck a white child named Rufus, who had been down in the dark part of town with his holy-rolling mother, preaching the word to the fallen Negroes of Jackson’s bitterest streets. Nobody cared about Jelly Belly; but the death of Rufus just barely avoided getting Moon lynched or tarred and feathered, and only because the judge was a noted radical did he allow for Moon’s lack of intent toward the boy Rufus, and so put Moon away for life plus two hundred and made him, shortly, by the natural order of things, the new king of Parchman Farms. There he killed three guards, five convicts, escaped twice, once for six months, and that at last had him removed to Thebes a
nd the Ape House.”

  “Yes, I had heard the stories, sir.”

  “So if you take Moon, you must take him hard and well. You must tell him at the start who his master is, and strip him of hope, which is the root of courage.”

  “Yes, sir. But if I get him before the whip, I will break him.”

  “I know you will, son.”

  So, at last, Moon.

  Taking him down was hard. The guards went in during the dead of night with twice the usual detail. They beat him in his bunk while others with shotguns held his boys off. Bleeding, chained and dazed, he was dragged to the black vehicle and taken to the Whipping House.

  Twice he awakened and mutinied, breaking a man’s jaw, caving in three ribs of another before he was subdued by another blizzard of blows. But his rebelliousness only put off the inevitable, and the inevitable had at last arrived. He was alone with Bigboy.

  Moon was chained to the post, and it was early in the morning with a gray dawn beginning to edge its way into the day. Candles had burned low.

  “I expect you’ll fight me pretty hard, Moon,” said Bigboy, who had stripped to his skin so that his muscles, every bit as sculpted and magnificent as Moon’s, gleamed.

  “You can’t bust me, boss,” said Moon. “Ain’t got no bust in me. Yo’ arm goin’ tire afore I sing yo’ song.”

  “Now Moon, if I remember, it’s been a time since you tasted the lash.”

  “Ain’t never tasted no whippin’, boss.”

  “Of course not. Then, why now? And to what point? This would be so easy. You tell me who whispered to you the magic words ‘pale horse coming.’ Then you sit back, have a nice Pepsi-Cola, and I’ll find that boy. I will have a talk with him. Then I will know what I am charged to know and it will be all fine here at the Farm.”

  “Ain’t tellin’ you nuffin’, boss man. You think you can beat it out of Moon, you go ahead. Moon done been beat before.”

  “But Moon, not by a whip man. I am a whip man. I can do things with a whip that will amaze you.”

  Bigboy thought of the massive muscle-ripple expanse of Moon’s broad back as his new canvas. He would need all his strength. He would be pressed to the maximum, forced to find new creativities of torture.

  “Let’s try this for a start,” said Bigboy. “Tell me what you think.”

  He unfurled the whip, gave it a crack like a gunshot as its tip broke the sound barrier, then unleashed five fast snaps like darts at five nerve points on Moon’s broad back.

  Moon jacked hard at each bite, for at the nerves the man is most vulnerable, and pain rocketed to his brain.

  “How was that, Moon? Help me here? Was it much?”

  “My ol’ daddy done hit me harder than that, boss.”

  “Tell me, Moon, did he hit harder than this?”

  THE Whipping House filled the air with screams that night, and the night after and the night after. It was an epic battle, if a bit one-sided. The whip man punished, the convict endured. On and on it went, the agonized screams floating like an unholy vapor, seeming to hang in all the air and casting upon it all a pall. Evil things were being done; everybody knew it.

  At the Store, the black women of Thebes were especially surly. They could smell the blood floating in the heavy jungle air. They stood in their line with their tickets to get their pound of bacon, their five pounds of flour, their pound of coffee, and no one said a word. Usually, this was the best part of the week, for it was release from the muddy, grueling sameness of Thebes, the despair, the fear of men in the night with dogs. But no more. The women languished, silent, untouchable. Admitted, they did their business and left, for the long walk back through the piney woods. They never looked back; they traveled alone, and swiftly.

  But perhaps the ordeal was hardest of all on Fish. Not that you would have noticed. Fish went about his ways, merrier, it seemed, than ever. He stopped in the kitchen house for the day’s supply of lunches for the field hands, filled up his water can, and then rode about the fields with his wagon and his two mules, jingling wherever he went, bringing palaver, a note of cheer, a desperate hunger to entertain.

  Nobody was in a mood to be entertained. Too many had gone in the night, screamed their nights away, and never returned. The guards were testy too, for they too had known something was up, that the pale horse was said to be coming, that their empire, so stable, so beautifully constructed, so munificent, was possibly in jeopardy. This led to an outbreak of twitchy-finger-itis, a disease that primarily afflicts men with guns in charge of men without them, where every shadow is seen to be a threat, every comment a promise of violence to come. Three men were shot, one fatally, over behaviors that in other circumstances would have been dismissed with a laugh, or at most with a smack or two upside the head.

