Pale Horse Coming (44 page)

S
AM
was done. He had solved the mystery; he had gotten the information to Earl, at the expense of his dignity, considerably shredded when he had been kicked out of Austin by the Austin Vice Squad, once he had convinced them he meant no harm and was entirely innocent, at least until the girl began screaming, of the meaning of
Treponema pallidum.
It was all a mistake.

I have done what I could do, thought Sam. I have done all I have said I would, and if it helps or not, that is beyond my control. Earl even knew what Fort Dietrich was, and had explained it all to Sam, and now, at last, it made some sense.

But he could not rest yet.

He had one last call to make, and checked his wallet to find the card with Davis Trugood, Esq.’s law firm number on it. But he could not. Who knew where it had gone? Sam lost things all the time. That was part of who he was.

But of course he recalled the august law firm’s name, those hallowed syllables: Mosely, Vacannes & Destin.

From his hotel room in Waco, where he had taken refuge after the embarrassment in Austin and the strident suggestion that he leave town and only return after the world ended or Texas declared its independence, whichever came first, he called long-distance information to get the number.

“Sir, I have no listing for that firm.”

Sam was taken aback.

Then he said, “I may not have pronounced it correctly.” This always happened: Northern operators could not decipher the soup of what they thought was his corn-pone “accent,” although his of course was the proper way of speaking and theirs the abomination. “Mosely, that would be MOSE-ly, VAY-Cans and DES-tin. I can spell—”

“Sir, I have no listing like that. I don’t have anything even close to it.”

“In the whole area?”

“In all of Chicagoland.”

“I see,” said Sam.

He hung up, most puzzled. His mind fulminated on this discovery. In a while he came up with something of a solution.

He had his notebook with him and quickly found the name of a federal prosecutor out of Little Rock who, if memory served, had logged much time in the parallel office in Cook County, that is, Chicago, Illinois.

Sam called, made swift contact with his old friend, and explained the peculiarity of the situation.

The man consulted
his
notebook and came up with a number. He told Sam to call in five minutes.

Sam did, and soon got, “Fifteenth Precinct, Detective Chicowitz.”

“Ah, Detective, believe Charlie Hayworth just called on my behalf.”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Vincent, that it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So run it by me.”

Sam explained. He gave all the relevant data, and the detective said he’d call back.

That call took seventeen minutes; that’s how good this cop was.

“Well, sir, there isn’t a law firm called Mosely, Vacannes and Destin. Not in Chicago or in Evanston or Skokie or any of the outlying areas. However, I did find a listing for Bonverite Brothers, a firm in Chicago.”

“Hmm,” said Sam. “I don’t follow. What does ‘Bon—’”

“You said your fellow’s name was Trugood, right? And all this has to do with something way down in Mississippi, where it’s still Frenchy and dark?”

“Yes.”

“Well, sir, the French for Trugood would be Bonverite. If you were a Cajun from down there, and you wanted to disguise your name but stay in contact with it, as many, many people changing names do, it’s a pattern, then you’d come up with Trugood. See what I’m saying? That would be the closest thing in Chicago to Trugood.”

Sam was dazzled.

“Now I checked the reverse directory. Here are four numbers leased to Bonverite.”

He read them.

A litany of integers came back at Sam, woozily familiar.

“That’s it!” Sam cried. “Yes, that’s it!
That’s
the number I called!”

“Well, it’s been disconnected. Just recently.”

“I see,” said Sam. “What kind of firm is Bonverite?”

“It’s an undertaking parlor. I checked with the boys. It’s very prosperous. He has all the southside and uptown business. He buries a lot of people. He has a lot of money, does this Mr. Davis Bonverite.”

“I see. Is there anything else I should—”

“Yes, sir. He’s probably the richest of them in Chicago. He’s probably got more than a couple of million dollars. He’s quite successful for one of them.”

“I don’t—one of
them?
”

“Yes, sir. He’s a Negro. Davis Bonverite runs his business at Cottage Grove and 139th on the South Side. Darktown. He’s Chicago’s richest colored man.”

N
OT
much of Fish is left.

