Behold a Pale Horse

by Franklin Allen Leib

  “My friends, my fellow patriotic Republicans, we have to take back our party so we can clean it up before we begin the larger task of cleaning up the government in Washington.”

  Justice paused and allowed the cheers and applause to swell. A few piercing rebel yells caused the cheering and clapping to grow louder. Fine television.

  Justice raised his hands. “My friends,” he shouted into the still-cheering crowd. “Send Justice to Washington and I will clean up the mess! I’ll muck out the Congress. I’ll end the corruption in the White House. I will, as God is my witness!”

  “Witness. Witness,” the crowd roared. Tolliver looked around. Ezekiel Archer beckoned him to exit stage left. Tolliver had had a small Secret Service detail since his win in South Carolina, but his main protection was provided by the Witnesses to Justice, a group of powerfully built young men in conservative blue suits, white shirts, and plain red ties with military-style short haircuts. No mustaches or beards. Many were off-duty or vacationing Texas Rangers, and all were from Tolliver’s church in Dallas. They were unarmed but they were tough, and eight surrounded the candidate as he descended from the bunting-draped stage into the crowd. The Witnesses let people reach the governor’s hands and good-looking women got close enough to kiss him, but the guards were so careful to keep hecklers or even reporters shouting questions away that the boys on the press bus called them the Witness Protection Program.

  Tolliver felt exhausted, drained by his communion with the crowd. “Where we goin’ now, Zeke?” he shouted at Archer, while shaking four or five hands at once.

  “Orlando, Florida, then a helicopter hop to Cape Canaveral. Donahue’s due down kissing the rings of Cuban bishops in Miami about the same time.”

  Progress through the happy crowd to the buses was slow, but Justice could see that the TV cameramen kept pace, and smiled at the lenses as he shook hands and said what he said in answer to any question: “Thank you and God bless you for your support.”

  Movement abruptly halted. The Witnesses drew in closer, bristles standing out on their thick necks. Six black men in suits, one with a bullhorn, blocked the governor’s path to the bus. “Hypocrite! Racist! Fornicator! Liar!” thundered the one with the bullhorn, a very fat man in a gray silk suit, a black shirt with clerical collar, a large gold medal on a chain around his neck. “For shame, Rupert Justice Tolliver. You call yourself a man of God yet you preach hatred as surely as you do practice it!”

  Justice looked around in panic. Sure enough, the television handheld cameras had swung over to the angry black preacher. “Jesus, Zeke,” he whispered to Archer. “This is bad television!”

  The friendly crowd seemed to shrink back. Young white men dressed in dirty jeans and work boots, some wearing cut-off leather jackets and some carrying chains or baseball bats, swarmed out of the crowd and attacked the preachers, wrestling or beating some to the muddy fairground.

  Spectators began to scream as bats rose and fell. Justice felt hands—Zeke Archer’s—grab his shoulders and propel him forward into the fray. “No, no,” Justice shouted, pulling one of the attackers off. “Let my brothers speak.”

  Archer grabbed him again, as did two Witnesses. He was half dragged, half carried the rest of the way into his bus. The driver released the brakes and the bus rolled slowly forward, parting the crowd. Justice sat in a back seat, shaken and sweating from the encounter. One of the cameramen who had jumped on behind him came back and shook his hand. “Wonderful, brave gesture, Governor,” the cameraman, who was black, said. “You saved those men.”

  “Thank you,” Justice said, grinning modestly and relaxing. Who the hell set that up? he wondered. Bad television into good.

  Yet in a strange and unexpected way, he felt he had done right.

  ON THE PLANE TO FLORIDA, he got Ezekiel Archer alone. “Who was it back there who thumped those niggers, Zeke? Coulda been a disaster.”

  “You handled it beautifully, Juss,” Zeke said softly.

  “Yeah, after you shoved me into it. I still want to know who those greasy bikers were with their bats at just the right or wrong moment.”

  Zeke fidgeted. “I don’t know. I’ll ask the Mormon.” The Mormon was Jim Bob Slate, head of the Witnesses, not a Mormon at all but one of Justice’s flock. He was called the Mormon because he never smoked, drank alcohol or caffeine, or cursed. “I’ll find out; you think about what you’re going to say in the State of Florida.”

