Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  Charlie also has a couple of Colt Detective specials which he’ll wear, one in a boot holster, the other in an underarm job. All of his guns shoot the .38–44 that Earl has provided, and Charlie knows that it’ll take the fight out of a white man just as quickly as it’ll do the same to a Mexican.

  But Charlie’s real killing instrument isn’t his handgun at all, though he’s done in a few possibly bad individuals that way. No, Charlie is a shotgunner, and for this job he’s brought along the instrument that got him through many a tough night on the border. It’s a Browning Auto-5, with an extended magazine, so that now it holds eight 12-gauge double-ought shells instead of five, and he refers to the shells as Blue Whistlers, for he’s convinced that he can see them whistling through the air in fleets as he fires. But the best is that he’s cut down the barrel to eighteen inches, and there, at the end of the new muzzle, screwed on what he calls his duck bill. It’s a spreader. It’s as if you squashed the bell of a horn till it was flat and its effect is to cause the shot cluster to sail down the barrel of the gun to spread horizontally rather than circularly, so that it exits the muzzle like a deadly spray of paint flung from a quickly flicked brush. It does the job very well on Mexicans, and a part of Charlie genuinely wants to know how it’ll work on big ol’ white boys.

  Out on the prairie, alone, is the most haunted of them. This is the young Audie Ryan. Audie has two Colts, but they’re single-action revolvers, six-guns of the Old Western school, which he’ll carry in custom-made black leather double buscadero holsters made for him by John Bohlin of Hollywood. You would think from this Audie is a cowboy; in the pictures, he’s a cowboy.

  Like so much of what’s in the pictures, it’s another lie. Audie wasn’t raised on a ranch, though he’s from Texas. His life had nothing of the West, or the range, or cattle or honor or horses or sidekicks to it. It was more out of Walker Evans’s photography, those horrific images of the dispossessed, the thin-faced, the desperate hardscrabble Southern poor. Those are Audie’s memories, sharecropping near Greenville in northwest Texas, after his no ’count old man lit out on them, and he and the boys had to rent themselves out early as sharecroppers, at twelve, just to keep a little food on the table and the sense of family, so instinctive, somehow alive. It was then that he began his hunting, and only alone in the hills with a beat-up old Winchester .22 single-shot—if he missed he went hungry—that he began to feel any sense of selfhood. A gun was at the center of it. Without the gun, he was a Texas redneck pretty boy with freckles and a girly name, who had to fight his way to and from school when he went. With the gun he felt the admiration of the family when he returned with rabbit or squirrel or pheasant or dove, each shot beautifully. He felt the most primitive thing a hunter feels: I have fed my family; I am a man.

  So for him the war wasn’t what it was to so many, a crushing obstacle erected across a promising life. It was an expression of all the lonely lessons he’d learned in the scruffy woods of northwest Texas, where the gun was the only means to manhood.

  The two Colts are emblems of just how successful he had been. In the war he had been a terror, a little, bitty speck of kid, almost without fear, who brought his talents for shooting and his instinct about the lay of the land to the fields of Europe, where, after the first day or two, everything just seemed to make sense, to fit together. His instincts were always right. He wasn’t really frightened in the way a lot of the others were. He didn’t really care if he got back or not; he had gotten off the goddamned farm where his goddamned father had left him; he had gotten off it, and how. When he fired, men dropped. When he shouted, men listened. Where he went, men followed, him hardly more than a child, with a soft, baby face, almost like a little girl, with small hands, but he was grit tough from the way he was raised, and even the Army food felt like a feast compared to the thin vittles of the rabbit split six ways he’d grown up on.

  The two six-guns were presented to him by a very important man, Mr. Graham H. Anthony himself, the president of the Colt’s Company, on the occasion of his tour of the plant in 1947. The folks there were all very nice to Audie, who didn’t say much, and whose childish looks somewhat nonplussed them. Like so many others, they couldn’t see in this polite, nearly mute young man of surpassing beauty the great hero who had killed close to three hundred of his country’s enemies.