Fish has hung from the chains for five days. For those five days, with all his cunning in full force, Bigboy has worked him hard with the whip.

There’s no space on the old man’s skin that hasn’t been shredded. There isn’t a nerve that hasn’t been lashed raw. There’s not a scab that hasn’t tripled over, that is, scabbed, torn away, scabbed again, torn away again, and scabbed up again.

Fish hangs, his wrists broken, his hands dead crab claws, the weight of him fully on the shattered bones. His lips are cracked dry. He can’t lick them because Bigboy has tied a bit between his teeth, jammed under the tongue, to prevent him from biting his tongue and drowning on his own blood to escape the pain. It’s happened to Bigboy, but not recently, not since he got so smart.

Fish has tried to lose himself in the space of his own mind, to go there in madness and lose all contact with reality, and never come back. But he’s too goddamned tough. He can’t order himself to go mad, and his mind betrays him by refusing to break off with reality. It feels everything, it remembers everything.

“Fish, don’t you die, goddamn you,” the bare-chested Bigboy whispers, breathing hard into his shredded ear from ever so close. “You, me, we got business. You don’t die till I say so. You don’t die till you talk. You think you’re close? I can spin you out like this for days yet to come.”

Maybe so. Maybe not. Fish feels close to death. He knows his heart will give up of its own accord, strangled on the pain, crushed by the stench of his own shit and piss caked to him.

Besides hurting him, Bigboy has walked the other road: has offered him temptations. Bigboy always understood that Fish had the imagination to make him vulnerable to ideas of the future, to possibilities, to pleasures not palpably there.

“You can go free,” he crooned one evil night. “You tell me, we take care of it, and you are out of here, old man. You spent your life here. This is the way out. This is the only way out, and I am the only one who can give you this. Think of it, old man. Back to N’Awleens with some jingle-jangle in the pocket. To sport with some high yellers and some slanty Chinee. Those girls know all the tricks. No tricks they don’t know. You’d be at home. You’d be the old whore-master, plump and well-fucked in his senior age.”

Fish fought him on that one. He denied it, banished it, made it go away, thought of his own scabbed, scarred flesh, not of the women’s. He fought him on all the temptations: freedom, sex, juju weed and Uncle Horse, wealth, pleasure, all offered in various stages between the whippings, so in his mind, he went from pleasure unimaginable to pain unfortunately too imaginable.

He howled and screamed and begged for mercy.

Mercy came in but one form, however.

“What does it mean, Fish? What does ‘pale horse coming’ mean? You have to tell me, you know. You will, in the end. The only question is when. Tell me, Fish. Save us both trouble, and the warden worry. Tell me, Fish, tell me now.”

Fish did not and paid for his disobedience.

He paid, he paid, he paid.

And then he paid some more.

But he never opened his lips.

Now, at last, death dogged him. He could smell it, taste it, knew it was here at last for him.

Ha! That would be his victory.

But Bigboy wouldn’t surrender.

“Even now, Fish, when you are so close to passing. Even now I can jack you with yet more pain, and I will, too. You know I will.”

The old man tried to spit in his face, but could not, because of the bit in his mouth.

“Okay, Fish. Then here we go again. Now it gets bad again. Now it comes again.”

He heard the man stride back. He heard him lift the whip from the table. He heard it unroll, then hiss as the whip man snarled it gently through the air, then made it snap and pop, so that the old man could actually feel the airwaves where the supersonic flick at the end pushed them aside.

“Fish, here it—”

From close by came the rattle of what could only be machine-gun fire. A few seconds later, more shots filled the air.

Bigboy dropped his whip and ran to the old man, pulled the bit out of his teeth.

“What is it?” he screamed urgently. “What is that? What is happening? Goddamn you, Fish, goddamn you,
tell me!
”

Fish smiled.

“Pale horse be
here,
motherfucker,” he said. “Pale horse done come for
you.
”

He laughed in the second that he died.

T
HEY
watched him. He was a stubby old fellow, and he sat in the flickering candlelight of the bar, and the two Negroes were behind the bar. They were nervous as hell. You could smell their fear.

