Pale Horse Coming (10 page)

That done, he again slipped out before the dawn, to get some sleep. He had another hard day tomorrow. And after that, the days got harder still.

T
HE
sheriff came by at 3:00
P.M.

“Well, sir,” he said, “at last I’ve got some news for you.”

“Well, that’s wonderful,” Sam replied. “And I have some news for you. Not only will I file formal complaints, Sheriff, with the state police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I will sue you and your men in a civil court of law. It’ll be a great pleasure not merely to send you behind bars for a very long time, but to leave you destitute and without hope for gainful employment for the rest of your life. Possibly you can replace some of the Negro washerwomen at the prison farm when you get out.”

“Sir, you have got a vicious tongue. I do believe I ain’t never met a man with a golden voice and a poison tongue combined like you. You surely wouldn’t fit in down here in Mississippi.”

“When I am done with you, Sheriff, you will rue the day not that
I
set foot in this state, but that
you
did, goddammit all to hell.”

“We shall see about that one. As for tomorry, you’ll be moved downriver and sent to a small town called Lucedale. That’s where we’ll present our findings to the judge of the Third Circuit, and he will determine whether or not we have the evidence to try you on a charge of murder.”

“You know I could not have committed that crime. There is no physical evidence, there was no blood anywhere on my person, I left no fingerprints. A coroner would have concluded that the woman’s death was well in advance of my arrival.”

“Well, maybe so, maybe not. Fact is, Vincent, you
was
found in a dead woman’s house by my deputies and no one else was. Maybe you couldn’t stand visiting a Niggertown without cashing in on some cheap cooze and thought that old gal be accommodatin’. But she wouldn’t lie with you, and so you done poleaxed her head in. Seen it before. Now, if you’s a local, we might just say, Old Vincent, he got to thinking with his little head ’stead of his big one, and let it go at that. Them kind of things will happen. But you’s a big
outside agitator
so the rules are much different this time.”

“This is
ridiculous.
Any prosecutor would scoff at that. Did you interview other witnesses, did you develop a timeline, did you quarantine the crime scene, did you investigate her standing in the community, her kinship relations, those who might hate and fear her? No, you just arrested—”

But Sam quit. He suddenly knew what this was all about.

It was as Earl had said. Tomorrow, on the boat, he’d be drowned. The river would eat him, as it had eaten the Negro family. This story, it was all to get him quieted.

“You’ll have your day in court,” said Sheriff Leon, with a smile. “You’ll git your chance to call an attorney. We’ll git all this straightened out, once and for all. It’s all gonna be all right, and justice will be paid out, as it always is in Thebes County.”

N
O
moon, not much breeze. The dogs were quiet, and in Thebes, Mississippi, it seemed to be just another night in a long summer of nights, each the same.

But Earl crouched inside the wire at the sheriff’s compound, checking his watch. He was not dressed seasonably, but rather for war: heavy dark hunting pants, boots, a dark navy sweater, a watch cap, his face muted by mud. The K-bar knife was sheathed at his hip. His Hamilton was upside down on his wrist so that the radium dial would not show.

By his reckoning, in exactly one minute a Molotov cocktail of gasoline and powdered soap would detonate when its cigarette fuse burned into the soaked rag in its nozzle in an outbuilding in Thebes less than a half mile away. That fire would spread through the abandoned building and lead to powder fuses, which in turn would track to firecrackers Earl had constructed from the powder of .45 shells. For a few brief seconds it would sound like a gunfight had broken out in all its fury in Thebes. The building would burn; a few more shots would ring out through the night as the flames ate the wood.

He expected the boys would be up in seconds. Whatever else they were, they were well-drilled troops, and that sheriff expected them to react fast. They’d be saddled up and out to fight the invaders in a matter of minutes. That’s when Earl would kick his way into the lock-up and conk whomsoever there he found, and liberate Sam. They’d be off. But the time of freedom to move was short and chancy, and he knew he had to get as good a lead on the dogs as possible.

He checked his watch again, thinking briefly how many other times over the years he had checked his watch in dark places, waiting for a certain time to arrive, a certain signal to be given, and somebody’s idea of what was necessary to begin. But this time, at least, it was his own idea of necessary, and he would save the man whom he loved most in this world or life itself would not be worth continuing. That is how his mind worked, and that is the only way it worked. It felt no deviation, no consideration of other possibilities, no reluctance, no doubt, no temptation to a softer course, and if there was fear it was buried under a willed aggression that was his one gift in the world.

He had committed to Sam. In a youth he cared not to remember, it was Sam who offered the only tenderness in an unpleasant world, far more than Earl’s own father, a sheriff who enforced the will of God and the righteous Baptist Bible with a razor strop many times a week to Earl, his brother and his mother. But Sam was a good man who’d even once upbraided the father for his readiness to punish.

