Pale Horse Coming (43 page)

His plan, he knows, is sound, if all the surprises work as they are set, and if the guards react as he expects they will react when confronted with strong, willful, armed men of extremely refined shooting ability and no mercy whatsoever. But he knows too that anything can go wrong at any time, and without radio communications, backup, a quick exit strategy, the whole thing can turn to catastrophe faster than a cat can blink.

But he can’t do any more. A sergeant, in this instance, should be out and around, cajoling his boys, feeling their fears, trying to calm them. These old goats are too old and too salty for much in the way of sergeanting. So Earl leaves them alone to do as they may, for they will do as they may when the day arrives, ever so shortly.

Earl, like the rest of them, works on his guns.

Earl has two revolvers. He would have preferred a .45 Government Model automatic, for he carried one as a Marine for fifteen years and again in the fracas in Hot Springs. He knows the Government Model well, and can shoot fine with it. It’s powerful, it reloads fast, it’s reliable, just what the doctor ordered. But his whole sense of this thing is that it can’t be a military operation. It’s not commandos, raiders, a secret, private army. It’s a posse of citizens who have taken it upon themselves to face what no one in authority has the courage to face. He thinks it’s all right like that, if it can be all right at all, but now it’s gone so far, it don’t matter much whether it’s all right or not. He’s going to do it, goddamn, and live with it forever after.

Earl doesn’t take a stand on American gun-making. He has a Colt and a Smith. His Smith is the Heavy Duty, on the .44 frame, to shoot the .34–44 high velocity, with the same stubby 4-inch barrel. The Colt is the Trooper, a beefed-up Official Police to shoot that same hard-recoiling .38–44. He’s good and fast with both.

Now he, too, can do nothing but clean the guns, smoke his Lucky Strikes and watch the moon disappear.

T
HE
phone call awoke the warden. He wasn’t used to being alerted this early in the morning, and he had a moment of panic.

Was the pale horse here?

But no. It was his bedroom. It was his Big House. It was the cool of the morning, but already the place outside had come alive. His servant was close at hand. He felt no disturbance in the ecosystem of his great place, for he was exquisitely attuned to such small disturbances.

The warden blinked, felt his breath return to normal. He glanced around, took a drink of water from the pitcher next to his bed, then picked up the phone. Since there was only one other working telephone in all of Thebes County, he had no doubts as to who it was.

“Warden here.”

“Sir.”

Of course: the sheriff, Leon Gattis.

“Sheriff Leon, what is this about?”

“Mr. Warden, thought you should know. They’ve arrived.”

“And, Sheriff, what would
they
be?”

“Why, sir, you know. Heh-heh, we had us quite a celebration when this all set itself up last spring. The
coffins.
The waterproof
coffins
that fellow done paid us to sell here to them bush Negroes.”

The warden recollected. Yes, indeed, last spring, the big news was the coming of the waterproof coffin company to Pascagoula, and the Pascagoula County people were all happy, because it meant jobs, and it also meant many greased palms. One of the distribution points for the new product was set to be Thebes, and on account of that plan, the warden had taken an emolument of five hundred dollars, that is, five dollars per coffin, for there would be one hundred of them, as had the sheriff, because it was deemed proper and appropriate that on such issues, important personages in the county should get their beaks wet, to make certain that no unforeseen legal obstructions came in the way of men desiring to do business. The sheriff had spent his money on whores and bourbon in New Orleans, and the warden had shipped it to his broker in New York.

“Hmmm,” said the warden.

Did he see conspiracy in all this? That would have to be a mighty conspiracy, for the coffin transaction was all set in place months before that Arkansas lawyer showed up, initiating this whole mad gyre of unease in his little empire. Who could engineer such a thing? No one alive, the warden knew.

“Sheriff,” said the warden, “tell me how they came and who or what came with them?”

“Well, sir,” said Leon, “they just came. They’s here. I just got a call in from one of my boys. He seen ’em.”

“Was there a fellow with them? Or a bill of lading? Or anything to make it official, as we would deem something official?”

“No, sir. Evidently, they’s barged up in the night, and the boat what towed ’em got an early start back. The fog lifts, the sun rises, and there they be, a cargo of wooden boxes heaped atop a barge, which is moored by itself in the river.”

“Leon, were you classically educated?”

“Sir?”

“No, of course not. Does the story of Troy mean anything to you? Or the story of a wooden horse in which men hid, and in the night broke out to raze a walled city otherwise impenetrable?”

“Hmmm. Might have heard something like that sometime, someplace.”

