Pale Horse Coming (24 page)

W
HETHER
the boy died right away or later was unknown. In any event, he had been more or less in survivable condition by the time the guards arrived at 4:00
A.M.
and he was hauled off, though not, he was assured, to the Screaming House.

Earl thought he’d make it. The cut wasn’t deep, but arterial, and he’d spent the last two hours with his fingers in the boy’s thigh, pinching off the blood flow, while the boy moaned for his mama over and over again. The other men had gotten him calmed with their strength and their music.

But he died, anyway.

As for Moon, the same hidden convict grapevine conveyed the news that his jaw was broken and he’d been wired up as best as possible, but he had to be shipped via the prison launch to Pascagoula, where a surgeon would repair his jaw and he’d be in a maximum security ward while his jaw healed. He’d be back in a few weeks or so.

It was another day on the levee. Earl worked hard, though at a strange angle, because he didn’t want to stress his own wound, which had not been stitched closed as it should be but instead bound up with linens. He knew a sudden twist or jump and the blood would start spurting again. It wasn’t arterial, so he wouldn’t bleed out fast. He’d just get weaker and weaker.

The sun was a monster’s eye that day. It was a huge, angry thing, and it poured out its fiery radiance, and it sucked the energy and the will off them all. The flies, the skeeters. The heavy work, the poor food, the never-enough water. Section Boss sneering at Earl up top his horse, but now, since he’d kept himself alive much longer than anybody had expected, keeping a wary distance. They were afraid of Earl now, the guards. Earl liked that. Somewhere deep inside himself, he liked that a lot.

The rain came at 3:00. It slashed down from heaven with such vengeance that even Section Boss, now in a hunter’s poncho, understood that it was pointless to work, a rare concession to the elements. He commanded the convicts out of the soupy hole and up to the levee, where they could at least sit this one out.

Earl sat, as usual, alone. But he had a strange sense that men were closer to him than before.

“You, white boy. You box? You musta boxed, boy. You gots fast hands.” The voice came from directly behind him, but nobody was looking at him.

“Did some fighting in the service,” Earl said, in response to the first question anyone had asked other than Moon or one of his young thugs.

“I worked corners and cuts for a coupla years. You gots fast hands and can slip a punch. Nice jab combo.”

“You pick things up,” was all Earl allowed himself to say.

“You so smart, buckra, how come you done made a big mistake? You be dumb as any nigger, ask me.”

“What mistake is that?”

“You shoulda kilt Moon. He down, he out of the fight. You should have pulled that blade out of that no’count Junior and come over and gutted Moon.”

“He’d said he was through.”

“You is dumb, buckra. You is
dumb.
That boy gonna come back with one thing on he mind. He goin’ kill you. You done messed up his old haid twicet, he gots to kill you. You best kill him first night he gits back, else he kills you deader ’n a motherfucker.”

It was solid advice, Earl knew. Moon wasn’t the sort of man who’d learn a lesson. He’d get through his pain and fury in the prison ward in Pascagoula, wired up without anesthetic, and he’d lay in silent pain for a week or two or three, in the darkness, and all that time he’d nurture his hatred for Earl, he’d think on it and polish it and lick it shiny, until there was no other thing in his mind, no other thing at all. That was the way a fellow like Moon worked.

So: Earl had to kill him.

Or: Earl had to prepare to die.

Or: Earl had to escape.

None of the possibilities were inspirational to him. Instead, he just tried to fight the despair by snatching a quiet moment in the warm, hard rain, feeling slightly cleansed for the moment. He looked around: fronds of palmetto pulsed out of the green undergrowth, and before him, down the levee slope and in the hole, though the ground had turned even muddier and more desperate, the vegetation was green and glisteny. It was like a Guadalcanal in Mississippi, where the beauty of the wild place stood in contrast to the squalor of the savagery. That was the now. That was the present. That he could enjoy.

“Hey,” he said to the man who had spoken to him, “tell me something. The Screaming House Junior was yelling about. What would that be?”

“You don’t want to go there, white boy. Take my word on that.”

“It’s the end of the line?”

“You see them bedbug-crazy boys down ’end of the barracks? Look, they standing over there.”