The years passed, Earl’s in the Marine Corps, and then he came back from the war and got himself in another one, in Hot Springs, and again almost got himself killed. Sam came to him a second time and said, “Now, Earl, I do have a job open. I need an investigator in Polk. Don’t pay much, but you’ll be in the public safety sector and I will be making calls on your behalf. I want you working for me, young man. I don’t want nothing bad happening to you.”

So they worked together for a number of years, and Earl finally began to understand that in some way—no book would ever say this, but he felt it and knew it to be so, whatever the books might say—Sam was the father he’d always wanted. He couldn’t put this in words, of course, for words were tricky things and never meant exactly what they said, or worse, never said exactly what they said, or worse, never said exactly what was meant. But Sam was steady and fair and honest and as hard a worker as Earl had ever seen, and it was Sam who got Earl a bank loan so that he could fix up his father’s old place, and it was Sam who treated Earl’s boy more like a grandson than an employee’s son, and it was Sam who loved that boy, Bob Lee, and made the boy feel connected to family.

So now: we do it, goddammit, without looking back, we do this thing.

He looked again at his watch. Yes, any minute now and—

From far off the blast erupted. It wasn’t a blast so much as evidence of a huge force being released. A glow rose up through the trees, and seconds later the crackers popped—Earl had set up twenty-five of them from thirty cartridges, the bullets painfully pried out of shells, then resealed with mud. They went off, powder and primer detonating simultaneously, and it sounded like the Dalton gang had decided to rob two banks in a town that had none.

Earl watched as the big log house stirred, and lamps were lit all around it. Someone fired up the generator, and then a man, then another, then three or four clambered out to see the ruckus. Someone started clanging on a big gong, and for a little bit it looked almost humorous—the term Chinese fire drill came to Earl’s mind—as the boys, then the sheriff, tried to figure out what was going on.

A night patroller came thundering up the road and roared into the compound, gathered his sweated horse to a halt, and started screaming.

“Sutter’s Store is burning and men is shooting the place up. Don’t know what it is, maybe the niggers are getting a revolt going.”

“Y’all git a-goin’,” screamed the sheriff. “You got to stop these goddamn things early else they git wild and big on you. G’wan, git out there, you bastards!”

The horsemen saddled and mounted, and played with guns for a bit—revolvers loaded, shells inserted into shotgun tubes, levers thrown, hammers drawn back—and then, without much chatter, the unit roared out the gate, pulling up a screen of dust from the road.

Earl had placed himself at an angle to the house such that the fewest of the windows opened onto him. At the same time, he knew he couldn’t slouch or scurry. Now he arose and walked purposefully forward, presuming that in the general melee no one would be focused enough to notice, or that no one would notice that as he walked, he had Sam’s old undershirt knotted around the ankle of one leg. He made it.

He slid around the back of the house as another group of outriders, this time led by the sheriff himself, hurried off. Possibly the place was deserted by now; possibly it wasn’t.

Quickly, he found the shed that contained the generator, which was plugging away and coughing up smoke as its gasoline engine drove its gears. He crouched to it and unscrewed the cap to the tank. He untied the bunched undershirt from his leg, rolled it thin and fed one end of the tube of cloth down into the gas. He wedged the shirt into the nozzle of the tank, knowing full well that the gasoline would diffuse upward until it had saturated the shirt. Except that he took out a Lucky Strike cut in half already, lit it, took a deep puff, and wedged it into the bunched cotton. It would burn down as the fuel spread up; in two minutes (he’d timed it with the other half of the cigarette), when they met, the tank would be lit off and the boys would then have two fires to think about, one that was burning up their own goods.

He left the shed, slipped along the house and into the lock-up. He tried to ease his way in, but an old guard was standing up, looking in the direction of the fire, fingering a large double-barreled sawed-off. The man smoked a cigar, shifted weight from one foot to the other uneasily, wiped his dry lips, scanned the horizon, and generated unease in all the ways a man can generate unease.

Earl removed his K-bar, feeling its familiar heft and weight, the worn smoothness of the leather grip. He knew exactly the length of the blade and what it was capable of.

Swiftly he walked to the old man, gripping the knife handle.

Earl struck, and he went down.

Earl hit him with the metal cap at the end of the grip, right where the jaw meets the skull, an inch below and an inch on the diagonal from the ear. It was the haymaker. It conked the old boy so solid his lights went out before he hit the ground, and the shotgun clattered away into the dust. He’d be gone cold for a good five minutes.

Earl stepped in, grabbed the keys off the desk, and went back and unlocked Sam, who had dressed silently, even to the point of tightening his tie. His eyes bulged with anticipation or fear, and he was already breathing hard and shallow.

“Let’s go,” Earl hissed, and the two of them scurried out the door.

But before Sam could lurch himself off into the night, Earl had him under control.

“We goin’ run out the front, trying to step in the tracks cut up by the horses. Step in horseshit if you see any. You got me?”

“How can I see? I can’t see the—”

Whoomph!