“Leon, you set up a guard right now on that barge, and you keep watching it. I will meantime send my men downriver in the prison launch, they will board, and they will examine these coffins and see if any clever Ulysses means to use them to engineer our destruction. And if that’s so, we’ll do what Priam never thought to do, and that’s burn them on the spot.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then, Leon, you comb the riverbank for tracks of men coming from that boat. Use those dogs you’re so proud of. Find me my Ithacans, do you hear, Leon?”

“Yes, sir. Lord, yes, I do!”

L
EON,
of course, did what he was told, well and thoroughly and earnestly, and by the time Bigboy arrived in the prison launch he could report that no tracks had been found along the bank for miles in either direction, no dog smelled a trace of stranger, and that not a man or a thing had left the barge, which simply drifted listlessly against the current.

Bigboy, pulled from his third straight day from the surprisingly tough old man Fish, navigated the prison launch close enough and tied to it. He boarded it, he and three guards with weapons and a work detail of three large Negroes, who were happy to be spared the fields that day.

They set to work. The coffins were unstacked one by one, opened, and examined. It was a long afternoon’s work, but of course it yielded nothing: no coffin had a human cargo, and all coffins were opened, turned, poked. Randomly, three were selected for destruction, and in pieces revealed themselves merely to be…wood, slathered with some sort of gummy water-resistant pine tar, held together by stout, well-driven nails, as the shipwrights of Pascagoula were among the best carpenters in the world.

Bigboy, having done his duty well, returned at the end of day and made his report.

“Sir,” he said, “if a pale horse is coming, it doesn’t have a thing to do with them wooden boxes, I guarantee you.”

The warden duly noted this.

“I am sure you are right, Sergeant Bigboy.”

T
HE
cowboys are having a tea party. It’s Sally’s idea.

They sit out in the meadow on lawn chairs, all dressed for their fight, with legs daintily crossed, while the pretty young lady scurries before them, filling their teacups and offering scones and muffins, with dabs of jelly. To Sally it’s a kind of farewell party, for the men will be leaving ever so soon, and she’s enjoyed this all so much. She’s moving about, dressed all old-timey, in a big old white cotton dress, fluffy with petticoats beneath, its frilly sleeves covering her pale arms, its full hem fluffing at the ground, so that she looks like some kind of schoolmarm in a cowboy picture.

It’s been wonderful seeing Grandpap so happy again, among his friends, laughing and joshing with these colorful old fellows. Everybody is so nice, even if she suspicions that the one with the prominent nose and personality, Charlie, occasionally halts outside her room and tries to peek through the cracks of the door to catch a glimpse of young Sally in her boudoir. She can hear his dry, crackly, old breath. But he hasn’t seen anything, she knows, because she has been very careful.

The men are wrapped in old-timey coats called dusters that give them the appearance of undertakers. These are full length canvas coats that reach to their boot heels. Under the dusters she can see something that might surprise many young women of her age but doesn’t throw the granddaughter of Ed McGriffin a bit: that is, a lot of guns. A lot of revolvers in belts heavy with ammunition crossed this way and that across their bodies. The men clank a little when they walk, like old knights or something; they have a metallic seriousness to them, a density. Some wear chaps that exaggerate the flow of their legs. They wear their hats low over their eyes and don’t speak much as they sit and wait, their gear—rifles mostly, though each has a pouch that appears jammed with something heavy—off to one side.

Only Grandpap doesn’t wear a duster. He’s too formal, still. He wears a three-piece suit and a black tie, knotted tight, and a high white Stetson, a fifteen-gallon hat, the boys joke. He’s particularly twinkly today, and merry, in a way he hasn’t been in ages. He’s happy. They’re all happy.

What is about to happen?

Sally isn’t sure, and some of the old cowboys aren’t either. They’re to leave today, and somehow, some magical way, they’re to get where they’re going by tonight, unwrinkled and unchallenged by the journey. Sally has in her mind some idea of a bus, but she knows that can’t be right, somehow. But Grandpap tells her it will be okay.

She pours more tea. The boys enjoy it. She offers Charlie a scone and he takes it, with a wink. Audie is quiet, seemingly in a dream land. Bill, with that granite face, is the same as always: imperturbable, silent, polite. Mr. Kaye and Mr. O’Brian are still squabbling, and take efforts to sit in directions so they are not facing each other. Mr. O’Brian, who fancies himself a man of high social standing, nibbles his biscuit discreetly, careful not to spill a crumb. Mr. Kaye, on the other hand, wolfs his down with gusto.

