Behold a Pale Horse

by Franklin Allen Leib

  In February 1969, Brother Rupert Justice’s tiny church was visited by a middle-aged woman in black glasses. Rupert recognized her from the pulpit despite the harsh TV lights shining in his eyes. She was dark-haired around an incongruous pillbox hat, large-mouthed, and ugly if you ignored the softness of her smile. She was Claudia King Travis, who owned all the radio and television stations in south and central Texas. Brother Rupert Justice held his eyes on her dark glasses and delivered his sermon to her alone, mixing his fire with compassion, almost singing at times.

  At the end of the service, Rupert stood by the door on the broad porch added on with money from the TV program. The little church was freshly painted and the roof sheathed with new asphalt shingles. Brother Rupert Justice shook hands with each parishioner in turn, and each thanked him and blessed his heart.

  Claudia King Travis kept her seat in a back pew. After the last worshiper had gone, one of her retainers came out to the porch and beckoned Rupert back inside. He told Mrs. Travis what an honor it was—

  “I want to move this program to a studio in San Antonio,” she said, interrupting, a woman with little time for small talk. “Better lighting, a much larger studio audience, broadcast over most of Texas and Oklahoma.”

  “Uh, the choir—”

  “Will be taken care of. When can you move?”

  “Well, it’s a great honor, a great calling, but my flock—”

  She took off her glasses. Her eyes were hard. “Get someone to help you with the flock; you’ll be making enough. Or should I find me another TV preacher?”

  “I’d be proud to come to San Antonio,” he said smoothly.

  “Isn’t pride a sin, Reverend Tolliver?” Claudia said sharply. Then she smiled, stood, and gave him her white—gloved hand. She was a small woman but radiated great confidence. Rupert bowed over the hand and accepted her will.

  12

  July 2000

  JUSTICE ARRIVED IN Orlando on July 4, three days before the convention of the Republican Party was to begin. He felt confident that this was his last stop before the prize, the move to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in what he always called Godless Washington, D.C. (D.C. for the Devil’s Cloister) on January 20, 2001, the true beginning of the new millennium.

  Justice held the slimmest margin of any major party candidate since primaries took over from state conventions to dominate the nominating process. After winning New Jersey and going over the top, he had added North Dakota a week later and finished with 1,029 delegates to Senator Donahue’s 951. Joseph Donahue had neither conceded nor endorsed his rival, and had angrily promised a fight over each plank in the Republican platform. Ezekiel Archer urged Justice to make peace with Donahue to avoid a fight over policy on nationwide television; Justice refused.

  “Fuck him,” Justice said into a large glass of bourbon. “Candy ass, Pope-loving, soft-handed, Yankee liberal! What’s he got to trade?”

  Zeke sighed. The suite in the Marriott Hotel, close by Disney World, was cramped, smoke-filled, and littered with room-service leavings. “Juss, you don’t win general elections the way you win nominations. You’ve proven yourself in the South and West, but that’s Republican territory. To beat Vice President Sandman, you need at least some of the Northeast, most of the Midwest, and above all, California.”

  “Donahue’s states,” Justice said to his glass. “Shit, Zeke, here I am on the verge of a major triumph, a Texas poor-boy preacher about to receive the nomination of our party to carry the standard forward to victory in November, and you’re about to tell me I got to kiss that pretty boy’s ass? I won’t do it.”

  “No, Juss, you shouldn’t.”

  “Damn right.” Tolliver went to the bar and rebuilt his drink, and poured out a dark one for Archer, even though his confidant had an untouched full one on the table beside his chair. “Fuckin’ A right.”

  “Unless,” Archer said, studying his fingernails, “you want to win.”

  Justice wheeled, his face flushed and blotchy with anger. “Just say your piece, Zeke.”

  “Let me meet with his people. Cut them some slack on the platform. Unify the party, Juss.”

  “That’ll do it? The stupid platform that nobody remembers a week after it’s done? Sure.”

  “Juss, ask Donahue, implore Donahue, to run with you as vice president.”

