Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  “What are you doing? What is this monstrosity? What is happening?”

  He saw his brother had a revolver, and his hand slid to his own under the pillow.

  “Why, I’ve come back to destroy the plantation, every Negro’s dream. I’ve even managed to cajole some white boys into doing the dirty work for me.”

  “You are insane.”

  “Quite possibly. But insanity has its uses. It enabled me to succeed in a far-reaching plan and to accomplish the impossible. Remember, Cleon, how you used to humiliate the little pale nigger boy who was your brother? And now he’s here with an army of gunslingers for a night of fire and brimstone.”

  “You were not a Negro, not ever. Were you a Negro, none of this need have happened, for you would have known your place and accepted it. You were mixed! We can have no mixing of the races, for that is the source of all evil and the end of us all, white people and Negro people.”

  “My, how you do go on.”

  “You are the worst of us. You are a murderer. Whatever you became it is because of Father. You owe all to him. Yet you killed him.”

  “I did, and would again. He killed my mother.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “It was the kind of accident that happens when a white man loses interest in the Negro woman who has borne him a son and seeks a younger, yellower gal. She fell down the stairs. She died in the servants’ quarters, which you now call the Whipping House, though I believe if you check, you’ll see that it’s in flames and most of its occupants are dead.”

  “Do you have any idea what harm you do? This isn’t just a prison. We are doing a mission for the nation. We are helping America! We have a charge from the government. I am providing a place for our great crusade. You cannot just come in and—”

  “Let’s have a look at you,” said Davis. He lit a match, ignited the wick of a lamp, set the glass on it so that light filled the room. He saw that his brother was far too plump, that his hair had been dyed white, that he was somehow a different man. But he was the same man, too.

  “Your journey must have been as remarkable as my own,” Davis said. “No one here knows you as Cleon Bonverite. They just know you under whatever name you chose. They don’t know you were born and raised here, that it was to be your inheritance. You left Thebes one man, and disappeared. Years later you returned, this time as another man, who had been appointed warden of the prison our father decreed into existence. You managed to become its supervisor. That was some trick.”

  “I had Father’s will and intelligence, just as you did. It wasn’t easy. I’ve had no other life. Thus I recovered my own family inheritance. Thus Thebes survives, as Father wished.”

  “No more. It’s already ashes, and all it stands for. It ends tonight. I swore I’d—”

  “You were mixed. You should have been aborted at the start. You should not have been allowed! You have no right to live. Your mother’s cunning whore ways got her swollen with the child that became you; so you are whore spawn. You think you deserve an entitlement; you do, the abortionist’s scraper deep in the mother’s belly, that’s what you deserve. All our troubles in civilization are encompassed in mixing what cannot be mixed.”

  “Lord, how you hate me still.”

  “You should not exist! It’s an atrocity! You combine the black man’s rage and strength with the white man’s cleverness and will, and you can bring nothing but tragedy and ruination into the world! You are not my brother. You are an abomination.”

  “I am what my father made me, as are you, Cleon.”

  “You burned him in his bed.”

  “He killed my mother.”

  “He did not kill your mother. Your father in his way loved your mother, which was his character flaw. He loved you, too, Davis, did you know that? Here’s what you don’t know, Davis: I killed your mother. I shoved her down the steps. She never saw me. I would have killed you, too, if you had not evaded me and burned Father that night. Oh, Davis, I killed a nigger whore, you killed your own father, who loved you. Don’t you see the evil in your ways?”

  “Then I punish you for Father, too. And I mourn him now.”

  “You are evil. You will bring it all down for nothing beyond your vanity. It is so wrong, Davis. It is so wrong.”

  Davis fired twice, Cleon but once. Davis’s shots were truer. His brother lay back, breathing heavily as the blood seeped through the nightclothes.

  “You killed me,” said Cleon. “But I killed you, too. You at least will be wiped off the earth.”

  “Not quite,” coughed Davis. “I have sons.”

