Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  Then Sally saw them.

  She had never seen anything like them before.

  There were three of them, low to the earth, bulbous craft of dark blue, squatty behind windshields that glittered in the sun, under three beating, whirling blades that suspended them from the sky. She thought somehow of insects; they looked like engorged blue-tail flies, buzzing malevolently, adroit in the air, graceful, somehow, in their insect clumsiness.

  “Helicopters,” said Elmer Kaye. “Damnation, ain’t that a sight!”

  It was a sight. Holding a tight formation, the three Navy whirlybirds vectored in on the party in the meadow, and Sally was stunned to realize that unlike airplanes, these flying machines could go straight down and straight up. Beating up a devilish roar, their spinning rotors whipping up a screen of dust and dirt so strong you couldn’t look into it, so powerful you had to lean double to go against it. Napkins from the tea party flew this way and that, and a teacup or two was knocked atumble.

  She heard Jack O’Brian scream over the noise to Earl, “Earl, you must know somebody big in Washington.”

  “Pulled a kid out of a Wildcat on Guadalcanal. He ended up the chief of naval aviation, that’s all. This is just a little training mission for these boys. They goin’ to drop us and tomorrow they goin’ to pick us up. Only thing is, we got to be there.”

  “We will,” said Jack.

  The men clambered aboard, three, two and two, and Sally watched as Earl helped her grandpap up the little step into the craft and got him seated. His face was boyish with astonishment and enthusiasm.

  He waved at Sally as Earl conferred with the pilots, and then the thumbs-up was given.

  Sally smiled, waved, and stripped off her dress. Earl’s jaw dropped. What the hell?

  He was rooted in stupefaction.

  Her dress came off with a crackling of buttons popping, and in seconds it lay at her feet. She wore jeans, a tight khaki shirt with a bandanna, and pulled out a crushed piece of material which she unfolded quickly into a much battered cowboy hat. She picked up some kind of canvas kit and ran toward the helicopter.

  Earl intercepted her in the hatchway.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I would not be the kind of gal who sits home, sir,” she said. “What happens if one of these old fellows catches a damn bullet? Does he bleed out there? I have bandages, disinfectant and every other damn thing. I’ve patched plenty a bullet hole. Now stand out of my way, sir, or you and I will go at it, and as I said, I pack a punch.”

  “For Christ’s sakes, you—”

  But with a twitch of her strong pale arm, Sally wrenched free and squirted by him.

  Her grandpap twinkled.

  The roars accelerated and, suddenly lighter than gravity, the three helicopters rose vertically a hundred feet, then dipped their noses, oriented themselves to the northwest, and hurtled away, trailing a wall of noise as they went.

  And then, as if they had not been there, they were gone.

  IN an hour they were at their destination, for such are the miracles of the H-5 Sikorsky. The navigators calculated well, charting a course over northwestern Florida, across the toe of Alabama, evading, of course, the city of Mobile, choosing an arc above the unpeopled zones of that state, and of Mississippi’s southeast corner. Beneath, pine forest and swamp fly by, and the choppers head into the setting sun until by map and navigational reading they have arrived: there it is, a band of sluggish water, the Yaxahatchee, lost in silent quagmire two miles above the prison farm at Thebes and three above the town.

  Each chopper works its further magic swiftly, for this is exactly what such craft are for, and this is exactly what they have trained on. Each bird approaches the river, and there pauses, as its blades beat rills into the water, as it hovers but five feet off the surface. An object sails from each hatch and lands with a splash that soon reveals itself to be more than a splash. In the commotion there’s a sense of gassy pressure, and from each sense of commotion, again almost magically, there unfolds a yellow naval raft as it inflates. A chain ladder is lowered and, quickly, each cowboy clambers down, and then a few packages are dropped to the waiting men. The choppers alter their pitch, and with a yowl climb to three hundred feet and head back to where they came from.

