Pale Horse Coming (39 page)

F
INALLY,
Moon.

Of course, Moon.

Who but Moon?

Moon was given up by Charles who was given up by Noah who was given up by Vonzell who was given up by Roosevelt who was given up by Titus who was given up by Raymond who was given up by George Washington Carver who was given up by Orpheus who was given up by Three Finger.

“You must be prepared for Moon, Sergeant Bigboy,” the warden counseled. Yes, Moon was different than the rest, and Moon demanded special consideration, so Bigboy had gone to the world’s greatest authority on the male Negro miscreant, classification, behavior, psychology and complexity: the warden, who knew everything about them.

“Moon is a monster, and he is a hero,” the warden lectured. “Moon is all the nobility of the Negro race, its courage, its endurance, its cleverness, its strength, its physicality. Yet he is also all its flaws, its seething, never vanquished anger, its innocence about the complex, its inability to concentrate on one goal, its refusal to put today’s small pleasures aside for next year’s bigger payoff, its ready will to violence of no point, its omnivorous sexual hunger above all else, its insane refusal to consider consequences. Moon is all these things and more.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bigboy, awed as always at the man’s wisdom.

“You’ve seen the records,” said the warden. “Moon has been a pimp, a gambler, a boxer, a confidence man. He has beaten men to death for money, and he ran a string of high yellers in Jackson. He has had money. He has drunken wine and bubbly champagne. He has won immense amounts betting on the ponies. He has had fine clothes, an automobile, an army of go-fers and factotums. He has raped, pillaged, burned, pirated, done evil by violence, cut men to death with knives. And all before he was twenty-two, at which point he shot and killed a Negro gangster named Jelly Belly Long, but the bullet traveled through Jelly Belly and struck a white child named Rufus, who had been down in the dark part of town with his holy-rolling mother, preaching the word to the fallen Negroes of Jackson’s bitterest streets. Nobody cared about Jelly Belly; but the death of Rufus just barely avoided getting Moon lynched or tarred and feathered, and only because the judge was a noted radical did he allow for Moon’s lack of intent toward the boy Rufus, and so put Moon away for life plus two hundred and made him, shortly, by the natural order of things, the new king of Parchman Farms. There he killed three guards, five convicts, escaped twice, once for six months, and that at last had him removed to Thebes and the Ape House.”

“Yes, I had heard the stories, sir.”

“So if you take Moon, you must take him hard and well. You must tell him at the start who his master is, and strip him of hope, which is the root of courage.”

“Yes, sir. But if I get him before the whip, I will break him.”

“I know you will, son.”

So, at last, Moon.

Taking him down was hard. The guards went in during the dead of night with twice the usual detail. They beat him in his bunk while others with shotguns held his boys off. Bleeding, chained and dazed, he was dragged to the black vehicle and taken to the Whipping House.

Twice he awakened and mutinied, breaking a man’s jaw, caving in three ribs of another before he was subdued by another blizzard of blows. But his rebelliousness only put off the inevitable, and the inevitable had at last arrived. He was alone with Bigboy.

Moon was chained to the post, and it was early in the morning with a gray dawn beginning to edge its way into the day. Candles had burned low.

“I expect you’ll fight me pretty hard, Moon,” said Bigboy, who had stripped to his skin so that his muscles, every bit as sculpted and magnificent as Moon’s, gleamed.

“You can’t bust me, boss,” said Moon. “Ain’t got no bust in me. Yo’ arm goin’ tire afore I sing yo’ song.”

“Now Moon, if I remember, it’s been a time since you tasted the lash.”

“Ain’t never tasted no whippin’, boss.”

“Of course not. Then, why now? And to what point? This would be so easy. You tell me who whispered to you the magic words ‘pale horse coming.’ Then you sit back, have a nice Pepsi-Cola, and I’ll find that boy. I will have a talk with him. Then I will know what I am charged to know and it will be all fine here at the Farm.”

“Ain’t tellin’ you nuffin’, boss man. You think you can beat it out of Moon, you go ahead. Moon done been beat before.”

“But Moon, not by a whip man. I am a whip man. I can do things with a whip that will amaze you.”

Bigboy thought of the massive muscle-ripple expanse of Moon’s broad back as his new canvas. He would need all his strength. He would be pressed to the maximum, forced to find new creativities of torture.

