Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  But at least Jack and Elmer didn’t fight directly. Theirs was more of an oblique thing, the soft comment made just in earshot, the stony frigidity that expressed itself in formal politeness too ostentatious to be real.

  “Morning, Mr. O’Brian.”

  “Mr. Kaye.”

  “What’s that pipe tobacco, sir?”

  “Why, Briarwood. With a touch of gingerroot.”

  “Oh, say, I’ll bet that’s a nice flavor. Favor rougher stuff than that, I do, but as they say, each to his own.”

  “Yes, Mr. Kaye. Each to his own.”

  As for direct confrontations, that was a specialty of the border patrolman and ex–pistol champion Charlie Hatchison. The other five men and Earl were at least unified in one thing: their hatred of Charlie.

  Charlie was addicted to aggression. He never tired of telling the others he had killed seventeen men, and if asked, he’d speak all night on the details of each victory, the weight and design of the bullet, its placement in the flesh, whether the opponent died quickly, well shot, or, alas in the case of a poor Wehrmacht soldat whom the old bastard had pretty much simply executed, slowly, crying for vasser and mama. Charlie never tired of that one.

  “You should have seen the look on that poor boy’s face when my .38 punctured his lung. Never seen nothing like it. It was as if he’d been poleaxed. But he doesn’t fall. Now here’s the interesting thing. He sits down, very formally, by God, as if he’s afraid he’s going to dirty up his trousers and get in trouble with God or something. Ha! Never saw nothing like it. On the border, you shoot a Mex, he just goes all floppy, crybabying to his goddamned Catholic God or whatever them beaner people b’lieve in, but this German feller, he managed to kick off real slow like.”

  That was Charlie is a gentle mood. In the more common pugnacious mood he’d strut around looking for a fight, and it didn’t matter to him if it were verbal or physical. His special target was the other border patrolman, the gigantic, taciturn Bill Jennings, another damned writer (all these boys was writers!) for the guns and hunting books, and Charlie loved to needle Bill.

  “Bill, you sure you’re what you call a human being? Don’t say nothing. Don’t even kill nothing. You just go around with that mug of yours, bluffing folks to surrender.”

  “Maybe it’s his reputation,” said Elmer.

  “Hell, just ’cause he was on a television show drawing and shooting a Ping-Pong ball don’t mean he’s got no reputation, except maybe with that phony-baloney host. I mean a man-killing reputation.”

  “They say he’s the fastest man with a gun ever.”

  “Hell, he looks like a goddamned mummy. He ain’t faster than that old man over there, that is, if you can wake him.”

  It was true. Ed McGriffin showed up with his lovely little granddaughter Sally in tow, and she made his meals individually, presquashing everything and soaking it in milk so the old boy could get it down. And somehow, she slipped into making all the meals, and the men just let her, including Earl, who was amazed at her energy, her matter-of-factness and her endurance for no guff at all. She chased that damn Charlie out of there at least three times, suspecting, rightly, that he had something unseemly up his sleeve.

  Meanwhile, old Ed just sat in a rocker on the front porch, sometimes rocking, sometimes dozing, with a nice pleasant look on his old face. He wore a tie every day and a three-piece suit, and carried with him a gigantic hat that dwarfed his almost hairless, egg-shaped head.

  “That old man forgot more about shooting than you’ll ever learn in a dozen lifetimes, Charlie,” said Elmer.

  “Maybe he does, but what the hell good it do anybody if he sleeps all the time? Earl, wasn’t you being a mite over optimistic when you invited that geezer?”

  “That old man invented fast, Charlie.”

  “Ah! Earl, you done read too many of those True West books. You b’lieve all that hokum.”

  “Charlie, Earl would know a thing or two,” Elmer said. “He killed what you killed thirty times over. Only, he don’t yammer on it all day long. They don’t give out them big medals to no ’counts, that I know.”

  “I don’t doubt but that Earl had a good day or two in the war. I’m talking about a lifetime of warring. I’m talking about living by the gun with the gun, with the gun’s quickness, for over thirty years. That would be me. Y’all boys just talked on it and figured on it and wrote it up like you done it. Hell, I was there! I done it.”

