Pale Horse Coming (51 page)

I
T
all danced before Section Boss: how he and he alone had tracked the Northern communist night riders who came South with fire and brimstone. How he slew them in the river. How justice was served. How he became a hero in the white South, the king of N’Awleens and all them pretty gals, how he was elected to the state legislature and then the governor’s mansion and then who knew what.

How he killed a damn girl who humiliated the great white South!

And all he had to do was squeeze a trigger and hold it down for a few seconds, as he had done so many a time.

He felt the trigger yield to his steady pressure and…

And then he heard a crash as something or some fleet of things blasted from the piney woods upon him.

The dogs. The dogs came out of the brush like rifle shots, all snarl and teeth and blood hunger. Somewhere in the swamp, they had picked up the scent of the man who beat them all those months, and hunted him hard.

They hit him with a frenzy, and he screamed as the fangs drove into him, though in his pain he could not hear it and neither could anyone else, over the arrival of another sound, the roaring of engines, loud and low and close.

T
HE
call came at half past noon. Sam picked it up quickly.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Sam?”

“Earl! Jesus Christ, man, what happened?”

“It’s done. It’s finished. We hit ’em hard and got out pretty clean. Ain’t no more Thebes prison farm. It’s destroyed twice, by fire and flood. Destroyed three times, really, the first by gunmen.”

“You’re all right?”

“Have some stitches in me.”

“The others?”

“One man died of a heart attack. Three others were hit but should recover. We’re all beat to hell. And I’m sorry to report that Mr. Davis Trugood didn’t make it. I found him dead in the upstairs bedroom of the old house when I went looking for the warden. He found the warden first, but what happened between them or why, I have no idea.”

“Earl, I have found out much about him you should know.”

“Later. I’m too tired to remember. You can move your family back to Blue Eye. It’s all over. It’s finished.”

“Earl, you…I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say a thing. We all agreed. After today, the words Thebes penal are never going to be said. I’m going to rest a spell, then go back on duty. No more gunfighting. That’s all over, unless the gunfight comes to me, and I don’t think it will. At least I hope it never does.”

“Earl—”

“Mr. Sam, you keep this under your hat. I’ll see you in a few days. I have to set my adventuring right by Junie, and I’d prefer to do that face-to-face than on a phone.”

“Of course.”

Sam hung up and looked about himself, to a little messy Little Rock office-bedroom. He meant to call his wife first.

But he couldn’t.

Some things never change.

He called Connie.

B
ILL
Jennings and Jack O’Brian didn’t leave the helicopter at the farm; instead, they were flown on to Pensacola, under the advice of Sally, who urged that Jack needed to get plasma into him as quickly as possible. The word came that night from Bill that Jack would be all right, the doctors in Pensacola said, and would be three weeks in the hospital. Jack’s wife, Sarah, was headed down. Earl knew how much was left in the fund from Davis Trugood and knew that there’d be enough. He told Bill to tell Jack and wondered if Jack had a last message. Bill said that Jack sent his best to all the boys and hoped to see them again, maybe sometime in the 1970s or ’80s. The boys got a laugh out of that, especially since they knew they’d see him at next year’s NRA convention and could josh him merrily.

Meanwhile, Charlie and Elmer, with their lesser wounds, saw no need to rush. Charlie had a rat’s amazing ability to recover. He would be bruised for a month, but his cracked ribs would heal, and the two flesh wounds sealed themselves up and didn’t infect. Elmer had a whopper headache, so bad that for the first time in years he let his correspondence languish. He just sat on the porch, drinking whiskey and swallowing aspirins. But he wasn’t grumpy a bit. He actually seemed to enjoy it all.

At night, much drinking was done, though not by Earl, and much retelling around the campfire. It seemed Charlie had killed hundreds and he would have recreated each of them if he weren’t hooted down by the others. But the cowboys were happy, to a man. Audie said he hadn’t been so happy since V-E day, and he’d spent that in the hospital with a chunk of his hip shot away. This time, he got to celebrate it up right! They almost seemed in the end as if they couldn’t quite let go of it. But already they missed Bill and Jack, though they knew the two weren’t coming back. There was a sense, somehow, that this was it: a last roundup, and they’d never be together again, at least not like this, in the lassitude of survival, thankfulness and drunkenness.

The next day Sally made the arrangements for her grandfather, and a hearse from a mortuary in Pensacola came by to pick up the body. The mortician had the death certificate, and nobody seemed particularly bothered by the legality of it. Old men died, it happened all the time, and this fellow was in his eighties without a mark on his body. The mortician—he seemed somehow to be a deputy sheriff, too—assured Sally there’d be no problems at all, especially when Earl paid out a nice lump of change for him.

The next day, it was Earl who drove Sally to Pensacola for the long trip to Montana by train, and for burial for Mr. Ed.

Earl parked in front of the station, which was all jammed up with Navy personnel in their whites and their girls and folks and kids. A lot of hubbub floated in the air, and Earl could see the big steam train hissing and puffing at the head of its cars.

“You are a special one,” he told her.

“So are you, Earl.”

“Where will you go? Have you a place?”