  Audie loved the guns. Aware that if he were to prosper in Hollywood as a Western hero, he’d have to learn to shoot them and handle them, that’s exactly what he did, even when he was living in Jimmy Cagney’s pool house his first few years out there. He’d rise early and head out to the hills over the city and just practice, slowly at first. When the world didn’t make a lot of sense, the guns always did. He drew fast, with both hands. He learned to slip fire, to Curly Bill spin, to fan, to hit aerial targets, to load and unload fast. It was amazing how much you could learn if you put your mind to it, particularly when it was men’s work, with machines and techniques, not like this acting business, which was mainly about getting yourself seen, and “pretending” a certain thing, even if it wasn’t true, and there were no rules at all.

  So Audie, alone in the field, practiced a kind of warfare he had never fought, except in front of a camera: the Old West style, where the gun flew from his holster, clicked four times—C-O-L-T, the legend had it, as the hammer peened against Sam Colt’s genius system of pins and screws and levers—and then fired with the satisfying detonation of a big .44.

  With a gun in his hand, he knew he could do anything.

  ALONE in his room, by design, Earl works the map again. He knows you can study a thing too hard, until you are so up close to it it makes no sense whatsoever. That is what he does not want to do.

  His plan, he knows, is sound, if all the surprises work as they are set, and if the guards react as he expects they will react when confronted with strong, willful, armed men of extremely refined shooting ability and no mercy whatsoever. But he knows too that anything can go wrong at any time, and without radio communications, backup, a quick exit strategy, the whole thing can turn to catastrophe faster than a cat can blink.

  But he can’t do any more. A sergeant, in this instance, should be out and around, cajoling his boys, feeling their fears, trying to calm them. These old goats are too old and too salty for much in the way of sergeanting. So Earl leaves them alone to do as they may, for they will do as they may when the day arrives, ever so shortly.

  Earl, like the rest of them, works on his guns.

  Earl has two revolvers. He would have preferred a .45 Government Model automatic, for he carried one as a Marine for fifteen years and again in the fracas in Hot Springs. He knows the Government Model well, and can shoot fine with it. It’s powerful, it reloads fast, it’s reliable, just what the doctor ordered. But his whole sense of this thing is that it can’t be a military operation. It’s not commandos, raiders, a secret, private army. It’s a posse of citizens who have taken it upon themselves to face what no one in authority has the courage to face. He thinks it’s all right like that, if it can be all right at all, but now it’s gone so far, it don’t matter much whether it’s all right or not. He’s going to do it, goddamn, and live with it forever after.

  Earl doesn’t take a stand on American gun-making. He has a Colt and a Smith. His Smith is the Heavy Duty, on the .44 frame, to shoot the .34–44 high velocity, with the same stubby 4-inch barrel. The Colt is the Trooper, a beefed-up Official Police to shoot that same hard-recoiling .38–44. He’s good and fast with both.

  Now he, too, can do nothing but clean the guns, smoke his Lucky Strikes and watch the moon disappear.

  56

  THE phone call awoke the warden. He wasn’t used to being alerted this early in the morning, and he had a moment of panic.

  Was the pale horse here?

  But no. It was his bedroom. It was his Big House. It was the cool of the morning, but already the place outside had come alive. His servant was close at hand. He felt no disturbance in the ecosystem of his great place,
for he was exquisitely attuned to such small disturbances.

  The warden blinked, felt his breath return to normal. He glanced around, took a drink of water from the pitcher next to his bed, then picked up the phone. Since there was only one other working telephone in all of Thebes County, he had no doubts as to who it was.

  “Warden here.”

  “Sir.”

  Of course: the sheriff, Leon Gattis.

  “Sheriff Leon, what is this about?”

  “Mr. Warden, thought you should know. They’ve arrived.”

  “And, Sheriff, what would they be?”

  “Why, sir, you know. Heh-heh, we had us quite a celebration when this all set itself up last spring. The coffins. The waterproof coffins that fellow done paid us to sell here to them bush Negroes.”