  Justice drained his glass. “We back to kissing his ass.”

  It was Zeke’s turn to show a little anger. “Juss, we’re talking New England or at least Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, plus Illinois, Indiana, and California.”

  “But I’d have that sneaky, disloyal bastard hard on my heels for four years. And what, by the way, would be his price? He doesn’t love me as we both know.”

  Zeke spread his large hands. “Juss, what do you care? Promise him anything. I believe it was Vice President John Nance Gardner who said the vice presidency wasn’t worth ‘a bucket of warm spit.’”

  “Promising’s one thing,” Justice said with a sudden grin. “Paying off’s another.”

  “Exactly,” Zeke said. “Do I have permission to talk to his people?”

  Justice refilled his drink. “Yeah, talk, but don’t sign any deal without getting back to me.”

  Clarissa Alcott Tolliver entered the suite’s living room from the bedroom. She was flushed from the shower and wrapped in a hotel terry robe that showed a lot of leg and more cleavage. She bent and kissed Justice on his bald spot. “Find out what they want,” Tolliver said, caressing his wife’s thigh. “Let me and my manager here have the final say.”

  Archer turned at the door, wanting to say a final word about Donahue’s probable demands. Clarissa had dropped the robe and stood, pink and glowing, caressing Tolliver’s hair and pressing her sex into his upturned face.

  Zeke closed the door softly and went back to his own room to think about how to knit up a deal with Senator Donahue’s people.

  THE MEETING WAS held in one of the smaller meeting rooms on the ground floor of the Marriott. Six people were present; by agreement, Tolliver, Donahue, and two aides each. Tolliver brought his wife and Ezekiel Archer, Senator Donahue brought his strategist, James “Wild Man” Rochefort, and the banker Colonel Alfred Thayer. “Thank you for coming on such short notice, Senator,” Justice said graciously. He stood at the head of the shabby cloth-covered table; he was, after all, the nominee-apparent.

  Joseph Donahue nodded but said nothing. He took the chair at the foot of the table, his aides on either side. Clarissa and Zeke took their places while Justice remained standing. There were many empty seats on both sides of the table between the two delegations.

  Justice sat, grinning at the Senator from Connecticut. He hates this, Juss thought, but he’s here. The deal had already been worked out between the candidates’ staffs and needed only ratification in this meeting. “I’ve asked Zeke here to prepare a short statement we might issue jointly, Senator, if you approve,” Justice said. He nodded to Zeke, who got up and passed out copies to Donahue and his two assistants. Everybody had seen the statement, but Rochefort read it again to make sure nothing had been changed. He nodded at Donahue, who pushed the paper away. “Agreed,” he said, the only word he had spoken since entering the room.

  “Let’s review,” Rochefort said. “As vice president, Joseph Donahue will head the National Security Council and be the administration’s chief architect of foreign policy.”

  “Chief adviser to the president, yes,” Zeke said softly. “We’ll be glad of Senator Donahue’s experience in this critical area.”

  “The platform is as agreed,” Rochefort continued. “No endorsement of same-sex marriages but no more gay-bashing either. Right to Life but muted. Welfare for unwed mothers limited by time but not eliminated. School prayer on a voluntary basis to be left to the states. Welfare reform—”

  “The platform,” Clarissa said evenly, “has been agreed.”

  “Senator Donahue,” Justice said, rising and extending his hand. “In the
interest of a unified party, in the interest of winning back the White House, will you accept the nomination as vice president? Believe me, sir, though we have our differences, we can and should work together.”

  Donahue let the offer sit on the table a long minute. His mouth was as pursed as if he had just sucked a lemon. Hell, he thought, and shrugged. It was a done deal. “Yes, Governor, I will, and thank you.” He did not rise from his seat to reach for Tolliver’s hand twenty feet away. Tolliver reddened and Donahue smiled.

  Zeke jumped to his feet and all but ran to shake Wild Man Rochefort’s hand. High fives and back slaps were exchanged all around as the handlers sought to celebrate a deal both principals loathed. Both delegations left the meeting as quickly as they decently could.

