Pale Horse Coming (36 page)

S
AM
came home ragged and spent. He was not in the best of moods. He gathered up his mail, poured himself a bourbon, and retired alone to his dark study. Throughout the house, he could hear the echo of kids, which had once filled him with joy. Tonight, it just made his headache greater and his depression heavier.

He’d spent hours on the phone, tracking fellows from the Harvard Medical School class of ’28, and all that he could find were well established now, deep in prosperous practices or inhabiting prestigious professorships, which meant of course that they were too busy or too important to come to the phone, and when they did, they were usually so pompous and self-adoring that it took a great deal of nudging and apple-polishing to get anywhere with them. And when he finally got someplace, it was no place.

Some, but by no means all, remembered David Stone, and an even smaller subset of that group were willing to share any insight into him, and even those who did, it quickly turned out, knew only the David Stone that Sam began with: brilliant researcher, selfless humanitarian, hard worker, charmer. Married a beautiful woman. Came from a great family. Never had kids, no, but he was too busy on the frontiers of medicine, doing good in the world. Did something important for the Army during the war. A real tragedy, his loss. There seemed to be something of a physicians’ benevolent protective society in play by informal fiat, by which one doctor agreed never to say anything negative about another doctor.

The David Stone that Sam had uncovered—a man with secrets, a man obsessed with cleansing the world, a man who in his most intimate letters to his wife was strangely inauthentic, a man with a nervous disposition that might be regarded as clinical madness—only existed in Sam’s knowledge, but there was no other public acknowledgment of such a personality.

So Sam had the hideous weight on his shoulders that he was simply wasting his time and the money that Davis Trugood would have to pony up for the phone bills of so many long-distance calls. And Sam
had
to charge him, for he was very low on funds, and no other even small cases were coming to him, as if the men from HUAC, though vanquished and driven off, had still besmirched him in the county imagination.

So Sam also kept busy living up to his civic responsibilities during this period, to keep himself before the public eye, though his heart was no longer in it. He attended town council meetings and Democratic party meetings (essentially the same, and Sam always wondered why the hell they just didn’t combine them) and continued as a deacon of the church and as recording secretary of the P.T.A. and made the rounds on the Negro churches because he didn’t want to lose that vote, and encouraged the newspaper to continue its chronicles of the various malfeasances of the hapless Feebus Bookins, his scandalous replacement.

And of course he worried.

This was his natural condition. He had given Earl a conditional blessing, and thought he meant it. But a certain part of him was not convinced, and that part of him continued its campaign of undermining all that he enjoyed and poisoning his life.

It is not right.

It was not right. You cannot lead armed men against legally sanctioned civil authority and commit violence. That is murder, it is insurrection, it is a form of treason. It does not matter how corrupt and despicable your antagonists are; if you do that, you become them, and once you become them, you have lost your soul.

He picked up his mail, found the usual accumulation of bills, circulars and advertisements, then came across something new. It was a personal letter from one Harold E. Perkins, of Washington, D.C.

Sam searched his memory. The search revealed no record of a Harold E. Perkins, which Sam took to mean either he was losing IQ points fast in his quest, or that Harold E. Perkins was a complete stranger writing for money.

Sam opened the envelope, found a small, handwritten note card.

“Dear Mr. Vincent,” it began,

I don’t know if you remember me, but I am, or was formerly, the member of Congressman Etheridge’s staff that his chief aide Mel Brasher sent to look for information on a David Stone, M.D., for you. I ascertained that none was available via Army Medical Service.

Since then I’ve left the congressman’s employ and am now working for the Department of Atomic Energy in a clerk’s capacity while going to George Washington University Law School at night.

I write you because of a small item I encountered in my duties of no import to anyone but which I thought you should hear about. I was examining records of nuclear material shipments from the Los Alamos Plutonium Laboratory to a facility in Maryland, called Fort Dietrich. I have no information on Ft. Dietrich, or what was being done there in conjunction with plutonium experiments, but I note that the information was cc-ed to a doctor at Thebes State Penal Farm, Thebes, Mississippi. I don’t remember the name, but it was definitely not Dr. Stone. I only noticed it because for some reason the word “Thebes” leaped out at me, being somewhat unusual. The more I thought about it, the more I thought you should know about it.

I would like to ask a counter favor, if you don’t mind. I think Mr. Brasher got the wrong idea about me owing to certain events in the men’s room, in which the Capitol Police apprehended me. I never really had a chance to explain the misunderstanding. I wonder if you’d drop him a line, telling him how much I’ve helped you out. Thanks so much.

Harold E. Perkins.

 

Sam turned this new information over in his head. Fort Dietrich again! What on earth was going on at this obscure post in Maryland that now involved some form of nuclear materials from Los Alamos, and why on earth would all of this be reported to an unknown doctor in Thebes, Mississippi?

“Daddy?”

It was Caroline, his seven-year-old daughter, an adorable child who had her mother’s blond hair and freckles and her father’s serious intelligence, but also, from neither of them, a sense of humor and amazement.

“Honey, Daddy’s busy now,” he said, too cruelly and too quickly.

