Pale Horse Coming (32 page)

T
HE
world’s oldest gunman slept in his rocker on the porch, in a blanket wrapped up against the cold, except of course there was no cold, only a memory of it.

Outside it was Montana everywhere you looked. Beyond the far meadows some blue mountains rose out of mist, but so many miles off no details could be tracked. In his chair the old man slept as soundly as the dead. In repose his features softened some. He had an egg-shaped face like a dream granddad and not much hair left. He was pink, as so many men in their seventies become. Though swaddled in the wool, he clearly had stumpy arms and a stumpy body, and short legs. And, like many men of his generation, he was dressed formally, for to face the world, even in sleep, without a tie was to admit that one was a no ’count. But without a hat was even worse, and though he dozed, his round head was crowned in ten gallons’ worth of imposing black Stetson.

Earl wondered if he were indeed dead, but every few minutes or so he’d let out with some low, growly sound from who knew where? He’d stir, shiver, twitch, but only for a second; then it was back to dreamland.

“Mr. Swagger,” his granddaughter said, as she brought him another cup of coffee, “I’m sure grandpap wouldn’t mind if you nudged him awake.”

“Thank you, young lady, but I feel Mr. Ed has earned his sleep, and I’ll not be taking any of it from him.”

She was a pretty girl, possibly twenty, with the kind of pugnacious jaw that suggested that under her sugar lay considerable spice. Earl marked her down as a firecracker, even as she twinkled at him.

“I swear, he sleeps the day away most of the time. He needs an eight-hour nap so he’ll be fresh for his twelve-hour-night sleep.”

“He’s running down some.”

“Just a bit. If he comes to in a good mood, he’ll still be a one-man fire station.”

“That’s what I’m betting on.”

“I’m sure he will. He so likes his visitors.”

Earl waited an hour, then two. He smoked three or four Luckies, but mostly he just sat patiently.

Finally, well past the noon hour, the old man stirred with more gumption than ever before, seemed to spit and cough and struggle a bit with his breathing, and came out of his sleep as a man comes out of the water that’s just tried to kill him.

“Huh? Wha? Umph, er, ah, whoa, what the—?”

He blinked, spluttered, shook his head, and looked about.

“Sally? Sally, honey?”

“Yes, Grandpap,” came the cry from within.

“I must have dozed.”

“Just a bit. Are you ready for some lunch?”

“Yes, please.”

“Say hello to your visitor.”

The old man looked over at Earl.

“Howdy,” he said. “Care for some lunch? The girl makes a fine tomato soup.”

“It’s only Campbell’s out of a can,” Sally called from inside.

“That would be fine, sir.”

That said, the old man sat back and quietly contemplated the meadows for a while. Earl did nothing to hurry him along, figuring that Ed McGriffin would take his own sweet time about things.

The girl, Sally, brought a tray, with a bowl of tomato soup, a few saltines and a glass of Coca-Cola with ice. The old man crunched up the crackers into the soup—Earl saw that his fingers were still clever and firm—and commenced to eat with considerable gusto. Earl had a bowl of soup too, though he passed on the crackers.

When the eating was done, Mr. Ed belched, and Sally came to take the trays away. Then he said, “I now have to pee. You can wait another few minutes, can’t you, sir?”

“I sure can.”

“Well, I have to say, you’re a patient fellow. You don’t believe in speeding things along, do you?”

“Things will happen or not, and whether you speed them up don’t matter much, I’ve noticed,” Earl said.

“True enough,” said the old man. Earl helped him rise and watched as he found his legs, and then stomped inside. A few minutes later he returned.

“Now I won’t have to pee for at least another seven, or maybe even eight, minutes. Well, go ahead, then. Speak your piece. I get fellows up here all the time, want to hear about the old days or want me to dictate stories to some magazine or other. That what you want, young fellow? I do have to levy a small fee, you understand. Milk money.”

“No, sir,” said Earl. “I think I’m up on what you’ve done. I do have an offer, however.” And he told him who he was, who he knew, and what he wanted.

