Pale Horse Coming (35 page)

T
HE
warden sent a man to Sheriff Leon Gattis, requesting that worthy’s fastest presence. The sheriff, who’d essentially been created by the warden, came apace.

He tied his horse at the rail outside the great house within the old brick wall. He tried not to look at the ruin of the Whipping House off in a grove of palmettos and palms, for he knew the purpose of it and it filled him with unease. In fact, the prison itself made him a mite nervous. That
WORK MAKES YOU FREE
arched over the entrance; what was that? It was familiar somehow, but the sheriff couldn’t place it. Then that place called the Screaming House, off by the river, where the convicts said you went, you screamed, and you never came back again. The sheriff shuddered ever so slightly.

Also, the Negro women lined up to get into the Store for their week’s ration of food and goods were not a welcoming sight. The women were surly, hang-dog, defeated. They hadn’t the sass of your average colored gal; none of them looked to be much fun in the hay, and that was generally where your nigger gal outshined her white counterpart. These gals looked hungry and scurvy, like someone had just let them down off the rack after applying the cattail ten or twenty times. They had no light in their eyes, no laughter in their primitive souls, though one or two, the sheriff could not help but notice, had nice sets of jugs wobbling loose under their sack dresses.

A trustee, old nigra-style, admitted the sheriff, who stomped his boots clean before entering the great house. Inside, he hit that same wall of ancient smell: dust, rot, the damp cool of mildew, a significant temperature reduction, the whole thing out of a South that only existed in the movies and there with no exactness to it. Daylight at least meant there was no need for candles or lanterns, which turned the place even ghostlier. The old trustee, moving as if his spine were fused into a solid pole and each step a pain, took him to the warden’s office, knocked, opened and admitted him.

There the great man sat, alone at his desk, working hard. He held up a hand in pause, as if to suggest his concentration was so mighty it could not be breached, and thereby held the sheriff frozen at the door. A big clock ticktocked as the second hand loafed along. Books, portraits of old gentlemen of fine breeding, Southern pastoral scenes in oil, a rack of fine rifles, the state flag of Mississippi all filled the place with color and detail.

Finally, with a flourish, the warden finished up whatever it was he was writing with a fountain pen, pressed a roller across the pages to dry the ink, then carefully removed the document to a desk drawer and permitted himself to look up.

“Why, Sheriff Leon, how kind of you to join me upon such short notice.”

There was no chance in hell that the sheriff would not obey a summons
immediately,
but it was the warden’s preference to proceed by the old Southern ways of politeness. He was a polite man, as if he believed that politeness, chivalry, the rules of society, were all that separated him and his kind from the niggers.

“Yes, sir, it is my pleasure.”

“Do sit down. Join me in a glass of sherry?”

“Sir, may I be frank?”

“Of course, Sheriff Leon.”

“Sherry would not be to my likin’. My people never had no sherry, and so I never grew a taste for it.”

“I have some fine sour mash bourbon.”

“Sir, that would make this old dog a happy dog indeed.”

“And I’ll join you, Leon, if you don’t mind.”

“Yes, sir. I’d be proud if you would.”

The ceremony of the drinks, quite elaborate, unfolded, and in a few minutes each man had returned to his respective seat, though now each was armed with two fingers of neat brown fluid.

“That is a fine batch,” said the sheriff, after a taste.

“It is indeed,” said the warden.

“Now, how may I be of assistance?”

“I have read your report over and over, Leon, about the Arkansas lawyer who escaped.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You recommended that the situation be looked into?”

“Yes, sir.”

“In my wisdom, I thought it wise to let sleeping dogs lie. That is to say, my thought was that as he had not seen our institution he only had a confused picture of what he would have dismissed as ‘typical Southern methods,’ unlikely to bestir the world at large. There was furthermore the issue of the fellow involved with him, whom we felt we had to learn more about. Alas, he is no longer with us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, Leon, that was my judgment. Leon, it was the wrong judgment. I am not averse to acknowledging my failures. You were right, Leon, I was wrong.”

“Sir, you ain’t hardly ever wrong about nothing. You done got this county and your prison set up just fine, and we all the better off fo’ it, with good jobs, money in the bank, bread and vittles on the table, and a solid future. You have done things down here that have—”

The warden let Leon lick his boots for several moments, though he didn’t much enjoy it. But finally, when the fellow was done groveling, he continued.

“Now, Leon, I will tell you very confidentially that something is astir among the convicts. They are muttering about a deliverance. In their primitive minds, God is gathering the righteous to strike, riding in on a pale horse of retribution. Do you know a thing about it?”

“No, sir. Not a thing.”

“Of course not. I do not believe this has a thing to do with that lawyer. I cannot in my mind work out a chain which would in some way not merely involve him, but more to the point, permit the knowledge of his engagement to return here and boil up my black wards. It doesn’t make sense at all, does it?”