  If Cleon heard or not, Davis would never know. For Cleon settled in a stillness that could only be death. Davis examined his wound and concluded it was fatal, possibly not in the next ten seconds, but certainly in the next ten minutes. He had seen many gunshot wounds in his time in Chicago’s best undertaking parlor for Negroes. He rose, limping and leaking, and went to the window to see what he had wrought. He saw flame everywhere, rising in the night, the sky bright with the dance of fire. He had his mighty victory.

  He turned and went to the lamp he had lit. He looked about his father’s old bedroom. It was much the same but for his dead brother. A great tide of tragedy overcame him. Would it ever be over? Would we and they ever live together? He doubted it. He raised the lamp and threw it against the wall, where it broke, splattering flaming kerosene about. Quickly it spread against the old wood of the house.

  He sat in the chair. The pain in his guts grew harsher, as did the heat in the room. When he could stand no more of each, he put the gun to his head and had a good laugh. This is what they came to. The Bonverites, that long line stretching back over a hundred years, men who had fought the land and made a plantation and prospered and passed prosperity down generation to generation. But other things were passed down, too, the Bonverite curse, which was its tendency toward violence, its impatience, its fury.

  And so finally the two brothers, so smart, so educated, so dedicated, so thrifty and industrious, so gifted in their own ways, ending up in the bedroom of the house where each had been born, though one upstairs and one down.

  He laughed.

  It was perfect.

  It was everything he had dreamed of.

  He pulled the trigger.

  EARL found them like that as he raced through the burning house. Both gone, both together. Who were they? But the flames drove him out and took them both.

  64

  ELMER lobbed a Hopalong Cassidy firebomb onto the roof of the Store and watched it detonate with a pop and spew a bouquet of flame across the shingles, where each lick caught and started its own fire.

  But he had no time to contemplate fire.

  He ran onward, beyond the Whipping House to a larger building that was the guards’ headquarters. Three men prone outside testified that the affray had started already. That was Bill’s steady, quiet work.

  Elmer was close to a door, and so, with a large .44 in each hand, he kicked it in, and found a corridor full of half-dressed men, most in a state of panic and confusion, some with weapons, others not. Elmer fired with each gun, the powerful, amplified .44 slugs finding targets in the hallway. It was a killing time.

  The .44s didn’t just hit a man, they thumped him good. They thumped him so hard he didn’t fall, he was bowled to the ground. Moreover, the muzzle blast was so tremendous it too was like a force in the corridor, for if the bullets missed, the disorienting effect of all that blast took the fight out of a lot of the men.

  But Elmer clicked empty on each cylinder, and knowing that he was now unarmed and would be so until thirty seconds’ worth of reloading work, he faded back, rotated around, and headed for cover behind a tree. That is when he was shot in the head.

  It hurt mightily. He went down, disoriented, feeling the blood pour from the wound. Next thing a bullet hit next to him, pulling an angry gout of earth, and then another close by. He was being shot at from on top of the building. They had him cooked but good, and it
didn’t matter because he’d been shot in the brain.

  But if he were shot in the brain, how could he think so clearly? He slid his hand under his hat and felt a bloody furrow atop his skull, pulsing with blood. It was a grazing wound.

  Another shot tore into the earth, filling the air with dust. Them fellows were not the best shots.

  Suddenly someone was next to him, pulling him upward, while nearby, someone very calmly fired, fired again, fired some more.

  The girl pulled him upward.

  “Mr. Kaye, you are too heavy to carry, sir.”

  “Sally, watch yourself.”

  “Now you come on and we’ll get you looked at.”

  She dragged him back to the trees under cover of the very fast fire that Bill Jennings laid over the top of them.

  Then Bill faded, slipped around to the other side.

  “I take it I am not hit bad,” said Elmer.

  “Your head is as hard as a potbellied stove,” she said. He felt three or four fast pricks.

  “Ouch! Girl, what are you—?”

  “Hold still. Knitting you up. You’ll like to bleed out otherwise. Now this is really going to hurt bad.”

  With that, she applied some kind of astringent. It stung like holy hell.