When he was done, the old man sighed. Then he said, “You say it’s up a river. Now, how the hell is an old coot like me going to get up a river? I can’t sit still in a boat, I have to pee every three seconds, I can’t run, much less climb stairs or dig a hole. I can’t even paint a house no more, and I made my living painting houses.”

“But you can still shoot, I’d bet. As good as ever.”

“Probably,” the old man said. “I’d say it’s like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, you don’t never forget.”

“Can you still throw five glass balls in the air, draw and hit all five double-action before they hit the ground?”

“Before they hit the ground? Hell, boy, I can hit them before they reach apogee. Maybe now the fifth ball would be in descent when I pinged it, but none of them would touch the planet whole again.”

“That’s what I thought. And five shots in a two-inch group at twenty-five feet in less than four-fifths a second?”

“I reckon. If not that exact, close enough so’s no one would note the difference without electric timing gear. Say, seven-eighths a second. I always could shoot a Smith .38 right dandy.”

“I’d imagine practice had a bit to do with it.”

“It’s better to be talented than to be a hard worker. But to be a talented hard worker, that’s the best combo, son.”

“Many a man has said you are the best revolver shooter who ever lived, bar none.”

“That may be so. I try not to dwell on it now that the end of the journey has been glimpsed.”

“Do you wish you’d been around in the days when the Earps and the Clantons ruled, when Billy and Bat and Wild Bill were the fancy Dans? You’d have been better than them all.”

“And then I’d be famous? Someone might have made a movie about me and gotten it all wrong, and then cheated me out of my money. So I’ve done all right, I suppose. But yes, now and then, a little part of me wishes that just once I’d gone up against a bad man for all the stakes. Now you offer me a chance, but it’s too late. Maybe five years ago. Three even. But as you can see, I’m not vigorous no more.”

“Well, here’s the funny part. Everything I told you was true, and we are going to go in come dark of moon and set it right. And you will be able to go along if you so choose.”

“Son, I—”

“Mr. McGriffin, I have a way. It’s a new way, ain’t nobody hardly never thought of before. I’ll get you into that town no more tuckered than if you’d taken a Sunday walk in the park. High and dry, too. And I’ll match you against some bad boys who think that their guns are the loudest. You will prevail. You may not survive, but you will prevail. And if you do survive, I’ll get you back just as high and dry as I got you in. And you’ll be on your way, and you’ll be able to consider your life as complete. You will have done all the things a man of the gun can do, including the most important: using that gun in service to justice.”

“Mr. Swagger, I’d never call a man who won the Medal of Honor a liar, but unless they build a railroad track into that swamp in less than three weeks, I’m stuck here.”

So Earl told him.

“Well, you’ve figured it out right pretty.”

“You’ve figured it out right pretty but for one thing,” came the voice of the girl. She walked into the porch from the living room, where she’d evidently been sitting, and listening. “That one thing is me.”

“Ma’am?” said Earl.

“Now Sally,” said old Ed, “don’t get your back up.”

“Sir,” Sally said to Earl, her features bunched and her eyes forceful, “if you think I’m going to let this fine old fellow travel all that way by himself, you must have left your head in Buffalo Bend, or wherever it is you come from. He only has me in this world, and I only have him, and if he’s going on some fool trip of adventure, you’d best believe I’m coming too, and I won’t hear another word or there’ll be trouble. I may look frail but I pack a punch.”

“Sweetie,” said Earl, “you’d be stuck down in a farmhouse with a bunch of old fellows, none of whom has a tenth the grace and manners of your grandpap here. I can’t think it would be pleasant.”

“And who’ll cook for this geezer crusade?”

“Ma’am, it’ll mostly be beans and franks.”

“Well, I know ten ways to cook beans and ten ways to cook franks, and someone has to mulch grandpap’s food and make sure he don’t wander off. I will go with grandpap or grandpap will go nowhere, and that is the truth. And you had better adjust to that now, or you will be an unhappy fellow for some time to come.”

“When Sally speaks, what she declares is usually what happens,” said McGriffin.

Earl shook his head.

“You won’t have a fun time. It ain’t a party.”

“I can handle myself,” she said, and as she was Ed McGriffin’s granddaughter, Earl knew she spoke the truth.

