Pale Horse Coming (3 page)

“I see. My task would be to locate either Lincoln or evidence of his fate. A document, that sort of thing?”

“Yes. From close-mouthed Southern types. I, of course, need someone who speaks the language, or rather, the accent. They would hear the Chicago in my voice, and their faces would ossify. Their eyes would deaden. Their hearing would disintegrate. They would evolve backward instantaneously to the neolithic.”

“That may be so, but Southerners are also fair and honest folk, and if you don’t trumpet your Northern superiority in their face and instead take the time to listen and master the slower cadences, they will usually reward you with friendship. Is there another issue here?”

“There is indeed.” He waved at his handsome suit, his handsome shoes, his English tie. His cufflinks were gold with a discreet sapphire, probably worth more than Sam had made in the last six months. “I am a different sort of man, and in some parts of the South—Thebes, say—that difference would not go unnoticed.”

“You have showy ways, but they are the ways of a man of the world.”

“I fear that is exactly what would offend them. And, frankly, I’m not a brave man. I’m a man of desks. The actual confrontation, the quickness of argument, the thrust of will on will: not really my cup of tea, I’m afraid. A sound man understands his limits. I was the sort of boy who never got into fights and didn’t like tests of strength.”

“I see.”

“That is why I am buying your courage as well as your mind.”

“You overestimate me. I am quite a common man.”

“A decorated hero in the late war.”

“Nearly everybody in the war was a hero. I saw some true courage; mine was ordinary, if even that.”

“I think I have made a very good choice.”

“All right, sir.”

“Thank you, Mr. Vincent. This is the fee I had in mind.”

He wrote a figure on the back of his card, and pushed it over. It took Sam’s breath away.

“You are sending me to be your champion in hell, it sounds like,” said Sam. “But you are paying me well for the fight.”

“You will earn every penny, I assure you.”

I
T
took Sam but a few days to bank the retainer, rearrange his schedule, book a ticket on the City of New Orleans, and spend an afternoon in the Fort Smith municipal library reading up on Thebes and its penal farm. What he learned appalled him.

On the night before he was to leave, he finally faced the unsettled quality of his feelings. At last, he climbed into his car and drove the twelve miles east along Arkansas Route 8 toward the small town of Board Camp; turning left off the highway, he traveled a half mile of bumpy road to a surprisingly large white house on a hill that commanded the property. The house was freshly painted as was the barn behind, and someone had worked the gardens well and dutifully; it was June, and the place was ablaze with the flora chosen to flourish in the hot West Arkansas sun. A few cows grazed in the far meadows, but much of the property was still in trees, where Sam and the owner shot deer in the fall, if they didn’t wander farther afield.

Sam pulled up close to the house, aware that he was under observation. This was Earl’s young son, Bob Lee, almost five. Bob Lee was a grave boy who had the gift of stillness when he so desired. He was a watcher, that boy. He already had made some hunting trips with them, and had a talent for blood sport, the ability to understand the messages of the land, to decipher the play of light and shadow in the woods, to smell the weather on the wind, though he was some years yet from shooting. Still, he was a steady presence on the hunt, not a wild kid. It was Sam’s sworn duty as godfather to the boy to draw him into the professional world; Earl was adamant that his son would do better than he and not be a roaming Marine, a battlefield scurrier, a man killer, as Earl had been. Earl wanted something more settled for his only son, a career in the law or medicine. It was important to Earl, and when things were important to Earl, it was Earl’s force of will that usually made them happen.

“Howdy there, Bob Lee,” called Sam.

“Mr. Sam, Mr. Sam,” the boy responded, from the porch where he had been sitting and looking out over the land in the twilight.

“Your daddy’s still on duty, I see. Is he expected back?”

“Don’t know, sir. Daddy comes and goes, you know.”

“I do know. How you got such a worker as a daddy I’ll never figure, when he has such a lazy son who just sits there like a frog on a log.”

“I was memorizing.”

“It doesn’t surprise me at all. Memorizing the land? The birds. The sky, the clouds.”

“Something like that, sir.”

“Oh, you are a smart one. You have received all the brains in the family, I can see that. You’ll end up a rich one. Is your mama here?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll fetch her.”

The boy scooted off as Sam waited. He could have walked in himself, for he was that familiar with the Swaggers. But something in his mood kept him still and worrisome.

Junie Swagger emerged. Lord, a beauty still! But Junie was, well, who knew? The childbirth had been a terrible ordeal, it was said, and Earl not around to help, at least not till the end, and so the poor girl fought her way through fifteen hours of labor on her own. She had not, it was also said, quite ever come back from that. She was somewhat dreamy, as if she didn’t hear all that was said to her. Her great pleasure was those damned flowers, and she could spend hours in the hottest weather cultivating or weeding or fertilizing. It was also said that she would have no more children.