But the old man seemed unperturbed, merry even, and that’s what upset the deputies. He just sat there with a mellow grandpappy look on his face, in his three-piece black suit with his tie all neatly tied up in a bow, his huge Stetson down to his ears, and he drank.

He drank, he drank, he drank.

“Don’t know how a fellow swallow that much dadgum white lightning and stay sittin’ up,” said Opie.

“He must have the constitution of a horse,” said Skeeter.

“He drink more, we don’t have to whap him none a-tall. No sir, he’ll just fall over blindy drunk.”

“Yes, sir.”

But that wasn’t what had them so spooked. That wasn’t why they’d sent their third member, Darius, to get the sheriff.

What spooked them was: Where’d he come from?

The old man was just there, sitting in the bar.

No boat had arrived, no horsemen had fought their way through the piney woods, no automobiles had suddenly come roaring up a suddenly cleared road. So where’d he come from? How’d he get there? Who was he? What was this all about?

“I say we go in there and thump him hard.” This was Skeeter. Skeeter was the master of the billy club. Skeeter could beat a tattoo on your arm so fast that arm would be dead for a month. He could slap you upside the ear hard enough to kill, to stun, to daze, to annoy, all with the flick of a wrist. His club hung on a leather thong off his supple right wrist.

“Hmmm,” grunted Opie.

“Just go in, do it. He’s a old man. We cool him out, handcuff him, and then off he go to the station. That’s all that is. And we git to the bottom.”

Opie chewed this over. It seemed okay. But he didn’t want to make the wrong decision.

“Pret’ dadgum soon the sheriff be here. He’ll know what to do. Meantime, this ol’ boy just filling himself with rotgut, getting blurrier and blurrier. Let him drank himself to perdition, that be all. That’s what the sheriff would want.”

“I don’t like it none.”

“I don’t like it none nohow neither,” said Opie. “But that is what we going to do, dadgum it.”

And dadgum it, that is what they did. In forty minutes or so, Sheriff Leon Gattis himself arrived, to find the scene the same. His two deputies were outside, peering in. Inside, the old man sat merrily by himself at the table, drinking jar after jar of white lightning, getting himself all lit up to hell and gone.

“Don’t see how that boy is still standing,” reported Opie. “All that corn shit he got in him.”

“That ain’t the problem. Whar’d he come from?” asked the sheriff.

“Don’t know. He just come from nowhere, out of the air. Sheriff, I say we go in and thump him hard and brang him down. Then we git to the bottom of this.”

Why was the sheriff reluctant? Why did he have an odd feeling in his gut? It was that the whole thing was so ghostly, somehow. It had the feeling of the remembered, or the previously glimpsed. He had already seen it, in a movie or a book or something. Very strange feeling.

The old cowboy sat there in the saloon. The funny part was, there wasn’t a twitch of fear on him. He’s either crazy or goddamned stupid as they come, and he didn’t look neither. There was something bull-goose loony about the man, and the sheriff, at one time a New Orleans detective (a long, tragic story), had seen it on a few of the big-gun boys of the thirties. The Pretty Boy had it and the Babyface had it even more. Johnny D. had it best of all, that sense of masterly command, that sense of self-regard of the truly dangerous.

“Goddamn, Sheriff, he just a old man. A drunk old man. A
very
drunk old man.”

Besides Skeeter and Opie and Darius, the sheriff had brought two more boys. That meant six.

“All right,” he said. “We goin’ do it this way. Ray, you go ’round back. Work in that way. Gun out. You stay just inside the doorway, cover that old geezer from the rear. That’s just in case. The rest of us wait five minutes, then we go in and brace him good. Listen up, y’all. This boy look old and drunk, but to me, he also looks a little salty. He been around some. He may still be fast, some men don’t never lose their quick. He may have some quick on him still. So you got your hands on your revolver grips so you’re ready for your own quick, if it comes to that. It don’t hurt none to be all set, all right?”

“Yes, sir,” said the boys, and Ray peeled off for his back shot. Then it was only a question of waiting.

