Pale Horse Coming (50 page)

The fire’s heat was explosive. It burned furiously, spewing gobbets of itself about, lighting the room in just seconds.

Earl beat it to the door, and by the time he was outside, the building was gone in fire.

S
ECTION
Boss had no taste for battle. When he heard the shots, he knew immediately that one loomed. It so happened that he had drawn duty that night in the dog kennel, a job he hated and felt should be beneath him, given all his responsibility. His job was to beat the dogs with rawhide soaked in Negro sweat, not care for them. But as the firing mounted and mounted and the glow of flames began to light the horizon, he understood how lucky he had been in being way out here, away from the prison’s central structures.

The dogs yowled. He didn’t care. He just wanted to get the hell out of there.

He took Mabel Louise, of course, his treasure: the Thompson submachine gun. He took a bagful of thirty-round magazines brimful with ammo and all the food he could carry. His damned horse was back at the corral, so he couldn’t ride. It was simply a question of following the river upstream, staying calm, and living to live another day.

He stayed close to the riverbank, and came soon to the big levee the engineers had built in ’43. It was grassy and broad, and walking it was no difficulty. At the center he halted. There he could see it and…My God!

The whole sky was lit up with flames. Knowing the place as intimately as he did, he could place each blaze to a building and figured in a second that his intuition had been correct: the whole place was going. It was over, razed to the ground, forgotten and flattened to ashes.

Glad I ain’t there, he thought.

Turning, he continued his way along the levee, the gun in his hand, the going easy.

But soon levee gave way to riverbank, and the going got tougher. Sawtooth cut at his legs and boughs whipped his face. The ground here was infirm, a soupy insubstantial margin between earth and water. But onward he went, at a considerably reduced pace.

Sometime toward dawn he heard an explosion. It shook the trees and rattled the leaves. Dust seemed to be torn from the earth by its vibrations, and he realized what had happened: they’d blown the levee and whatever remained of Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored) would shortly be gone completely. One thing about them boys: they did the job up right.

But he continued on, now altering his plan. He’d just get far enough out and go to ground for a bit. No sense in trying to fight his way out of this place, and getting torn to shreds.

Then, maybe in a day or so, he’d work his way back. He’d shoot off a couple of clips, dirty his face, and by the time he returned and the state authorities had found out and taken over the site of the disaster, he could represent himself as a weary veteran of the fight who’d stayed at his post ’til it was overwhelmed, then heroically fought his way out of there and laid up.

Hell, he guessed there’d be no other damned witnesses. This thing could play out right swell for him.

So it was that he found a dry spot off the riverbank and set himself down for a nice nap in the cool pines, far removed from the violence.

He dreamed of glory and escape and a better life and at some point people were cheering him madly. But then he realized the cheering was in the real world, not the dream one, and he blinked awake to the sound of voices.

He fought his panic as he looked around. He checked his watch. It was nearly 10:00.

The voices seemed to be coming from the river. He snaked his way forward, and then he saw them.

Cowboys.

There were six of them, sixty feet out in the water. They were in the prison launch, which they had commandeered. They were laughing and joshing loudly among themselves, having a fine old time.

Then he recognized that goddamn Bogart.

That one!

Still alive!

Suddenly it made all kinds of sense. Bogart had somehow survived his murder, and as everybody said he was a trickier man than he let on. Back in the world, he recruited these bandits, and they came back in the dead of night for the dark pleasures of retribution. Now on the stolen prison launch they were escaping, heading upriver.

Section Boss had a machine gun.

He could kill them all. Even if he didn’t get them all, he could shoot the shit out of the boat and sink it dead in the water. Then if there were any left alive, he could finish them, or simply vanish before they could get organized and come after him.

He
would
be a hero. An actual, real-life hero.

He hunkered down behind the gun, began to check off the firing requirements. Steadily, he drew the bolt back, till it clicked. He looked at the two levers above the grip on the left-hand side, the safety (off) and full-auto (on).

He checked the sight, that fancy Lyman job, and diddled a bit with it to make certain the gun would shoot to point of aim at less than fifty yards.

He had them.

He brought the gun to bear, and at that moment beheld an amazement. A thin cowboy stepped out of the cabin of the craft, and took his hat off, and cascades of blond hair fell out, and Section Boss saw that it was a girl!

A goddamned girl!

For some reason this infuriated him even more profoundly. A girl! A girl had been among the raiders, and had brought all this hell upon the place.

A girl!

He squiggled and wiggled gently, oriented the big gun this way and that, until he’d put the big sight blade square on her and had it centered in the peephole of the Lyman sight.

Gun braced tight, he began to squeeze the trigger.

He was a hero!

T
HE
birds sensed it coming somehow, and the dark night was full of them, seething and cawing, wheeling and darting. Amazing how many birds a piney woods could contain, and how mysteriously they could read the future and know it to be tragic. They launched, like carrier planes, before the water arrived.

Earl wondered how it would come as he labored at the prison launch, trying to find fuel to add to the tank, mixing some oil in, studying the primitive controls so that he could understand it well enough to run it, and finally cracking off the control panel at the keyhole (he had no time to look for a key) and trying to hot-wire the tangles to spark, and get out of there.

He tried to concentrate, but he could not. The world was about to end, this world at any rate, and by his hand. He somehow had to see it, know it, watch it finish and drown.

Birds in the air. Animals scurrying through the brush. A sense of disturbance in the universe, as the animals understood flood as well as fire, and made to flee.