  The warden, who had the only working telephone in the prison, worked it hard every day. He called his network of snitches up and down the river, the politicians he owned in Jackson and Pascagoula, the sheriffs throughout the piney woods. He was reassured that the word was the same.

  “Bigboy,” he said at their nightly meeting, just before his bedtime and Bigboy’s session with the recalcitrant Moon, “there is nothing going on. Not a damn thing. If anybody seeks to move against us, they must come up the river or through the piney woods. I have instructed all to be wary of groups of armed men assembling here or there. They are on the lookout. All is clear. No one can come move against us without coming to us, pale horse or not. Only God could deposit men on our doorsteps without us hearing about it three days in advance.”

  “Paratroopers,” said Bigboy, more given to tactical considerations. “They could ’chute in.”

  But the warden surprised him; he’d thought of this one too.

  “I think not, Sergeant. That would involve a goodly expenditure, training, almost certainly some sort of government intervention at some level. Our people in the government who support this endeavor would find out about it, and it could not be done in secret. Who would support financially such an enterprise? No, we have no fears from the sky, at least not from a force large enough to do us any harm. No one coming in here without our knowing about it three days ahead.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bigboy, much assured. Then he went off to his assignation with Moon, and the warden went sleepily to bed.

  FISH was having a nightmare. In the nightmare he was underwater, amid the field of dead Negroes chained to the concrete blocks of their own doom. He clawed for the surface, but he was held down. He pulled amid bubbles and sparkle in the water, his lungs all but exploding, his consciousness ebbing away. He could see faces just above the surface, all white, all laughing. Bigboy was there, just enjoying it so much, a nigger drowning slowly just beyond the surface. Fish saw his own dying face reflected in the darkness of Bigboy’s sunglasses, where so much woe had been mirrored. The warden, too: not laughing, but intent, in that preoccupied way of his, as if relating things to things as was his tendency, always seeing the methodical connection, the link, the pattern in all things, pedantic, prosaic, a mechanic in the art and science of keeping the Negro down. He saw Section Boss with that goddamned motherfucker gun he carried everywhere, just guffawing away. He saw Moon, too. Moon, however, was a white man, though big and just as carved up by his adventures in the Jackson underworld, and Moon was laughing at little old Fish, the fixer, the smuggler, the bringer and taker, dying under the water. And he saw the white boy, Bogart, his savior. He was laughing because he was not coming to save Fish or any of them. That was the biggest joke of all.

  Fish jerked awake.

  He looked around on his pallet. He saw nothing in the darkness, no movement, nothing. He slept in his own room, as a senior trustee in the trustees’ quarters, where the men like him who had responsible prison jobs and good incomes from illegal activities by which they could pay off the guards lived in relative comfort, far from the squalor of the field barracks or the Ape House.

  Something was different.

  He looked out through a barless windo
w at the swamp, slightly agleam in the shimmery light of a shrinking moon. He saw water shining, the shadows of the bent trees, the snaky limbs and twisted fronds. Frogs, maybe a coyote, small mammals, ’gators: they slithered around out there. The crickets sounded.

  What was different?

  Then he had it.

  There was no screaming.

  Moon had been broken.

  50

  THE old bastards were making Earl crazy. He wanted to shoot them all. They were like old ladies, bickering among themselves, forming allegiances, then selling each other out in a trice and forming new ones. But also holding ancient, ruinous grudges, beyond any notions of forgiveness or grace. No Marine unit could have functioned with so much inner strife, but for these old fellows bitterness was one of the great joys of life. What was the point of being old if you couldn’t hate your brothers?

  Elmer hated Jack. This had to do with a philosophical issue, to be sure: Elmer was a believer in the theory of the big, slow bullet, while Jack only cared for small, fast bullets. But it was more than that, and if one had switched to the other argument, the other would counterswitch just to be not on the same side. Basically, each felt entitled to the leadership of what might be called the gun world. Each was a king. Each had a magazine that published his comments and research, each had a retinue of followers (who hated each other too, even more than the two old rulers), each had connections with certain gun manufacturers (Jack with Winchester, whose products he used exclusively, Elmer with Smith & Wesson, likewise). Each said nasty things about the other whenever it was possible. Each acted with arrogance and majesty. Each had killed over six hundred wild game animals, and while Elmer had once busted broncs and was very cowboy in his way, Jack saw himself as an aristocrat or even an intellectual of the rifle, and had no popular gifts and no interest in them. Elmer could spin a yarn, Jack could deliver a lecture. Each held to his positions as fiercely as rival party chairmen, which of course they were.