Where is Mr. Earl? Well, he’s still on the phone. He got a call from someone called “Sam” just a minute ago, when everybody was heading out to the meadow for the tea party, and he’s still on the phone, listening carefully, taking down information, nodding intently, as if some last bit of crucial information has arrived.

She heard him say, “I’ve heard of Fort Dietrich.”

Finally, he too comes out. He’s a tall, hard man, without much beauty to him, but he has that command quality that even Sally can feel, and he seems dark today, pressed by concern. He’s not much for the tea and crumpets, and his duster is stiff because it carries so much ammunition in its pockets. She can see guns on his belt.

There’s just a moment here that becomes weirdly still. The seven cowboys sit on lawn chairs in the bright sun, under a cloudless sky. They could be heading for a roundup, a showdown, some movie mission of the sort Sally has seen a thousand times on the screen. But it’s different than a moment in a movie, for it’s real, the guns have bullets, and whatever it is they’re off to do, they’re ready, even eager, if tense.

Then Sally hears it.

Engines.

Engines, low and from the south, where there are no roads. She is baffled, but none of the others are.

“Right on time,” says Earl.

“Them Navy boys know what they’re doing,” says Mr. Kaye.

“Yes, sir, they surely do,” says Earl. Then, to all of them, “Okay fellows, time to load up. Y’all got your guns and your ammo and your maps and your compasses. I will see you in the river in a couple of hours and we will git this job done up right and finished.”

Charlie Hatchison held up his teacup.

“A toast,” he cried. “I celebrate us. We are the last of the cowboys, and this is the last goddamn gunfight at the OK Corral. Drink with me, boys!”

“Hear, hear,” came the cheer, and the teacups came up and were drained.

Then Sally saw them.

She had never seen anything like them before.

There were three of them, low to the earth, bulbous craft of dark blue, squatty behind windshields that glittered in the sun, under three beating, whirling blades that suspended them from the sky. She thought somehow of insects; they looked like engorged blue-tail flies, buzzing malevolently, adroit in the air, graceful, somehow, in their insect clumsiness.

“Helicopters,” said Elmer Kaye. “Damnation, ain’t that a sight!”

It was a sight. Holding a tight formation, the three Navy whirlybirds vectored in on the party in the meadow, and Sally was stunned to realize that unlike airplanes, these flying machines could go straight down and straight up. Beating up a devilish roar, their spinning rotors whipping up a screen of dust and dirt so strong you couldn’t look into it, so powerful you had to lean double to go against it. Napkins from the tea party flew this way and that, and a teacup or two was knocked atumble.

She heard Jack O’Brian scream over the noise to Earl, “Earl, you must know somebody big in Washington.”

“Pulled a kid out of a Wildcat on Guadalcanal. He ended up the chief of naval aviation, that’s all. This is just a little training mission for these boys. They goin’ to drop us and tomorrow they goin’ to pick us up. Only thing is, we got to be there.”

“We will,” said Jack.

The men clambered aboard, three, two and two, and Sally watched as Earl helped her grandpap up the little step into the craft and got him seated. His face was boyish with astonishment and enthusiasm.

He waved at Sally as Earl conferred with the pilots, and then the thumbs-up was given.

Sally smiled, waved, and stripped off her dress. Earl’s jaw dropped. What the hell?

He was rooted in stupefaction.

Her dress came off with a crackling of buttons popping, and in seconds it lay at her feet. She wore jeans, a tight khaki shirt with a bandanna, and pulled out a crushed piece of material which she unfolded quickly into a much battered cowboy hat. She picked up some kind of canvas kit and ran toward the helicopter.

Earl intercepted her in the hatchway.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I would not be the kind of gal who sits home, sir,” she said. “What happens if one of these old fellows catches a damn bullet? Does he bleed out there? I have bandages, disinfectant and every other damn thing. I’ve patched plenty a bullet hole. Now stand out of my way, sir, or you and I will go at it, and as I said, I pack a punch.”

“For Christ’s sakes, you—”

But with a twitch of her strong pale arm, Sally wrenched free and squirted by him.

Her grandpap twinkled.

The roars accelerated and, suddenly lighter than gravity, the three helicopters rose vertically a hundred feet, then dipped their noses, oriented themselves to the northwest, and hurtled away, trailing a wall of noise as they went.

And then, as if they had not been there, they were gone.

I
N
an hour they were at their destination, for such are the miracles of the H-5 Sikorsky. The navigators calculated well, charting a course over northwestern Florida, across the toe of Alabama, evading, of course, the city of Mobile, choosing an arc above the unpeopled zones of that state, and of Mississippi’s southeast corner. Beneath, pine forest and swamp fly by, and the choppers head into the setting sun until by map and navigational reading they have arrived: there it is, a band of sluggish water, the Yaxahatchee, lost in silent quagmire two miles above the prison farm at Thebes and three above the town.

