Pale Horse Coming (13 page)

At the crest, he made a terrifying discovery.

The trees had been timbered all the way down the slope. There was no cover at all. And he could see Sam, alone, amid a forest of stumps, picking his painful way down to the tracks, now plainly visible.

He knew what that meant.

A rifleman on the crest would have a clear shot at Sam all the way down. If he was any good at all, he’d have Sam dead three hundred yards before he got to the track.

Earl squatted to gather his breath for a second. It wasn’t even a dilemma. Even though he was close enough to the limit of the timbering, and had at this moment technically escaped, and had only a last downhill plunge before intercepting the train, it never occurred to him to go.

Instead, he dropped back on the other side of the crest, and headed toward his pursuers.

Now he was hunting them.

S
AM
felt naked. He knew this wasn’t good, but the nearest timber was a half mile in either direction, and if he raced for it he’d miss the train. He hoped and prayed the boys behind wouldn’t get a good shot at him, and he stumbled ahead, feeling so helpless. He had no shirt, but only Earl’s hunting coat, a waxy canvas thing, and his shoes were sodden, and his ankle still throbbed from the twist, and the breath came in hard, dry spurts, as if he hadn’t enough room in his throat to get the proper right amount of air into his lungs.

He could see the track before him, glinting in the sun like a piece of ribbon on the floor, but at the same time bobbing in his perspective because of the spastic quality of his breathing and his downward lurching. The sun was hot. He seemed to be floating through thickets of moths or butterflies. Now and then a pine stump jabbed or poked at his already torn and battered legs, but the slope helped him immensely, as did his momentum, as did the prospect of gravity.

Suddenly he heard a shot.

T
HE
first dog bounded into view. It was a hound, sleek and young, a beautiful animal, gobbling up Sam’s scent as it plunged ahead.

It saw Earl, and it didn’t pause a second, and went from tracking dog to attacking dog, flying at Earl with a fury no man could muster, its fangs bared, a guttural growl of pure insanity screaming from its throat. The eyes were red and narrowed as it leaped, and Earl took it from the hip, one shot, the bullet piercing its throat, blowing its brains out at an upward angle as it passed through the not-so-thick skull, and the dog, so beautiful, was also so dead. It collapsed in a heap.

A bullet kicked up a gout of dirt near him, a geyser of high-powered energy. One of the deputies had fired.

Earl threw his lever, jacked a shell out, and took up a kneeling position halfway behind a tree. The stupid boy ran ahead to see if he had bagged something and Earl put the sight blade in the center of his chest, and almost squeezed the trigger, but instead let it drop and fired a round at the running boy’s feet, throwing up his own geyser. The boy dropped, both himself and his rifle, and if the other were aiming, he took a dive when he saw the closeness of the round.

But Earl saw none of this.

Instead another dog leaped and before he could get a new round levered into his rifle it was upon him so even in the motion of cocking, he wheeled and clubbed it with the butt of the rifle, feeling it shudder with the blow and sigh. But the dog after that was on him, and he felt its tearing snout burrowing through his shirt as it tried to rip his throat with its canines. There’s something terrifying about the totality of the way an animal fights; it has no doubts or qualms and its fear releases a pure blast of chemicals into its blood, so that its muscles triple in their strength and its savagery quadruples. But the animal could not get purchase on the soft flesh of Earl’s throat because he protected it with his chin, then ripped out his K-bar and got the blade into her.

She squealed in the sharp pain, and knew herself to be mortally hurt, but in a second she was back at him.

By this time he had gotten the rifle up and fired. He belly shot her, and down she went, and he could not stand the idea of so brave an animal suffering, and so he levered the rifle again and shot her in the side of the head.

The beaten dog came at him and got its jaws locked on his left wrist so he could not shoot. The pain flared through his arm. He transferred the rifle to his right hand, flipped it, then used it to brain the dog. The dog relaxed. He swung it overhead and brought the full weight of the accelerating rifle down upon its skull, and something broke. The dog lay still.

He sat back, leaking blood from a dozen ugly wounds. He could feel it in his eyes, running down the side of his face, darkening his shirt, running down his arms to his hands, making them so slippery they could hardly hold the rifle. He tried not to look at the ruined bodies of the animals. It seemed to cast a bad spell on this business. Killing something so beautiful that was only doing what it had been trained to do, well, it was nothing to be proud of.

As he sat back momentarily, he made another terrifying discovery. The force of thumping the last dog was so intense that the lever had popped, opening the action, and the remaining two .30-06 cartridges had spilled out to somewhere on the floor of the forest. He was unarmed.