Earl glanced quickly through the rain, to a small knot of gibbering crazies who were shunned and stood apart from the others. He recognized a few: the fellow who talked to himself, the fellow who gripped his own arms so tightly you thought he’d squeeze himself to death, the gentleman with the fused spine who looked as though an iron bolt had been sunk through the center of his spindly old body. Each had a bright red number painted on his shirt so that he could be recognized.

“Them boys should be in a hospital someplace.”

“Ain’t no hospitals here. Only the Screaming House. You ain’t been here long enough, but when one gits so bad he can’t work, they comes git him in the night. They takes him off to the Screaming House. We calls it that. No man never seen it. It’s off to the west a bit. Fish claims it’s cool there, and clean. But off goes a crazy boy and you can hear him in the night, the wind is right, the weather calm. You can hear him screaming. He scream and scream and scream. These country niggers let a place like that grow on their minds, think it’s some kind of torture place. Think these guards got a special torture place.”

“What happens?”

“The screaming stops. That boy don’t never come back. Nobody never comes back from the Screaming House.”

“I will avoid that place if I can,” said Earl. “What they sick from?”

“Don’t know, white boy. Some say it’s bad blood. Some say it’s the fevers of the river. Some say it’s the shots they give us when the doctor look us over every three-fo’ months.”

“What kind of doctor would let men like that fry in the sun?”

“The white kind,” said the man, simply, and that seemed to end the conversation.

Earl noticed the rain had stopped just as suddenly as it had started, and now shed of his poncho, his tommygun named Mabel Louise gleaming from frequent cleanings, Section Boss rode the levee road commanding the convicts back into the hole.

“Git ’er goin’, you lazy niggers. Work to be done. You too, white boy, you git on down there and don’t you think you be slackin’ none. I catch you leaning, I’m going to beat your hide with my stick, boy.”

Earl rose, feeling the endless pains cut at him. His respite was over. The hole beckoned, with its sucking mud and stubborn, iron-hard cyprus stumps and its endless tangles of bramble and thorn, its mosquitoes, its snakes.

“You do what Section Boss says, or I be on you ass, white boy, and maybe, heh heh, I be
in
yo’ ass!”

It was Fish, who’d jingled up on his mule-drawn cart unnoticed during the rain.

“You tell him, Fish!” came the cry from the guards.

“Yassuh, boss. Talked to ol’ Moon afore he done left. Moon, before he guts you, he goin’
fuck
you! Yassuh, he be goin’ do dat. Up the ass! Make you his sweet bitch. So you die a bitch! Ha, lawdy, lawdy, don’t that beat it all! Make you wear lipstick! You be a fancy lady!”

The homosexual content of the jibes annoyed the hell out of Earl. Things like that weren’t right. Shouldn’t be said out loud. He’d once caught two Marines doing something sexual out near the shitters on one island rest camp and immediately transferred them out of the unit, to different regiments. His fear on this one went deep, for some reason.

“Hoo, don’t think the white person like to know he goin’ be Miss Katharine Hepburn for old Moon when he gets back! Hey, white boy, iffn’ you can take out the garbage and wear nylons, maybe Moon
marry
yo’ pale bootie!”

Earl lost himself in his work, trying not to feel humiliated and debased by this new tack of Fish, who clearly had a way of getting under the skin.

As Earl used his hoe to chop at the root of an old tree, Fish was making Lana Turner smooching sounds, full of the suggestion of tongue and spit, to raucous laughter from the guards, particularly Section Boss.

Earl tried to erase the contaminated image from his brain, but couldn’t. Himself being held down and stripped buck naked while Moon, behind him, had his way. It was a shame he couldn’t live with. It would kill him, that’s all. He feared it, for some reason, deep in his brain, beyond all logic and clarity.

That would kill me, he knew.

I’d rather be gut shot and die slow than live with that in my mind.

He chopped and dug and dug and chopped. The heat and the sun came back. He was in a dream of fear, trying to see only what was before him. It had one salutary effect, and that was that the afternoon seemed to pass more quickly than ever before, and soon enough the twilight was on them, and the cry came down the line, “Convicts, out of the hole and form up.”

As Earl came out, he saw something new. It was a car.

