Pale Horse Coming (34 page)

In he stepped, to air-conditioning, and to a grim foyer of a greenish unpleasant place, where a girl was behind a desk, and behind her many men in ties but not coats worked phones hard.

Earl had called ahead; he was expected.

“Mr. Swagger?”

“That’s it.”

His fellow was his own age, with the beaten look of too many disappointments. Thinning hair, glasses, no tan, grubby fingernails from a lot of ballpoint work.

Earl sat at his desk in the bull pen.

“Now I can make you quite a deal. You’ve hit it just right.”

“That’s what I understand.”

“The studios have switched over to newer stock. Modern stuff, easier to care for, no disintegration.”

“I see.”

“So right now there’s a glut of the old stuff. Our market is usually TV stations who’ll run this stuff for kids, fill out their programming. They call them old-time movies. Ever hear of Johnny Coons, Uncle Johnny, in Chicago? That’s all he does, and he banks a fortune.”

“No, sir.”

“You’re from the South.”

“Yes, sir. My people would like old-time cowboy pictures, is my belief. None of this new stuff. They don’t care about new stars. They want the old.”

“Well, sir, I can put a package together for you, probably for under a thousand? Is that the budget area you’re looking for? I’m not sure how much your chain has to spend.”

“I was thinking more like half that.”

“Five. I can work with five. I’ll throw some extra in, because I like you.”

“You’re a fine man.”

“Not really. Okay, let’s see, I think I could do Hoppy. Lots of Hoppy. Hoppy’s still big in the South, I’d bet. Hoppy’s moving to TV and so nobody’s going to pay to see him on-screen when they can see him on the television. You like Hoppy?
Hoppy Sees a Ghost. Hoppy and the Riders of the Purple Sage. Hoppy and the Indians. Hoppy and the Mystery of the Bar X Ranch.
”

“I like Hoppy. Hoppy is fine.”

“If you want to go back further, I have Hoot Gibson, Tom Mix, Buck Jones, John Wayne as Sandy the Singing Cowboy, though he can’t carry a tune to save his life. What about Gene Autry?”

“Gene can sing.”

“Yes, he can. Also, I’ve got some old William S. Hart. Have you ever heard of him? A little before your time, I’d guess.”

“’Fraid so.”

“Well, sir, you’d like it. Your audience might see it as a novelty. Real ‘pure’ stuff, you know. Not fancy like it later became.”

“Yes, sir. Throw that in, too.”

A deal was struck. Earl bought the exclusive rights to exhibit a package of one hundred prewar Western movies, for less than five hundred dollars in an area of Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. The films themselves were part of that deal and would be shipped to the address Earl specified. It was understood that if he wanted to show them on the television, he’d have to pay a further royalty.

“Doubt I’ll be showing them on television,” he said, signing on the dotted line. “Ain’t no television yet where I operate.”

“Take advantage of that while you can, sir. The television will change the face of our business, I guarantee you.”

“I believe you are right.”

After the papers were dispatched, and the check written and handed over, his representative had a grand statement to sum it all up: “Sir, you are the inheritor of the myth of the American West. You should be very proud.”

“I hope I can live up to it,” Earl said.

S
AM
sat in the medical school library at Fayetteville. He was completely puzzled. He was still studying the fabulous career of the fabulous David Stone, M.D., M.S., Ph.D., Maj., U.S.A.M.C., beloved humanitarian, disease battler the world over, and he was wondering: Where is the research?

Perhaps he had misunderstood. Perhaps Dr. Stone wasn’t a researcher. Perhaps Sam didn’t quite connect with the protocols of a complex, high-level medical career such as the late or possibly late doctor had enjoyed.

But for whatever reason, the man simply had ceased to exist after 1936, at least on paper. Before then, as the mountain of books before him on the table of the reading room testified, he’d been everywhere, stunning the world with the brilliance of his research. He was in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
four times, he was twice in the
New England Journal of Medicine,
he was twice in
Lancet,
the British medical publication, and he was once each in a series of regional medical publications or publications devoted to specific diseases or specialties, such as blood, eyes, upper respiratory, virology and so forth and so on. Judging by the letters his pieces always generated, he was a brilliant researcher.

And then…silence.

And this was well before he entered the Army, before whatever happened to him or he happened to in Mississippi.

Well, it was not quite silence. It was the doctor who disappeared, that is to say, the research physician in desperate small countries the world over. That man vanished. The Dr. Stone everybody knew and loved did not disappear at all; if anything, he had flourished, and if anything, the glory wall in his widow’s apartment only told the half of it.

In the popular press, he continued to thrive, and the
Reader’s Guide
yielded citations in the
Washington Times-Herald,
the
Baltimore Sun,
the
Los Angeles Times, P.M., Collier’s
and
Newsweek.
He even got a 1938 spread in
Life,
where in his pith helmet, with his beautiful wife by his side, he was in the slums of Bangkok in a country called Siam surrounded by beautiful and not so beautiful little yellow people. The story described how he’d advised the Red Cross on a clinic and spent six months there working with the poorest of the poor, the most wretched of the wretched, all in the name of humanity and science. But details were scanty.

