Pale Horse Coming (42 page)

A
LL
the talk is done now. The old enmities have run out of steam, the gossip on the misfortune of others has lost its lure, the fascinations of the technical have been discussed until they’ve been drained of all meaning. Bourbon has been drunk. Gunfights, famous and obscure, valorous and pathetic, have been gone over again and again; great pistoleros have been analyzed, respected or dismissed. Heroes have been saluted, cowards shunned.

There is nothing left.

Even Earl feels it.

Men about to go into battle acquire a certain pallor. They may be salty old dogs, such as these boys, or innocent kids, such as his Marines, but they know death is very close at hand and that there’s no guessing what lies in the immediate straight-ahead. It settles them, it drains them, it stills them.

Still, they must turn to something.

And you can learn a lot about a man in what he turns to. The very good turn to the Bible. The very carnal turn to images of the flesh, in the thousands of sepia-toned male magazines of the war, with their starlets cupping ice-cream scoop breasts, or their skirts a-fling, showing luscious, stocking-kissed gams with fancy undergarment riggings. The prosaic turn to facts, memorizing the operational orders, studying maps and weather reports and even current charts. The physical turn to action: they must unleash themselves in basketball or wrestling or just plain horsing around.

The warriors turn to guns.

W
E
are in the revolver kingdom. Those brilliantly crafted devices, the hallmark of unnamed genius engineers of Hartford, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, dominate both the law enforcement and the civilian imagination.

So there sits Elmer Kaye, the dean of the revolver boys. Elmer has cleaned his guns before and will again, but tonight he cleans them with a new cold knowledge. Meanwhile, outside on a calm night, a silvery moon edges toward extinction and battle.

Elmer will fight with his guns, and has decided to ignore Earl’s injunction to use guns that can be abandoned easily and lead authorities nowhere. Better to love and trust what you fight with, and worry about the consequences later, than to go into the fight with a gun you don’t trust, which lets you down and gets you killed.

So he’s running a rod through the four inches of his big-framed Smith & Wesson .44 1950 model, a plug-ugly thing made grotesque by the thickness of the barrel combined with a hood for the hand-ejector rod, which gives it the look of a cartoon gun, as Donald Duck would carry, not a real one, that Elmer Kaye would carry. It wears ivory stocks from the Gun Re-Blue Company with the visage of an eagle on both sides, and the thickness of that grip will cushion Elmer’s hand from the heavy recoil of his specially loaded “improved” .44 cartridges, with a dose of new powder and his own design of semiwadcutter bullet. The gun will buck hard when fired, but whatever that bullet hits, it will knock down and keep down. Elmer’s already cleaned the others he’ll carry, a Colt Police Positive as a hideout gun in a shoulder holster (it’s delicate and ladylike, and he doesn’t want Jack O’Brian to see it and tease him) and a Colt Single Action, that is, an old cowboy-style revolver, also in .44 Special, with a specially hand-honed action, so that cocking and shooting it is like squashing your fingers around a stick of butter.

Old Ed McGriffin is also a Smith & Wesson man. Been one his whole damned life. Set all his records, did all his exhibitions, trained many a policeman and Boy Scout, all with Smiths. Ed has two hand-honed mid-framed .38s with graceful six-inch barrels. He’s fired each at least ten thousand times, and he knows them as well as any man can know a gun. His pretty niece, Sally, cleans them for him, but he watches, and once again his eyes are sharp and focused, as if he’s willed himself back from the place of content and memories, for what she is doing is important. She scrubs out each cylinder, she ramrods the barrel, she uses a piece of screen to peel the impacted lead out of the barrels. She knows the guns, too; she’s been cleaning them for grandpap since she was eight.

Jack O’Brian isn’t a handgunner, not really. His weapon of choice will of course be a Winchester Model 70 in his beloved .270, which is accurate as hell, especially with the loads he’s prepared for it. But he knows he has to have a handgun, and the one he chooses he can’t let Elmer see, for Elmer will tease him, because it represents exactly the opposite of his public position on these matters. He doesn’t mind being a hypocrite if it’ll keep him alive. So he cleans it furtively, up in his room.