It was the first car he’d seen at the prison.

It was a black Hudson sedan, gleamy and creamy in the twilight. And standing next to it, like a general attended by his staff, was Earl’s main antagonist, Bigboy himself, examining the world through his MacArthur sunglasses. Two minions hung by him; Section Boss, even farther down the line of hierarchy, had dismounted and assumed a submissive position.

Earl felt Bigboy’s eyes on him through the dark lenses. But he didn’t dwell on it. He simply clambered up the slippery slope, took his hoe to the toolshed where a trustee stacked it, and looked for his exile’s place at the end of the formation.

But suddenly two men were beside him and a third behind him. In the next second, they collided upon him, his chains were drawn tight, two more added to secure his arms to his body with no clearance whatsoever, and he was dragged in his mincing, humiliating walk before the great man.

“You still alive, Jack Bogart? You know what?” said Bigboy, “you made me some money. These section guards swore you wouldn’t last a night. You’ve lasted twelve. You’ve killed a man, even if it was only a lowly Negro. You’ve made friends and influenced people. I had money riding on you, and I’ve come out to collect.”

Whap!

Someone hit him hard upside the head.

“You look at Mr. Bigboy when he be talkin’ to you, son. That’s how we do it here.”

“You are a sight, I will allow, Brother Jack,” Bigboy went on. “Cut and beaten, you still fight on. From what I hear, it only gets worse. Everybody is saying old Moon has special plans for you. Why do I think you aren’t going to enjoy what Moon intends? Seems to me a hero like you can’t lose his dignity, or he’s nothing. That true, Jack Bogart?”

Whap!

Another openhanded strike to the back of the skull.

“Cat got your tongue, boy? Answer the guard sergeant.”

“My name is Jack Bogash,” Earl said. “It ain’t no Jack Bogart, like that movie fellow. I am a truck driver from—”

Whap!

The boys commenced to beat on him, for their amusement, for a few minutes. Even Section Boss, emboldened by Earl’s chains and pain, came over and got a few licks in. One of the blows opened the cut across Earl’s body, and he felt the blood begin to seep out of his shirt.

“Enough,” said Bigboy. “Get him up and in the back of the car. Jack Bogart, you’re going for a ride.”

T
RAMMELED
by his chains and pinned by the beef of guards on either side, and with a sawed-off Winchester pump rammed in his ribs for good measure, Earl rode through the penal farm. Once he even glimpsed the river beyond, pale and flat and broad, like some highway out of town. But soon the vegetation thickened and darkened again, and the tropics took over; they came to a gate.

“Yes, sir,” said Bigboy in the front seat as the driver ran out to unlock the gate and pivot it open, “you listen hard to what the man is going to say to you. You won’t get another shot at redemption. We don’t sell redemption here. We’re not in the salvation trade. We’re punishers. We make the evil pay for their sins, that’s our specialty, but on account of my deep and abiding affection for heroic types, I have arranged something special for you, along temptation lines. We shall see how tough you are. Pain doesn’t frighten you, Mr. Hero, nor does the fear of death or degradation. We’ll offer you what the devil offered Jesus Christ himself, which is the whole world.”

He chuckled softly in the fading light.

The car purred along a narrow jungle path and soon encountered a strangely tidy building nestled among the loblollies and the palmettos, white and trim, well built along strict government guidelines. It had a very 1943 feel to it; it reminded Earl of the jungle headquarters the Seabees would throw up so efficiently on back islands away from the battle zone, where staff and intelligence matters were considered in comfort.

Earl was dragged out, further confused by a mechanical hum arising from somewhere. It was the sound of generators, well insulated, churning away, another cue familiar from the Pacific in wartime.

In he went, to an utter astonishment: coolness.

The place was air-conditioned.

The temperature must have been seventy-two degrees. He blinked in low darkness, and the two hulking guards took him down a shiny corridor. Doors off it opened to what appeared to be ward rooms, and one was opened just enough so that he saw a black man in an oxygen tent, clearly close to death. They reached the end of the corridor and an office which, entered, proved to be clean and modern along military lines, with a medicine cabinet, a sink, a shelf of jars, a pile of clean towels, many sterilized packets of either pills or small instruments and an examining table.