  In the falling twilight, the three rafts begin their slow journey down the Yaxahatchee. As they pass the prison levee, one raft, with Audie and Jack, scuttles ashore. The two men pull it up, take a compass reading, identify land forms from the photo map, give the thumbs-up and head inland. They’re headed for the guard towers at the Ape House.

  A half mile down, past the prison launching facility where Earl was “murdered,” the second raft pulls up. This one holds Bill and Charlie and Elmer, two of whom will infiltrate the Big House, the Store and the Whipping House from the north and one of which, cackling madly the whole time, will head north to the sheriff’s station in the woods. That baby is his and his alone. Sally is with them. She’ll stay close to Bill and Elmer, who will more or less be at the center of the action, and all of them will ultimately rally upon them.

  Earl touches her hand.

  “You do not have to do this.”

  “Yes, I do. Grandpap, you have yourself a nice time and be careful.”

  “I will, darling,” says the old man.

  Earl says, “Listen here, you men. You cannot be thinking about Sally in the fight. If you do, you will get killed. You do your job. Sally, you stay behind them, goddammit, and do not run into fire. If you lose contact, you break back to the river, which is due west of any place you’ll be. Tomorrow morning, you look for us one way or the other. I will find you.”

  “There’s no time, Mr. Earl,” said Sally. “I will be fine.”

  She pulled off and fell in with the others, and Earl watched her go with something caught in his throat, or possibly his heart.

  “Let’s go, Mr. Ed,” he said.

  “Yep.”

  THE final raft pulls up close to town. Earl helps old Ed disembark and guides him up the town mainline toward the public house in the dark. The old boy is surprisingly spry tonight, almost gay. They pass through the dark, deserted town, almost a ghost burg.

  A last few words pass between them.

  “You okay, sir?”

  “I am, Mr. Earl. Hale, hearty, fit as a fiddle. Feel as if I could lick my weight in wildcats today.”

  “You ain’t forgot nothing?”

  “No, sir. Wait till eleven. Then take up a position at the town bar. Them black fellows won’t like it but that’s what it’s got to be. Soon enough some bad-boy deputies and maybe even a sheriff come along. They’ll take their time, but sooner or later, they move agin’ me. Tough boys, like to beat heads.”

  “That’s them.”

  “Got a surprise for them.”

  “Yes, you do. I feel bad about your granddaughter.”

  “You try telling that one what to do. I never could.”

  “Well, I ain’t had much luck either.”

  He left the old man, sitting quietly a few hundred yards from the bar, quite content and lively. Earl headed inland, toward the Whipping House.

  EARL didn’t see it. Nobody saw it. But that night, there was other action in Thebes. At about the time his men were wiggling into position, the mournful barge of coffins, floating ever so lazily against the current of the Yaxahatchee, stirred slightly. No coffin itself moved, for the coffins were empty, as Bigboy and his detail had ascertained.

  But from the barge, or from a hollowed out space under the deck, a noise rose. It was the noise of wood on wood, as wood was unlimbered, almost like the wood in a wooden horse four thousand years earlier. A segment of the deck slid open.

  The opening of this wood yielded, however, no party of mad Ithacan raiders, hell-bent on mayhem and city burning. Instead, uncranking as if from a long sleep, a more angular figure emerged, unsure, blinking, not especially confident but animated by a motivation no man could know. He rose, replace
d the wooden grating on the deck, and looked around.

  Thebes dozed peacefully under the black night sky.

  It was his home.

  Home again, home again, home again. After all these years.

  Gingerly, he slipped over the side and waded toward shore. He pulled himself from the current just south of the city dock. It all was so familiar and yet so distant, as if he were recalling not a reality but a dream.

  He headed inland, toward the Big House. It was his house, after all.

  It was Davis Trugood; he had a gun.

  58

  SAM was done. He had solved the mystery; he had gotten the information to Earl, at the expense of his dignity, considerably shredded when he had been kicked out of Austin by the Austin Vice Squad, once he had convinced them he meant no harm and was entirely innocent, at least until the girl began screaming, of the meaning of Treponema pallidum. It was all a mistake.