  At that there came a wet, slurpy sound, and it was old Ed, gobbling down whatever damp stuff his system manufactured while he dozed, but now he’d come awake.

  “Charlie, if you shot as much as you talked, there wouldn’t be no Mexes left, nor no desperadoes. Yet we have a job agin’ desperadoes, so clearly you ain’t nothing but turkey poop.”

  “Grandpap, don’t you talk like that!” scolded pretty little Sally. “You’d be mighty embarrassed to face your maker if words like that were the last to cross your lips before you passed. You’d have a powerful lot of explaining to do.”

  “You listen to that purt’ gal,” said Charlie, who had a carnal streak in him as well and was known to place himself so that he could get a good, uninterrupted look at the young woman. “’Cause you don’t want to check out with no blasphemy on your tongue.”

  “And as for you, Charlie Hatchison,” said Sally, “why, you can say any damn thing you care to, for no amount of amening and dear Lording and holding back on the blasphemy is going to keep you from frying up all bubbly crisp in Hell like a chicken leg, and that’s a fact!”

  Everybody laughed, for Charlie was pure unrepentant sinner man. Everybody laughed, that is, except for Jack O’Brian, busy reading some flashy new book like Plutarch’s dialogues or Marcus Aurelius’s commentaries, who merely huffed majestically from across the room, as if his dignity had been ruffled by all the snippy spatting, and he felt so annoyed he had petitioned to make his feeling known.

  FINALLY, the last of them showed, late and a little bedraggled. Audie Ryan climbed out of his MG sports car with a busted lip, a black eye and patches of scab on his knuckles. His fancy cowboy duds were all messed up.

  “Audie, where you been, boy?” asked Charlie Hatchison. “You look like you got the worst part of it.”

  “Don’t know why boys in bars always decide I need to be taken down a notch or two. I just wanted a damned beer. But twice, once in New Mexico, once in Tennessee, I had a bully wanted to smack me around some. Boys, don’t ever get your picture on the cover of Life magazine. All kinds of mischief can spring from it!”

  So, somehow, Charlie knew Audie, from some killers’ Valhalla in the San Fernando Valley or possibly in north Texas. But the others crowded ’round to shake hands with the famous young man, and he seemed to fit in right away, among men he’d not have to explain a thing to.

  He opened up the trunk of the car, pulled out his small leather suitcase and a machine gun.

  “Wow! Audie, what the hell is that gun? You are loaded for bear.”

  “I traded a long-barreled Luger for this from some tank sergeant in France after the war,” said the Texan. “Figured it might come in handy, and looks like I may be right.”

  “What the hell is it, Audie?”

  “I think it’s what they call a Strumgewehr. Model of nineteen forty-four. They call it an attack rifle.”

  “Them Germans,” Charlie said. “They had a goddamn name for everything.”

  Audie pulled the thing out. It was ugly like no gun any of them had ever seen, stamped from black metal, its furniture of plastic, its magazine a curved thing like a banana, extending from the well beyond the trigger guard. The whole gizmo had a pungent whiff of some alien future to it.

  “Looks like a goddamned ray gun,” Elmer said. “What’s it shoot, atoms?”

  “No, sir,” said Audie. “Some kind of short little bullet.”

  “It shoots a 7.92 short,” said Charlie. “If they’d have had them early enough, we’d be holding this conversation in German.”
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br />   “It’s a lot handier than a carbine or my old Thompson,” said Audie. “And it’s pretty accurate, and it’s got more punch. It’s like a combination of a carbine and a tommy.”

  “Goddamned no ’count little bullets,” said Elmer.

  “The bullets aren’t particularly small, Mr. Kaye,” said Jack O’Brian. “Those are .324s. But the case is quite short, so it never develops rifle velocity. You could say it combines the best parts of a carbine and a Thompson, or you could say it combines the worst parts: too heavy, not enough punch. And I hope you have a lot of ammo for it, young man.”

  “Well, some.”

  “Little damn bullets,” said Elmer.

  “Yeah, Elmer, but when he hits you with it, it’s like a hose. You get three in one second, six in two. That’ll do the damned job,” argued Charlie, contrary as always.