And none of this, moreover, had a thing to do with some installation in the wilds of Maryland about which, in all his learnings, Sam had not uncovered a single thing. What was done at Ft. Dietrich to have them so interested in what was done at Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored)? There was no evidence of a thing.

Sam had a headache and a dead end.

He couldn’t call the widow who now hated and despised him, particularly since she’d blurted out her hideous secret (he knew how the human heart worked), and he’d exhaustively worked the War Department, the Medical Corps, the American Medical Association and the American Virology Association, having burned out those bridges, or having them burned out by those industrious boys from HUAC.

Where could he go?

He realized he had but one course open, and it was a tedious one. He had to try and find the names of Stone’s 1928 Harvard Medical School graduating class. Then he had to call them. Every one of them. Sooner or later, he’d find one who had known Stone well, or so it seemed. Sooner or later, he’d find one who’d talk. Sooner or later. But he realized there were only a few weeks left till the dark of the moon, so he hoped it would be sooner rather than later.

He wished he believed in what he was doing a little more fervently.

T
HE
two men sat at the back table in the dark cavern known as Pablo’s Cantino, in the city of El Paso, another long flight from the last destination.

Earl watched them. How they ate expressed their deep personalities. One was feisty, quick, full of aggression, hungry for sensation. He devoured his food. To him, life was a picnic of Mexican vittles, a profusion of spices to be sampled for flavor, then devoured. More controlled, the other man sat glumly, picking at his plate, a giant of control and taciturnity; he looked like a minister at an orgy.

“Fellas,” said Earl.

“Well, goddamn, Sergeant Swagger, didn’t know you’d be bringing my old friend Bill along,” said the feisty fellow, who was a former border patrol officer named Charlie Hatchison. He was wiry, peppery, loud, and couldn’t sit still. His sharp eyes darted everywhere on constant patrol, and it was a problem for him to keep a smirk off his face, for what one sensed most immediately about Charlie Hatchison was the pleasure he took in being Charlie Hatchison.

“Bill’s quite a feller,” he went on maniacally, “and if it’s action upcoming, damned if I don’t want to stick close to old Bill, on account he’ll git me through it, right, Bill?” Charlie was a needler. He liked to prick at people. Everybody was a challenge to him, and he was always looking for ways to bring people down a notch or two.

Bill Jennings was his opposite, lanky and solemn. His face was like a melted puddle of bronze, hardened, then tempered. It never changed expression, not even slightly. It was the dullest face anybody had ever seen. To most men, that epic mug with its message of violence contained was enough. People surrendered to him in legendary numbers, and that exactly was the bone of contention between the two men. Charlie Hatchison, in a life on the border in the twenties and thirties, had killed seventeen men in gunfights, and had savored every one of them. Bill Jennings, an author and renowned fast gun, who’d performed revolver tricks on
What’s My Line?,
had killed no one. Charlie was not famous, though he’d won the national bull’s-eye competition four times in the thirties, and Bill Jennings was, though he’d never won a thing.

“Yes, sir,” said Charlie, “see heah, if’n I git in a jam, you know, why I just pull out a copy of Bill’s book
Second Place Is No Place,
and I look up my situation in the index, flip to the pages listed, and damnation, hellfire and brimstone, it’ll tell me what to do!”

It was quite a show. Charlie liked being noticed. He expected to be at the center of attention, and when he wasn’t he grew surly and restless.

Finally, Bill spoke, though quite slowly.

“Y’all probably think I
put
that burr up Charlie’s butt. Fact is, he’s
born
that way. Passing strange, but that’s how it is. Pay him no mind, and he’ll quieten eventually.”

Charlie laughed.

“You can’t git Bill’s goat, ’cause he done
strangled
the goat some years back. You can call him
anything
and he just looks at you with them dead eyes and you feel the Lord’s presence, beckoning you forward to them pearly gates.”

It was true. Bill Jennings looked like death in the tall grass, with that lanky frame, those long arms and big hands and that eerie calm, while Charlie looked like a traveling salesman for a snake-oil company.

“Hell, he
is
deadly. Why, between us we killed seventeen men,” Charlie laughed.

“What I am offering the two of you,” said Earl, “is something hard to come by. It’s what you want. It’s the best thing for gunmen, and the world is changing so much it’s going to be gone soon, or at least gone in the way I’m offering it. I’m talking about action.”

“I will drink to action,” said Charlie, throwing up a tequila and downing it neat. “Gittin’ close to the worm,” he said, indicating the gross object that floated in the bottle.