  I have done what I could do, thought Sam. I have done all I have said I would, and if it helps or not, that is beyond my control. Earl even knew what Fort Dietrich was, and had explained it all to Sam, and now, at last, it made some sense.

  But he could not rest yet.

  He had one last call to make, and checked his wallet to find the card with Davis Trugood, Esq.’s law firm number on it. But he could not. Who knew where it had gone? Sam lost things all the time. That was part of who he was.

  But of course he recalled the august law firm’s name, those hallowed syllables: Mosely, Vacannes & Destin.

  From his hotel room in Waco, where he had taken refuge after the embarrassment in Austin and the strident suggestion that he leave town and only return after the world ended or Texas declared its independence, whichever came first, he called long-distance information to get the number.

  “Sir, I have no listing for that firm.”

  Sam was taken aback.

  Then he said, “I may not have pronounced it correctly.” This always happened: Northern operators could not decipher the soup of what they thought was his corn-pone “accent,” although his of course was the proper way of speaking and theirs the abomination. “Mosely, that would be MOSE-ly, VAY-Cans and DES-tin. I can spell—”

  “Sir, I have no listing like that. I don’t have anything even close to it.”

  “In the whole area?”

  “In all of Chicagoland.”

  “I see,” said Sam.

  He hung up, most puzzled. His mind fulminated on this discovery. In a while he came up with something of a solution.

  He had his notebook with him and quickly found the name of a federal prosecutor out of Little Rock who, if memory served, had logged much time in the parallel office in Cook County, that is, Chicago, Illinois.

  Sam called, made swift contact with his old friend, and explained the peculiarity of the situation.

  The man consulted his notebook and came up with a number. He told Sam to call in five minutes.

  Sam did, and soon got, “Fifteenth Precinct, Detective Chicowitz.”

  “Ah, Detective, believe Charlie Hayworth just called on my behalf.”

  “Yes, sir. Mr. Vincent, that it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So run it by me.”

  Sam explained. He gave all the relevant data, and the detective said he’d call back.

  That call took seventeen minutes; that’s how good this cop was.

  “Well, sir, there isn’t a law firm called Mosely, Vacannes and Destin. Not in Chicago or in Evanston or Skokie or any of the outlying areas. However, I did find a listing for Bonverite Brothers, a firm in Chicago.”

  “Hmm,” said Sam. “I don’t follow. What does ‘Bon—’”

  “You said your fellow’s name was Trugood, right? And all this has to do with something way down in Mississippi, where it’s still Frenchy and dark?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, sir, the French for Trugood would be Bonverite. If you were a Cajun from down there, and you wanted to disguise your name but stay in contact with it, as many, many people changing names do, it’s a pattern, then you’d come up with Trugood. See what I’m saying? That would be the closest thing in Chicago to Trugood.”

  Sam was dazzled.

  “Now I checked the reverse directory. Here are four numbers leased to Bonverite.”

  He read them.

  A litany of integers came back at Sam, woozily familiar.

  “That’s it!” Sam cried. “Yes, that’s it! That’s the number I called!”

  “Well, it’s been disconnected. Just recently.”

  “I see,” said Sam. “What kind of firm is Bonverite?”

  “It’s an undertaking parlor. I checked with the boys. It’s very prosperous. He has all the southside and uptown business. He buries a lot of people. He has a lot of money, does this Mr. Davis Bonverite.”

  “I see. Is there anything else I should—”

  “Yes, sir. He’s probably the richest of them in Chicago. He’s probably got more than a couple of million dollars. He’s quite successful for one of them.”

  “I don’t—one of them?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s a Negro. Davis Bonverite runs his business at Cottage Grove and 139th on the South Side. Darktown. He’s Chicago’s richest colored man.”

  59

  NOT much of Fish is left.

  Fish has hung from the chains for five days. For those five days, with all his cunning in full force, Bigboy has worked him hard with the whip.

