Pale Horse Coming (37 page)

I
T
seemed to take forever. Sam stood there, trans-fixed, caught up in the utter fragility of it. His fingers, not ideally distributed against the tension of the ribbon, nevertheless held it taut, and with his other hand he pinned the cardboard box flat. He had very little room to move, not without disturbing his hands and somehow altering the tension on the ribbon which, if he had figured this thing out correctly, could release the firing pin of what had to be an M1 Pull Firing Device, or something similar, which would allow the spring-driven striker to plunge forward against whatever primer was in the package, and the whole thing would go ka-boom. End of house. End, more to the point, of Sam.

He tried to recollect the thing. The M1s were ubiquitous in the war, standard equipment for rigging booby traps in defensive positions, but common to any artillery or mortar unit as well. For if you were in danger of being overrun and didn’t want your guns to fall into enemy hands, you could unscrew the fuse of a shell, screw in the M1, pull out the safety pins (two of them), and run a cord from the big ring at the end of the device to your position under cover. One pull on that ring, and the dance began and ended one second later with that big ka-boom. No guns for the Germans to turn against us, as they were wont to do.

Sam forced himself to concentrate. In that way, he drove from his imagination the fear and the discomfort. The discomfort, however, was not so easily vanquished. It refused to obey his will and insisted on manifesting itself in the cramps that had begun to spread through his awkwardly splayed fingers, in the itchy sweat catching in his hairline, in the sudden weight of his glasses, which had slipped down his nose and were pinching his nostrils and clotting his breathing, in the needles that had begun to prickle in his feet as the blood collected there, and in the dryness of throat and mouth as his throat grew raspy. It seemed as if the atoms of his clothes were increasing in density and acquiring weight, until they were pressing against his skin and constricting his chest.

He heard the sirens. He was aware, somewhere, of great activity. It had to be outside, and soon the familiar pulsing red illumination of fire and police department emergency lights came flashing through the windows. If a crowd gathered—as why would it not?—he heard that too, that low human buzz of a species drawn hypnotically to drama, hungry to see and feel another’s tragedy.

Yet no one appeared.

He waited and waited. The seconds seemed to liquefy and elongate, like drops falling off a window sill, fighting gravity till the last, until a final gossamer broke and off they plunged, slowly, slowly to obliteration.

Goddammit, when will they get here?

When will somebody get here?

The sweat now ran lazily down his face, irritating under normal circumstances, insanely bothersome under these. He scrunched his brow to stop it, and failed; it cascaded down, and his knees knocked, and his heart thudded.

He imagined that at any second the pin could slip that final millionth of an inch from where it now prevented the striker from plunging, and one hundredth of a second later there would be no Sam, only a crater in the block where Sam used to live.

At last a door opened.

“Mr. Sam?” came a timid voice from outside.

Sam recognized it as Sheriff Harry Debaugh.

“Harry! Thank God you’re here.”

“What you got in there, Mr. Sam?”

“I think it’s a sixty-millimeter mortar shell with a detonating thing screwed into the fuse. Pull it all the way out, it goes off. I started, and, well, anyway, I stopped just as I felt the pressure of a spring. So now I am hung up but good. I can’t move. If I relax, I think it’ll go.”

“What should we do, Mr. Sam?”

He didn’t know! He had no idea!

“Well, call Camp Chaffee and surely they have an explosive ordnance disposal team with equipment. That would be one thing.” Why do I have to think of these things myself? They should be on the way
now!
“Or try, let’s see, Little Rock would have a bomb squad. Maybe they could get here faster. I don’t think the state police boys up at Fayetteville could get here in time. Harry, I could drop this at any second, goddammit. My hands are cramping up something fierce.”

“Sam, you hold tight. I’ll make them calls.”

Another geologic epoch crawled by. One-celled animals evolved into fishes and plants and dinosaurs and then snakes and bugs and dogs and birds and monkeys and finally men came into the picture. Cave-dwellers arrived and departed, and then the Greeks, the Romans, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the terrible nineteenth century with its Civil War, and then, fifty-one full years and two major wars into this one, Harry again piped up.