“But the man said you had to sign,” she said.

“What?”

“The present. Someone sent you a present.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Sam. “Who in hell would send me a present?”

“It’s from New Orleans. From the Scott’s Department Store.”

“Hmmm,” said Sam.

He rose wearily and followed his daughter out through a roomful of children, some his own, some his neighbors’. A delivery man stood patiently in the doorway, with a package under his arm and a clipboard with a form on it.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Mr. Samuel Vincent, sir? That would be you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, sir, I have a package on special delivery for you all the way from New Orleans’s finest department store. Someone must think highly of you.”

“Not likely,” said Sam, quickly signing the form. Outside he saw the delivery truck, brown, part of the famous fleet of such trucks that worked faster and better than the U.S. mail.

“Very good, sir,” said the man. “Here it is, and enjoy it.”

“Thanks.”

The children were excited. To them, packages were automatically a festive occasion, associated with celebrations such as Christmas or a birthday. Happiness was a package.

Sam carried the thing to the dining room table. Whatever it was, it was solid weight, about three pounds, with no rattle or gurgle in it, no sense of anything cloth or paper. Possibly a paperweight or possibly a set of old books, though it didn’t seem big enough for that.

He examined it, and nothing surprised him. It was professionally wrapped, with his address typed cleanly on the address label, and the return address denoted the store he knew to be one of New Orleans’s most prosperous.

He tore the package open, and the brown paper revealed festive colored paper, merry and gay.

“It
is
a present,” said Caroline. “Oh, Daddy, open it!”

“Sweetie, I’m sure it’s just a business gift. Don’t get your hopes up. It isn’t going to be a new doll.”

“Doll! Doll! Doll!” Terry, his youngest at three, began to cry. She loved presents. She loved dolls and prissy frilly things, and was still a sweet baby, still her daddy’s favorite.

“Bet it’s a ball glove,” said Billy, who was clearly projecting his own desires on it, for at six all he wanted was a ball glove like his two big brothers’.

“Billy, it’s a pewter mug from the State Prosecutor’s Association or some such,” Sam said dourly, as he pulled off the wrapped paper, tore off the ribbons, and got the thing free to reveal a white paper box ensnared by a final gold ribbon, which could possibly hold a selection of books or shot glasses or a telescope or pair of binoculars.

“It’s candy,” Caroline concluded, and she had a formidable sweet tooth, so that would please her immensely. “Chocolate candy, with strawberries inside.”

“Could be candy, we’ll soon see,” Sam said and pulled the ribbon loose.

“I bet it’s jelly.”

“No, it’s a dolly, I know it’s a dolly.”

“It’s a plastic airplane, betcha. Daddy, hurry.
Hurry, Daddy!
”

“
Hurry up,
please,
Daddy!
”

But Daddy couldn’t hurry. Daddy had the ribbon half off the box, and he froze. He froze dead still and his face lost its color and its joy. It was frozen into a mask and he himself seemed frozen in the odd position. He had the ribbon pulled tight, just almost to the breaking point, but he was holding it as if it were the rope to a boat or something in danger of floating away, and with his other hand he kept the package pinned to the table. He could feel an unusual tension in the ribbon, a tension that should not be there. But that alone wasn’t the source of his sudden desperation. It was an odor that seemed to float up from the package, just a trace, but enough to re-create a whole world for him, and that terrified him.

“Caroline,” he said very carefully, “I want you—”

“Hurry, Daddy, so I can have a—”

“
Caroline!
”

His voice stunned them.

“Caroline, honey, get these kids out of here. Get them across the street. Do it now, sweetie, do it now.”

“Daddy, I—”

“Sweetie, do what Daddy tells you, and don’t let anybody come in here, do you understand? If Mommy shows up, keep her from coming in. And tell Mrs. Jackson to call the fire department and the police, and please, please, baby, do it right away!”

T
HE
Whipping House was never quiet now. This is how Bigboy investigated: with the calm, methodical, unemotional application of whip to skin. The speed was supersonic, the devastation cruel and specific. He could open a nick, or a slice or a gash or a hack. He could make the whip tease like a feather or bite like a lion, but he preferred what lay in between, in escalating degrees, increment by increment, with enough downtime and not too much blood loss so that the boy could understand with perfect logic and clarity that which was happening to him, that which would happen and, finally, that there was no other inevitability save the will of the whip man.

In the Whipping House, the whip man whipped. When a boy passed out, he was cut down, revived, treated tenderly, his wounds dressed, and just when it seemed he was out of his agony and removed to a more benevolent universe, he was hung again, and whipped again, harder, taken farther into pain, but not quite all the way to death.

Nobody died without talking, for that is the way of a good whip man. The whip man knows. The whip man is brilliant, cunning, and has all the attributes of a chess player or a counterintelligence officer or a gifted businessman. He has an intuition for the psychology of weakness, he can anticipate, he knows just how close to the line he can come each time, and each time he cuts that distance in half. And there is always another half to be achieved, always. He can string you along for hours or days, take you through lifetimes of pain, so that nothing else has ever existed for you, and the only mercy is a dream of death which he is too wise to give you easily.