  BEFORE THE REPUBLICAN convention, Vice President Gene Sandman, anointed by the sitting president and unopposed in the Democratic primaries, enjoyed a lead in nationwide polls of 16 percent. The Republican convention proved to be a surprisingly (and for the journalists covering it, disappointingly) peaceful affair dominated by Justice Tolliver’s upgunned but largely unchanged stump speech on his acceptance of the nomination. Zeke and Clarissa had gone down to the floor to watch the speech among the rank-and-file delegates, and Zeke was awed by how good the speech sounded and how well Justice gave it after five months of endless repetition. After the convention, Sandman’s lead in the polls slipped to five points.

  Senator Donahue kept up his end of the Faustian bargain he had accepted in Orlando, campaigning vigorously in New England, the Midwest and California, sometimes with the candidate and sometimes on his own.

  The Democrats convened in San Francisco in mid-August and their convention was even more boring than the Republicans’. Sandman’s lead stayed at five to eight points right up to Labor Day as the nation largely ignored the tired campaigns.

  “Zeke,” Justice said, pulling his aide aside after a day of dark skies and thin crowds in Colorado and California. “We need more TV, a lot more, especially here in the West.” Clarissa, at the governor’s side as they boarded the chartered airliner, frowned and nodded emphatically.

  Zeke shook his head. “Juss, the stations won’t book us until we pay the bills for earlier time. We’re damn near out of money.”

  “Book the damn time,” Clarissa rasped. “The money will be there.”

  13

  THE CAMPAIGN TURNED ugly. A Tolliver rally in Anaheim, California, was disrupted by Latinos protesting his exclusionary stand on immigration, and his declared intention to prevent illegals from receiving any government services, not even access for their children to public schools. Chanting demonstrators were set upon outside the hall by booted bikers in gang colors and many were hurt. A Mexican-American woman who weighed over three hundred pounds was knocked to the pavement and stomped. She went into cardiac arrest and died in the street when the ambulance and police cars responding to the riot could not get through the crowd to help her.

  Justice Tolliver met reporters later that day in his plane and deplored the incident, saying he would pray for the victim and her family. He was asked whether his position on closing the borders to immigrants might have contributed to the mood of the crowd and the violence; he replied that as a youngster in south Texas, most of his friends had been Mexicans.

  In San Jose, California, a journalist shouted a question about “bullyboys” attached to the governor’s campaign intimidating the press and protesters. The governor cupped his hand to his ear and shrugged, but kept moving. The same evening the journalist was run off the road on his way home; his car wrecked, and him dragged out and badly beaten.

  The buzz continued. Black demonstrators were kept away from rallies, also homosexuals, Latinos, and pro-choice women. Stories were written about a shadowy group called the New Zealots. A Denver radio talk show host who had taken up the issue of New Zealots and complained to his audience about phoned-in threats was beaten to death in the underground garage beneath his studio after he ended his show at two in the morning.

  Justice continued to deliver his simple message of faith, family, and cleaning up corrupt politics. By October 15, he had drawn even in the polls, and more important, ahead in California.

  At the end of a fourteen-hour day of campaigning in dozens of gritty midwestern cities by bus, Justice summoned Ezekiel Archer to his suite in the Fremont Hotel in Chicago. Zeke found the governor dressed in a hotel robe, his skin pink from hot water, a bottle of Wild Turkey whiskey, glasses, and an ice bucket beside him as Clarissa, herself also wearing a robe with a towel over her hair, admitted him. Zeke was dead tired and felt grubby from the bus and wished he had had time to shower, but he was still in his wrinkled suit and sticky shirt he had been wearing for twenty hours and four states. It was past two in the morning.

  Justice, beaming, waved him to a chair. Clarissa made a dark drink for him and one for herself, then rebuilt the governor’s. “Great day, Zeke,” Justice said. “Good crowds all along the way.”

  “Lots of demonstrators, Juss,” Zeke said gloomily. “Lots of scuffles, many of them on television.”