“My aunt. Grandpap’s other daughter. She’s been after me for years. It’ll be fine. I’ll be all right, Earl, don’t you worry. Don’t I seem like the type who makes out just fine?”

“You do. But let me tell you this: Young men are going to come courting hard now. You pick the best. You deserve the best. If you wind up with some no-good, old Uncle Earl will visit you and kick his butt and give you what-for, do you understand?”

“Well, Earl, as I have not done a single thing you ever told me, why should I do that?”

“I’m hoping you’ll change your wild ways. Lord, I wish I was twenty years a younger man. I’d give them young bucks a run for their damn money.”

“Well, guess what happens now? You have to kiss me. It’s how the story ends. Don’t you see? Prince Charming kisses Snow White and releases her from her spell and so she doesn’t have to live in the woods with the Seven Dwarfs anymore.”

“I ain’t no prince and I certainly ain’t charming. Though I would admit them other fellows was mostly dwarfs. And you’re not a princess. You’re a queen, you just don’t know it yet. So I shouldn’t be kissing so far above myself.”

“Well, as I sewed your ear back on and did a nice damn job on it, I will determine what happens, and for now you will kiss me. And that will be that. The queen has spoken.”

“You were the toughest and the bravest. Do you know that?”

“I just tried to live up to grandpap’s standards, and then to old Uncle Earl’s.”

“You done that, and how.”

He kissed her, hard, just to see what it would feel like, and of course it felt exactly as he knew it would, and an electricity of regret flashed through him and then it was over and no more. She smiled and laughed, and got out of the car.

“Do you need help?”

“Earl, if I don’t get away, I’ll never leave. You go on, I can handle this little suitcase.”

She grabbed it and took off, without looking back.

He watched her go, and damn, as had happened so rarely in his life but happened this time, some kind of grit came sailing through the window and clouded up his eyes, and the thin young woman walked away and back to whatever her life would be, disappearing in a squall of sailors.

When Earl got back, Audie and Charlie had left. Audie had made a phone call, and he yelled out a big whoop-de-do when he hung up. He had gotten that big part in that Civil War picture. He’d play a hero. He had to leave right away, as he had to get back for what Elmer reported was called “wardrobe” by the end of the week, and since he was going west, he’d drive Charlie back to Texas.

Anyhow, those two boys would have some fun together. And maybe it was better that all the parting took place in this strange way, without much of a final ceremony, just in little dribs and drabs. These were not men who spoke clearly of things they felt, and more often ran from them. So it was best for everybody that they just separated without much palaver.

Only little Elmer was left, and he helped Earl clear the house. All the leftover provisions were buried, the beds stripped, everything returned to normal. The lease still had some time to run, and Earl allowed it best to let it run out, so no authority could ever link the abandonment of the farm in Florida with the strange events in Thebes two states over, though the only news so far was something Elmer heard on the radio about a flood in southeastern Mississippi, and the destruction it had wrought. It didn’t seem like anybody was making a big to-do about it.

And then they were done and each was set to head off in a different direction.

“So Earl, tell me now: Was it worth it?”

“I think so,” Earl said. “But it all fades from memory fast, don’t it?”

“Yes, it does. But I want your conviction, Earl. We did the right thing, didn’t we?”

“I would say we did.”

“A lot of men died that night. I never killed a man before. It’s different than a game animal, who’s lived a magnificent life and whose meat will honor my table as his head will honor my medicine lodge. But you don’t put no human heads on no walls, and maybe those boys thought they was serving a moral purpose.”

“Maybe they did.”

“So I don’t know, Earl. Maybe we’d have been best off to leave it all alone.”

“I think we done right, Mr. Kaye. Something bad ugly wrong was going on down there—you could sense it yourself.”

“That I could. It was the last stop at the end of the world, where there are no rules.”

“Well, we were the ones that stopped it. Maybe there were other ways to stop it, but I don’t know them. And maybe what follows won’t be much better, but by God, one thing I know is it’ll be different. Maybe different is better enough.”

“We shall see.”

“We shall, indeed.”

“I will say this, Earl. It was a hell of a fight. I will always take pleasure in the fight I fought and in the men I fought it with. It was a hell of a fight.”

“Yes, sir,” said Earl, “it was the best damned fight I ever saw, that I deeply believe. And I’ve seen some fights in my time.”

And with that, they parted, sworn between themselves by deepest bond to never speak of such things again.

T
HE
boy was watching. He sat alone in the late afternoon, intent upon his task on the porch of the white house on the hill. He never spoke much, but he’d been speaking even less since his father had disappeared. But he was a noticer, a collector of information. He saw things, he tracked things, he filed them away for later recall and examination.

He could see a flock of black crows in the trees off to the left. He knew they’d flown in from the west and would settle the night and fly out to the east in the morning at dawn. He could see the yellow thatch where the dried-out grass had lost its color, but knew also that it contained teeming wet microscopic life under the apparent dryness. He could see the occasional southward flight of Vs of high geese and duck, their trumpeting far off and incomplete. It was getting cooler. He sat, he watched, he waited. He thought.