T
HEY
didn’t come slyer than old Ed McGriffin. He had a diamond ring on his pinky, given him by the president of Smith & Wesson in 1934, when he had set a world speed record, firing six times in four fifths of a second and hitting a man-size target in the gut thirty feet away in a group small enough to be covered with one hand. As he sat in the bar in Thebes, he held the jar in one hand, and slid his pinky underneath. It didn’t take much grinding. Diamond always beats glass. In less than five seconds, he had drilled a hole in the bottom of the jar.

What commenced thereafter was a little old-salt theater. He plugged the hole with his finger, raised the glass to his mouth, let the foul stuff touch his lips, but did not admit it. Christ, it would blind a white man in three sips and put hair on his palms to boot. Then, he moved the jar to the edge of the table, let his finger slip off the hole and in that fashion bled out a gulp’s worth of lightning. He’d done this through five jars now, and his left boot was sodden with the corn alcohol. Drop a match down there and he’d explode in flames. But otherwise he was just fine.

He picked up on the deputies right away. Subtle boys they wasn’t, no, sir, not by a long shot. One, particularly idiotic, kept pressing his nose against the window, flattening it even further. He was the big dumb blond one. The other one was furtive, feral even; looked like a weasel, dark and skittery, with tiny teeth.

“Say there, Pops,” called out old Mr. Ed. “Bring this old feller one more toot, okay?”

The two elderly black men behind the bar eyed each other nervously. They didn’t like this a bit. Not that they cared about crazy old white boys, but such a situation could get them in trouble with Sheriff Leon and his deputies, who tended toward extravagant solutions for simple problems. The place could get busted up bad; they could get busted up bad.

On the other hand, they were of a generation where disobedience to a commanding white person was unthinkable. It simply was not conceptualizable, so they greeted the paradox with utter sullenness and desperation.

One tottered over, filled the old boy’s glass with the white lightning, of a very fine vintage: 2:00
P.M.
that afternoon. He’d never seen a man, white or black, drink so. Should be blind, as the stuff was about 600 percent alcohol. It wasn’t designed for refinement, but to hit with a sledgehammer after the first swallow and blot out a man’s terrible pain for a whole night. This old geezer had had enough to blot out the whole damn prison farm’s pain.

“Sir, the deputies in this here town don’t cotton to no strangers. You could git yourself into a tub o’ trouble.”

“Oh, I’m the sort of fellow who gets along with everybody. If they show up, I’ll buy ’em a drink, and we’ll have a laugh or two about it. I’ve many an entertaining story and have traveled the world, so nothing in Mississippi frights me much. Whyn’t you and the other grandpappy pull up chairs? Be pleased to buy each of you a slug of your own damned hooch.”

“Sir, they wouldn’t cotton to no Negroes and white mens sitting at the same table, neither.”

“Now, don’t that beat all. I say we’re all on this earth together, and the sooner we learn to git along, the better off we’ll all be. Bet your damn blood is just as red as mine.”

“Sir, I—”

But the door opened and five white men, large, armed and grim, entered.

“Willie, you knows it’s well past curfew for Negroes here tonight,” said the blond one.

“Sir, I
tried
to ’splain to the gintleman that—”

“Boys, boys, boys,” said Mr. Ed, “it was me that
insisted
that these fine gents stay open and serving. Is there a fine? By God, boys, I will be
proud
to pay it up. Whyn’t y’all take a load off and come over and share a tot. Mighty fine. Burns on the way down, and burns way down afterward. Fire in a bottle.”

“Sir, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but we have rules in this town.”

“I’m sorry? Don’t hear so good now.”

“Rules, goddammit. We don’t like strangers coming in and riling our colored folks. We don’t like strangers buying liquor after hours in colored joints. We don’t like curfew violators, outside Northern agitators, commies, Jews, Catholics, bleeding hearts nor other race traitors. We charged with keeping law and order down here in this powder keg, and goddamn we do it right dadgum good.”

“Well, fellows, I sure ain’t no commie. I actually may be Catholic, but it was so long ago, I don’t remember. I certainly haven’t been to confess—”

“Sheriff, the old bastard’s funning on us. He ain’t showing no respect at all. Let me clock him a good ’un.” With that, the blond one flicked his wrist so his club came into his hand, and he smacked it hard against the palm of his other hand.