  The warden recollected. Yes, indeed, last spring, the big news was the coming of the waterproof coffin company to Pascagoula, and the Pascagoula County people were all happy, because it meant jobs, and it also meant many greased palms. One of the distribution points for the new product was set to be Thebes, and on account of that plan, the warden had taken an emolument of five hundred dollars, that is, five dollars per coffin, for there would be one hundred of them, as had the sheriff, because it was deemed proper and appropriate that on such issues, important personages in the county should get their beaks wet, to make certain that no unforeseen legal obstructions came in the way of men desiring to do business. The sheriff had spent his money on whores and bourbon in New Orleans, and the warden had shipped it to his broker in New York.

  “Hmmm,” said the warden.

  Did he see conspiracy in all this? That would have to be a mighty conspiracy, for the coffin transaction was all set in place months before that Arkansas lawyer showed up, initiating this whole mad gyre of unease in his little empire. Who could engineer such a thing? No one alive, the warden knew.

  “Sheriff,” said the warden, “tell me how they came and who or what came with them?”

  “Well, sir,” said Leon, “they just came. They’s here. I just got a call in from one of my boys. He seen ’em.”

  “Was there a fellow with them? Or a bill of lading? Or anything to make it official, as we would deem something official?”

  “No, sir. Evidently, they’s barged up in the night, and the boat what towed ’em got an early start back. The fog lifts, the sun rises, and there they be, a cargo of wooden boxes heaped atop a barge, which is moored by itself in the river.”

  “Leon, were you classically educated?”

  “Sir?”

  “No, of course not. Does the story of Troy mean anything to you? Or the story of a wooden horse in which men hid, and in the night broke out to raze a walled city otherwise impenetrable?”

  “Hmmm. Might have heard something like that sometime, someplace.”

  “Leon, you set up a guard right now on that barge, and you keep watching it. I will meantime send my men downriver in the prison launch, they will board, and they will examine these coffins and see if any clever Ulysses means to use them to engineer our destruction. And if that’s so, we’ll do what Priam never thought to do, and that’s burn them on the spot.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then, Leon, you comb the riverbank for tracks of men coming from that boat. Use those dogs you’re so proud of. Find me my Ithacans, do you hear, Leon?”

  “Yes, sir. Lord, yes, I do!”

  LEON, of course, did what he was told, well and thoroughly and earnestly, and by the time Bigboy arrived in the prison launch he could report that no tracks had been found along the bank for miles in either direction, no dog smelled a trace of stranger, and that not a man or a thing had left the barge, which simply drifted listlessly against the current.

  Bigboy, pulled from his third straight day from the surprisingly tough old man Fish, navigated the prison launch close enough and tied to it. He boarded it, he and three guards with weapons and a work detail of three large Negroes, who were happy to be spared the fields that day.

  They set to work. The coffins were unstacked one by one, opened, and examined. It was a long afternoon’s work, but of course it yielded nothing: no coffin had a human cargo, and all coffins were opened, turned, poked. Randomly, three were selected for destruction, and in pieces revealed themselves merely to be…wood, slathered with some sort of gummy water-resistant pine tar, held together by stout, well-driven nails, as the shipwrights of Pascagoula were among the best carpenters in the world.

  Bigboy, having done his duty well, returned at the end of day and made his report.

  “Sir,” he said, “if a pale horse is coming, it doesn’t have a thing to do with them wooden boxes, I guarantee you.”

  The warden duly noted this.

  “I am sure you are right, Sergeant Bigboy.”

  57

  THE cowboys are having a tea party. It’s Sally’s idea.

  They sit out in the meadow on lawn chairs, all dressed for their fight, with legs daintily crossed, while the pretty young lady scurries before them, filling their teacups and offering scones and muffins, with dabs of jelly. To Sally it’s a kind of farewell party, for the men will be leaving ever so soon, and she’s enjoyed this all so much. She’s moving about, dressed all old-timey, in a big old white cotton dress, fluffy with petticoats beneath, its frilly sleeves covering her pale arms, its full hem fluffing at the ground, so that she looks like some kind of schoolmarm in a cowboy picture.

