Pale Horse Coming (49 page)

S
OMEHOW
the town itself became engulfed in flame. No bombs had been thrown. But evidently in the melee, as the convicts ripped lumber from the dogtrot cabins and hammered them into frameworks on the pontoons of the waterproof coffins, a lamp was spilled over. That flame caught, and a wind or whatever propelled its jump to another cabin and another.

The conflagration didn’t matter, though. By this time, far into the night, the original townspeople had long since departed, taking with them what they could, cached money and food, old photos, a treasured Bible. Sally had been everywhere among them, cajoling, speaking gently, helping the elderly, giving guidance or medical help or benediction as the circumstances warranted.

“That girl is some kind of angel,” said Elmer.

“She is pure goodness,” said Jack, from his stretcher. “Her grandad would be proud for her,” said Bill. “Should we wake him?”

“Let him sleep some more,” said Elmer.

And the convicts labored hard and well in their own benefit, some of them proving master carpenters as well, and indeed their rafts were even more soundly engineered and constructed than the first generation.

The plan was simple; it was hardly even a plan. No, they would not drift into Pascagoula, all two hundred of them, and hope that nobody would notice. Instead there were three or four Negro towns in the great swamp, and segments of them would make landfall at each of these, and there gather wits and disperse overland. They’d have at least a couple of days’ head start, and if they didn’t bunch up and stayed cool and kept moving, they’d have disappeared so totally Mississippi would not have the energy to look hard for them if it ever quite caught on that they were not dead and not drowned by a flood.

So they had it at last: freedom. It was worth working the long night for, and so they did, and not soon but soon enough, they were gone and on their way, without a farewell, leaving the three awake white men, the girl and her sleeping grandpap.

Sally and the old men watched them go.

“Well, that’s the last goddamn act. We done what we come to do.”

“We done it good,” crazy Charlie said. “I ain’t had a ball like this one in years, if ever.”

“I hope it turns out for the best, ’cause there’s no going back.”

“I’d bet we done the right thing.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Elmer, “but my theory of the human heart may be darker than yours.”

“Mr. Elmer, you should believe in the good,” said Sally. “If you believe in it, maybe it will happen.”

“But Sally, most people ain’t like you. You’re special. Most are like us, crabby old men who don’t care much about nothing except what’s in it for us.”

“Wasn’t nothing in it for you as I can see,” said Sally. “You did it because it was right, and I did it because it was right, and who can ask for more?”

“I did it because it felt so damn good,” said Charlie.

“Charlie, underneath it all I don’t believe that’s the true you.”

“No, honey,” said Elmer, “underneath it all that
is
the true Charlie.”

Of course all the time they were talking, the modest, humble, silent Bill was working. He had carpentry skills, too, and he threw together a raft as fine as any of them in an hour’s worth of labor, a platform on a frame nailed neatly to four strategically placed coffins. He worked hard and steadily.

“Y’all can sit there yapping, but if you do, you ain’t riding on
my
raft,” he finally said, and the two other gunfighters wearily arose to join him.

“Problem is,” he said, “we got to go upstream. Them other fellows, they all headed downstream.”

“Bill,” said Charlie, “whyn’t you build us a Johnson outboard? That’d get the trick done right fine.”

“No oil,” said Bill. “If I built it, we couldn’t run it, ’cause we got no oil to cut the kerosene with.”

“Good point,” said Charlie.

“Can we pole?”

“
Have
to pole,” said Bill. “No other choice.”

“What’s ‘pole’?” asked Charlie.

“Don’t you know a goddamn thing?” Bill said.

“We stay close to shore and sort of push ourselves upstream.”

“I got it.”

“It ain’t all that hard to get.”

“I’ll go into the woods and look for saplings we can cut into them poles.”

“Charlie, that’s the first smart thing you’ve said all week,” said Jack from his stretcher.

Charlie went off, Jack rested, Bill worked on the raft, Elmer helped, Sally helped—she couldn’t be ordered to rest—the town burned to ash and chars, the sky began to lighten and the old man dozed contentedly.

In time, Charlie returned, and with his knife set to hewing the instruments of their deliverance. He did a good job and was finished just as the dawn was breaking.

“Want to go?”

“It’s not seven yet. I figure two hours to get upstream. We—”

A boom cracked the air, far off. That meant that Audie had blown the levee.

“Best wake your grandpap, sweetie.”