It wasn’t a blast so much as an unleashing; a blade of light ruptured up the shank of the dark sky, spreading illumination as it rose. When it rose high enough, it fragmented, sending flowers of devouring flame off in a thousand directions. Enough landed upon the house to catch its roof ablaze, and in this comforting glow, Earl and Sam found the cut and shit-caked tracks of the angry horses, and dashed out the front gate.

“Off here,” he yelled.

They left the road and headed to the trees. It was a maze of interlocking pines, a complete bafflement in the dark. But Earl found an incline just where he knew it to be, and climbed a small hill, and at the top, oriented toward the east, found a brief interruption of meadow, and then another wall of trees. Where he thought it should be, he stopped, then snapped on, ever so briefly, his flashlight, until the beam disclosed a loop of rope around the trunk of a pine. He went to it, and with his K-bar cut it free and stuffed it into his belt.

“This way, you stay with me, goddammit. We got some hard travel ahead. We got twenty miles to go in about ten hours. You up to it? ’Cause if you ain’t, I can’t carry you, Mr. Sam.”

“I will run till I die, Earl. You are a great man. You are a great American.”

“That I doubt. But I do mean to get you clear of here, goddammit, so let’s go.”

And off they went into the woods, stopping every one hundred yards or so for Earl to find and cut a rope necklace from a pine trunk.

T
HEY
got the fire out by dawn, but already the dogs had found the scent.

“He won’t git far,” Pepper told Sheriff Leon. “My pups got him lined up right fine. They’ll be nipping at him by noon, Sheriff, and by four you can put him back in the cuffs and I can kick his ass for the knot he done give me.” Pepper was the conked one. The left side of his head was swollen like a softball. He had a headache, and he’d swallowed a plug of Brown’s Mule when he’d been hit. That was the worst, for he’d puked brown slop for an hour and it had emptied him of hunger for the ’baccy; so he had two grudges going, one for the knot on the skull, the other for the wasted plug.

“Yessir, the pups be on his Arkansas be-hind.”

But the sheriff was not so convinced.

He knew there had to be a second man and that the second man had to be mighty smart. Already the sheriff found himself behind the eight ball. The fire in town proved to be nothing but an old building burning and some kind of firecracker put together from some .45 shells. It was clever. This feller’d thought hard to come up with that one.

Meanwhile, as all the sheriff’s deputies are hiding behind trees and looking for targets at what’s nothing but burning lumber, whoever he is is back in the compound, jury-rigging a bomb out of the generator and freeing up that goddamned Arkansas lawyer.

He should have killed the dogs, though, the sheriff thought. He should have slipped in there and cut twenty dog throats. Why didn’t he kill the dogs?

“Okay,” he said. “Y’all got your sleeping packs? This may be a long ’un.”

His deputies by now had switched to hiking boots, for there were no horse trails in the deep woods, and they all carried packs. It was the drill. They’d hunted men before. They also all had rifles.

“Sheriff, you want I should go on up to the Farm and tell Warden and Bigboy we gots a runner. They’s got them good hounds, too.”

“Hell, they hounds ain’t no better ’n my hounds,” Pepper put in. “My pups outtrack them mangy Farm mutts any day of the week, including Sunday and Armistice Day. Yes sir, my hounds the best hounds.”

Pepper’s hound pride meant little to the sheriff, and he considered telling Warden and Bigboy and getting the guards in on the hunt. Some of them were essentially professional manhunters, as they’d run many a nigger to ground their own self over the years. But again: that meant notification and coordination, it meant trying to rendezvous in deep, twisting piney roads and nobody had radios or anything, and it could just mess it up bad. Sometimes too many on a manhunt got in their own way and ended up chasing each the other.

“Naw, it’s only one man, maybe two. Running through woods they don’t know, toward what they ain’t sure. We knows our land, and them dogs old Pepper has are good enough. You boys, let’s git her going. And, let me say this again, man fleeing justice who done lit up a municipal building is a desperate man. No limit likely on what he’s willing to do to taste some free cooze and a jar of lightning down the road. So if you git him in your sights, you jack. Okay? Understood? You shoot him dead. This boy’s had the smell of mischief on him from the git-go, and his wagon should be fixed. Let’s move it out.”

With Pepper’s six best hounds straining against their chains, driven almost insane by the thickness of the Sam-smell clinging to the earth, they set out, the dogs snuffling furiously at what they believed to be Sam’s path out of the compound, around the back of the house and crosswise to the wire, where he’d obviously slid underneath.

The sheriff commanded the wire cut, for now that he’d started he didn’t feel like backtracking to the gate, then circling around again to this spot. One by one his men slipped through, and then he followed.

“Cut the dogs free, Sheriff?”

“Cut ’em, Pepper. Let ’em hunt.”

So Pepper clicked to his animals in some strange dog tongue he knew, and the old blue, the master of the pack, fought through his instincts and settled. Soon the others followed.

Pepper passed among them, freeing each, and though each had instincts that commanded onward, they had had their obedience beaten into them by Pepper’s brutality, and so they knew they risked a thumping if they disobeyed, no matter how their loins ached to.