  “Ow!”

  “Ow yourself. Now get back in the fight, sir. No time for lollygagging.”

  Elmer skootched over with his rifle. The girl slipped away. Wasn’t she a heller! That one had some damn grit!

  The flames of the burning Store illuminated the scene. Shots came from his left; that had to be Bill. Farther away, it was now the Whipping House that blazed in the night. The whole scene was lit by the lusty flames; the odor of fire and meat filled the air.

  Elmer took up his rifle, a Winchester ’92 in .38–40. Now and then a figure would appear in an upstairs window with its own rifle, and Elmer was so quick and accurate, he knocked three down in as many minutes. He cranked the lever behind each shot. Then a man emerged, and Elmer drew to him.

  But he could not fire.

  The man had a woman in front of him, a Negro gal constricted both by his strong arms and by her own terror. She was too far gone to scream much. In the firelight, her eyes shone brightly, all white.

  “Y’all come to set the niggers free? Well, we goin’ kill ’em all if you don’t back away, goddamn your race traitor hides. We goin’ to—”

  Elmer couldn’t get a shot. He slithered sideways, glad that no blood would be filling his eyes, though perturbed at the ruination of a good hat. That hat upset him. It had cost seven dollars in Medicine Bend, Montana, a specially big Stetson that climbed a full six inches above the top of his head. It would be hard to replace, but then it occurred to him that blood-spattered and with a nice hole in it, it would make an excellent souvenir. He’d hang it off the bison head in the dining room.

  He had found the angle. Now quickly, he drew the rifle to him, finding the tiny blade of the sight, and pressing it sideways until he lost it against his antagonist’s head behind the Negro woman, pressed trigger with ball of finger, and fired. He hit the yelling man under the left eye. What a big soft chunk of .38–40 lead does to a human head at that range is not a pretty thing to see, and skull emptied and tattered, this fellow slipped softly to the earth and went limp, and the colored woman ran away.

  “Nice shooting,” Bill called.

  “Believe I hit him right square.”

  “Believe he won’t be no problem.”

  The next event was the approach of a horse, driven hard by a rider who knew his business well. Reinforcements? Elmer quickly loaded a passel of .38–40s into the rifle, cranked the lever and watched, hoping he wasn’t about to be trapped by shooters on two sides. But of course it wasn’t reinforcements: it was Charlie Hatchison, cackling madly, his face lit red by the fire. Charlie seemed to have come straight from hell; he was jabbering as he dismounted his animal and gave it a smack to drive it away. He raced to Elmer.

  “Yee haw, ain’t this a goddamned picnic. You get any?”

  “I got some.”

  “How many?”

  “Charlie, I done what I had to do. Didn’t stop to count. We got a batch of ’em in there. Bill’s off on the side.”

  “You been hit?”

  “Yes, I have. But where it don’t matter. The head.”

  “Me too. In the ribs.”

  “Get that girl to look at it. She’s good with wounds.”

  “Hmmm, think I could sneak a kiss?”

  “You try, and I’ll shoot you, only I’ll put it between the eyes and that’s an ache that won’t go away.”

  “You are an ornery bastard, Elmer. It was a joke. Say, got any more them firebombs? I say we light ’em off, then gun the boys as they flee. But sometimes them bombs don’t work so well and—”

  “That’s too much like murder to me,” said Elmer.

  “Hell, son, murder’s what we come to do. Cover me as I get closer and toss a few. Though sometimes they don’t work too good. That Earl isn’t quite the genius he thinks he is.” He turned and yelled, “Bill, don’t you shoot me. I am going to light up these boys mighty fine.”

  “You hold on there, you old bastard,” said Bill. “I got a play to make.”

  Bill now did an amazing thing. Ramrod straight, with all his guns holstered, he stood out clear and bold in the firelight and approached the smoky building. No shots rang out, though he was now easy pickings.

  “It’s that goddamn face of his,” Charlie said. “Nobody got the sand to shoot at a fellow looks so scary.”