  “If Mr. Jack O’Brian has his way, that’s what we’d all end up carrying. Little goddamn guns with little goddamn bullets. I’ll stick with my .44s, thanks very much, if it’s all the same.”

  “Mr. Kaye, you are a cantankerous, obstinate, obdurate sonofabitch.”

  “Can someone please translate that into English?” said Elmer grumpily. “My Latin’s a little rusty.”

  “I think I got the ‘sonofabitch’ part just right.”

  But before the two oldsters could square off, Audie defused the situation by piping up with, “Is that Ed McGriffin?” He had spied the old man sleeping softly on the porch through all this blabbing.

  “Yeah, but don’t wake him!”

  “Howdy there,” Audie sang to young Sally.

  “Well, howdy yourself,” she replied.

  “Oh, I think it’s lovey-dovey at first sight!” said Elmer. “I think we got us a thang goin’ on here.”

  Earl watched the two young people with an interest that surprised him. He hadn’t thought that out, and he didn’t want some romance gumming up the works here. Shit. It annoyed him, he didn’t know why.

  But Audie said quickly, “No, sir, I am just payin’ my proper respects is all. Ma’am, pleased to meet you. My name is Audie Ryan.”

  “I saw you in a cowboy picture,” she said.

  “I hate them pictures,” Audie said. “You have to wear girly makeup, and most of the men are kind of flower-sniffing, if you know what I mean. It ain’t no work for a Texan.”

  “Pays good though, don’t it, Audie?”

  “Hell, I just use the money for booze, more guns and a fancy car or two. Ain’t nothing big about it.”

  “I thought the picture was pretty good,” she said. “Cowboy and all. Lots of cowboys.”

  “Well, girlie,” said Charlie, “if that’s your taste, you are definitely hanging out at the right medicine lodge. This here is the last corral, and we are, by God, the last cowboys. And we are riding out to our last big gun affray. After us, it’s all gone.”

  “Yee haw,” said Elmer. “That is the goddamned truth.”

  “I’d drink to that!”

  Even Bill Jennings, silent as the sphinx, let a smile crease the lower portion of the battered Hoplite shield he carried around as a face.

  “Well, while you all are drinking and telling each other how big and brave you are, and welcoming this here fellow, I’m out there trying to find some new way to fancy up franks and beans. So you just go on, you heroes!”

  Sally stormed out, and the old men, and the new young one, hastened after, to avoid her wrath.

  51

  AS he said he would, Davis Trugood drove straight through the night and arrived the next day in Pascagoula. The old city lay balmy in the soft breezes off the bay, and Davis stopped just outside of town, rented a room in a tourist home, took a nice shower, put on a new suit of white linen, a fresh spruce white shirt and a nice yellow tie. Meanwhile, his driver buffed up his shoes to a fine shine.

  At 3:00 P.M., they drove into Pascagoula, but he wasn’t looking for a place to have a church prefabricated under crash conditions, as he had told Earl. In fact, had Earl and Sam seen what happened next, it would have boggled their minds no end at all. For with no hesitation whatsoever, Mr. Trugood’s driver headed them downtown and swiftly found the town hall on Pascagoula Street, where a crowd had gathered and some sort of festivity was soon to commence. The driver guided the large black car to the curbside, where indeed a red carpet lay, its destination the stairway into that ancient, distinguished building.

  Davis Trugood stepped out.

  Flashbulbs popped.

  Applause arose.

  A tide of well-wishers engulfed the man, pumping his hand, welcoming him back, assuring him that everything was as he had planned.

  There, standing proudly on the steps of the city hall, was the mayor, the assistant mayor, the chief of police, the president of the city council, three aldermen, two distinguished-looking gentlemen from the governor’s office in Jackson, ready to make excuses that the governor himself was not there to grace the proceedings with his presence.

  Davis, accompanied by two smartly dressed police officers, was taken to the confab at the top of the stairs, where handshakes were exchanged all around.

  Microphones were brought out, and quickly the mayor took over as master of ceremonies.

  “May I say, Mr. Davis Trugood, we are so happy to see you back on this wonderful day, which promises so much for our fair city, for its out-of-work ship chandlers and carpenters, for the entire region of southeast Mississippi, for all our citizens, for our nation forever.”