  Zeke left Justice alone in the private compartment of the chartered airliner. The candidate chewed his lower lip. Who set that up?

  JULIA EARLY WATCHED the eleven o’clock news in her apartment. Her roommates, Judith Langtry and Hilda Chu, were out making the rounds in Georgetown, but Julia had a cold. Wrapped up warm in a thick terry bathrobe, she ate ice cream and drank herbal tea. The little Sony flickered, its volume muted through the sports. Julia was drowsy, and reached for the remote to shut it off when suddenly the sportscaster’s face was replaced by Governor Justice Tolliver’s. Julia turned the volume up. Tolliver was stepping off an airplane, waving and shouting. The caption at the bottom of the picture said Austin, Texas. The governor began his stump speech and the TV station cut away to the black woman anchor. “Governor Tolliver made eight campaign appearances today, crisscrossing the South in what some in this town consider a last and desperate effort to break Senator Joseph Donahue’s momentum toward the Republican nomination. Earlier today, the governor had to intervene personally in a violent clash between bat-wielding supporters and a small, peaceful group of African-American clergymen who confronted the governor, saying he practiced hatemongering.” The anchor looked to her left and twenty seconds of tape appeared, showing the shoving crowd and the black preachers warding off blows from the bikers. Then the governor was in the middle of the camera’s lens, his face bouncing as the cameraman was jostled. The governor pulled one of the attackers away, said, “Let my brothers speak,” and was himself hustled away.

  The anchor’s pretty face returned, her expression somber. “The governor’s spokesman deplored the attack and disclaimed any knowledge of the attackers.”

  Ezekiel Archer’s narrow face appeared on the screen. “We’re just glad no one was seriously hurt.”

  The anchor’s image returned. “Now, the weather.”

  Julia turned off the television. The Washington establishment despises Governor Tolliver, she thought, wouldn’t even give him credit for stopping a violent act. All her friends dismissed Tolliver, as they were mostly Democrats or Donahue Republicans, Julia tried to defend the governor, but people looked at her like she was a drooling idiot, so she stopped. She knew Tolliver was a good man, a little rough around the edges, but compassionate. She believed he loved God, as she did. She hoped he would do well in tomorrow’s primaries.

  She put out the light and went to sleep.

  8

  BEFORE DAWN ON Super Tuesday, volunteers gathered at Protestant churches large and small across the states of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas. All the volunteers were young and clean-cut. The men wore khaki pants and the women skirts of the same color. They all wore shirts with the broad blue and white stripes that were a trademark of the Tolliver campaign. Most, but not all, of the volunteers were white. They drove their own cars or cars lent to the churches. Hand-painted signs taped to the doors read “FREE RIDES TO VOTE.” The volunteers wore no buttons but did carry literature. They were given lists of streets to canvas, and told only to render an opinion of the candidates if asked, then offer their flyers listing Governor Tolliver’s positions on key issues of the day. As day dawned, fine and warm across the South, the volunteers fanned out to neighborhoods and began their good work.

  The whole effort had been organized by Jim Bob Slate, the head of the Witnesses, the one nicknamed the Mormon. He drove a van himself in his hometown of Houston, and assigned himself a black neighborhood. By the time the polls opened at eight A.M, there were already many people out on their carefully painted front po
rches. Some were women with small children, and more were elderly. Jim Bob drove slowly, leaning over, greeting people, asking them if they needed any help getting to the polls. Many people looked right through him, or away. One white-haired black man sitting with an old black woman with palsied hands called down to him. “What you doin’ here, boy?”

  “Offerin’ to take you and the missus to the polls so you can vote. Y’all registered?”

  “Damn right.” The old man stood up. It was five blocks to the school where they voted, and he supposed he could make it, but not Millie, his wife.

  “Republican, I do hope,” Jim Bob said, leaning across and opening the door.

  “No. We be democrats.” He turned to his wife. “Set back down, Millie, we’ll have to wait for the church bus.”