“Yes, it’s time.”

She walked up the incline to the old man dozing comfortably in the rocking chair in the middle of the empty street in the town of burned-out buildings and returned in a bit.

“What’d he say? Want to snooze some more?”

“Grandpap didn’t say a thing,” she said. “He’s dead.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Elmer.

“At least he died happy,” said Charlie. “Hope I die that happy, though it’ll happen in bed likely, after a crotchety decline and lots of hell thrown at and received back from damn women nurses and wives.”

“Are you all right, Sally?” Bill Jennings asked.

“Yes, I’m fine. Give me a moment please, is all.”

She walked off and faced the river, the dawn, the far shore, the rest of her life.

“Well, whatever, she don’t have to spend the rest of her life caring for an old man. She can find a young one now.”

“Doubt there’s one good enough for her,” said Jack. “These kids these days, if you catch my drift.”

“I do.”

“All right,” she said, returning, “I am all fine now.”

“Let’s wrap Mr. Ed carefully.”

“He sure deserves that.”

“He surely does.”

And they set about to prepare a funeral shroud and then place the old man in one of the Trugood waterproof coffins.

E
ARL
pulled the coiled whip off him as if it were an infected snake whose very skin contained poison. He hated the gnarly feel of the thing, and threw it as far as he could off into the fields, with a shudder of revulsion. Then, quickly, he went to look for his revolvers and found one, the Heavy Duty Smith. The Colt Trooper was evidently gone forever, for he did not have a night to hunt for it. It would rust away to nothingness in the coming years. He picked up the pouch with the last few firebombs.

Then at last he touched his face. There wasn’t much blood, except at his ear. His sorest spot remained the top of his left hand, where the whip tail had cracked deep. That one was almost useless, and the ear, with a deep and bad tear, was equally a mess, though for some odd reason it didn’t hurt as much. The openings on his face had coagulated and ceased to bleed. Stitches would close them up, but stitches were still a day or so away.

Settled, he turned and headed down the road. Not once did he look at the ax-burred body of the big man, as if it didn’t exist, and as if therefore his barbarity, and the hunger and glee with which he’d planted that last blade deep in the face of the man, didn’t exist either. He pressed along, wondering how much time he had before Audie blew the levee, and how much after. How quickly would the lowlands go under? Would the water have the force of a moving wall, a pure destructiveness, or would it seep slowly forth, rising in increments until it soaked the world? He didn’t know. He really didn’t care all that much either. If he made it out, wouldn’t that be a treat and a half? And if he didn’t, that was the way the cards sometimes came to lay on the table.

He found the turnoff, took the new road, which led back into piney woods that gradually yielded to more jungly growth. The fires still burned on the horizon in one sector of the sky, but not nearly so brightly. He didn’t care. He didn’t look at his watch either, because he didn’t care what time it was. He didn’t pay attention to the possibility of ambush by yet still-unaccounted-for guards, because he didn’t care much about that either.

At last he came to still another smaller road behind a gate and realized that the Screaming House lay behind it; but this road, followed another few hundred yards, led to the Drowning House, where the prison launch was moored and the concrete blocks and chains were stored. He saw now what he’d have to do if he had the time.

The gate was locked. He shot it off, not caring about noise. He walked boldly up the road, and any man hiding in the bushes or the building with a rifle could have shot him. He didn’t care. He came then to the building. It was the newest structure on the property, giving ample evidence of sound U.S. Army Engineer Corps design and construction. He heard the generator going out back, which explained the electric lights blazing in a region yet to be electrified.

He kicked in the door.

No one greeted him, but the place was neat, almost antiseptic, any government building foyer, from the Marine Corps to the Civil Conservation Corps. The swirls of a wax buffer on the green linoleum testified to the spic-and-span efficiency of whatever labor detail attended. From far off came a loony tune of music, though of the higher form, that orchestra stuff, that spoke to Earl only of balls and fancy snoots in fancy suits. He had no idea what it was and no curiosity.

He opened the door and walked down the hall, as the music rose, until at last he reached the room where he had been examined all those weeks ago. He kicked it in.

It was empty. Whoever had staffed this place, they had fled, leaving almost nothing. A few papers and towels lay on the floor, evidence of a hasty retreat. Who knew where they went?

Then Earl heard soft music. It came from one more door.

Earl kicked it in.

A
UDIE
dug.