“Let’s try this for a start,” said Bigboy. “Tell me what you think.”

He unfurled the whip, gave it a crack like a gunshot as its tip broke the sound barrier, then unleashed five fast snaps like darts at five nerve points on Moon’s broad back.

Moon jacked hard at each bite, for at the nerves the man is most vulnerable, and pain rocketed to his brain.

“How was that, Moon? Help me here? Was it much?”

“My ol’ daddy done hit me harder than that, boss.”

“Tell me, Moon, did he hit harder than this?”

T
HE
Whipping House filled the air with screams that night, and the night after and the night after. It was an epic battle, if a bit one-sided. The whip man punished, the convict endured. On and on it went, the agonized screams floating like an unholy vapor, seeming to hang in all the air and casting upon it all a pall. Evil things were being done; everybody knew it.

At the Store, the black women of Thebes were especially surly. They could smell the blood floating in the heavy jungle air. They stood in their line with their tickets to get their pound of bacon, their five pounds of flour, their pound of coffee, and no one said a word. Usually, this was the best part of the week, for it was release from the muddy, grueling sameness of Thebes, the despair, the fear of men in the night with dogs. But no more. The women languished, silent, untouchable. Admitted, they did their business and left, for the long walk back through the piney woods. They never looked back; they traveled alone, and swiftly.

But perhaps the ordeal was hardest of all on Fish. Not that you would have noticed. Fish went about his ways, merrier, it seemed, than ever. He stopped in the kitchen house for the day’s supply of lunches for the field hands, filled up his water can, and then rode about the fields with his wagon and his two mules, jingling wherever he went, bringing palaver, a note of cheer, a desperate hunger to entertain.

Nobody was in a mood to be entertained. Too many had gone in the night, screamed their nights away, and never returned. The guards were testy too, for they too had known something was up, that the pale horse was said to be coming, that their empire, so stable, so beautifully constructed, so munificent, was possibly in jeopardy. This led to an outbreak of twitchy-finger-itis, a disease that primarily afflicts men with guns in charge of men without them, where every shadow is seen to be a threat, every comment a promise of violence to come. Three men were shot, one fatally, over behaviors that in other circumstances would have been dismissed with a laugh, or at most with a smack or two upside the head.

The warden, who had the only working telephone in the prison, worked it hard every day. He called his network of snitches up and down the river, the politicians he owned in Jackson and Pascagoula, the sheriffs throughout the piney woods. He was reassured that the word was the same.

“Bigboy,” he said at their nightly meeting, just before his bedtime and Bigboy’s session with the recalcitrant Moon, “there is nothing going on. Not a damn thing. If anybody seeks to move against us, they must come up the river or through the piney woods. I have instructed all to be wary of groups of armed men assembling here or there. They are on the lookout. All is clear. No one can come move against us without coming
to
us, pale horse or not. Only God could deposit men on our doorsteps without us hearing about it three days in advance.”

“Paratroopers,” said Bigboy, more given to tactical considerations. “They could ’chute in.”

But the warden surprised him; he’d thought of this one too.

“I think not, Sergeant. That would involve a goodly expenditure, training, almost certainly some sort of government intervention at some level. Our people in the government who support this endeavor would find out about it, and it could not be done in secret. Who would support financially such an enterprise? No, we have no fears from the sky, at least not from a force large enough to do us any harm. No one coming in here without our knowing about it three days ahead.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bigboy, much assured. Then he went off to his assignation with Moon, and the warden went sleepily to bed.

F
ISH
was having a nightmare. In the nightmare he was underwater, amid the field of dead Negroes chained to the concrete blocks of their own doom. He clawed for the surface, but he was held down. He pulled amid bubbles and sparkle in the water, his lungs all but exploding, his consciousness ebbing away. He could see faces just above the surface, all white, all laughing. Bigboy was there, just enjoying it so much, a nigger drowning slowly just beyond the surface. Fish saw his own dying face reflected in the darkness of Bigboy’s sunglasses, where so much woe had been mirrored. The warden, too: not laughing, but intent, in that preoccupied way of his, as if relating things to things as was his tendency, always seeing the methodical connection, the link, the pattern in all things, pedantic, prosaic, a mechanic in the art and science of keeping the Negro down. He saw Section Boss with that goddamned motherfucker gun he carried everywhere, just guffawing away. He saw Moon, too. Moon, however, was a white man, though big and just as carved up by his adventures in the Jackson underworld, and Moon was laughing at little old Fish, the fixer, the smuggler, the bringer and taker, dying under the water. And he saw the white boy, Bogart, his savior. He was laughing because he was not coming to save Fish or any of them. That was the biggest joke of all.