  A small crowd had gathered. Jim Bob got out of the truck and smiled at all of them. “Well now, sir, I offered you a ride to the polls. How you vote is your business and yours alone.”

  The old man looked at him with ill-concealed suspicion. “Who you work for?”

  “Governor Justice Tolliver, the next President of the United States.”

  “He done some good things here in Texas,” the old man conceded. “He don’t much care for the Colored.”

  “Well now, sir, I’ve got no mind to contradict you, but Governor Tolliver cares about all God’s children. It’s his opponents who lie about him and say he doesn’t. Only yesterday he risked his life to prevent some bad boys from molesting a delegation of African-American preachers in Louisiana. Waded right in and pulled them boys off, walked right in under their clubs.”

  “I seen that on the news,” a young woman with a baby said. “My man and me, we voted for Tolliver for governor.”

  “Well come on down and vote for him again.”

  Soon Jim Bob’s van filled up with happy voters, high-spirited as if being taken to a party. Jim Bob closed the doors and promised to come back and get more people as soon as the first group voted.

  He grinned to himself as he drove off. If this worked in this neighborhood, it would work anywhere.

  JUSTICE TOLLIVER SAT in his study in the Governor’s Mansion in Austin. There was a television on in one corner with the sound off, but he wasn’t watching. He stared into a low fire flickering in the grate that, with the television picture, provided all the light in the room. He had taken a new bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a bucket of ice with him as he left dinner with his wife and Ezekiel Archer just as the polls were closing and the news shows began. He had instructed Archer to see he was undisturbed until all the results were known, and then he was to bring them personally. The bottle of whiskey was half empty and Justice was slumped deep in his armchair. His head ached and his nerves jangled. He would not look at his watch but he sensed it wouldn’t be long before he knew what the South thought of his upstart challenge to the party leadership and organization. He took a sip of whiskey and poured more over the melting ice cubes, spilling a little on the table.

  Zeke Archer came in without speaking, closing the door behind him. “Tell it, Zeke,” the governor said without looking up.

  Archer carried a clipboard. “Do you mind if I turn on a light so I can read my notes?”

  “Go ahead. Start with Texas, Zeke.” The best chance for good news.

  Zeke turned on a light and took a chair next to the candidate. “Texas is yours, Juss. One hundred twenty-three delegates.” He paused; Tolliver showed no sign that he had heard. “Also Louisiana, twenty-seven, Mississippi, thirty-two, Oklahoma thirty-eight, Tennessee thirty-seven, and the networks just declared you winner in Florida with ninety-eight.”

  Justice nodded. “Donahue?”

  “Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Fifty-three delegates between them to your total today of three hundred fifty-five. Juss, you jumped all over that fair-haired Yankee Irish son of a bitch, and now you got the lead by a hundred forty delegates and we headin’ west. Can I get you maybe to let out a little Texas whoop?”

  Justice heaved himself out of his chair, staggered forward, caught the mantelpiece, and sagged. Zeke jumped up and steadied him. “Everybody did a hell of a job,” Tolliver said, his voice soft and slurred. “Gotta go downstairs and thank them.”

  Zeke turned the governor back to his chair. “Most everyone’s gone home,” Zeke lied. The campaign coordinators and many volunteers were downstairs but it wouldn’t do to have them see the candidate drunk. “It was a long day for everyone, and we all need sleep,” he added pointedly.

  “OK. Thank ’em tomorrow. Thank you tonight, Zeke. Have a drink with me.”

  “No thanks, Juss,” Zeke said, looking down at his friend. “I’m beat, and you must be exhausted.”

  “Have a fucking drink, Zeke.” He held out his glass. “And freshen mine up. We still got business.”

  Zeke made two drinks with more ice than the governor liked. He sat and looked at Justice’s sweaty, sagging face. “It’ll wait till morning, Juss.”

  “Can’t. Who did it, Juss? Had them niggers whomped in Baton Rouge?”

  “That kinda worked out for us.”

  “Who, Zeke?”

  Zeke sighed. “I spoke to the Mormon. He says they’re kind of an undercover wing of the Witnesses. He calls them the New Zealots and says they’re extra security. He also says he had your authorization to set them up.”