  It’s been wonderful seeing Grandpap so happy again, among his friends, laughing and joshing with these colorful old fellows. Everybody is so nice, even if she suspicions that the one with the prominent nose and personality, Charlie, occasionally halts outside her room and tries to peek through the cracks of the door to catch a glimpse of young Sally in her boudoir. She can hear his dry, crackly, old breath. But he hasn’t seen anything, she knows, because she has been very careful.

  The men are wrapped in old-timey coats called dusters that give them the appearance of undertakers. These are full length canvas coats that reach to their boot heels. Under the dusters she can see something that might surprise many young women of her age but doesn’t throw the granddaughter of Ed McGriffin a bit: that is, a lot of guns. A lot of revolvers in belts heavy with ammunition crossed this way and that across their bodies. The men clank a little when they walk, like old knights or something; they have a metallic seriousness to them, a density. Some wear chaps that exaggerate the flow of their legs. They wear their hats low over their eyes and don’t speak much as they sit and wait, their gear—rifles mostly, though each has a pouch that appears jammed with something heavy—off to one side.

  Only Grandpap doesn’t wear a duster. He’s too formal, still. He wears a three-piece suit and a black tie, knotted tight, and a high white Stetson, a fifteen-gallon hat, the boys joke. He’s particularly twinkly today, and merry, in a way he hasn’t been in ages. He’s happy. They’re all happy.

  What is about to happen?

  Sally isn’t sure, and some of the old cowboys aren’t either. They’re to leave today, and somehow, some magical way, they’re to get where they’re going by tonight, unwrinkled and unchallenged by the journey. Sally has in her mind some idea of a bus, but she knows that can’t be right, somehow. But Grandpap tells her it will be okay.

  She pours more tea. The boys enjoy it. She offers Charlie a scone and he takes it, with a wink. Audie is quiet, seemingly in a dream land. Bill, with that granite face, is the same as always: imperturbable, silent, polite. Mr. Kaye and Mr. O’Brian are still squabbling, and take efforts to sit in directions so they are not facing each other. Mr. O’Brian, who fancies himself a man of high social standing, nibbles his biscuit discreetly, careful not to spill a crumb. Mr. Kaye, on the other hand, wolfs his down with gusto.

  Where is Mr. Earl? Well, he’s still on the phone. He got a call from someone called “Sam” just a minute ago, when everybody was heading out to the meadow for the tea party, and he’s still on the phone, listening carefully, taking down i
nformation, nodding intently, as if some last bit of crucial information has arrived.

  She heard him say, “I’ve heard of Fort Dietrich.”

  Finally, he too comes out. He’s a tall, hard man, without much beauty to him, but he has that command quality that even Sally can feel, and he seems dark today, pressed by concern. He’s not much for the tea and crumpets, and his duster is stiff because it carries so much ammunition in its pockets. She can see guns on his belt.

  There’s just a moment here that becomes weirdly still. The seven cowboys sit on lawn chairs in the bright sun, under a cloudless sky. They could be heading for a roundup, a showdown, some movie mission of the sort Sally has seen a thousand times on the screen. But it’s different than a moment in a movie, for it’s real, the guns have bullets, and whatever it is they’re off to do, they’re ready, even eager, if tense.

  Then Sally hears it.

  Engines.

  Engines, low and from the south, where there are no roads. She is baffled, but none of the others are.

  “Right on time,” says Earl.

  “Them Navy boys know what they’re doing,” says Mr. Kaye.

  “Yes, sir, they surely do,” says Earl. Then, to all of them, “Okay fellows, time to load up. Y’all got your guns and your ammo and your maps and your compasses. I will see you in the river in a couple of hours and we will git this job done up right and finished.”

  Charlie Hatchison held up his teacup.

  “A toast,” he cried. “I celebrate us. We are the last of the cowboys, and this is the last goddamn gunfight at the OK Corral. Drink with me, boys!”

  “Hear, hear,” came the cheer, and the teacups came up and were drained.