  Lanky, Western, his long arms hanging free, his hat set square on his head, Bill walked like a movie gunfighter to the barracks and stood outside. No shots rang out.

  “We got you outgunned and overmatched and outmaneuvered. We can shoot the tits off a cow at a hundred yards a hundred times out of a hundred. We have firebombs that can fry you up crispy like catfish. You are already dead. Now you have two choices. You can play it out and be dead in just a little while. Or you can come out buck naked and lie face down in the mud. Don’t make no never mind to us.”

  He stood there.

  There was some scurrying inside and then, one by one, they began to file out. Three or four Negro women came out, too, and raced off in the darkness.

  “Y’all git nekkid,” Bill commanded, “and if you don’t move fast enough, I got a crazy redneck over there kill you just as soon as spit on you.”

  There were eight of them, and they commenced now to pull clothes off, then go prone.

  “You, all the way nekkid. You could have a gun in them underdrawers.”

  The last pants came off, and the guards lay flat in the mud.

  “Anybody left inside with fight in ’em?”

  “No, sir,” came the call.

  “Hope not, ’cause we now going to burn her out. Charlie, light the bonfire.”

  “You do it, Elmer,” said Charlie.

  So it was Elmer who unscrewed a canteen cap, pulled the cord, and tossed the fizzing thing through a window. It worked perfectly, as did the one that followed and landed on the roof. So Charlie tried one, and when it didn’t fizz like it should, he just threw it through Elmer’s window so those flames would light it off.

  “I musta got all the duds,” he said.

  The barrack began to fire up, and in moments it was ablaze.

  “We should kill ’em.”

  “Don’t you dare, Mr. Hatchison,” said the young woman, stepping out of the shadows. “They’ve surrendered, you can’t kill them.”

  “Girl, what world are you from?”

  “The one you’d never understand. Anyhow, let me have a look at that hole in your side.”

  “It’s okay. Say, you’re all right, out here in all this, a girl. You’re a little bit of just fine.”

  “Don’t think a compliment will git you a kiss, Mister. If I can’t see your wound, then you have to get back in the fight.”

  “We’re going to cook, lying here nekkid,” one
of the fallen men yelled.

  “Crawl on your hands and knees then. We got other places to go, other men to kill. Count yourself lucky, boys, you fought so poorly, wasn’t interesting enough to kill you all. You crawl to the trees and hide there. In two days a boat comes, there’s your way out of here. In a bit, all them Negro men are going to be free, and if they run into you, by God, what we’d have done to you will seem like a picnic. Now crawl, damn you, crawl.”

  BY the time Earl got to the barrack, the flames had eaten it almost to the foundation. He heard shots ahead, in the fields, and knew it to be Audie and Jack finishing their play. He assumed that the others had moved on to join them.

  He crouched by the trees. Fires raged everywhere. A few bodies lay flat in the dirt, where the others had potted targets. He checked and by his own vision could sense that none was Bigboy.

  Damn!

  He edged around the tree line, meaning now to head straight to the prison compound a half mile ahead. But his eye snagged on something white. He focused, unable to recognize it, but saw that it was a human shape. Then he got it: it was a guard, naked, crawling ahead toward the trees. He must have surrendered.

  Earl ran to him.

  “Hey!”

  “Don’t shoot! Goddamn, don’t shoot, I done give up. My leg’s hurt bad, Mister. That fella done shot me ’bove the knee. I may die.”

  But Earl didn’t care. He just saw a bare-ass man in the dirt, crawling ever so slowly ahead.

  He knelt by him.

  The guard turned ever so slightly, looking up.

  “You!”

  “Me.”

  “You’s a haunt. You’s a ghost. I seen you go down in that black water. I seen the river take you and—”

  Earl put his Colt Trooper barrel against the nape of the man’s neck and let him feel the slight grind of the cylinder wheeling around as he drew back and cocked the hammer with an oily click that must have filled the vault of the man’s skull with its reverberations.

  “I am the man who’ll blow a goddamned hole in your head if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”