Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  Anyhow, those two boys would have some fun together. And maybe it was better that all the parting took place in this strange way, without much of a final ceremony, just in little dribs and drabs. These were not men who spoke clearly of things they felt, and more often ran from them. So it was best for everybody that they just separated without much palaver.

  Only little Elmer was left, and he helped Earl clear the house. All the leftover provisions were buried, the beds stripped, everything returned to normal. The lease still had some time to run, and Earl allowed it best to let it run out, so no authority could ever link the abandonment of the farm in Florida with the strange events in Thebes two states over, though the only news so far was something Elmer heard on the radio about a flood in southeastern Mississippi, and the destruction it had wrought. It didn’t seem like anybody was making a big to-do about it.

  And then they were done and each was set to head off in a different direction.

  “So Earl, tell me now: Was it worth it?”

  “I think so,” Earl said. “But it all fades from memory fast, don’t it?”

  “Yes, it does. But I want your conviction, Earl. We did the right thing, didn’t we?”

  “I would say we did.”

  “A lot of men died that night. I never killed a man before. It’s different than a game animal, who’s lived a magnificent life and whose meat will honor my table as his head will honor my medicine lodge. But you don’t put no human heads on no walls, and maybe those boys thought they was serving a moral purpose.”

  “Maybe they did.”

  “So I don’t know, Earl. Maybe we’d have been best off to leave it all alone.”

  “I think we done right, Mr. Kaye. Something bad ugly wrong was going on down there—you could sense it yourself.”

  “That I could. It was the last stop at the end of the world, where there are no rules.”

  “Well, we were the ones that stopped it. Maybe there were other ways to stop it, but I don’t know them. And maybe what follows won’t be much better, but by God, one thing I know is it’ll be different. Maybe different is better enough.”

  “We shall see.”

  “We shall, indeed.”

  “I will say this, Earl. It was a hell of a fight. I will always take pleasure in the fight I fought and in the men I fought it with. It was a hell of a fight.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Earl, “it was the best damned fight I ever saw, that I deeply believe. And I’ve seen some fights in my time.”

  And with that, they parted, sworn between themselves by deepest bond to never speak of such things again.

  75

  THE boy was watching. He sat alone in the late afternoon, intent upon his task on the porch of the white house on the hill. He never spoke much, but he’d been speaking even less since his father had disappeared. But he was a noticer, a collector of information. He saw things, he tracked things, he filed them away for later recall and examination.

  He could see a flock of black crows in the trees off to the left. He knew they’d flown in from the west and would settle the night and fly out to the east in the morning at dawn. He could see the yellow thatch where the dried-out grass had lost its color, but knew also that it contained teeming wet microscopic life under the apparent dryness. He could see the occasional southward flight of Vs of high geese and duck, their trumpeting far off and incomplete. It was getting cooler. He sat, he watched, he waited. He thought.

  He knew other things. He knew his mother was desperately unhappy. He felt her tension, and it frightened him. She wasn’t speaking much these days either. The two of them lived in silence, ate in silence, slept in silence. His mother had become a different kind of watcher; she was the sort who watched, but never saw. She would stare for hours out the window and see nothing at all. Her fear had made her haggard. Though to the boy she was beautiful and would always be beautiful, he saw enough through his idealizations to realize that she was losing weight, her bones were showing, the knobs in her face were sharpening, and there was an emptiness coming into her eyes.

  The father was simply gone. It had been weeks now, and it cast a dark spell across the farm. It seemed even the plants felt it, and they withered in the sun, and now that it had begun to cool with the coming of autumn, everything seemed in a rush to go to brown.

  The boy would wake up in the night, sure he’d heard his father’s voice, rumbly hoarse and powerful, yet always with a kindness under it.

  “Daddy! Daddy!”

  “Bobby Lee, it isn’t your daddy,” his mama would call from her bedroom down the hall, where again she was lying but not sleeping.

  “I heard my daddy.”

  “No, Bobby Lee. You were dreaming, honey. It wasn’t him, I’m sorry.”

  So he would ask the next morning.

  “When is Daddy coming home?”

  His mother would stare off into the distance.