It’s a Colt New Service, in .45 Long Colt. It’s a giant’s gun, the biggest Colt ever made, its frame spreading the hand wide on it, its trigger-pull taut, even its hammer-pull a little tense. It’s ugly, humpbacked, with its checkered wood grips, a Pachmayr grip adapter to swell out the gap between grip and trigger guard. But it’s the preeminent man-stopper; in fact, many knowledgeable New York detectives carry such a piece, but with its barrel cut down to two inches. They know that if they have to put a man down, they have to put him down fast and solid, and Jack has done his research.

It shoots gigantic shells that seem like ostrich eggs in their heaviness and density. Jack deposits each into the gaping chambers in the cylinder, then gently locks the cylinder shut. The gun trembles when he does so and, loaded, the whole weapon feels charged with electricity, with stored energy. Immense and sagacious, it waits to speak.

Bill, taciturn and controlled in all things, is the same in this. He does not have relationships with his guns and they do not speak to his imagination, nor is his ego expressed through them. They are totally and completely tools to him. He has three, all Smiths, all .357 Magnums, which he’ll load with the .38–44 super-high-velocity 158-grainers that Earl has provided. His actions have been honed, but what’s odd about his revolvers that marks them as different from the others are the grips. He can’t use the standard Smith magna grip, not even with a Pachmayr or a Tyler adapter to fill out the curve behind the trigger. Bill’s hands are simply too big. Bill has huge hands, long arms loaded with fast twitch muscles, and at six feet four inches enough lanky body to make sleeping in a normal bed or walking through a normal door an exercise in patience. But the hands are the secret to his gun work, because in them, the guns can be manipulated with extraordinary effect, if he can get a good grip. Thus his Smiths wear a somewhat magnified set of stocks, swollen, though polished smooth, seemingly without art to them at all. They simply look like the noses of bowling pins or some such, but they are big enough to extend his fingers and make contact with his palm all the way around, and place the pad of his forefinger against the curve of the trigger, so that his strong forearms can provide the muscle for that steady, straight-back pull that is the core of all great revolver work.

Equally odd is his holster. Unlike the others, who’ll wear Lawrence or El Paso Saddlery gear with a Western flavor to it, in basket-weave or floral carving, and fancy leather rigs for undershoulder carry for their backup pieces, Bill’s holster is a simple pocket of leather, smooth and black, his trigger guard exposed. With the big grip, the smooth, small holster, his incredible hand size and reflexes, Bill can draw and fire faster than most people can see. He has even been on the TV, where he held a Ping-Pong ball on the back of his gun hand, drew and fired (a blank) so fast that his muzzle blast sent the plastic ball flying across the studio, setting an audience alight with glee.

Charlie goes the Colt way. Charlie uses a Police Positive Special with a King’s sighting rib along the top of the four-inch barrel. It’s got a slim, now yellowed ivory stock, with his initials “CH” carved vividly into it, and the gun has been honed and tweaked. But he’s a devotee, it turns out, of the famous Colt shooter John J. “Fitz” Fitzpatrick, who believed that trigger guards slowed up draws. So Charlie has followed his mentor’s mandates and had the front two-thirds of the trigger guard removed so that, under duress, he may seize the gun and his finger will fly directly to its trigger without having to curve, then straighten, to engage that part’s sweep. Of course, if you don’t know what you’re doing with this outfit, you’ll blow off your foot. Charlie knows what he’s doing.

Charlie also has a couple of Colt Detective specials which he’ll wear, one in a boot holster, the other in an underarm job. All of his guns shoot the .38–44 that Earl has provided, and Charlie knows that it’ll take the fight out of a white man just as quickly as it’ll do the same to a Mexican.

But Charlie’s real killing instrument isn’t his handgun at all, though he’s done in a few possibly bad individuals that way. No, Charlie is a shotgunner, and for this job he’s brought along the instrument that got him through many a tough night on the border. It’s a Browning Auto-5, with an extended magazine, so that now it holds eight 12-gauge double-ought shells instead of five, and he refers to the shells as Blue Whistlers, for he’s convinced that he can see them whistling through the air in fleets as he fires. But the best is that he’s cut down the barrel to eighteen inches, and there, at the end of the new muzzle, screwed on what he calls his duck bill. It’s a spreader. It’s as if you squashed the bell of a horn till it was flat and its effect is to cause the shot cluster to sail down the barrel of the gun to spread horizontally rather than circularly, so that it exits the muzzle like a deadly spray of paint flung from a quickly flicked brush. It does the job very well on Mexicans, and a part of Charlie genuinely wants to know how it’ll work on big ol’ white boys.