I
T
was a snitch who told Bigboy first, and he just laughed. But then another snitch told him, and this time it wasn’t so much fun. The third time he heard, it began to sound ominous. So naturally he went to see the warden, who had the keenest insights into Negro psychology of anyone in the world, to have a chat.

“Warden, it’s the niggers. You know how you’ve always said they let us rule them because they have no hope of anything else, and so in the end they come to think such an arrangement is necessary and even right, to save them from themselves.”

“Yes, Bigboy, I believe I do. Our enemy is hope and belief. We must crush them because that is our duty. But if they grow, they can grow in wild ways, and bring down the most intricate and stable of edifices.”

“There’s a disease spreading.”

“Yes?”

The two men were in the warden’s office on the first floor of the ghastly old house just inside the prison walls. Bigboy actually hated this place, for its smell of rot and corruption, of damask crackling toward dust and wood turning to mush, was faintly sickening. He never understood why a brilliant man like the warden took such pleasure in it. It could have been torn down and the state persuaded to build a more modern structure quite easily. The warden had powerful allies in Jackson, men who knew what he was doing and approved of it heartily. They would want him to be happy, for he was their bulwark, their champion, against the coming of change.

But the warden loved this old place. It held a secret meaning to him that even Bigboy, intelligent in practical ways, could not imagine. So Bigboy sat in the office, sipping port to the flicker of lamps and candles, on a warm summer night, where servants waited just outside of visibility. If you closed your eyes it was 1856 or so, before the convulsion of the War of the Rebellion, when the South stood at the apex of its civilization. Bigboy, not a native Southerner, nevertheless felt the powerful pull the era had for such as the warden and the men who supported him in Jackson. That past was as alive as their gardens, and just as alluring; if it could not be preserved, its memory could nevertheless be preserved, if not enshrined.

“It’s the disease of hope,” said Bigboy. “They’re stirring as they’ve not stirred before. They have a dream. They have a possibility. They see change coming.”

“And what is this hope?”

“It’s obscure. I do not know the meaning of it. But I know it’s being whispered nigger to nigger, and the whole farm is alive with it. Where it came from, I do not know.”

“That is disturbing. Did you know that before the Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857, chapati cakes were distributed. No one knows how or where or by whom, or what it signified, but it held some inchoate meaning to the natives, and these simple disks of unleavened dough were passed hand to hand to hand. It was an omen, and the British were blind to it. Then came the mutiny, and years of slaughter and rapine. Race war, really, though no one will call it that. The world ended. Or, rather,
a
world ended. Thousands and thousands of lives later, the British reestablished control, but not really. It was all different, and they never had confidence again. Possibly that was the beginning of the fall of the British empire even before they were half done building it, and look at India now. Improved? I think not. The wogs run everything, and everything is running down toward savagery and chaos, as it must when an uncivilized mind assumes charge. Are they better now that they are free of the English? Hardly, and it will get worse. In such a way, will the Negro be better off when he is free of the white man? Of course not. He’ll be worse off. There’ll be nothing to check his natural tendencies, his infantile but potent sexuality, his commitment to appetite, to instant gratification, his inability to imagine a world of permanence, because he was raised in tropical innocence for a million years, and at some deep conceptual level lacks the imagination to foresee a time without heat and rain and verdant greenery, which is where all his troubles come from. Worse than that, however, is his lust for the white woman, and the progeny that ensues: children with Negro bodies and appetites, with Negro fury, with Negro violence, but as guided by secret white cunning? That is a world I care not to live in, Sergeant Bigboy, and have dedicated my life to preventing. The Negro and the white must never cohabit; only anarchy can follow.”

This was a cherished rumination on the part of the warden, and Bigboy had heard it many a time before, but it was delivered with such force, he dared not interrupt.

“My, my, how I
do
go on. You come with a report, I give you a lecture. And you are gentleman enough not to correct me and hold me on track. So, back to this magic message, this hope. How is it expressed?”

“In the following idiom,” Bigboy reported. “The words are ‘pale horse coming.’ They are muttering it among themselves.”

“Well, what an unusual turn of phrase,” said the warden.