“Sam, it’s going to take at least an hour. The Army people have to git together. I’ve rung up state police and they’ll escort ’em in, sirens an’ all, but, dammit, I don’t think it’ll be no sooner.”

Sam knew he couldn’t last that long. He had another twenty minutes at most before his fingers reached muscle failure, and then the ribbon would slip and it would be over.

“Sam, you sure? I mean, it could just be a bottle of bourbon.”

“
No!
Goddammit, I smelled Cosmoline. In arms depots, small arms and ammo are stored in a penetrating grease called Cosmoline. Its smell sinks into everything. This shell must have been wrapped up in excelsior from the place where it was stored. I
smelled
it as I was pulling the ribbon. That’s why I stopped.”

“Sam, you hold on now. No need gittin’ upset.”

I am one tenth of a second from being blown to smithereens, but I AM NOT UPSET.

“Listen, Harry. I can’t hold this position much longer. What I need is a cool young volunteer. Someone who can cut the cardboard away so that we can see what we have. Then maybe I can improvise a way to defuse the thing.”

“Sam, I can’t order no man to—”

“I said
volunteer,
dammit!”

“All right, Sam, hold your water. I’ll ask.”

Harry disappeared, and again Sam stood alone in the living room. He glanced around as the seconds pulled their long tails by. He could see a wedding picture of himself and his wife on a shelf, he could see a radio, he could see a picture taken at Hot Springs and one in Miami, the whole family, all those kids who would now grow up without a father. He could see plaques from Kiwanis and Rotary and the Masons and the Chamber of Commerce. He could see books from the Book-of-the-Month Club and
Life
magazines and
Time
magazines piled up in the magazine rack, but no damn television, as he wouldn’t have one in the house. He could see…he could see his whole damned life and how little it came to, how much nothing it was.

God, if I get out of this one, I swear I’ll do SOMETHING. Don’t know what, but something.

He knew who it was from, of course. It could have come from but one source.

Goddamn them, they got me. I thought I got away clean, but they got me. They reached into Arkansas, into my house, into the bosom of my family, where my children gathered, and they got me and they would have killed them all.

The bitterness was so intense he almost yanked the ribbon that last quarter inch just to release it. But he didn’t.

Oh, Lord,
he thought,
just let me survive this and get my licks in.

And then Harry was back. Sam sensed him sliding nervously up to the house and lingering there in the lee of the door, breathing hard.

“Sam?” he finally said, and his tone carried the whole story.

“Yeah?”

“Sam, nobody would do it. It’s too tricky. I can see the point, too, can’t you? I mean, either your thing is going to go off or it’s just a bottle of Pepsi-Cola and we can all laugh about it, that’s all. And if it’s the first, getting another man killed, I mean, what the hell good does it do? One’s enough, by my reckoning. I wish Earl were here. He could do it.”

“Well, Earl isn’t here, dammit, and we will just have to deal with that.”

“How do you feel, Sam?”

“This palaver is no help at all. But my hands hurt like hell, my arms are weakening, my lower back is cramping and my knees are shaking. Oh, and my vision is blurring.”

“Sam, I…”

“Yes, Harry?”

“Sam, I can’t stay here. A mortar shell goes off this close to me and I’m cooked too, along with you. I’m sorry, Sam. You see what it is, don’t you? Either them Army boys are going to get here or not, and either there’s a mortar shell in there or there ain’t. My being here, it don’t matter.”

“All right, Harry.”

“Do you want me to say anything to your wife and kids?”

“Only what they know. That I loved them, that I wish I was a better man for them. Now get the hell out of here, Harry, and get busy on your praying.”

But Harry wasn’t listening.

Some sort of ruckus came up outside, a welter of noise and emotion, hard to make out, though indistinct sentence fragments came around the corner and into the room where Sam so delicately stood, the ribbon taut, the pains scaling his arms and legs, the sweat running down his face into his bushy eyebrows.