Out on the prairie, alone, is the most haunted of them. This is the young Audie Ryan. Audie has two Colts, but they’re single-action revolvers, six-guns of the Old Western school, which he’ll carry in custom-made black leather double buscadero holsters made for him by John Bohlin of Hollywood. You would think from this Audie is a cowboy; in the pictures, he’s a cowboy.

Like so much of what’s in the pictures, it’s another lie. Audie wasn’t raised on a ranch, though he’s from Texas. His life had nothing of the West, or the range, or cattle or honor or horses or sidekicks to it. It was more out of Walker Evans’s photography, those horrific images of the dispossessed, the thin-faced, the desperate hardscrabble Southern poor. Those are Audie’s memories, sharecropping near Greenville in northwest Texas, after his no ’count old man lit out on them, and he and the boys had to rent themselves out early as sharecroppers, at twelve, just to keep a little food on the table and the sense of family, so instinctive, somehow alive. It was then that he began his hunting, and only alone in the hills with a beat-up old Winchester .22 single-shot—if he missed he went hungry—that he began to feel any sense of selfhood. A gun was at the center of it. Without the gun, he was a Texas redneck pretty boy with freckles and a girly name, who had to fight his way to and from school when he went. With the gun he felt the admiration of the family when he returned with rabbit or squirrel or pheasant or dove, each shot beautifully. He felt the most primitive thing a hunter feels: I have fed my family; I am a man.

So for him the war wasn’t what it was to so many, a crushing obstacle erected across a promising life. It was an expression of all the lonely lessons he’d learned in the scruffy woods of northwest Texas, where the gun was the only means to manhood.

The two Colts are emblems of just how successful he had been. In the war he had been a terror, a little, bitty speck of kid, almost without fear, who brought his talents for shooting and his instinct about the lay of the land to the fields of Europe, where, after the first day or two, everything just seemed to make sense, to fit together. His instincts were always right. He wasn’t really frightened in the way a lot of the others were. He didn’t really care if he got back or not; he had gotten off the goddamned farm where his goddamned father had left him; he had gotten off it, and how. When he fired, men dropped. When he shouted, men listened. Where he went, men followed, him hardly more than a child, with a soft, baby face, almost like a little girl, with small hands, but he was grit tough from the way he was raised, and even the Army food felt like a feast compared to the thin vittles of the rabbit split six ways he’d grown up on.

The two six-guns were presented to him by a very important man, Mr. Graham H. Anthony himself, the president of the Colt’s Company, on the occasion of his tour of the plant in 1947. The folks there were all very nice to Audie, who didn’t say much, and whose childish looks somewhat nonplussed them. Like so many others, they couldn’t see in this polite, nearly mute young man of surpassing beauty the great hero who had killed close to three hundred of his country’s enemies.

Audie loved the guns. Aware that if he were to prosper in Hollywood as a Western hero, he’d have to learn to shoot them and handle them, that’s exactly what he did, even when he was living in Jimmy Cagney’s pool house his first few years out there. He’d rise early and head out to the hills over the city and just practice, slowly at first. When the world didn’t make a lot of sense, the guns always did. He drew fast, with both hands. He learned to slip fire, to Curly Bill spin, to fan, to hit aerial targets, to load and unload fast. It was amazing how much you could learn if you put your mind to it, particularly when it was men’s work, with machines and techniques, not like this acting business, which was mainly about getting yourself seen, and “pretending” a certain thing, even if it wasn’t true, and there were no rules at all.

So Audie, alone in the field, practiced a kind of warfare he had never fought, except in front of a camera: the Old West style, where the gun flew from his holster, clicked four times—C-O-L-T, the legend had it, as the hammer peened against Sam Colt’s genius system of pins and screws and levers—and then fired with the satisfying detonation of a big .44.

With a gun in his hand, he knew he could do anything.

A
LONE
in his room, by design, Earl works the map again. He knows you can study a thing too hard, until you are so up close to it it makes no sense whatsoever. That is what he does not want to do.