Fish jerked awake.

He looked around on his pallet. He saw nothing in the darkness, no movement, nothing. He slept in his own room, as a senior trustee in the trustees’ quarters, where the men like him who had responsible prison jobs and good incomes from illegal activities by which they could pay off the guards lived in relative comfort, far from the squalor of the field barracks or the Ape House.

Something was different.

He looked out through a barless window at the swamp, slightly agleam in the shimmery light of a shrinking moon. He saw water shining, the shadows of the bent trees, the snaky limbs and twisted fronds. Frogs, maybe a coyote, small mammals, ’gators: they slithered around out there. The crickets sounded.

What was different?

Then he had it.

There was no screaming.

Moon had been broken.

T
HE
old bastards were making Earl crazy. He wanted to shoot them all. They were like old ladies, bickering among themselves, forming allegiances, then selling each other out in a trice and forming new ones. But also holding ancient, ruinous grudges, beyond any notions of forgiveness or grace. No Marine unit could have functioned with so much inner strife, but for these old fellows bitterness was one of the great joys of life. What was the point of being old if you couldn’t hate your brothers?

Elmer hated Jack. This had to do with a philosophical issue, to be sure: Elmer was a believer in the theory of the big, slow bullet, while Jack only cared for small, fast bullets. But it was more than that, and if one had switched to the other argument, the other would counterswitch just to be not on the same side. Basically, each felt entitled to the leadership of what might be called the gun world. Each was a king. Each had a magazine that published his comments and research, each had a retinue of followers (who hated each other too, even more than the two old rulers), each had connections with certain gun manufacturers (Jack with Winchester, whose products he used exclusively, Elmer with Smith & Wesson, likewise). Each said nasty things about the other whenever it was possible. Each acted with arrogance and majesty. Each had killed over six hundred wild game animals, and while Elmer had once busted broncs and was very cowboy in his way, Jack saw himself as an aristocrat or even an intellectual of the rifle, and had no popular gifts and no interest in them. Elmer could spin a yarn, Jack could deliver a lecture. Each held to his positions as fiercely as rival party chairmen, which of course they were.

But at least Jack and Elmer didn’t fight directly. Theirs was more of an oblique thing, the soft comment made just in earshot, the stony frigidity that expressed itself in formal politeness too ostentatious to be real.

“Morning, Mr. O’Brian.”

“Mr. Kaye.”

“What’s that pipe tobacco, sir?”

“Why, Briarwood. With a touch of gingerroot.”

“Oh, say, I’ll bet that’s a nice flavor. Favor rougher stuff than that, I do, but as they say, each to his own.”

“Yes, Mr. Kaye. Each to his own.”

As for direct confrontations, that was a specialty of the border patrolman and ex–pistol champion Charlie Hatchison. The other five men and Earl were at least unified in one thing: their hatred of Charlie.

Charlie was addicted to aggression. He never tired of telling the others he had killed seventeen men, and if asked, he’d speak all night on the details of each victory, the weight and design of the bullet, its placement in the flesh, whether the opponent died quickly, well shot, or, alas in the case of a poor Wehrmacht
soldat
whom the old bastard had pretty much simply executed, slowly, crying for
vasser
and
mama.
Charlie never tired of that one.

“You should have seen the look on that poor boy’s face when my .38 punctured his lung. Never seen nothing like it. It was as if he’d been poleaxed. But he doesn’t fall. Now here’s the interesting thing. He sits down, very formally, by God, as if he’s afraid he’s going to dirty up his trousers and get in trouble with God or something. Ha! Never saw nothing like it. On the border, you shoot a Mex, he just goes all floppy, crybabying to his goddamned Catholic God or whatever them beaner people b’lieve in, but this German feller, he managed to kick off real slow like.”

That was Charlie is a gentle mood. In the more common pugnacious mood he’d strut around looking for a fight, and it didn’t matter to him if it were verbal or physical. His special target was the other border patrolman, the gigantic, taciturn Bill Jennings, another damned writer (all these boys was writers!) for the guns and hunting books, and Charlie loved to needle Bill.