Now, a little wan, she stood before him.

“Why, hello, Mr. Sam. Come on in.”

“Well, Junie, thank you much, but I don’t want you making no fuss. I have to have a chat with Earl is all. You needn’t even consider this a visit, and there’s no need to unlimber any hospitality.”

“Oh, you are so silly. You sit down, I’ll git you a nice glass of lemonade. You’ll stay for supper, I insist.”

“No, ma’am. Can’t. I’m in the middle of getting ready for a business trip to New Orleans. I’m driving over to Memphis tomorrow to catch the train.”

“You know, Mr. Sam, Earl sometimes gets so caught up he doesn’t get here ’til late.”

“I do know. It seems a shame after all he’s been through that he can’t have a quieter life.”

Junie said nothing for a second, but her face focused with a surprising intensity, as if some spark had been struck. Then she said, “I fear he has other things on his mind. I know this Korea business has him all het up. I’m scared he’ll get it in his head he has to go fight another war. He’s done enough. But I can read his melancholy. It’s his nature to go where there’s shooting, under the impression he can help, but maybe out of some darker purpose.”

“Earl is a man bred for war, I agree, Junie. But I do think that he’ll sit this one out on the porch. He’s still in pain from wounds, and he knows what a wonderful home you’ve made for him and the boy.”

“Oh, Mr. Sam, you can be such a charmer sometimes. I don’t believe a word you say, never have, never will.” She laughed and her face lit up.

“Now you sit here, Earl will be along shortly or not, as he sees fit. I will bring you that lemonade and that will be that.”

So Sam sat and watched the twilight grow across the land. He could have sat all night, but on this night Earl had decided to come home as quickly as possible, and within a few minutes Sam saw the Arkansas Highway Patrol black-and-white scuttling down the road, pulling up a screen of dust behind it. Earl had meant to asphalt that road for four years now, or at least lay some gravel, but could never quite afford to have it done. Sam had volunteered to front him the money, but Earl of course was stubborn and wanted no debts haunting him, none left for his heirs to owe if his melancholy about the true nature of the world ever proved out and he turned up shot to death in some squalid field.

Earl got out of the car with a smile, for he had seen Sam from a long way off. He loved three things in the world: his family, the United States Marine Corps and Sam.

“Well, Mr. Sam, why didn’t you tell me you were coming? Junie, get this man a drink of something stronger than lemonade and set an extra place.”

Earl lumbered up to the porch from his car. He was a big man, over six feet, and still so darkened from the Pacific sun after all these years some thought he was an Indian. He had a rumbly, slow voice famous in the county, and his close bristly hair—he’d removed the Stetson by now—was just beginning to gray. He was near forty years old, and his body was a latticework of scar tissue and jerry-built field-expedient repairs. He’d been stitched up so many times he was almost more surgical thread than human being, testimony to the fact that a war or two will write its record in a man’s flesh. His hands were big, his muscles knotty from farmwork on weekends and plenty of it, but his face still had the same odd calmness to it that inspired men in combat or terrified men in crime. He looked as if he could handle things. He could.

“He says he won’t stay,” Junie cried from inside, “though Lord knows I tried. You tie him to a chair and we’ll be all set.”

“Bob Lee’s going to be disappointed if old Sam don’t read him a story tonight,” Earl said.

“I will stay to read the story, yes, Earl.” In his stentorian, courtroom voice, Sam could make a story come more alive than the radio. “And I wish this were a pure pleasure call. But I do have a matter to discuss.”

“Lord. Am I in some kind of trouble?”

“No, sir. Maybe I am, however.”

It was such a reversal. In some ways, unsaid, Sam had become Earl’s version of a father, his own proving to be a disappointment and his need for someone to believe in so crucial to his way of thinking. So he had informally adopted Sam in this role, worked for him for two years as an investigator before Colonel Jenks had managed at last to get Earl on the patrol. The bonds between the two men had grown strong, and Sam alone had heard Earl, who normally never discussed himself, on such topics as the war in the Pacific or the war in Hot Springs.

The two sat; Junie brought her husband a glass of lemonade, and he in turn gave her the Sam Browne belt with the Colt .357, the handcuffs, the cartridge reloaders and such, which she took into the house to secure.

Earl loosened his tie, set his Stetson down on an unused chair. His cowboy boots were dusty, but under the dust shined all the way down to the soles.

“All right,” he said. “I am all ears.”

Sam told him quickly about his commission to go to Thebes, Mississippi, and the tanned, smooth-talking colleague who had put it together for him, and the large retainer.

“Sounds straightforward to me,” said Earl.

“But you have heard of the prison at Thebes.”

“Never from a white person. White folks prefer to believe such places don’t exist. But from the Negroes, yes, occasionally.”

