Pale Horse Coming (33 page)

I
T
was a long flight. It was hard to find a cab. The city was run-down, seedy, like the worst parts of Little Rock, but it had crests of low mountains running through it. The local businesses seemed mostly to be pawn and doughnut shops, though car washes were numerous as well, and restaurants serving what Mexicans ate. But mainly: doughnuts. It was the cake doughnut capital of the universe, Earl thought.

But eventually, he got there, an even more run-down section of town, and he stepped out of the cab, felt the blast of heat, the movement of pedestrian traffic. He glanced about: palms stood, but they were far from the majestic ones he’d seen in the Pacific; these were bent down, brown at the edges, and looked as if they’d breathed in too much automobile exhaust for anybody’s good. You could catch cancer from a palm like the sorry specimen that grew crookedly in a patch of dry dirt out here in the flats of an unlovely place called the San Fernando Valley, where Hy Hooper had his gun shop.

In the window it said:
HOME OF THE
.357
ATOMIC
!

Earl shook his head. Instinctively he didn’t like California generally, and Los Angeles specifically, its brown hills, its sense of thickness filling the air, like they were burning rubber somewhere nearby, the arid little neighborhoods of bungalow amid burned-out shrubbery, its heat, but most of all: its showiness.

This was where they made the pictures, and Earl didn’t like the pictures a bit, except for that John Wayne fellow or one or two other cowboy-style heroes. He could never remember their names. But there was something sinister about the picture business, and it seemed to have been reflected all through the Los Angeles he’d just traveled, and here it was again:
THE
.357
ATOMIC
! What the hell would that be but some slightly jacked-up .357 Magnum, which had been around since ’35, but now some slick boy was trying to make it showy by connecting it with the atom bomb!

Yet this is where he had to go. Grudgingly, carrying his valise, straightening his fedora, he stepped in. He found himself in what might be called more showiness yet: a cavern of guns.

There were guns everywhere. Unlike other gun stores, where the guns were in display cabinets, in this one they lay there, but not only there; hundreds, it seemed, had been mounted on the walls, and as Earl looked up, he saw that the guns rose to and spangled the ceiling as well. The low firmament was filled with cheap break-top .32s and .38s from the first part of the century, most of them looking unshootable and unsafe.

“Sort of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” asked the man behind the counter, who was florid and heavyset, with his hair slicked back. He had a cowboy belt on, much carved, with an elaborate silver buckle, and his khakis were cowboy-style as was his shirt, which had some kind of floral inscriptions on the chest. He wore a white Stetson and had a car-salesman’s smile to him.

“Quite a few guns, I’d say,” said Earl.

“And you’d be Earl Swagger, I’m guessing. You look like someone who could handle one of these things.”

“Yes sir, I am. Mr. Hooper?”

“I am that, sir. Please, it’s an honor to shake the hand of a Medal of Honor winner.”

He reached and Earl complied.

“You’d be surprised who drops by here once in a while. Why, just the other day I had a nice chat with Marsh Williams. You know him?”

“Fellow that designed the carbine?”

“Designed in
prison
no less. How’s that for genius. He was up for manslaughter in North Caroline. To keep his mind free he concentrated on guns, which he knew well, and that way he figured out a way to get a semiauto into a much tinier amount of space than anything before. Six million M-1 carbines later, he’s a national hero. They say they’re going to do a picture about Marsh, with Jimmy Stewart.”

“Won’t that be a thing,” said Earl.

“Did you carry a carbine, Mr. Swagger?”

“No, Mr. Hooper. I was a tommy gun man. We did a lot of up-close work, and I liked the thump of the Thompson. I didn’t mind a little extra weight for the extra thump. But you can bet a lot of our boys did. It was a right handy little number.”

Earl would keep his actual opinion of the carbine to himself.

“Then, Mr. John Wayne. I’m trying to get him to carry our .357 Atomic in his next Western picture. That’d really move them off the shelves. But you didn’t come to talk about picture stars, did you, Mr. Swagger?”

“Only the one I wrote you about, Mr. Hooper.”

“Well, like I told you on the phone, I know him well, and he’s a fine young man. He’s a wonderful young man, though he has a touch of that Irish melancholy to him. But I called him, and gave him the invite, and maybe he’ll show and maybe he won’t.”