“Bill, you sure you’re what you call a human being? Don’t say nothing. Don’t even kill nothing. You just go around with that mug of yours, bluffing folks to surrender.”

“Maybe it’s his reputation,” said Elmer.

“Hell, just ’cause he was on a television show drawing and shooting a Ping-Pong ball don’t mean he’s got no reputation, except maybe with that phony-baloney host. I mean a man-killing reputation.”

“They say he’s the fastest man with a gun ever.”

“Hell, he looks like a goddamned mummy. He ain’t faster than that old man over there, that is, if you can wake him.”

It was true. Ed McGriffin showed up with his lovely little granddaughter Sally in tow, and she made his meals individually, presquashing everything and soaking it in milk so the old boy could get it down. And somehow, she slipped into making all the meals, and the men just let her, including Earl, who was amazed at her energy, her matter-of-factness and her endurance for no guff at all. She chased that damn Charlie out of there at least three times, suspecting, rightly, that he had something unseemly up his sleeve.

Meanwhile, old Ed just sat in a rocker on the front porch, sometimes rocking, sometimes dozing, with a nice pleasant look on his old face. He wore a tie every day and a three-piece suit, and carried with him a gigantic hat that dwarfed his almost hairless, egg-shaped head.

“That old man forgot more about shooting than you’ll ever learn in a dozen lifetimes, Charlie,” said Elmer.

“Maybe he does, but what the hell good it do anybody if he sleeps all the time? Earl, wasn’t you being a mite over optimistic when you invited that geezer?”

“That old man invented fast, Charlie.”

“Ah! Earl, you done read too many of those True West books. You b’lieve all that hokum.”

“Charlie, Earl would know a thing or two,” Elmer said. “He killed what you killed thirty times over. Only, he don’t yammer on it all day long. They don’t give out them big medals to no ’counts, that I know.”

“I don’t doubt but that Earl had a good day or two in the war. I’m talking about a lifetime of warring. I’m talking about living by the gun with the gun, with the gun’s quickness, for over thirty years. That would be me. Y’all boys just talked on it and figured on it and wrote it up like you done it. Hell, I was
there!
I done it.”

At that there came a wet, slurpy sound, and it was old Ed, gobbling down whatever damp stuff his system manufactured while he dozed, but now he’d come awake.

“Charlie, if you shot as much as you talked, there wouldn’t be no Mexes left, nor no desperadoes. Yet we have a job agin’ desperadoes, so clearly you ain’t nothing but turkey poop.”

“Grandpap, don’t you talk like that!” scolded pretty little Sally. “You’d be mighty embarrassed to face your maker if words like that were the last to cross your lips before you passed. You’d have a powerful lot of explaining to do.”

“You listen to that purt’ gal,” said Charlie, who had a carnal streak in him as well and was known to place himself so that he could get a good, uninterrupted look at the young woman. “’Cause you don’t want to check out with no blasphemy on your tongue.”

“And as for you, Charlie Hatchison,” said Sally, “why, you can say any damn thing you care to, for no amount of amening and dear Lording and holding back on the blasphemy is going to keep you from frying up all bubbly crisp in Hell like a chicken leg, and that’s a fact!”

Everybody laughed, for Charlie was pure unrepentant sinner man. Everybody laughed, that is, except for Jack O’Brian, busy reading some flashy new book like Plutarch’s dialogues or Marcus Aurelius’s commentaries, who merely huffed majestically from across the room, as if his dignity had been ruffled by all the snippy spatting, and he felt so annoyed he had petitioned to make his feeling known.

F
INALLY,
the last of them showed, late and a little bedraggled. Audie Ryan climbed out of his MG sports car with a busted lip, a black eye and patches of scab on his knuckles. His fancy cowboy duds were all messed up.

“Audie, where you been, boy?” asked Charlie Hatchison. “You look like you got the worst part of it.”

“Don’t know why boys in bars always decide I need to be taken down a notch or two. I just wanted a damned beer. But twice, once in New Mexico, once in Tennessee, I had a bully wanted to smack me around some. Boys, don’t ever get your picture on the cover of
Life
magazine. All kinds of mischief can spring from it!”