“I’m sure this old boy don’t need no beating on his old head,” said the sheriff. “Sir, you just stand up and raise your hand. We’ll search you, we’ll cuff you and take you off, and get to the bottom of all this.”

“Sir, the bottom of all what? Here I sit, in a public place, drinking quietly. Surely that’s no—”

Whap!

The young deputy pounded the table with his club, making the jar jump and rattle. The report of the percussion filled the air sharply, seeming to bring dust off the ancient rafters.

“You keep your goddamn mouth shut, pappy, when the boss here is talking. You in a heap o’ trouble.”

“Sir, we’re done playin’ here. You get on up and cooperate, or you will be a sorry pappy.”

“Why, sir, I meant merely—”

“Goddamn
you, sir!
” the sheriff exploded, “this is not no time for palaver. You get yourself
up!
”

He loomed, eyes abulge, face grave, leaning forward in a stance of sheer aggression, his hands twitching.

“Okay, fellas,” said Mr. Ed.

He rose.

His coat parted.

They saw his revolvers in two strapped-down holsters.

A long moment of silence came.

“Sir, you will with opposite hands remove them two guns or by God we will shoot you down like a diseased animal.”

“See, I’m thinking you all the ones going to put down the guns.”

“Who are you?”

“You no nevermind that. It ain’t yours to know. You only have to know that the night of reckoning has done come.”

“He is talking through his hat, Sheriff. One old goddamned big-talking old geezer.”

“Shut up, Opie. Them guns are tied down old-timey gun-boy style.”

“Now fellows,” said Ed, “here’re the two things that can happen. First off, I’m thinking I want your guns out, opposite hand, on the table. Then you strip bare-ass naked, not no skivvies, but buck bare as the day you born. Then you go down, lie in the street while I figure what to do with you ’til the prison’s burned flat then flooded over and all them Negro fellows you done been beatin’ on are free and clear.”

“It ain’t never happening like that, old man.”

“Then, boys, seems to me we are at where we were going the whole time. Palaver’s over. Nothing left to say. You throw down and die like men or I will simply shoot and move on.”

“You are a goddamned big-talking fool, old man.”

Ed was done talking.

Opie drew first, and possibly a tenth of a second later the sheriff made his play.

It didn’t matter.

Smooth is fast. Ed was so smooth and fast with both hands the revolvers were simply there, as if by will. It was not a physical act but a metaphysical one. His big hands flew, his fast-twitch muscles twitched, his dexterity was simply unrecognizable by human standards.

He fired five times in less than two-fifths of a second, the reports hung together like a single loud repercussion, as dust jerked from the old rafters above and the jars on the shelves rattled. This was well off his world-record speed, but it was fast enough by a far piece.

He knocked three down dead, Opie first (left ventricle), then Darius (throat), then a boy called Festus (solar plexus). They fell like tenpins bowled hard, with a thump to the floor, heaving more dust up as their heavy bodies yielded to gravity, each dying on the way down as the blood emptied from organs and spurted under arterial pressure into geysers. Skeeter fell slower, but fell just the same.

The sheriff had been shot last because he was slowest. He sat down, holding his gut.

“You have killed me, damn you, sir.”

“I have, sir, for your evil ways.”

At that point a small sound announced the presence of another gunman behind, as the deputy Ray stepped clear to fire. But Ed had heard him long ago back in there raging around like a bull, and simply pivoted his right gun hand under his arm and with circus-freak twistiness fired at the sound, after complex, nearly instantaneous deflection calculations in a brain that had fired several million revolver bullets in its time. The bump of Ray hitting the bar, then pulling jars down with him in a shower of shattering glass clatter, ended that drama quick enough. Ed didn’t even look around.

“Who are you?” gasped the sheriff.

“We rode in from the river.”

The sheriff’s passing lacked movie drama. He simply slumped over, his eyes gazing forever into the eternal darkness. He didn’t fall or scream or moan; he stopped breathing is all.

Mr. Ed turned. The two old Negroes were clasping each other in fear behind the bar.