“You can’t—”

“I told—”

“Sheriff, we tried—”

“She wouldn’t listen—”

“Now, Mrs. Longacre,” cooed the sheriff, “this is a very dangerous—”

“Goddamn you,” came the clear, hard tones of Connie Longacre, “you get out of my way, Harry Debaugh, or I will sic such a crew of lawyers on you, you will wish you had never ever set foot on this planet from whatever coward’s rocket ship you arrived on.”

And with that, she stepped around the door, the sheriff and two deputies in pursuit, but unable to stand against her force of will.

Connie was beautiful. She had blond hair and soft skin and a nose like an ax blade. She could have used more chin, and eyes of blue or green instead of sea gray, and she could have dressed more like the woman she was instead of in jeans and boots and a sweater, but she was still such a heartbreaking vision Sam almost started to cry.

“Connie, for God’s sakes, get out of here. This is—”

“Sam, I tried to stop her.”

“Mrs. Longacre, this is a crime scene, and you are not authorized.”

“Ma’am, your husband—”

“You shut up, all of you. I’ve heard enough. You run away, you little man, and pray I can help Sam or my husband, Rance, will be very angry.”

“Sam, I—” began the sheriff.

“Sam, what is all this nonsense?”

“Connie, please, this thing could go off at any moment.”

“Mrs. Longacre, won’t you please come this way and—”

“
Don’t you touch me!
” she screamed, and the two deputies jerked backward. The sheriff yielded, then surrendered.

“All right, Sam,” she said, approaching as steadily as a three-masted schooner under nine sheets and a full breeze, “what the hell have we got going on here?”

“Connie, I cannot—”

“I am not going to go sit in the car, Sam, while you blow up, so you had better tell me what to do and tell me now!”

C
ONNIE
cut slowly, with perfect concentration. The surgical shears were sharp, and she cut in smooth strokes, unfaltering, unperturbed, unhurried, as if she’d worked with bombs her entire life. She had most of the back end of the box off now.

“What do you see?”

“Just a second.”

With a deft snip, the scissors closed their last. She set them down gingerly, then with her pale and elegant but steady hands, removed the rear of the box.

The smell of Cosmoline immediately flooded the room.

“How disgusting,” she said.

“It’s government gun grease.”

“There seems to be wads of paper or something.”

“Can you get them out so you can see?”

“I can try. How are you doing, darling?”

“I’m fine. Never been better. I may start to dance any second I’m so happy.”

“There, there, darling. We’ll have a nice martini when this is over, and then touch fingers and go back to our happy marriages.”

“Connie, for God’s sakes—”

“All right, I’m pulling it out, just wait.”

Using the scissors’ tips as pincers, she eased out a wad of crumpled newspaper, then another, and then another.

“Now I can see our boy,” she reported.

“And?”

“Hmmm. Yes, yes, what a naughty boy he is, too. He’s about eight inches tall with a set of stubby little fins at the end of a shaft at his bottom. His body is egg-shaped, greenish, with striations around the middle. The end is conical, but there’s some kind of gizmo there, a sort of pipe coming out of it. I can’t see for sure, but it looks like a nest of wires at the top.”

“Can you see if any of those wires leads out of the box, through a hole or something?”

“It’s too dark, darling. Do you have a flashlight or anything?”

“Yeah, right here, in my pocket, I’ll just put this down and get it.”

“Sam, don’t be a smart aleck, even if you’re about to be turned into Swiss cheese.”

“There’s a flashlight somewhere, but oh, Christ, I don’t know where it is. Get a lamp.”

“Mary will be so upset.”

But Connie went to an end table, seized a lamp from it, and ripped off its shade. Carefully holding it so the cord ran free, she brought it over to the package on the dining room table and snapped it on. The harsh, shadeless light made Sam flinch, and he did not need to flinch, for he almost let the ribbon go.

But Connie was peering in intently at what the light revealed.

“It does appear there’s a cord tied neatly through the ring at the tip of the pipe, and a taut line runs up to the box and—” she lifted her eyes to follow the cord—“and, yes, darling, it does seem to be stoutly attached to the ribbon you are holding so tightly.”

“All right. This is what you have to do. You have to reach in there and very delicately unscrew the fuse from the warhead.”