  “Best there is, Zeke. Clarissa here and the Mormon think we should get more of that stuff videotaped.”

  “But why?” Zeke asked, taking a gulp of his drink. “You don’t want to look like a racist, or a homophobe, or any of the other names you’re being called.”

  “No, sir, I don’t,” Justice said, and cackled.

  “Justice looks just fine,” Clarissa purred. “His message is positive and his audiences are real mainstream Americans. The television audience sees that in contrast to a bunch of rude, noisy niggers and queers and longhaired, ratty-looking people getting a little push back to the fringe where they belong.” She smiled and dipped Zeke a little leg. “It’s working, and the polls show it.”

  “So you’re saying we should be looking like racists.” Zeke felt like he had been kicked in the stomach.

  “Hell, Zeke,” Clarissa said, bending over, patting his knee and treating him to a deep peek at her breasts beneath the loose robe. “We look damn good; it’s them as looks ugly.”

  14

  June 1969

  RUMORS BLEW THROUGH the camp along with the warm rain of the summer monsoon. The guards whispered that the camp was to be evacuated, the prisoners scattered. No one knew where or why, and there was speculation that the prisoners might be returned to North Vietnam, exchanged and sent home, or simply led into the bush and shot.

  Activity around the isolated camp increased. Dirty, ill-uniformed Pathet Lao guerrillas marched through, taunting the few Vietnamese guards and stealing ammunition and food. Villagers with trade goods appeared. Someone, some authority, was taking an interest in the hidden hills and fields of poppies.

  Cobra was selected as one of fourteen men to be marched across country with Major Peters, the camp’s senior officer, and three guards. The men were roped together and marched through Lao and Meo villages and fields. Cobra felt the hostile stares of the villagers, and he suspected the hill people hated the Vietnamese guards as much as they did the Americans. Both had brought destruction into their peaceful land.

  The men selected were the healthier ones, the ones likely to survive a march of several days. The gaunt giant Moser was left lashed to his crude pump to continue his endless march toward death. Cobra wished Moser was with them; he was a totem, a powerful, unbreakable spirit.

  In five days the prisoners reached a town on a bigger river, a town called Pak Sane that was teeming with North Vietnamese soldiers, all of whom appeared about to move out. The Americans were locked away in dark cellars, their filthy rice balls and weak tea thrown at them through the barred windows. Seven of the prisoners who had left the camp as the healthy ones died in the rank, drainless cellars.

  Six weeks after they arrived at Pak Sane, Moser appeared in the early hours of a rainy morning. He was gaunt, feverish and hollow-eyed, but he was strong. He carried an AK-47 carbine, an NVA canteen, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Cobra was one
of the few men who recognized Moser, and he helped herd the others down to the river and onto a sampan Moser had commandeered. Moser took them to Thailand across the Mekong, and returned them to American control.

  Cobra rested up in the hospital at the American base at Udorn, then at the naval hospital in Oakland, California. The day he was released from the hospital, he received a visit from the sergeant who had accompanied him when he had shot the sniper and saved the platoon on his first tour. The man gave him a present, wrapped in a marine seabag.

  “This be the rifle you used that day, Jack,” the sergeant said. “I had the armorer write it off as lost, and have been keeping it for you ever since.”

  In May 1970, Cobra was discharged from the Marine Corps. He used his military ID to obtain a passport and his considerable back pay to buy a first-class air ticket. After two weeks in Paris he returned to Southern Rhodesia and found work on a farm.

  15

  1971

  RUPERT JUSTICE TOLLIVER’S “Radio Mission to South Texas” became a television franchise worth tens of millions of donations and millions in profits as it spread through sharing agreements into Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and eastern Colorado. Claudia Bird handled the business end, treating her preacher well by her lights. After a year in the studio in San Antonio, the program was so flush with cash that a special tabernacle, a thirty-thousand-seat auditorium, was built outside Dallas. Rupert hired preachers to share the load, and accountants and lawyers. The sweet-sounding amateur singers from Batesville were augmented, later replaced, by a red-robed choir of three hundred professionals.