“No, sir, it don’t. But—”

“Yes?”

“But, well, wouldn’t it be safer, just in case—?”

“Exactly, Leon. Exactly. You read my mind and you help me correct my misjudgment. We must make certain we are not under threat. We have our responsibilities. I have a great charge which must be protected. We have the doctor to think about, our country, our society. I have some latitude in these matters, and know that if one acts, one must act decisively.”

“I know a fella in N’Awleens who’s very clever at gizmos. The gangsters there and throughout the South used him, and though many knew of him, he was never caught, on the simple reason that whatever acts he engineered by their very nature precluded much in the way of investigation. Hell, how do you investigate a hole in the damn ground?”

“How, indeed? The answer is, you don’t.”

“I have the contacts. I could arrange a package be delivered up to Arkansas. It would not be sent from Mississippi at all, and would have nothing to do with Mississippi, much less Thebes. It would look like any other package.”

“Hmmm, well thought out.”

“When it is opened by this here lawyer, they won’t be nothing left but smoke and bonemeal floating in the air, and there’ll be a new crater in the middle of Arkansas. This fellow could do that up right good.”

“Yes, I like that,” said the warden. “That would settle matters nicely, indeed. That would make all of us happy, and I would feel that my responsibilities—Leon, you have no idea the world of weight I carry on my shoulders—would have been well lived up to.”

“I’ll do it, warden. You are a great man, and I feel ever so good when I can serve you.”

“There is a great man here, Leon, but it isn’t me. I am but a humble servant. The great man is that doctor who works by the river, where he is saving our country.”

S
AILORS
everywhere. Earl did not like sailors. It was nothing personal. It was just that the Navy was always the daddy to the Marine Corps, and was always lording it over the Corps. That unease of relationship came through especially during the war in the Pacific, where Earl believed that no island was bombed or shelled enough before the Marines had to land on it, no ship got in close enough to get the wounded to safety fast enough, no supplies arrived soon enough, and on and on and on, a whole symphony of grudges.

So Earl did not like Pensacola, for it was full of sailors. They were everywhere, and now and then jets roared overhead or old prop jobs blew by in low formation, for Pensacola was a Navy town, as Navy a town as existed anywhere, and its particular form of the Navy was naval aviation.

So he bit down on his distaste and went about his business, though it was hard, for in the years before the war, there’d been too many occasions when he and his pals and sailors had found the fit in this or that port city bar too tight, and fists had flown. He’d learned as much about fighting there as he had under the mentorship of the old sergeants who’d coached him when he was fighting for the service in the late thirties in the Pacific fleet.

Earl knew he wouldn’t get into any fights because he no longer went into bars. Where he went instead was into a bank, where he deposited a large sum and opened a checking account under the name John R. Bogash. Then he went to a real estate agency, and there had an earnest conversation with an agent.

He was, the story he made up went, looking for a quiet place where he could park a while with his very sick father, so that that old man’s passing could be comfortable in the warmth and sun, rather than in the chill of up North. The father had been in the Navy, and it always cheered him to see the boys in their white uniforms parading down the street; and he liked airplanes, and as he sat on his porch waiting for the end, it would do him good to see the trim Navy aircraft practicing their skills overhead.

Did Earl want seaside?

Earl did not want seaside. Too much traffic seaside. People going to the beach and all. Someplace in the country would be nice, possibly with some room, for the dying old man was fond of his dogs, too, and wanted to be with his and watch them roam.

Well, the real estate agent made some calls, and soon enough he located a series of farms that were available. So off they went. This was always wrong, and that was always wrong, as they ranged ever farther northward, almost to the Alabama line, and the agent thought he’d lose his client to a competitor from Brewton, up in ’bama. But Earl eventually took a particular shine to a certain place, which lay at the end of a mile of dirt road, its fields fallow, its barn in need of paint, its general maintenance feeble. The agent was somewhat baffled as to why Earl made such a big deal about the size of the near field, for he hadn’t got the impression much from Earl that that was necessary. But Earl looked hard at the field, then peered at the location of the place on the map. But it was far and private and exactly what Earl had in mind, and so a check changed hands and in two days, when the check cleared, Earl took over the lease for the next six months.

“Hope you and your daddy are happy out here, Mr. Bogash,” said the agent.

“This place’ll make Daddy right happy, I guarantee it,” Earl said.