“Mr. Warden, would you know what it means? You know so much, I thought sure you’d know it.”

“‘Pale horse coming.’ Has a biblical feel to it, doesn’t it?”

“It does, Mr. Warden. Is it from the Bible?”

“Possibly. Let me think. But if I tell you what it might mean, that knowledge will corrupt you and taint your own thinking. I prefer before I comment to hear exactly what
you
think it means, Sergeant Bigboy. You are a man of immense sagacity, and your instincts should be trusted. Please tell me. Before we let any fancy learning intrude and occlude things for all time.”

“Sir, I think it refers to that fellow, that white fellow, Bogash, we called him Bogart, who was killed trying to escape.”

“Yes?”

“He was a tough one. He was a hero. He was an impressive enough boy in his own right, who stood up to ’em in their own jungle and fought them down, all of them. Then he stood up hard to us. In the primitiveness of their minds, they might come to believe he’s a messenger from God. Some kind of angel. And as Christ returned from the dead, Mr. Warden, so it seems to me that they could allow themselves to think that he would return from the dead.”

“I take it that is not possible.”

“It is not.”

“Your report was sketchy on details.”

“I guarantee you he will not be returning from the dead. Not in three days, not in three years, not in three millennia, not in three
million
years. I guarantee it.”

“I trust you. And I think you may be right. The word ‘pale’ does have religious connotations. We first find it in the Revelation of Saint John, Chapter Six, Verse Eight: ‘Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’”

“Yes.”

“‘Pale,’ of course, is a logical association with death, for it reflects the pallor of the flesh when having passed, denied of warm blood, marbleizing, calcifying as it breaks down. It’s cold, really, and paleness is a feature of the cold. Snow is white, it is pale, it is cold. A pale sky is a chilled sky. We find paleness as death in many places in the western imagination associated with death. Then there’s ‘and Hell followed them’; yes, I can see how that connection to the Bible would satisfy these desperate, evil men, for they believe that when that pale horse comes, death rides upon it, and in concert horse and rider bring hell to us here in our humble institution. So sayeth Saint John the Revelator.”

Bigboy nodded. The warden took another sip of port. There was no stopping him once he got going.

“Mr. Warden, begging your pardon, but do you think a Mississippi nigger here at Thebes would be reading much Saint John?”

“No, indeed, but that is the miracle of the way images move through literature, memory and the imagination. They wouldn’t know Revelations from shoofly pie, but they will have met people who have had, and will have communicated not so much the information as the idea. So ‘pale’ as an expression of death delivered will have forceful meaning to them, even if they know not why.”

“Yes, Mr. Warden.”

“Keats too was absorbed in paleness as death, but he saw it in the form of extremely competent men, very gifted, capable men. ‘I saw pale kings and warriors, too,’ he writes, ‘pale warriors, death-pale were they all; / They cried “
La Belle Dame sans Merci
/ hath thee in thrall!” ’ Now what is the meaning of
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’
and what is this thrall she holds over the pale warriors?”

Bigboy had about as much chance of answering this question as he did of flying to Mars. But he understood that it was rhetorical, and so he said nothing.

“Well,” the warden answered his own question, “though interpretations vary, I would say the beautiful lady without mercy is that hideous cow, duty. She demands that we give up all for her, she has no mercy on us. In thrall to her we fight, in thrall to her we die. So in this meaning of the phrase, he seems to be predicting the arrival of men of duty, with guns, who want to kill us all, and bring hell to our little part of the earth.”

“So you would take this very seriously?”

“Very. Very, indeed.”

“Then I will find out where it came from, what it relates to. It will not be pleasant work. You may hear the screams in the night.”

“I’ve learned to sleep through screams in the night. It is necessary sometimes. Our fortunes, our lives, may depend on those screams. Sergeant Bigboy, do what has to be done. Do it fast, do it without mercy. I will not be like the British, slaughtered in my bed because I didn’t read the signs. Find out what is going on.

“Meanwhile, I will notify the doctor that we suspect mischief afoot. If he feels threatened, he will conjure the highest powers of the state in self-protection. Our mission is to protect his mission; that is what gives all this nobility as well as necessity.”