  There’s no space on the old man’s skin that hasn’t been shredded. There isn’t a nerve that hasn’t been lashed raw. There’s not a scab that hasn’t tripled over, that is, scabbed, torn away, scabbed again, torn away again, and scabbed up again.

  Fish hangs, his wrists broken, his hands dead crab claws, the weight of him fully on the shattered bones. His lips are cracked dry. He can’t lick them because Bigboy has tied a bit between his teeth, jammed under the tongue, to prevent him from biting his tongue and drowning on his own blood to escape the pain. It’s happened to Bigboy, but not recently, not since he got so smart.

  Fish has tried to lose himself in the space of his own mind, to go there in madness and lose all contact with reality, and never come back. But he’s too goddamned tough. He can’t order himself to go mad, and his mind betrays him by refusing to break off with reality. It feels everything, it remembers everything.

  “Fish, don’t you die, goddamn you,” the bare-chested Bigboy whispers, breathing hard into his shredded ear from ever so close. “You, me, we got business. You don’t die till I say so. You don’t die till you talk. You think you’re close? I can spin you out like this for days yet to come.”

  Maybe so. Maybe not. Fish feels close to death. He knows his heart will give up of its own accord, strangled on the pain, crushed by the stench of his own shit and piss caked to him.

  Besides hurting him, Bigboy has walked the other road: has offered him temptations. Bigboy always understood that Fish had the imagination to make him vulnerable to ideas of the future, to possibilities, to pleasures not palpably there.

  “You can go free,” he crooned one evil night. “You tell me, we take care of it, and you are out of here, old man. You spent your life here. This is the way out. This is the only way out, and I am the only one who can give you this. Think of it, old man. Back to N’Awleens with some jingle-jangle in the pocket. To sport with some high yellers and some slanty Chinee. Those girls know all the tricks. No tricks they don’t know. You’d be at home. You’d be the old whore-master, plump and well-fucked in his senior age.”

  Fish fought him on that one. He denied it, banished it, made it go away, thought of his own scabbed, scarred flesh, not of the women’s. He fought him on all the temptations: freedom, sex, juju weed and Uncle Horse, wealth, pleasure, all offered in various stages between the whippings, so in his mind, he went from pleasure unimaginable to pain unfortunately too imaginable.

  He howled and screamed and begged for mercy.

  Mercy came in but one form,
however.

  “What does it mean, Fish? What does ‘pale horse coming’ mean? You have to tell me, you know. You will, in the end. The only question is when. Tell me, Fish. Save us both trouble, and the warden worry. Tell me, Fish, tell me now.”

  Fish did not and paid for his disobedience.

  He paid, he paid, he paid.

  And then he paid some more.

  But he never opened his lips.

  Now, at last, death dogged him. He could smell it, taste it, knew it was here at last for him.

  Ha! That would be his victory.

  But Bigboy wouldn’t surrender.

  “Even now, Fish, when you are so close to passing. Even now I can jack you with yet more pain, and I will, too. You know I will.”

  The old man tried to spit in his face, but could not, because of the bit in his mouth.

  “Okay, Fish. Then here we go again. Now it gets bad again. Now it comes again.”

  He heard the man stride back. He heard him lift the whip from the table. He heard it unroll, then hiss as the whip man snarled it gently through the air, then made it snap and pop, so that the old man could actually feel the airwaves where the supersonic flick at the end pushed them aside.

  “Fish, here it—”

  From close by came the rattle of what could only be machine-gun fire. A few seconds later, more shots filled the air.

  Bigboy dropped his whip and ran to the old man, pulled the bit out of his teeth.

  “What is it?” he screamed urgently. “What is that? What is happening? Goddamn you, Fish, goddamn you, tell me!”

  Fish smiled.

  “Pale horse be here, motherfucker,” he said. “Pale horse done come for you.”

  He laughed in the second that he died.

  FIVE

  Dark of the Moon

  60

  THEY watched him. He was a stubby old fellow, and he sat in the flickering candlelight of the bar, and the two Negroes were behind the bar. They were nervous as hell. You could smell their fear.