The youngest of the old men, but also the oldest, was late, of course. But not by much. Earl watched him arrive. He pulled up in some bright English sports car, red as blood, gleaming and slick. He wore sunglasses, a cowboy hat, an elaborate gentleman cowboy rig of buckskin coat and pressed dungarees, a white shirt with pearl buttons and a string tie, and finally a pair of handmade, three-hundred-dollar boots. He looked like somebody playing at being a grown-up and the grown-up he was playing at being was Hoot Gibson.

He came in shyly, and Earl could sense reticence in him. He wasn’t one of those fellows, like Hooper here, who grew larger in the presence of others. He grew smaller, waiflike, lost.

“Well, Audie,” said Hy Hooper, “I’m glad you dropped by. This fellow’s come a long way to meet you. He’s one of your own kind.”

Even in his sunglasses, Audie Ryan wouldn’t look at Earl. The older, larger man’s presence seemed to have him unhinged a bit. There was quite a war going on between the California fancy cowboy swagger of his style, and the pale, diffident boy it concealed. Finally, he took off his glasses, and Earl saw almost a gal’s eyes, soft and gentle and sensitive and a face startling in its beauty.

Hard to believe this little perfect angel was the most decorated soldier of the Second World War and had killed close to three hundred Germans, at least fifty of whom he got with a .50-caliber machine gun atop a burning tank destroyer as they came in to wipe out his unit and break out into our lines. He killed them all, and single-handedly drove back the tanks in support, and was given the Medal of Honor for that day’s work, which was only one of many good days he’d had across Europe.

“Major Ryan,” said Earl, “I’m Earl Swagger, sir. It’s an honor to meet you.”

Audie Ryan smiled shyly, embarrassed. He almost giggled to be reminded of the rank at which he left the Army in 1946.

“Gee, Sarge,” he said, “nobody’s called me ‘Major’ in five years. It’s just Audie. And I didn’t do anything you didn’t do, Sarge, from what I hear, so the honor’s just as much mine as it is yours.”

“I think we were both lucky bastards,” said Earl, “and the real heroes didn’t make it back.”

“If I had a drink, I’d drink to that, as that’s the truest thing I’ve heard in months.”

He had a soft accent from his native Texas, in whose northwest corner he’d grown up hardscrabble and poor, where it was his rifle alone that put meat on the table for a large, fatherless family. He learned to shoot well and early, and in the war his hunter’s skills had paid their dividends.

“So, Sarge, Hy tells me you’ve got some sort of proposition or something?”

“That’s right,” said Earl.

“Say, fellows,” said Hy Hooper, “why don’t you step on back and use the office.”

He led them back, and in the little room the heads of various beasts killed the world over stared at him. It reminded Earl of his father’s study; his father had been a mighty hunter, too.

“You haven’t got the buffalo back yet, Hy?” Audie asked.

“No, it takes a bit. I got back from Africa some weeks ago,” Hy explained to Earl. “Took some fine trophies, including an eighty-four-inch horn-spread Cape Buffalo.”

“Wow,” said Earl.

“Yep, proudest moment of my life, and listen to me talking about what
I’m
proud of in the presence of two men who’ve won the Medal of Honor. I ought to be skinned alive. I’m butting out. You go ahead. There’s Scotch and bourbon in the desk.”

He scurried out.

Audie Ryan, still a little nervous, poured himself a finger of bourbon and offered it to Earl.

“I gave it up soon after the war,” said Earl.

“I should give it up. But if I don’t, I see Germans,” Audie said, downing the brown fluid and quickly replenishing it.

“I still see the Japs everywhere.”

“It never goes away, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t. And everybody forgets.”

“What I hate most of all is, they think they want to know about it. And they ask about it. But it turns out they really don’t want to know about it. What they want to do is tell
you
about it. They know more’n you.”

“I get that, too. It does grow heavy on the shoulder.”