In this way, Ephram gave up Milton, and then Milton gave up Robertson. Robertson tried to kill himself by biting on his tongue, piercing it in hopes of drowning in lungs a-burst with his own blood, greedily swallowed to avoid further destruction, but the whip man was too smart, and saved him, for an especially long time on the rack, with the play of lash and light and sweat across the darkness of the night, until ultimately Robertson broke and gave up Theo, who broke fast to give up Broke Tooth, who gave up One Eye, who gave up Elijah.

It was a pagan scene, with the fires bright, and the sweat shiny on the bodies of the hung man and the whip man in their intimate squalor, and the singing in the air of the lash and the crack as it struck, each crack a detonation in the flesh that transmuted in a nanosecond to the deep brain where pain is registered.

Bigboy worked Elijah hard, for Elijah was the rare enough hero and would give no man up, and Elijah fought him all through the whip man’s night, filling the Whipping House with pain. But finally Elijah broke. They all broke. There was no other possibility.

Elijah gave up 22 and 22 gave up Albert, but there was a hitch.

In the case of Albert, the man was discovered in bed, his throat cut, a straight razor in his hand.

“He knowed he was next,” said Caleb.

“No,” said Bigboy. “Someone else knew he was next, and thought to cut the chain off before it led to him. And left the razor there to confuse us. But we will find him.”

A day was lost in that barracks, as each convict was interrogated by rough means, until at last one Yellow Ed gave up Mr. Clarence, and Mr. Clarence broke and ran, in the old days just exactly the ticket out in the amount of time it took a guard to pump his Winchester ’07 to his shoulder and ship off a .351. But nobody shot Mr. Clarence. The dogs ran him to earth, and he too went off to interrogation. The nights of the Whipping House continued.

F
ISH
knew he eventually would be found out. Knowing this, he had two choices. The first would be to hand himself into the warden and Bigboy, explain that he was indeed the originator of the phrase “pale horse coming,” and then tell exactly what it meant and why in his foolishness he had told it to but one man. That was his sin: hubris. He had no ability to keep his tongue from wagging, and for that his brothers were paying in flesh.

He would tell all: about the white boy Bogart’s secret survival, and his pledge to return in the night with men and guns, and pay out retribution in spades.

But if he did that, Fish knew also that the warden and Bigboy would take specific security precautions against exactly what it was the white boy Bogart had planned. That would doom Bogart’s attempt, that would get Bogart killed. The assault on Thebes would come to nothing; Thebes, like an evil city of the ancient times, would go on and on and on. It was like a Rome, and no force could bring it down except time’s slow track.

The other course demanded more belief. It was harder. It was hardest of all, because it could be construed by his own self as the cowardly way. That was to say nothing, and let Bigboy work his way through the convict population, hunting the disease of hope, until at last, depending on the courage of those who fell under his lash, it reached himself. This way played for time, and in that time the gamble was the white man Bogart would assemble his forces and smite the evil, wipe them off the face of the earth, and that he, Fish, would be here to see it. It was a coward’s way, for the first path surely guaranteed that he would himself get the lash, for even if the warden and Bigboy believed he was telling the truth, they’d take him to the last drop of blood to ascertain if what he said was truth. He would avoid that, but he would live with the screams of the whipped in the Whipping House, that anguish that floated every night damp and heated on the gentle breezes, so that all could hear and all could fear.

That is, if Bogart the white boy came. For many a man speaks powerfully when full of wrath, and makes great promises of what will come. Yes, and just as many a man forgets his pledge in the light of day after a woman’s soft caress or the numbing blur and comfort of whiskey, or the purr of a satisfied child cuddling with its daddy, and the warmth of a blazing hearth. These things, and a million or so others, will make cowards out of most men, who will not give them up to come back to muddy hell and set things right. They forget quickly, their memories erode, and after all, the men of Thebes were lost already. Maybe the white boy Bogart would be like that. What white boy, after all, would risk his neck to save a passel of niggers? Never happened before, maybe never would after.

But goddamning himself to hell, Fish decided at long last, after many a bitter and sleepless and scream-filled night, to believe in the white boy. That fellow had something, for sure. Something in the way his eyes blazed with death’s promise, and he took all this righteously, as if personal. He would ride that pale horse back with God’s mighty scythe and cut down the wicked of Thebes. That’s what Fish concluded. It was his only faith.

So he would give the white boy Bogart another week. He would give him till dark of the moon. Then he would stop the hurting and the dying by taking it on himself. Until that time, he would be hard of heart while yessin’ and shuckin’ and smilin’ and crawlin’ before the white demons. He hoped it earned him one thing: not a dispensation from hell, for he knew that was where he was going, but only the knowledge that certain others would be arriving at that destination first, or at least soon after.

T
HROUGH
these long nights of screaming, the warden slept soundly. He had taught himself from long practice not to be affected by the grim necessities of power. Power is what it must do, and if it lacks the will to do it, it will not remain power much longer. That is the rule of history, as written by the Romans and the Spanish and the British. He had made peace with it.

He slept soundly, for he knew that whatever had to be done, he was a truly good man.