“O
PIE!
Goddamn, there he be.”

“Wal, git him. Then we git t’other. And the sheriff be here with more dogs. Git that one down there. It’s that goddamned law fellow, I know for sure.”

Indeed they could recognize Sam as he worked his way toward the tracks, not going as fast as he should, a civilized man in rough territory without a clue. He was nakedly open to them in the distance, a tiny figure against the rawness of the timbered plot.

Both deputies dropped to prone and eased the hammers back on the Winchesters.

“You got to shoot high. You shoot over him, drop that bullet into him.”

“You watch where I hit, and yell corrections.”

“You ain’t so dumb for a dumb hick.”

“Only thang dumber than a dumb hick is a smart city boy.”

Opie was the designated shooter. He was young, his eyes sharp, he had shot a lot and hunted his whole life. He could see his target hobbling along at what appeared to be a range of about six hundred yards, a far carry for a .30-30, but not impossible. Hell, he didn’t even really have to hit him. He just had to scare him into dropping—and missing that coming train. If he done that, he done right good. The sheriff and the dogs and the other fellers could round him up.

He found the old man perched at the tip of his sight, and squeezed the worn, smooth trigger of Mr. Oliver Winchester’s best gun.

The target was lost in the jump of the rifle.

He levered the gun quickly, tossing the empty, bringing a new one into the chamber.

“You’s off seventy-five yards at least,” yelled Skeeter. “You got to shoot high.”

“I know that, dadgummit. Just gittin’ a feel for it.”

He held again on the man, then raised the rifle a good five man-lengths over his head and squeezed.

“Goddamn, that’s close. Still a mite short.”

“That’s five men high. I am five men high. I’m going to six.”

He levered, found the position, and fired.

The shot plunked up a spray of dirt not ten feet from the fleeing target.

“That thar be it.”

“Six men high gits it done.”

He fired again, and Skeeter saw the dust puff surprisingly near Sam, who dropped immediately, scurried a few feet in the low crawl, and took refuge in a gully.

“Whoooeee,” said Opie. “Now you shoot, Skeet. Six men high, that’s it.”

S
AM
lay in the gulch, heaving for oxygen. It was quiet, and then, with a lazy puff, the earth just behind him erupted in a scuffle of dirt and broken stone. Something stung him in the neck, some fragment.

Oh Lord, he thought.

Then, a full second later, the pop of the report lazily reached his ears, as the sound took its sweet time following on the bullet.

Oh Lord, Lord, he thought.

He could hear the train. It was getting closer and he was but a hundred yards from the track. But he knew he had to stay until the very last second, calculate it just perfect, and get up and run helter-skelter like some sort of Crazylegs Hirsch to catch the train, climb aboard, and drop out of sight from the bullets. He knew he had a chance, at least a small one, but he didn’t like that run, over the rough ground, trying to read the speed of the train and match his own speed, worried about stumps and potholes and stones, with those boys up there whacking away at him, just desperate to get close to him and pancake him with their sticks again.

Whop!

This one lit up about an inch from his face and filled his eyes with dust.

It enraged him.

Caught. Trapped. Stuck.

It occurred to him: I will die here and nobody will ever pay, and Earl will die, and for what, justice denied the heirs of a rich Chicago man who happened to leave money to a Negro who had worked for him.

It seemed so unfair, but then he counseled himself that life wasn’t fair and that things happened as they happened, and you never knew what you were getting into.

He got ready to make his run.

E
ARL
came upon them from the side, and they were so intent on shooting they did not hear him, as they had forgotten their own dogs in the excitement. He had lost blood and was no longer quick, but he was determined.

As he rushed at the deputy, the boy heard him and spun, but too late, and Earl knocked into him as he rose, pulling the rifle from his hands.

As he got it, he rose and hurled it at the other boy, who was now bringing his rifle to bear. But the thrown weapon crashed into the boy, knocking him backward.

Earl rushed to him as he rose. The boy absurdly raised his fists in classic fighting style, as if a boxing match were about to commence. There wasn’t a lick of fear on his face, just pure meanness. He looked about nineteen.

Earl hammered him hard in the jaw and he went down, but then the other boy was on him, trying to drive him to earth with one arm and both legs, while pummeling him in the kidneys with the other. Earl twisted and shucked and got the boy off him, slipped and rose as the boy fired a good punch with his left fist that tattooed Earl in the jaw.

“Haw!” shouted the boy with glee, then spit a brown goober of ’baccy off into the woods and closed in, fists rotating crazily as he tried to line up a good shot, squinting as he hunted the angle.