  “Honey, I do not know. He will come home when he is ready.”

  “Is he all right, Mama?”

  “Sweetie, it would take a tank to kill that man.”

  But the boy knew this was no answer. Yes, it would take a tank or something big and powerful and mean, but he had figured out that there were tanks in the world, as there were big, powerful, mean things, and that they killed people. There was a war in some place called Ko-ria and the older people and most of the boys talked about it every day, about how we had to stop them yellow commies and drive them back or they’d come over here and take over.

  Now he sat on a day like all the others, rotten in its sameness, and he watched as a car turned up the driveway and began to crawl toward the house.

  It wasn’t Mr. Sam’s car, that he knew. It had an aching familiarity about it, and in his heart, a thought exploded so fiercely he thought he’d die, but at the same time he fought it, for he knew he couldn’t face another disappointment.

  He prayed: Dear God, please let it be my daddy.

  This one time God listened, or so it seemed. The car pulled up, and Bob Lee now confirmed it was his daddy’s, and in that second, lumbering, strangely stiff, his father climbed out.

  “Daddy!” he screamed, loud enough to wake the dead, or even his mother from her solemnity, “Daddy!”

  “Well, howdy there, young man, say, ain’t you a big ’un. You know a boy named Bob Lee? Used to live here. Little squirt, whatever happened to that boy?”

  “Oh, Daddy!”

  The boy threw himself at the father, who swept him up, gave him a hug that was urgent in its intensity, then held him up to the sky at arm’s length in his two big hands.

  “Lord, you look good to this old man.”

  “Daddy, what happened? Was you in a fight?”

  His daddy’s ear was bandaged as was his left hand. His face was oddly swollen about the eyes, one of which was badly bloodshot. There was a darkness visible in the flesh of his face.

  “It’s nothing, Bob Lee. It’s all over. Don’t mean a damned thing. Oh, it’s good to see you, son! Say, what good would I be if I didn’t bring you something. Here, you see if you like this.”

  Earl took the boy to the trunk of the car, opened it, and there was a two-wheeled Schwinn bicycle, gleamy new, the twenty-four-inch model, purchased with the last few dollars in the late Davis Trugood’s operating fund.

  “Oh, Daddy!”

  “Yep. Figured it was time you learned to ride a two-wheeler.” The father pulled the bike from the car and dusted it off. “I will teach you—”

  This may have been the happiest moment in Bob Lee’s life. He already knew how to ride a two-wheeler. Jimmy Frederick, a school buddy, had one, and had showed him how, and for some reason Bob Lee just took to it so fast and natural it amazed Jimmy Frederick. Now Bob Lee climbed aboard, set the pedal, pumped hard that long first move, and shoved off, riding with no uncertainty about the farm yard.

  “Damn! Where’d you learn that trick?”

  Bob Lee’s face lit up in a blaze of intense pleasure.

 
“He’s a champion,” his mother said from the porch, her own voice lit with pleasure.

  “Howdy, ma’am,” said Daddy. “I brought you something, too.”

  “A new Crosley refrigerator, I hope.”

  “Naw, just some old flowers!”

  He pulled out a bouquet from the backseat of the car, a batch of roses red and dark as blood, and walked over to hand them to his wife. Then he kissed her hard, in a way that Bob Lee had never seen him before. His mother perked up something wonderful; it was like a parched plant getting a shot of water, and the leaves changing immediately.

  “Now you come here, Bob Lee.”

  Bob Lee obeyed.

  “I just want you both to hear this from my own lips. I had to go away, but now I am back. I will not be going nowhere again. I will be here with you forever and ever. Do you hear me? My adventures are over.”

  “Oh, Earl,” she said, as if she believed it.

  That night Bob Lee heard his father and mother talking earnestly. He knew something was different somehow. He could feel it in their voices. His father had changed in some small way, and that in turn led to a change in his mother. Whatever it was, Bob Lee couldn’t say, but he felt it. It scared him a little.

  Please God, he prayed, please don’t never take my father away.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many people came up with so many good ideas on this project I began to question, toward the end, whether I had anything to do with it at all.