That done, he spent the next few days setting up. This involved, of course, notifying the phone company to get the phone hooked up, but once that was done, it was mainly rounding up supplies, but never over-buying in a single store. Though if you looked, you might have been surprised to find that in each of ten gun stores in northwest Florida, and in Alabama, in towns such as Brewton and Bluff Spring and Atmore, then all the way over to Crestview and Milton, then as far west as the larger city of Mobile, which had three gun stores and pawnshops, and as far up as Greenville, five boxes of .38–44 high-velocity police cartridges had been sold. The fellows would bring their own rifle ammo, but Earl had to provide for himself, so in each of the stores he picked up something for the long gun he’d determined to carry, which was a .348 Winchester Model 71 that would punch through nearly anything solid. It was the biggest of the American big-game cartridges, and the strongest lever action ever made, and the bruise it left in his shoulder was nothing to the hole it left in what he’d be shooting at.

In each of the same number of grocery stores, he purchased like-size amounts of Coca-Cola, coffee beans, hamburger meat, cans of green beans, mustard, ketchup, buns, steaks, roasts and chucks, plus plenty of bread and milk were taken up, to say nothing of detergent, soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and of course toilet paper. Elsewhere, in department stores: sheets, blankets, pillows. You’d have had to travel a wide circle to catch on to the fact that somebody was caching up for the arrival of a group. Then he made his most astonishing purchase: at a war surplus store in Pensacola, he bought two cases of canteens. Not American, however; rather, these were Italian, from World War I, and they resembled wine bottles. Each had been well maintained, and each had a canvas cover with a strap.

He worked for a couple of days laying in these supplies and setting up the place for the few days in a week or so when it would be occupied. He had other tasks: he called Los Angeles and arranged for shipment of his cowboy pictures. He also studied maps of the state, the next state, and of course the next state after that, which was Mississippi. He tried to think of everything. Was he missing something? Had he forgotten a detail? He had good men, a plan, and had kept a careful running account of all this for Mr. Trugood, whose advance he hoarded shrewdly and paid out of with a great deal of misery. He couldn’t think of a thing, but he had a nagging suspicion there was a hole in his thinking. What the hell was it?

But it never came to him, and finally, he had but two last jobs to do. The first was easy: it was sending a cash payment and a letter to the classified ad section of the Pensacola
Journal Times,
specifying that a certain ad should be run on a certain day. That was the ad that would alert all the arriving boys to his number, so he could get them directions to come on out. But the last was tricky.

He wrote a letter, addressed to a fellow in government service in Pensacola. He waited. There was nothing to do but wait by the phone for it to ring, and he thought it would, for the man he’d written to was extremely dutiful about obligations. It could have taken a week; it took a day. Earl answered. They had a brief chat, and agreed to meet the day following in a bar in downtown Pensacola.

Instead of his slacks and a sports shirt, Earl put on his suit, Brylcreemed his hair, Kiwied his shoes, tied his tie tight, and tried to look as prosperous and solid as possible.

He then drove by back roads to Pensacola proper, and there he located the naval station. A uniformed shore patrolman stood sentry outside the gate that Earl had figured on, and Earl of course had his usual irritated reaction to such a fellow. They’d been the bane of his young life, but this one simply sat in his little house in his dress whites, saluting and letting folks in and out.

Then Earl saw the man he’d written to and who had called him. He was in civilian clothes and drove a ’50 Dodge convertible, jet black, but even so dressed everything about him looked military: the closeness of his haircut, the stern set of his mouth, and the precision of his head to his body, and the squareness of his shoulders and the erectness of his posture.

Earl followed him from five car-lengths back in his own car, the point being just security. He wanted to make certain nobody was following him. And nobody was.

The officer pulled up to the bar he had chosen at exactly the moment he had said he would, and he walked inside.

Earl lingered outside and made sure the meeting was unobserved, and then he headed in as well.

He entered, blinked in the darkness, and saw the man. He didn’t know him well, and the man, when he recognized Earl, didn’t smile. He put down his glass, stood, and briefly assumed a position of ramrod posture, a military gesture in an old run-down honky-tonk on the bad side of town.

The last time Earl had seen him was October of 1942. On that day, he was bleeding from two bullet wounds in the cockpit of a Grumman Wildcat that the Japs had just shot down. The plane was on fire and the Japs were still shooting at it. Earl shot at the Japs, driving them back, and raced under a screen of covering fire to the plane, which incidentally was about to blow up, said to him, when he got there, exactly what he now said in the bar, nine years later: “Sonny, this ain’t no way to meet new friends.”

“Howdy, Gunny Swagger,” said the officer. “Jesus Christ, nice to see you. I know you got out a first sarge, but you’ll always be ‘gunny’ to me.”

“Well, sir,” said Earl, taking the firm grip and paying it back with one just as firm, “it don’t matter, ’cause now it’s just plain old Earl. And you may not be so happy when you hear what I got cooked up.”

“Knowing you, gunny, I’ll bet it’s a wowzer.”

Earl smiled.

“It is, Admiral. It is.”