Earl took two ineffectual blows on the shoulder, ducked a roundhouse, then dropped the boy with a right to the point of the jaw that would have him sipping meals through a straw for a month.

Both boys were down.

Earl gathered up the two rifles, quickly cranked the levers to empty each one, and threw each empty gun as far as he could.

He stood and waved. It was too far to yell, but Sam saw him, rose and returned the wave. Earl made a get-going gesture, as if flinging an imaginary football that far distance, meaning to communicate the idea that the train was almost there, the train, the train, and Sam turned.

The huge thing pulled into view as it emerged from the trees, pumping smoke, pulling four boxcars and two flatcars loaded with farm machinery.

Earl turned to the boys. One was awake, nursing a busted jaw.

“Sorry about the dogs, but they didn’t give me no choice. Now you stay put or I will beat on you some more.”

The boy had no interest in further fighting, and so Earl turned just in time to see Sam clamber aboard the train.

He knew he’d never make it, but he had to try.

He began to dash down the slope, and the train slowed, because it had to climb a bit here, and he thought he just might be all right, and then he heard the barking.

S
AM
rode for an hour, unmoving. He lay among chained pieces of equipment, the vibration of the track rattling upward, making his head buzz. No one came for him, no one inspected the train, there was no train detective; it was just him, alone, on the bed of the flatcar, between a thresher and what might have been a combine, each a brand spanking new example of McCormick’s finest machines and speaking of hopes for the bright future.

Sam felt nothing. There was no joy available for him. He had not seen Earl. He did not know what had happened to Earl. Had Earl made the train? He doubted it. The last time he had seen Earl, Earl had been up the slope, waving him onward, and he’d turned and pulled himself toward the track.

The train thundered along. It was immense. You never appreciated from afar how big they were. Worse, it was terrifying, a contraption that vibrated the very planet as it crossed its surface, vast and deadly, and as Sam pulled near to it, he became aware of the hugeness of its wheels as they glistened and sliced along the track. Helpfully, a little ladder hung off the rear of the flatcar, and he hoisted himself up it, banging a knee on something hard, experiencing a moment of horror when it felt that he was slipping off. But then he had it, he was up, and he clambered desperately for cover and fell between the chained machines and lay there, terrified.

When it occurred to him to look for Earl, he picked himself up and peered through the spokes of the machine. But it was too late. The train had passed beyond the timbered-out zone and was now in close, dense trees. He could see nothing but piney woods a few feet back from the tracks, and whatever secrets they concealed they would not surrender.

His mind was in a fog. He had not expected an ordeal so piercing this late in life, after having survived the craziness of the war and having at last found his place in the world. It was as if he couldn’t wrap his mind about what had just happened to him, unhelped by the terrifying reality that nothing yet was settled. Earl was still out there, somewhere, somehow. That ate a large hole in Sam’s digestive tract and would not stop hurting, like an ulcer gnawing away on him.

He tried to reason it out. Earl probably got away. Earl, in the woods on his own, was a match for any ten men. Earl survived, for nothing could kill an Earl Swagger, state police sergeant, Marine war hero and all around the most capable of all men on the planet.

But that presumed…the rational universe. A place that made sense, where order prevailed, where justice was paid out. Wherever they had been, it was not a rational universe but some haunted zone of Manichaean savagery, as if out of some ancient tale, where survival was not for the just but for the lucky, and one’s antagonists were unbound by civil logic or the stays of the human heart.

I put Earl in that, he thought, and his heart broke again, as the tide of guilt, like a kind of phlegm in the soul, molasses-thick and greasy, pure sludge, oozed over him. He thought of what he had done to Earl, where he had put Earl, and for what?

His self-loathing exploded, and he worked himself over pretty hard, wondering if the right thing to do hadn’t been to jump off the train and head on back to help Earl. But even as he conceived that idea, he knew it was impossible. He could not have done so. He could not leap off a moving train (leaping on had been hard enough) and gone back to face Sheriff Leon Gattis and his deputies and their educated billy clubs and their dogs. He already had seen the battered skull of that poor black mama. Who could have killed her but them? He had seen the fear among the Negroes at their powerful and confident ways, their occupier’s arrogance, their complete self-assurance in their mandate to rule by force. He could not face that again, not without a shirt, with a twisted ankle, exhausted beyond any exhaustion that had afflicted him in the war, when he was so much younger and stronger and had believed so much more firmly.