So, somehow, Charlie knew Audie, from some killers’ Valhalla in the San Fernando Valley or possibly in north Texas. But the others crowded ’round to shake hands with the famous young man, and he seemed to fit in right away, among men he’d not have to explain a thing to.

He opened up the trunk of the car, pulled out his small leather suitcase and a machine gun.

“Wow! Audie, what the hell is that gun? You are loaded for bear.”

“I traded a long-barreled Luger for this from some tank sergeant in France after the war,” said the Texan. “Figured it might come in handy, and looks like I may be right.”

“What the hell is it, Audie?”

“I think it’s what they call a
Strumgewehr.
Model of nineteen forty-four. They call it an attack rifle.”

“Them Germans,” Charlie said. “They had a goddamn name for everything.”

Audie pulled the thing out. It was ugly like no gun any of them had ever seen, stamped from black metal, its furniture of plastic, its magazine a curved thing like a banana, extending from the well beyond the trigger guard. The whole gizmo had a pungent whiff of some alien future to it.

“Looks like a goddamned ray gun,” Elmer said. “What’s it shoot, atoms?”

“No, sir,” said Audie. “Some kind of short little bullet.”

“It shoots a 7.92 short,” said Charlie. “If they’d have had them early enough, we’d be holding this conversation in German.”

“It’s a lot handier than a carbine or my old Thompson,” said Audie. “And it’s pretty accurate, and it’s got more punch. It’s like a combination of a carbine and a tommy.”

“Goddamned no ’count little bullets,” said Elmer.

“The bullets aren’t particularly small, Mr. Kaye,” said Jack O’Brian. “Those are .324s. But the case is quite short, so it never develops rifle velocity. You could say it combines the best parts of a carbine and a Thompson, or you could say it combines the worst parts: too heavy, not enough punch. And I hope you have a lot of ammo for it, young man.”

“Well, some.”

“Little damn bullets,” said Elmer.

“Yeah, Elmer, but when he hits you with it, it’s like a hose. You get three in one second, six in two. That’ll do the damned job,” argued Charlie, contrary as always.

“If Mr. Jack O’Brian has his way, that’s what we’d all end up carrying. Little goddamn guns with little goddamn bullets. I’ll stick with my .44s, thanks very much, if it’s all the same.”

“Mr. Kaye, you are a cantankerous, obstinate, obdurate sonofabitch.”

“Can someone please translate that into English?” said Elmer grumpily. “My Latin’s a little rusty.”

“I think I got the ‘sonofabitch’ part just right.”

But before the two oldsters could square off, Audie defused the situation by piping up with, “Is that Ed McGriffin?” He had spied the old man sleeping softly on the porch through all this blabbing.

“Yeah, but don’t wake him!”

“Howdy there,” Audie sang to young Sally.

“Well, howdy yourself,” she replied.

“Oh, I think it’s lovey-dovey at first sight!” said Elmer. “I think we got us a thang goin’ on here.”

Earl watched the two young people with an interest that surprised him. He hadn’t thought that out, and he didn’t want some romance gumming up the works here. Shit. It annoyed him, he didn’t know why.

But Audie said quickly, “No, sir, I am just payin’ my proper respects is all. Ma’am, pleased to meet you. My name is Audie Ryan.”

“I saw you in a cowboy picture,” she said.

“I hate them pictures,” Audie said. “You have to wear girly makeup, and most of the men are kind of flower-sniffing, if you know what I mean. It ain’t no work for a Texan.”

“Pays good though, don’t it, Audie?”

“Hell, I just use the money for booze, more guns and a fancy car or two. Ain’t nothing big about it.”

“I thought the picture was pretty good,” she said. “Cowboy and all. Lots of cowboys.”

“Well, girlie,” said Charlie, “if that’s your taste, you are definitely hanging out at the right medicine lodge. This here is the last corral, and we are, by God, the last cowboys. And we are riding out to our last big gun affray. After us, it’s all gone.”

“Yee haw,” said Elmer. “That is the goddamned truth.”

“I’d drink to that!”

Even Bill Jennings, silent as the sphinx, let a smile crease the lower portion of the battered Hoplite shield he carried around as a face.

“Well, while you all are drinking and telling each other how big and brave you are, and welcoming this here fellow, I’m out there trying to find some new way to fancy up franks and beans. So you just go on, you heroes!”

Sally stormed out, and the old men, and the new young one, hastened after, to avoid her wrath.