“It’s all changing,” said Earl. “If you have to put a man down in the line of duty, you got lawyers and bureaucrats and newspaper reporters barking at you, you got those in the community calling you trigger-happy, you ain’t a hero no more, you’re some kind of outcast. And you got reports. You got endless paperwork and talks with the prosecutors and justifying and interpreting and figuring it all out.”

“That is true,” said Bill Jennings.

“Bill, haw!, you wouldn’t know if it was true or not. You done fought more with your face than with your gun hand!”

Bill’s face remained placid, overly affected by gravity, all its many lines vertical, his eyes dull as mud. If a flicker of distaste flashed through them, only Earl noticed; or maybe it was a trick of light.

“I never filed no reports on the seventeen I got,” said Charlie. “Some was Mex, and of course you never would bother with paper on them. But even the white boys, like that Perry Jefferson, I done perforated him like a piece of cheese with my Browning 5 with the duck-bill spreader all loaded up with blue whistlers, wooo-eeee, what a mess, but he’s as white as white can be, and nobody gave no two shits about him, ’cause he’s bootlegger trash from Dallas, carrying heavy guns with him ever which way. Sent him to his maker and was proud of it. Bill, now you tell the hero sergeant here ’bout your best action and the aftermath.”

Bill ate a tamale.

“Well,” said Earl, “let me tell you what I have going. Then you decide if you’re in or not.”

“I’m in,” said Charlie. “Tell you that right now. Bill’s in too, ’cause he don’t never want it said Charlie H. done something he’s afraid to do. His book might not sell no more.”

“Bill, you’re still serving law enforcement. What I’m setting up is technically against the law.”

“Never let the law git in the way of a good fight, right, Bill?” said Charlie. “Hell, on the border we’d cross and gun them bad boys who’s gunning for us. It was them or us in them wide-open days, and we’s serving justice first, survival second and the law maybe dead last.”

“Bill, I—”

“Hell, just say your piece,” said Bill.

So Earl just said it. Said it all, as he had with the others, while Charlie, if he listened at all, paid more attention to setting the worm in the bottle free, and Bill ate another tamale.

“That’s it,” said Earl. “So now it’s your play.”

“You know what, Earl,” said Charlie, “truth is I never had much use for your colored folk. That’s how I feel. So don’t look for me to hold no hands and do no holy-rolling. But you’re offering something money can’t buy, and that’s kills. I got me seventeen and figure on notching up my gun a few more times before I pass. So if I don’t got to lollygaggle no niggers, but just do some serious gun work, count me in, like I said.”

Earl turned to Bill, knowing that the big man had a lot to lose on this job, but was rewarded with a nod, almost imperceptible. Bill of course would remain silent on his motives, his dreams, his aspirations. Palaver wasn’t for him. You’d just have to tell him where and when, and if he said he’d make the party, by God, the party he would make.

Earl finished with his last details.

“I’ll give each of you five hundred dollars in cash. With that I want you to finance your travel and your guns. You travel to Tallahassee on September 5 and buy the newspaper. In the personals, there’ll be an ad selling a nineteen thirty-two Ford motorcar for six hundred dollars.”

“Hell, Earl, nobody pay six hundred dollars for a nineteen thirty-two Ford.”

“Well, exactly. So you call that number, and I’ll tell you where you come to the next day.”

“Ah.”

“You travel separately. You don’t swagger or make friends or buy drinks or let no one buy you drinks. You dress for hunting, not fighting.”

“Bring our guns?”

“No. Certainly nothing duty-issued where your serial number is recorded, or anything that can be identified as yours. Also, nothing military. Bring sporting arms only. I’d go to the pawnshop and pick me up a good rifle, say a lever gun, and a pair of .38s or .357s. If you want to shoot .45 or you have an old Luger or something, that’s fine. But don’t bring nothing you’d be afraid to leave in a swamp. Don’t bring Billy the Kid’s Lightning, if you happen to own it.”

“Hell, I got so many old guns I don’t need to go to no pawnshop. I must have three hundred of the goddamn things,” said Charlie.

“You travel low-key without no fuss. You’re hunters, traveling to the field. Got that?”

“Got it.”

“We’ll be there just a while. Then we’ll move, have our fun, and move out, all in a single night, fast and mean and loud. Then you never talk about this no more. Is that agreed?”

“It is,” said Charlie, and Bill nodded, again imperceptibly.

Earl slid the two envelopes over, and each was quietly slipped away.

“That’s fine.”

“Y’all drink a toast with me now,” said Charlie.

“Believe I will,” Bill finally said.

“I’m on the wagon. I’ll drink this here Coca-Cola, if you don’t mind.”

“Suit yourself,” said Charlie, throwing himself another shot of tequila, then throwing one to Bill.

The three glasses came up.

“Learned this one in France,” said Charlie. “It seems to fit right nice here in Pablo’s. Haw!
Vive la guerre, vive la mort, vive le mercenaire!
”