“This town is the worst. This picture business was probably a mistake, but since I can’t hardly read, and these people think I’m a cutie pie, I guess it’s what I’m stuck doing. It’s a stinking business, though. Everybody lies, everybody just wants to git ahead, they’ll do any damn thing. New York people run everything, and they talk so fast you can’t hardly understand them. But you get along with them or you don’t work. And so much waiting. I may get a big picture made by John Huston. You ever hear of him, Sarge?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Maybe it’s that other one, John Ford. Always get them two mixed up, which could hurt me bad. Whichever, it’s a war picture. But the Civil War, based on some old book. Of course, they can’t
really
show a war. They make it all pretty and heroic.”

“That it sure wasn’t.”

“So anyhow, don’t suppose you care much about the picture business, Sarge, do you?”

“The truth is, it seems silly. A man who’s done what you’ve done, out here with these showy people.”

“The truth is, it is silly. The truth is, I am sick to death of it all right, but stuck to it forever, I suppose. So if you have something to propose, I am all ears. I need a vacation from my vacation.”

“Well, Major Ryan—”

“Audie. Everybody calls me Audie. The Mexican boys who fill up the tank on my MG call me Audie.”

“Audie, then. Well, Audie, can’t say why you’d say yes to this here thing. It may be sillier than the picture shows. It may even get you killed, and it don’t make no sense at all. I don’t even know why I’m doing it, except somehow something’s got to be set right and nobody nohow no way is interested in doing it. It’s gun work, maybe heavy, and you and I both know that you can do everything right and take no chances at all in that game, and still some little piece of metal’s going to bounce off a doorknob and park between your eyes.”

“I do. Meanwhile, some guy who never takes cover doesn’t get a scratch.”

“That’s it.”

“Well, at least I could git some sleep then. You have trouble sleeping, Sarge?”

“Every goddamned night. First year I’s back, I almost blowed a hole in my head. Held the gun up to it, pulled the trigger, and the gun went snap. I’d forgotten to jack a shell into the chamber. Never forgot that in my life since, so I guess my number wasn’t up that day.”

“I think about it every goddamn night. A few drinks, get the fancy Peacemaker out that Colt’s gave me when I toured the plant one time, spin the cylinder a few times, and then at least I wouldn’t think about Lattie and Joe and what happened to them. I’d be with them. So go on, tell me.”

Earl told him. Told it all, start to finish, up to whom he’d recruited and who he still meant to see, how it would be done, when it would be done.

“Old men,” Audie noted.

“All of ’em ’cept you.”

“I can see why.”

“That’s right. Don’t care to see any more young fellows die. These boys have all laid with their women and had their kids and written their articles and gotten ever last thing to be got out of life. If they pass, so be it. But it would be a shame if you did.”

“Ah, well,” said Audie.

“They can all shoot, so they don’t have to be trained. I can’t waste no time on training. But I need one other fellow who’s been in action, and who won’t panic if we run into heavy automatic fire. They need to look and see someone cool and collected. I also need someone fast as I have it figured out. Who can get from place to place as needed. I can get each boy where he’s supposed to be and get him started, but if it gets heavy at some place, I need someone sharp to bounce over there fast.”

Audie poured himself another drink.

“As I said,” Earl went on, “you’d be a fool to do this. You can stay in this town and make these pictures and lay with all these starlet gals and be the toast of America. Have a house with a pool, a fancy sports car, wear them expensive boots. Don’t know why you’d risk that.”

A faraway look played over Audie’s delicate features. He sat back beneath a buck’s princely head, in his grown-up cowboy outfit, and his eyes focused on something not there. Earl knew where he was. Back in the little ruined towns and the snowy fields, up the heartbreaking, backbreaking ridges and hills, fording the cold, cold rivers, sleeping in mud and shit, hunting men in gray who hunted back.

“Oh, boy,” he finally said, “it sure beats waiting around for some New York fellow to call you and say you got the picture.”

“Maybe at least it’ll give you some new nightmares,” said Earl.

“Hey, I like that,” said Audie. “Sarge, you know. Yep, sign me up. I need new nightmares to replace the old ones.”

B
UT
that wasn’t Earl’s only stop in Los Angeles. He had one more, a brick warehouse building back over the low rims of hills in a part of town near to, but not officially part of, Hollywood. The cabbie dropped him and volunteered to stay, because he knew Earl’d never find another one in this godforsaken patch of nowhere. Earl thanked the guy, and said he didn’t think it would take too long.