So it was not until 8:30, when the train pulled into a freight yard at Hattiesburg, that the last reality suddenly occurred to him: he was a wanted man. The police would be hunting him. Bulletins had gone out, possibly by radio or radio telephone or telegraph. There would be a manhunt. And there he was with no money, no local connections, nothing to sustain him.

It was at this point that his hand closed on something hard and round and crisp in the left pocket of Earl’s canvas hunting coat, and he pulled whatever it was out to discover a roll of bills. He quickly slipped the rubber band off and discovered over four hundred dollars, mainly tens and twenties. With that he could buy lodging, a shirt, some new shoes, but he knew he had to be careful, and that the cops would have all forms of transportation covered. He formulated a plan: Connie Longacre could drive down here and pick him up. He could hide in the trunk of her car and hopefully get through the roadblocks that way. Connie would do it. Connie always liked a big adventure, as if being married to the worthless but wealthy Rance Longacre wasn’t adventure enough, or was perhaps too much adventure.

It wasn’t much of a plan. Earl would no doubt come up with a much better plan, as Earl was a natural man of action, whereas he, Sam, had a tight legal mind focused on the stratagems of the law, but at the same time somewhat indifferent to the physics of the natural world.

But he knew one thing: he had to get away from this rail yard. That would be the first thing to be reported, the first thing the police would think of. In fact, he realized with a start, they were probably combing the place now.

He looked around. It was dark. He saw nothing. He gathered the coat up around him and slipped off the flatcar, dropping a few feet and again feeling a twitch of amazement at the hugeness of the thing. Of course he was unobserved by anybody, except for the three police officers who happened to be strolling along the way at precisely that moment.

“Well,” said the first one, “ain’t you a bit old to be bumming the rails, Dad?”

“Ah! Well—”

Sam’s mind, normally so filled with words, so glib, swift, logical, eloquent, powerful, emptied. It purged. He felt his mouth gibbering soundlessly, his lungs inflating with air, his lips drying in the breeze.

He was caught.

“I, uh, er—”

“Cat got your tongue, buster?”

“It’s, ah, er, you see—”

“Bet he don’t got no ID neither,” said the last officer. “Bet he don’t know nothing about nothing. They never do.”

But the cops didn’t seem menacing. None of them put their hands on their revolver butts, which is, Sam knew from experience, the first thing an officer does if he’s not feeling right about a situation. Nobody unlimbered a billy or a cosh or a sap, no knuckles went white, nobody started breathing hard or squinting or hunching and coiling at the prospect of violence; there were no signs of aggression whatsoever.

“Well, let’s go, bud, or I guess we’ll run you down to the drunk tank to sleep it off all night long.”

“Sir,” Sam finally found the voice to say, “I am not inebriated.”

“Well, he’s got a voice and he knows some big words, by God!”

Sam was amazed at how quickly he had recovered, and at how quickly he was analyzing this: do they know? Have I been reported an escaped prisoner? If so, wouldn’t they be quick to the gun and the club, in full cop manhunt posture and tension, which he’d seen in his time, too. No, these boys were pretty relaxed and seemed to think he was a funny old goat.

“Bet there’s a helluva story on how he lost his shirt,” said one. “Something involving a farmer’s daughter, a farmer, a shotgun, and some city feller knows too many big words for his own good.”

Sam realized: they don’t know. They can’t. They wouldn’t be acting like this.

So he reached back ever so slowly and removed his wallet.

One cop took it; he put his flashlight on it.

“He’s an Arkansas lawyer. Mr. Sam Vincent, Esquire, of Blue Eye, Arkansas. Hell, don’t that beat all.”

“Mr. Vincent, sir, you are a long way from your stomping grounds. Ain’t Blue Eye way to the west in Arkansas, if I recollect correctly?”

“You do, sir.”

“Well, sir, I’m afraid we got to ask you how come you’re riding the rails into our little city? Without a shirt and looking like the devil hisself just got done throwing a party for you.”

Sam never knew where the inspiration came from, or why, or how, but there it was, and in a second or so he even had himself convinced.

“Officer, I was on a business trip to New Orleans. You know that town. I’m afraid I gave in to certain low temptations, after denying for years I felt them at all. In a certain house I met a certain young woman. She was a Negress. A yellow Negress.”

“A high yeller. Them’s the worst. They can make a man act like a dog faster’n hell.”