He was excavating an ever expanding hole halfway up the inside lip of the levee, where the ground was softest. Audie was young and strong, and his system was choked with the power that all his adrenaline and testosterone—considerable in both cases—had generated over the past few hours. He was also weirdly, fabulously happy. He could have whistled while he worked.

He had no idea how deep he should go, but after a furious forty minutes of work, he was a good five feet into the levee, and he figured that was enough.

He already had retrieved the bundled sticks of dynamite from the raft. The stuff was waxy and had an unpleasant odor. It amounted to five bundles of ten sticks apiece and awkwardly, he planted them in the bottom of the hole. Then he took the detonating cap, opened the waxy paper at a central stick in the central bunch, and plunged it in, twisting it against the cakelike consistency of the explosive itself. He twisted till the cap nearly disappeared, leaving a residue of ground powder on his fingers.

Next came the fuse. That was neatly wedged into the well at the top of the cap and screwed tight itself, so that the connection was solid.

The long green waxy twine of fuse curled up out of the hole. Audie climbed out carefully, so as not to kick anything with a foot or bring down a rush of earth from the hole and disconnect things. He wanted to do this right the first time, and not have to come back. Filling was easier; ten minutes of easy shovel work at the hole filled it in again.

He pulled out his Zippo, flicked it once. It whooshed healthy flame, which he quickly cupped to the frazzled end of the fuse. That waxy twine glowed red once, and then at last sparked to life and began to sputter away toward detonation.

Audie raced up the levee and stood for just a second. The broad black flat river stood on one side, placid in the moonless night. On the other side, beyond the levee, stood the reclaimed fields with their drained swamps and okra crops.

He thought: the world is going to look a lot different in ten minutes.

He climbed into the raft and paddled to the center of the dark river.

T
HE
music was sweet and sickly, full of tinkly piano passages.

The doctor sat at his table under a single-bulb lamp which bent on a curve to illuminate his work. He was writing with a fountain pen in a notebook, and Earl could see a piece of meat in a dish in front of him, uncooked. Then he realized it was human meat: it was a liver, with a kind of pale crust spotted with green at one end. The doctor was describing it in his ink scribbling.

Beyond him, on a morgue table, far in the darkness but clearly not quite indistinct, lay a black man. Earl didn’t recognize him. His chest had been bisected surgically then splayed backward, so that all his innards lay before the world. Some of them had been removed.

The doctor said, “Schubert.”

“What?”

“Schubert. On the Victrola. Schubert’s ‘Fantasie.’ Do you like it?”

Earl put a bullet through the Victrola, smashing Herr Schubert’s beautiful notes into a million pieces.

The doctor winced, for he was not used to such noise so close, so loud.

Then he said, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing. But even a man like you will understand this.”

He pushed a document across the table.

“Go on, read it. You can read. You are or were military. You know the meaning of orders and the higher good. Read it. Go on.”

Earl seized it and noted the heavy embossment of the United States Department of Defense.
TO ALL LOCAL, STATE AND FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES
, it began.

The bearer of this document is a participant in an operation that is classified
HIGHEST TOP SECRET
and has been officially deemed In the National Interest. As such it—and the bearer of this document—fall under the full protection of the United States Government. It and the bearer of this document have been granted a priori immunity from all state, local and federal laws.

Any violation of this policy on the local level will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law by the United States Attorney’s Office in your jurisdiction. You are hereby ordered to cease and desist all law enforcement or other activities involving the program at Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored) in Thebes County, Mississippi. You are ordered to release the bearer of this document and leave the area immediately.

For further clarification of this policy, call the duty officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency at WE-5-2433, Arlington, Virginia, using the code name
BLUE TUESDAY
for authentification purposes.

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT AND THOSE IN VIOLATION OF IT WILL BE CONSIDERED TRESPASSERS AND FACE ALL LEGAL SANCTIONS.

 

“You know what that means, don’t you,” said the doctor. “You are up the river in more ways than one. See, you have no idea how
valuable
this is, how
important?
”

Earl just stared at him. The moment seemed to go on and on.

“Suddenly you see your duty and you’re brought up short. The best thing you can do is escape again, with whatever men you’ve brought, and leave us in peace. This is too important for a little man like you to destroy. Too much is at stake, as that document—and you don’t doubt it, do you?—makes clear. You’ve killed all the rednecks who beat you, so you should be satisfied with your meaningless vengeance. Now, either you leave or I will make a phone call and in twenty minutes I can have the Marine Corps here.”