He knew other things. He knew his mother was desperately unhappy. He felt her tension, and it frightened him. She wasn’t speaking much these days either. The two of them lived in silence, ate in silence, slept in silence. His mother had become a different kind of watcher; she was the sort who watched, but never saw. She would stare for hours out the window and see nothing at all. Her fear had made her haggard. Though to the boy she was beautiful and would always be beautiful, he saw enough through his idealizations to realize that she was losing weight, her bones were showing, the knobs in her face were sharpening, and there was an emptiness coming into her eyes.

The father was simply gone. It had been weeks now, and it cast a dark spell across the farm. It seemed even the plants felt it, and they withered in the sun, and now that it had begun to cool with the coming of autumn, everything seemed in a rush to go to brown.

The boy would wake up in the night, sure he’d heard his father’s voice, rumbly hoarse and powerful, yet always with a kindness under it.

“Daddy! Daddy!”

“Bobby Lee, it isn’t your daddy,” his mama would call from her bedroom down the hall, where again she was lying but not sleeping.

“I heard my daddy.”

“No, Bobby Lee. You were dreaming, honey. It wasn’t him, I’m sorry.”

So he would ask the next morning.

“When is Daddy coming home?”

His mother would stare off into the distance.

“Honey, I do not know. He will come home when he is ready.”

“Is he all right, Mama?”

“Sweetie, it would take a tank to kill that man.”

But the boy knew this was no answer. Yes, it would take a tank or something big and powerful and mean, but he had figured out that there were tanks in the world, as there were big, powerful, mean things, and that they killed people. There was a war in some place called Ko-ria and the older people and most of the boys talked about it every day, about how we had to stop them yellow commies and drive them back or they’d come over here and take over.

Now he sat on a day like all the others, rotten in its sameness, and he watched as a car turned up the driveway and began to crawl toward the house.

It wasn’t Mr. Sam’s car, that he knew. It had an aching familiarity about it, and in his heart, a thought exploded so fiercely he thought he’d die, but at the same time he fought it, for he knew he couldn’t face another disappointment.

He prayed:
Dear God, please let it be my daddy.

This one time God listened, or so it seemed. The car pulled up, and Bob Lee now confirmed it was his daddy’s, and in that second, lumbering, strangely stiff, his father climbed out.

“Daddy!” he screamed, loud enough to wake the dead, or even his mother from her solemnity, “Daddy!”

“Well, howdy there, young man, say, ain’t you a big ’un. You know a boy named Bob Lee? Used to live here. Little squirt, whatever happened to that boy?”

“Oh, Daddy!”

The boy threw himself at the father, who swept him up, gave him a hug that was urgent in its intensity, then held him up to the sky at arm’s length in his two big hands.

“Lord, you look good to this old man.”

“Daddy, what happened? Was you in a fight?”

His daddy’s ear was bandaged as was his left hand. His face was oddly swollen about the eyes, one of which was badly bloodshot. There was a darkness visible in the flesh of his face.

“It’s nothing, Bob Lee. It’s all over. Don’t mean a damned thing. Oh, it’s good to see you, son! Say, what good would I be if I didn’t bring you something. Here, you see if you like this.”

Earl took the boy to the trunk of the car, opened it, and there was a two-wheeled Schwinn bicycle, gleamy new, the twenty-four-inch model, purchased with the last few dollars in the late Davis Trugood’s operating fund.

“Oh, Daddy!”

“Yep. Figured it was time you learned to ride a two-wheeler.” The father pulled the bike from the car and dusted it off. “I will teach you—”

This may have been the happiest moment in Bob Lee’s life. He already knew how to ride a two-wheeler. Jimmy Frederick, a school buddy, had one, and had showed him how, and for some reason Bob Lee just took to it so fast and natural it amazed Jimmy Frederick. Now Bob Lee climbed aboard, set the pedal, pumped hard that long first move, and shoved off, riding with no uncertainty about the farm yard.

“Damn! Where’d you learn that trick?”

Bob Lee’s face lit up in a blaze of intense pleasure.

“He’s a champion,” his mother said from the porch, her own voice lit with pleasure.

“Howdy, ma’am,” said Daddy. “I brought you something, too.”

“A new Crosley refrigerator, I hope.”

“Naw, just some old flowers!”

He pulled out a bouquet from the backseat of the car, a batch of roses red and dark as blood, and walked over to hand them to his wife. Then he kissed her hard, in a way that Bob Lee had never seen him before. His mother perked up something wonderful; it was like a parched plant getting a shot of water, and the leaves changing immediately.

“Now you come here, Bob Lee.”

Bob Lee obeyed.

“I just want you both to hear this from my own lips. I had to go away, but now I am back. I will not be going nowhere again. I will be here with you forever and ever. Do you hear me? My adventures are over.”

“Oh, Earl,” she said, as if she believed it.

That night Bob Lee heard his father and mother talking earnestly. He knew something was different somehow. He could feel it in their voices. His father had changed in some small way, and that in turn led to a change in his mother. Whatever it was, Bob Lee couldn’t say, but he felt it. It scared him a little.

Please God,
he prayed,
please don’t never take my father away.