“It has an evil reputation.”

“It does. I once arrested a courier running too fast up 71 toward Kansas City. He had a trunkful of that juju grass them jazz boys sometimes smoke. He was terrified I’s going to send him to Thebes. I thought he’d die of a heart attack he’s so scared. Never saw nothing like it. It took an hour to get him settled down, and then of course another hour to make him understand this was Arkansas, not Mississippi, and I couldn’t send him to Thebes, even if I wanted to. I sent him to Tucker, instead, where I’m sure he had no picnic. But at the trial, he seemed almost happy. Tucker was no Thebes, at least not in the Negro way of looking at things.”

“They live in a different universe, somehow,” Sam said. “It doesn’t make sense to us. It is haunted by ghosts and more attuned to the natural and more connected to the earth. Their minds work differently. You can’t understand, sometimes, why they do the things they do. They are us a million years ago.”

“Maybe that’s it,” said Earl. “Though the ones I saw on Tarawa, they died and bled the same as white folks.”

“Here’s why I’m somewhat apprehensive,” Sam confessed. “I went up to Fort Smith the other day, and found out what I could find out about this place. Something’s going on down there that’s gotten me spooked a bit.”

“What could spook Sam Vincent?”

“Well, sir, five years ago, according to the Standard and Poor’s rating guide to the United States, in Thebes, Mississippi, there was a sawmill, a dry cleaner, a grocery and general store, a picture show, two restaurants, two bar-and-grills, a doctor, a dentist, a mayor, a sheriff, a feed store and a veterinarian.”

“Yes?”

“Now there’s nothing. All those businesses and all those professional men, they’ve up and gone.”

“All over the South, the Negroes are on the move. Mississippi is cotton, and cotton isn’t king no more. They’re riding the Illinois Central up North to big jobs and happier lives.”

“I know, and thought the same at first. So I picked at random five towns scattered across Mississippi. And while some have had some social structure reduction and considerable population loss, they remain vibrant. So this does seem strange.”

Earl said nothing.

Sam continued.

“Then there’s this business of the road. There was a highway into Thebes for many years and it too supported businesses and life. Gas stations, diners, barbecue places, that sort of thing. But some time ago, the road washed out, effectively sealing the town and that part of the swamp and piney woods off from civilization, well, such civilization as they have in Mississippi. You’d think a civic structure would get busy opening that road up, for the road is the river of opportunity, especially in the poor, rural South. Yet now, all these years later, it remains washed out, and as far as I can learn, no one has made an attempt to open it. The only approach to what remains of Thebes is a long slow trip by boat up that dark river. That’s not a regular business either. The prison launches make the journey for supplies on a weekly basis, and to pick up prisoners, but the place is sealed off. You don’t get there easily, you don’t get back easily, and everybody seems to want it that way. Now doesn’t that seem strange?”

“Well, sir,” said Earl, “maybe it’s a case of no road, no town, and that’s why it’s all drying up down there.”

“It would seem so. But the decline of Thebes had already begun three years earlier. It was as if the road was the final ribbon on the package, not what was inside the package.”

“Hmmm,” said Earl. “If you are that worried, possibly you shouldn’t go.”

“Well, sir, I can’t not go. I have accepted a retainer and I have a professional obligation I cannot and would not evade.”

“Would you like me to come along, in case there’s nasty surprises down there?”

“No, no, Earl, of course not. I just want you to know what is going on. I have here an envelope containing my file on the case, all my findings, my plan of travel and so forth. I leave tomorrow on the ten forty-five out of Memphis, and should reach New Orleans by five. I’ll spend the night there, and have hired a car the next morning to take me to Pascagoula. Presumably I’ll find a boatman, and I’ll reach town late the day after tomorrow. If I can find a telephone, I’ll call you or my wife and leave messages on a daily basis. If I can’t find a telephone, well then, I shall just complete my business and come on home.”

“Well, let’s pick a date, and if you ain’t home by that time,
then
I’ll make it my business to figure out what’s happening.”

“Thank you, Earl. Thank you so much. You saw where I was headed.”

“Mr. Sam, you can count on me.”

“Earl, if you say something, I know it’s done.”

“I’d bring a firearm. Not one of your hunting rifles, but a handgun. You still have an Army forty-five, I believe.”

“No, Earl. I am a man of reason, not guns. I’m a lawyer. The gun cannot be my way. Logic, fairness, humanity, the rule of the law above all else, those are my guidelines.”

“Mr. Sam, where you’re going, maybe such things don’t cut no ice. I’ll tell you this, if I have to come, I’ll be bringing a gun.”

“You have to do it your way, and I have to do it mine. So be it. Now let’s read a story to Bob Lee.”

“I think he’d like that. He likes the scary ones the best.”

“You still have that book of Grimm’s?”