  The great Weyman Swagger, one of the world’s finest natural editors, brought considerable intelligence to bear from start to finish. Behind that grizzled countenance lurks penetrating insight; he really gets it.

  Then my friend Lenne Miller, in the throes of a divorce, took time out from his anguish to pitch in a key idea and to remind me that I couldn’t write a book where the hero hates dogs.

  Usual suspects Mike Hill and Jeff Weber were there as needed.

  In my journalism life, I went to my editor, John Pancake, and said, “John, I have a question that the Arts Editor of The Washington Post certainly ought to be able to answer. How do you drain a swamp?”

  Here’s the scary part: he knew.

  He also was, as always, somewhat forgiving in his definition of acceptable time-in-office, which provided me the freedom to have the two careers going simultaneously and puts off that Big Choice another year or two, if not forever. Gene Robinson, Deb Heard and Peter Kaufman were equally forgiving on the present/ absent issue.

  Cellmates Henry Allen and Paul Richard were enthusiastic, which is a great help, believe me. Bill Smart, another great old Post guy, loaned me certain shooters’ biographies helpful in concocting my old men; and when office politics in the Style Section grow wearying, I can always turn to him for an illuminating discussion on much more important subjects such as: 9-mm vs. .40 S&W for personal defense, or 7-mm Remington Mag—enough for elk?

  Randy Mays, retired from a certain agency he can’t talk about, supplied me with a Department of Energy book on Los Alamos science that I kept too long, as I usually do. Sorry, Randy, but thanks so much.

  Also in Washington, Mike Jeck of the American Film Institute came up with that wonderful use for old cowboy movies.

  I should also mention the late Jim Schefter. Jim, author of The Race, and several other volumes, died before he could read this book, I’m sorry to say. But he caught a huge geographical mistake in Hot Springs that would have made me the recipient of dozens of snippy letters. I’m sure he’s up there in Writer’s Valhalla, taking his red Corvette through 180 fish-tails on gravel roads whenever possible.

  In cyberspace, my thanks go to Bob Beers, who voluntarily runs a Stephen Hunter website at www.stephenhunter.net. Why I don’t know, but he seems to enjoy it. My appreciation.

  I should mention also that the prison work songs are taken from the Alan Lomax collections—“Prison Songs I and II,” recorded by the great Mr. Lomax at Parchman in 1948—and are available from Rounder Records.

  In the gun world, I was able to spend a morning on the range with Jerry Miculek, the world’s greatest revolver shooter and the heir to Ed McGivern. Jerry, and his wife Kay Clark-Miculek, are fabulous people, and I had to pinch myself several times to remember that I was hanging out with someone at the level of Joe DiMaggio, who was nevertheless decent, approachable, helpful and whose insights on the care, feeding and fast manipulation of a revolver were of great help.

  Jerry came into my life through the good offices of Ken Jorgenson of Smith & Wesson, and Michael Banes of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, who convened a writers’ play-day at the Fairfax County Rod and Gun club. And to Ken, thanks so much for other considerations.

  My good friend John Bainbridge spent a wet, cold, muddy week with me in Mississippi, most of it perched in tree stands on Steve McKenna’s ranch, waiting for the legendary Mississippi white tails to appear. If you spend time in a deer camp, you’re a lucky man if you have a buddy as congenial, decent and amusing as John Bainbridge.

  Professionally, those two legends, Michael Korda and David Rosenthal, editor in chief and publisher, respectively, of Simon & Schuster, were steady hands, true believers and highly accomplished facilitators; they made this book as good as it could be. And of course my agent Esther Newberg was always around to say gently, “Stop whining and get back to work.”

  I was particularly emboldened when I explained to my daughter Amy what I wanted to do in this book and she said, “Dad, works for me.”

  And of course the great Jean Marbella, one of the funniest, smartest, most beautiful women who ever lived, was supportive from the first and until the last.

  And I should say finally that while some readers may recognize the real life antecedents of my six old gunmen, there is no evidence at all, and this book was not meant to suggest, that they ever took part in such an enterprise as I’ve invented, technically illegal no matter how morally upstanding.

  And also to them—my heroes in the ’50s—I have to say, “Gents, I’d ride the river with you anytime.”