  “He’s a lying bastard, he said that. I want to see him in this room at seven-thirty sharp.”

  “Right.” Zeke got up. “See you in the morning, then.”

  “Seven-thirty sharp.”

  JIM BOB SLATE stared at the ceiling of the tiny apartment the campaign had rented for him in Austin. Clarissa ran her cool fingers across his damp chest hair as he felt his breathing and heartbeat slowly return to normal. She was always cool, he thought, even in her passion. She tortured him with her coolness, her seeming detachment while driving him to frenzy. He knew and she knew that what they were doing was sin, not only against God but also the governor. Clarissa Alcott was the wife of Rupert Justice Tolliver. Jim Bob burned in his soul with shame, but he couldn’t refuse her. She took him places he had never been growing up as a good Christian farm boy. She gave him such exquisite pleasure laced with pain that he lived in hourly fear that he might displease her and she might take it all away.

  Clarissa’s fingers outlined his washboard-hard abs and down to his spent, sore sex. He closed his eyes against temptation on top of temptation, but his sex rose anyway. “Again, lover,” she purred. “Do me with your tongue.”

  He whimpered, shook his head no. She held his head and guided him, and he complied.

  COBRA FOLLOWED THE American presidential campaign in the Rand Daily Mail that came up from Cape Town in bundles about once a week. He remembered the boy Tolliver in Cuba, what a silly shit he had been, and he remembered as well the boy’s boast that one day he would be President of the United States. Cobra didn’t understand the nominating system in detail, but it seemed that Tolliver, at first written off by the press as a hopeless long shot, had drawn ahead of his better-known and better-funded rivals and eliminated all but one, the Connecticut Senator Donahue.

  Cobra opened the early files in his memoirs. He wondered if anyone in the United States knew that the very right-wing governor of Texas had once visited Cuba and had, for a short time, direct access to the brothers Castro.

  Cobra closed the file, turned the little computer off, and went down to the stables where one of his grooms would have his favorite horse saddled for an afternoon ride.

  9

  1968

  AT THE END OF January, the sharpshooter Jack Chance, promoted to corporal, was ten months into his second tour in Vietnam and looking forward to going back to the world and out of the Corps. He had returned to his old outfit, the Second of the 26th Marines, but the turnover had been nearly a hundred percent, so he knew practically no one. They spent time in and around the Leatherneck Square, in the mountains near the coast near the Demilitarized Zone, or Dead Marine Zone, as it
was called. They joined large-unit sweeps and clearing actions from the coast west along Highway 9 that led into Laos. By December of the previous year, the battalion and several others had reached the western end of the road, the besieged, blasted market town of Khe Sanh. Dug into the hills surrounding the airstrip, the marines were rocketed on some nights and subjected to human wave attacks on others. The recon platoon leader, a deceptively soft-eyed, handsome first lieutenant named Tom Shanley, got himself a reputation, a Purple Heart, and a Silver Star for calling in artillery on his own position as it was being overrun, then remaining outside the bunker to correct fire.

  At the end of January, in the middle of the unofficial annual cease-fire around the Tet lunar new year celebration, the North Vietnamese sent their surrogates in the South, the Vietcong, to attack the stood-down garrisons of U.S. and ARVN forces from one end of the country to the other. The marines at Khe Sanh, already under heavy attack for ten days and nights, were suddenly cut off from resupply as troops along the coast fought to drive the Cong out of the cities and off the airbases. Cobra’s company was sent out to relieve one of the artillery firebases near the airstrip that was being hard pressed, and Cobra shinnied up a tall palm to get a look into the enemy position. In the racket of battle he managed to shoot most of a rocket crew with the bolt-action Remington without being spotted. At dusk he saw masses of Viet Cong in their black pajamas, backed up or maybe herded by North Vietnamese regulars in their green uniforms, preparing to attack. He shouted a warning down to his security detail that should have been waiting beneath him on the ground, but got no answer. He shinnied down; there was no one in sight. The platoon had pulled back and left him, and soon he heard the attackers sliding through the empty bush, flowing around his AO. He had nowhere to go but back up the tree.