Earl held the document up to his gun muzzle, and fired. The flash ignited the paper; he let it fall from his hands to the floor, where it was devoured crisply in a quick spurt of flame.

“You are trespassing on a
Top Secret
government—”

“What you’re doing is wrong,” said Earl.

“No, what we’re doing is right,” said the doctor. “You have no idea what this is all about.”

“I know exactly what this is all about, Dr. Stone,” said Earl. “Or is it Dr. Goodwin, whatever the hell you’re calling yourself these days? You been injecting these colored men with syphilis. I believe it’s called
Treponema pallidum,
or some such. But it ain’t just any syphilis. It’s some kind of supersyphilis. You’re trying to turn the clap into a germ warfare weapon. That’s why the Los Alamos Plutonium lab and the people at Fort Dietrich in Maryland are involved. Dietrich is the Army’s germ warfare installation. That’s why the infected convicts are painted with big numbers, so your boys can watch them die or sicken through binoculars from a long way out and take notes. That’s why the contaminated bodies have to go underwater. You’re making atom-powered syph to fight the commies, and you’re testing how it kills on American Negroes.”

Now it was the doctor who could think of nothing to say.

After gibbering ineffectively for a second or two, he recovered enough to say, “How did you know that? That is
Top Secret.
You are not supposed to know that. You cannot know that! How dare you know that? Who do you think you are to know that? This is the most secure—”

“I saw the red radiation marking on a package shipped to you some months back. Didn’t mean a thing then. But then someone you don’t know nothing about ferreted you out, and saw you’s receiving correspondence and shipments from Los Alamos and Fort Dietrich. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. But tonight it comes out zero. I’m ending it.”

“Look, you idiot, stop and consider. Yes, what has happened here is monstrous, and I am the monster in charge. But the bigger picture, the only picture that counts, is the war we will fight sooner or later against people who would destroy us. We must stop them. We must. We will fight it in Asia or Africa or South America. And what if we have become so comfortable we lack the will? And what if we can’t use atomic bombs? A biological weapon, untraceable, undetectable until too late, could decimate an enemy force. It could save the lives of hundreds or thousands of American soldiers. That is my humble contribution to our survival. I am building a weapon that will destroy our enemies. I am almost there. And you come along and destroy it in a single night.”

He stood.

“You started out to cure the disease,” said Earl, “after what it did to your wife and child. Now you’re turning it into a weapon. You’re killing American men, same as you and me, to test it, and you say it’s for commies. But I know soldiers and I know whores and I know it can’t be controlled. It’ll just go on and on and on.”

Far off came the sound of detonation.

Everything in the lab rattled a little and leaped ever so slightly from its place, including the liver on the plate. The vibration rolled through the room.

“That’s the water,” said Earl. He reached into his case.

“What is that?”

“That’s the fire,” he said.

“You cannot—”

Earl unscrewed the cap, pulled the cord; this one worked just fine. It sputtered, spraying sparks this way and that, and he tossed it deep into the room.

“Stand clear,” he said. “It’s burning time.”

The doctor did an insane thing. Earl had heard of such a thing in the war, and knew that men were capable of such commitment, or bravery. And it was bravery. Nevertheless, it stunned Earl; it was the last thing he figured on.

The doctor threw himself on the canister, to muffle its destructiveness. He was atop it when it detonated, and the radiance of the flame blowtorched him alive and swallowed him in incredible destruction. He burned, screamlessly and passively, his body just absorbed in the totality of the fire. He melted like a witch in an old movie.

And in his insane courageousness, he succeeded. The fire simply expended its entire force on him until nothing remained but a smoking carcass.

Earl turned away. He’d seen Japs fried crispy with the flamethrowers and hadn’t liked it. This was all that, only concentrated on one figure. He fought a surge of vomit in his throat but then regained control. He had one more bomb left. He removed it, pulled the cord—it worked just fine again, and tossed it. The device ignited, and the room filled with its illumination. Earl now saw in the light that the place was a kind of museum on the theme of atomic-powered
Treponema pallidum:
along the walls on shelves stood jar after jar, each full with liquid, each with its biological treasure, a harvest of items from inside the body, dense, meaty, placid. Or outside it: several large diseased penises were included.