“Yes, sir. I would confess also that alcohol played a part. In any event, the next day I believed myself to be in love and went back to the house to rescue her from it, and take her home with me. I admit I hadn’t yet figured out how I’d explain her presence to my wife of seventeen years and my five children. In any event, it was made clear to me that I wasn’t wanted, but I learned she was from Pascagoula, her name was Vonetta Louise, and thence she had returned. I imagined it was because she was so profoundly moved by my love for her and hers for me that she had struck out a new path in life.”

“Haw! Heard that one before! Knowed plenty of white boys thought they could rescue a nigger gal from being a nigger.”

“It don’t never work. God won’t let it work.”

“Anyhow, before I knew it, I had hired a car and traveled to Pascagoula, and began to make inquiries. I found her. I also found her boyfriend and his gang of brutish young Negro fellows, her daddy, her granddaddy, and most fearsome of all, her grandmama. They were not moved by my declaration of love, nor the whiskey on my breath. I seem to recall a scuffle, some rough thrashing and rolling, and the next thing, I was fleeing. I found myself without a shirt in a rail yard being hunted by large men of a dark persuasion interested in administering what I believe they referred to as a ‘big ol’ ass whuppin.’ That didn’t sound like much fun to me, and suddenly my love for sweet Vonetta Louise acquired a somewhat tarnished patina. I managed to sneak aboard a flatcar and lay still for the longest time. Then white men came and the Negroes left, but there was too much agitation for me to escape and I had no desire to explain my presence to them, either. Soon enough the train pulled out, and here I am.”

“Shee-it, don’t he tell a purty story!” one of the boys guffawed. All three had enjoyed it immensely. It connected with experiences they had either had or heard of, and it amused them no end to see a fancy talker, a man of education like Sam, brought low by the twin furies of drinking whiskey and high-yeller tail, which had been the ingredients in many a poor man’s destruction in the houses of New Orleans.

“The niggers will teach you a lesson if they catch you alone and there ain’t no other whites ’round. Way it is don’t mean jack to them in that sityation. Way up where you live, y’all don’t see that part of ’em. You just see ‘yassuh’ and ‘nossuh,’ but let me tell you, sir, they’s got it in for us, always will.”

“I fear I have learned that lesson the hard way. You know, I am not without means. I have some money. I require only a night’s lodging—preferably not in the drunk tank, as I can afford a hotel room—a shirt and some clean underwear, and I’ll be on my way by bus tomorrow.”

T
HEY
took Sam to their prowl car, and then to Hattiesburg’s best hotel, where a brief intervention got Sam a fine room, though of course he had to pay cash up front.

“Want you to see Mississippi hospitality at its finest, sir. Don’t want you to think all’s we do down here is fight the niggers for control. It’s a wonderful place to live and raise up your kids. You’d best call your wife with some story or other, ’cause I’ll bet that old gal is all upset.”

This was the youngest, nicest and smoothest of them.

“I certainly will, Officer.”

“Dave, Mr. Sam. I’m Dave.”

Dave appeared to have conceived of some major affection for Sam, along lines that Sam would never understand. Perhaps it was that, being discovered at a total disadvantage, Sam never got into his more usual powerful personality, where he was the best of all men, the smartest, the most capable, the boss prosecutor. Or perhaps it was as a residue of his experiences that he no longer quite believed so fiercely in those attributes as his birthrights, having seen how quickly and totally the world will dispense with them, and allow mean young deputies the privilege of beating a tattoo against your skull with a nightstick. In any event, whatever it was, the young officer responded to it.

Sam called home; he spoke to his oldest son, who seemed not to have noticed that he had been gone three weeks instead of one and then his wife, who had made the observation, but just barely. He then called Connie Longacre, got drunken Rance instead, but left a number, and she called back and they had a wondrous conversation, as they always did. Sam loved her; he knew he’d never quite have the nerve to blow up his life and then hers in order to make a change, and this thing between them, this fondness, was all that he would ever have.

The hotel sent a room service meal to his room; he slept, dreaming of Earl, convincing himself that Earl would make out just fine, Earl was all right, not to worry about Earl.

At eight someone knocked on the door, and he had a brief seizure of horror imagining that the news he was in some sense a wanted man had caught up to him, but opened it to find merely a portly gentleman from the Longbow Men’s Apparel Shop with a selection of coats, shirts, and ties, from which Sam selected a new outfit and paid for it in cash.

After a nice breakfast in the hotel dining room, Dave the cop came on by and drove him to the bus station. Dave had done some checking and discovered that the 10:00
A.M.
bus to Meridian would get Sam to the airport in time for a 3:00
P.M.
flight by DC-3 to Memphis, where his car was parked. After the cross-state drive, he’d be home in time for a late supper.