  More clapping and, smiling broadly, Davis Trugood acknowledged the applause.

  “These have been hard times,” the mayor continued. “With the war over and the Navy shrinking, Pascagoula ain’t the shipbuilding town it once was, and so our proud city has done seen itself on the decline. We have lost population to our northern neighbors. Our most talented young people have gone off to seek a better life in the North…” and of course it went on in that vein for quite some time, as the mayor was not one to speak succinctly when he could speak at length.

  A few other officials got their moment of glory, each to speak an equally fine piece complimenting each other, the great city of Pascagoula, the great state of Mississippi and the future.

  Finally, the mayor nodded, and an open limousine pulled up. The mayor ushered Mr. Trugood into its backseat, and, escorted by police motorcyclists and several other official cars, the small parade negotiated the few blocks to the waterfront where, outside a large building, another crowd awaited.

  The ceremony was repeated, though much attenuated this time through, and at last, Davis Trugood was allowed to speak.

  “Mr. Mayor,” he said. “I am happy to be here on this historic day, and I am so happy to have a small part in revitalizing this beautiful old town. I should tell you how this came to pass. In the North, where I do my business, where certain things are taken for granted, where I have prospered, we count upon one thing: the immutability of earth. Earth there is solid. It is unmoving, unyielding and permanent. You may dig into it, build upon it, mold it, channel it, sculpt it, landscape it. But here, earth is shaky. It is soupy, tangential, marginal stuff, which may not be trusted. The history of your region is a tragedy of rivers taking their revenge. Well, sir, it occurred to me that I would take my revenge on the river. Yes, sir, I would find a way to defeat the river, at least in a small way, and seize from it its most disturbing violence, the violence it does to our dearly departed, those who gave so much to establish us here in what we call civilization.”

  The applause was nice.

  “And so I have researched and invested heavily in this new factory. I have hired over fifty of your best artisans and I have provided them with the best materials. From quality lumber to quality caulking to quality joinery, and at a surprisingly modest price, for I am a kind man and wish not to make a profit but to assuage the anguish of grieving. I will, from this base, ship throughout the riverine southland, reaching into swamp and forest and creek and quay, and in that way, I will reduce the ache
of pain that a man feels when not only is his home or farm devastated by water but his progenitors are so destroyed. Therefore, I give you the Trugood Waterproofed Casket Company.”

  The applause was slapped dryly against the gulf breeze and the smell of the river was everywhere.

  “The new Trugood waterproof coffin is impervious to the ravages of the river. Your loved ones’ mortal remains will remain exactly as they were when they passed. Your rural poor will no longer have to consign the dead to the uncertainty of the water table, nor to store them aboveground in stone mausoleums that we understand to be baking ovens that do as much damage as the water, only faster.

  “Therefore, today we begin to ship to the immediate region.” Of course, there was no need to point out that this commercial enterprise, well financed by Mr. Trugood, was hastened to accomplishment by numerous gifts, loans, presents, and promises he had given the good politicians of Pascagoula and surrounding counties.

  “Today we ship to the Biloxi Bayou. We ship up the Pear River. We ship into Louisiana and into Alabama. We ship upriver even, so that our wares may even meet the benighted and isolated souls of counties such as George and Greene and even the farthest and most desolate, Thebes. Yes, friends, we consider this day the start of our revenge on the dark waters of Mississippi and all the grief and pain they have brought to our families.”

  52

  SAM had removed his family to St. Louis, where they lived with his wife’s mother, far from the retaliatory powers of the men of Thebes. He had become furtive, unsettled, paranoid. He knew he was on somebody’s kill list. He couldn’t even enjoy any time with the heroic Connie, whose finger had been stitched up and set (it was broken by the force of the descending striker), during which time she, of course, had made wisecracks and flirted with the young doctor. Sam had rented as cheaply and anonymously as possible a combination apartment-office in an undistinguished neighborhood of Little Rock, near the Air Force base, amid a sea of transients, where he could now but wait for Earl to strike in the dark of the moon and remove the threat against him and return his life to him.