Each chopper works its further magic swiftly, for this is exactly what such craft are for, and this is exactly what they have trained on. Each bird approaches the river, and there pauses, as its blades beat rills into the water, as it hovers but five feet off the surface. An object sails from each hatch and lands with a splash that soon reveals itself to be more than a splash. In the commotion there’s a sense of gassy pressure, and from each sense of commotion, again almost magically, there unfolds a yellow naval raft as it inflates. A chain ladder is lowered and, quickly, each cowboy clambers down, and then a few packages are dropped to the waiting men. The choppers alter their pitch, and with a yowl climb to three hundred feet and head back to where they came from.

In the falling twilight, the three rafts begin their slow journey down the Yaxahatchee. As they pass the prison levee, one raft, with Audie and Jack, scuttles ashore. The two men pull it up, take a compass reading, identify land forms from the photo map, give the thumbs-up and head inland. They’re headed for the guard towers at the Ape House.

A half mile down, past the prison launching facility where Earl was “murdered,” the second raft pulls up. This one holds Bill and Charlie and Elmer, two of whom will infiltrate the Big House, the Store and the Whipping House from the north and one of which, cackling madly the whole time, will head north to the sheriff’s station in the woods. That baby is his and his alone. Sally is with them. She’ll stay close to Bill and Elmer, who will more or less be at the center of the action, and all of them will ultimately rally upon them.

Earl touches her hand.

“You do not have to do this.”

“Yes, I do. Grandpap, you have yourself a nice time and be careful.”

“I will, darling,” says the old man.

Earl says, “Listen here, you men. You cannot be thinking about Sally in the fight. If you do, you will get killed. You do your job. Sally, you stay behind them, goddammit, and do not run into fire. If you lose contact, you break back to the river, which is due west of any place you’ll be. Tomorrow morning, you look for us one way or the other. I will find you.”

“There’s no time, Mr. Earl,” said Sally. “I will be fine.”

She pulled off and fell in with the others, and Earl watched her go with something caught in his throat, or possibly his heart.

“Let’s go, Mr. Ed,” he said.

“Yep.”

T
HE
final raft pulls up close to town. Earl helps old Ed disembark and guides him up the town mainline toward the public house in the dark. The old boy is surprisingly spry tonight, almost gay. They pass through the dark, deserted town, almost a ghost burg.

A last few words pass between them.

“You okay, sir?”

“I am, Mr. Earl. Hale, hearty, fit as a fiddle. Feel as if I could lick my weight in wildcats today.”

“You ain’t forgot nothing?”

“No, sir. Wait till eleven. Then take up a position at the town bar. Them black fellows won’t like it but that’s what it’s got to be. Soon enough some bad-boy deputies and maybe even a sheriff come along. They’ll take their time, but sooner or later, they move agin’ me. Tough boys, like to beat heads.”

“That’s them.”

“Got a surprise for them.”

“Yes, you do. I feel bad about your granddaughter.”

“You try telling that one what to do. I never could.”

“Well, I ain’t had much luck either.”

He left the old man, sitting quietly a few hundred yards from the bar, quite content and lively. Earl headed inland, toward the Whipping House.

E
ARL
didn’t see it. Nobody saw it. But that night, there was other action in Thebes. At about the time his men were wiggling into position, the mournful barge of coffins, floating ever so lazily against the current of the Yaxahatchee, stirred slightly. No coffin itself moved, for the coffins were empty, as Bigboy and his detail had ascertained.

But from the barge, or from a hollowed out space under the deck, a noise rose. It was the noise of wood on wood, as wood was unlimbered, almost like the wood in a wooden horse four thousand years earlier. A segment of the deck slid open.

The opening of this wood yielded, however, no party of mad Ithacan raiders, hell-bent on mayhem and city burning. Instead, uncranking as if from a long sleep, a more angular figure emerged, unsure, blinking, not especially confident but animated by a motivation no man could know. He rose, replaced the wooden grating on the deck, and looked around.

Thebes dozed peacefully under the black night sky.

It was his home.

Home again, home again, home again. After all these years.

Gingerly, he slipped over the side and waded toward shore. He pulled himself from the current just south of the city dock. It all was so familiar and yet so distant, as if he were recalling not a reality but a dream.

He headed inland, toward the Big House. It was his house, after all.

It was Davis Trugood; he had a gun.