When it came, it came stealthily. He thought of Japanese naval infantry moving through the fog, knowing how to use the land, geniuses of concealment and silent movement. The black water was not there and then in the next second it was, though at first only the oddest sense of shimmer or vibration where there should be none gave away its presence, and then it was everywhere, unstoppable, remorseless, powerful in its quiet, insistent way. It didn’t rush or gurgle or throw up sprays of white; it boasted no waves or tides; it just rose in the trees and spread with devilish speed until in seconds there was no ground visible but the trees stood sunk halfway in black water. Its current was strong, for boughs and chunks and pieces hurled along its surface, and here and there the corpse of a dead animal.

Earl knew it was time.

Come on, goddamn you, he said, jerking two splayed wires together. At last a spark, just a tiny twitch of light in the dark chaos of what had been a control panel, and the old craft heaved, shuddered, coughed up a throatful of blue, dense smoke, and then began to roar.

Earl steered straight into the channel, hoping there were no secret impediments or secret passageways concealed by the still calm water that he didn’t know (he hadn’t been paying much attention the last time he’d gone for a ride in this particular boat) or that he wouldn’t encounter some kind of supercurrent set off by the broken levee that would suck him in and down.

The old scow lurched into the dark water under a spray of stars, and Earl held her steady, aiming for an opposite shore, where there should be as much safety as possible.

He looked back and saw that the Drowning House had now been taken, its foundations eaten away by the flood; it fought its destiny but then gave up, tumbling into collapse as the water claimed it.

The sun was coming up. Its brightness oozed out of the east, and soon enough the water began to sparkle. The disk itself was shortly visible, and the sky began its run from black to gray to pewter to blue.

In the increasing light, Earl watched the clouds of birds circling the opposite shore, although shore wasn’t quite the right word. Remnants of the levee stood all along it, though here and there, by natural forces difficult to comprehend, it had been breached, and yet more water poured into the lowlands of Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored).

Earl navigated a course south, toward the town or what would remain of it. This took him along the whole course of the prison installation at which he looked for signs of destruction. They were ample. Of the four machine-gun towers only one still stood, the others having given way to the water; and that one looked ready to go at any second, twisted crookedly as its supports washed away. The air was full of the sense of water unleashed, and yet still whiffs of the night’s fires remained. Above it all the birds rotated in the sky, trying to figure out a new destination.

When Earl passed what should have been the Big House, the Store and the Whipping House, he could see nothing. But of course he hadn’t looked for them from the river before, and so he didn’t know if this signified their ruin or not. But he heard the rush of water, and that was enough to suggest they were inundated.

The last mile was calm, and he could tell from the columns of smoke of fires still burning that the town was gone, too, somehow. But at last he saw what he had come to see: a raft, poling its way up the river on this far bank, holding three cantankerous white fellows, cursing at each other loudly, a man on a stretcher, and a girl, who stood apart from them.

She took off her cowboy hat and waved, and her survival, honestly more important than any of the others’, filled him with sudden joy.

“Say there,” he hailed.

“Damn, Earl, where’d you get that damn boat?”

“Picked it up somewhere in the night. Here, let me get y’all aboard.”

“Be careful now. There’s a fifth.”

Earl wondered what Elmer meant, but then he saw a coffin on the raft that wasn’t being used as a pontoon.

“Oh, hell,” he said.

He maneuvered close enough, and throttled the engine back, afraid to turn it off. Elmer and Bill seized his gunwale and mated the two craft in the center of the current. Then Charlie and Sally helped Jack across, and though the man had difficulty with his pinned arm, in other respects he seemed spry enough. He was a tough old bastard. Then Elmer and Bill got the coffin up and slid it over the gunwale, with Charlie and Sally pitching in on their side, until it rested on the deck of his own boat. Then the two men threw rifles across, and came themselves.

They released the raft, and Earl steered hard astarboard to reorient upstream, and the current was much stronger running against than running with, but the old scow plunged ahead in the increasing light and heat, back in the direction he had come.

“Glad to see you, Earl,” said Elmer. “We’s getting tired of that poling and goddamned Charlie wasn’t pulling his own weight on his pole. And Jack wasn’t worth a damn.”

“Hell I wasn’t, old man. These two old coots let me do all the work.”

“What happened to Mr. Ed. He catch one?”

“No, sir, not by a damn sight. He faced his fellas and done that job up right good. He told all them colored men how to put a raft together, and they all been gone for hours now. They downriver a far piece. Then old Ed just passed, with a smile on his face, in a rocking chair. He went gentle into the good night, I’ll say.”

“I’m sorry, Sally. I never meant—”

“You never mind, Earl. Now what on God’s earth happened to you? Looks like you put your face in a meat grinder.”

“Had a ruckus with a fellow.”

“Someone else can drive this boat. Earl, you come here and I will stitch that ear on or it will fall clean off and you will look like a circus freak.”

“I—”

“Earl, you do what I say.”

Earl did. Charlie took over the steering, and Earl sat still as Sally ran a needle and thread through his ear and scalp, and it hurt like hell, but not nearly as bad as when she doused the stuff in some kind of disinfectant that made it burn like pure hell.

“Goddamn,” he said.

“You can get through it, cowboy, big man like yourself.”

“Oh, Christ, that hurts.”

The others laughed.

“Some damn hero. Earl, maybe you ought to give that medal back.”

They plowed up the Yaxahatchee, once again passing the flooded prison farm, which was now to the left. The fourth tower had fallen, and more of the levee was gone. It was all reverting to savage swamp. Everything would be buried under the water, and in months the silt would build up and all traces of a fight would be gone, unless Navy divers decided to make a million-dollar salvage project out of it, which seemed unlikely.

“Don’t hardly seem like nothing was there now,” said Elmer.

“Nope. It’s all gone to hell. We wiped ’em off the face of the earth.” This was Charlie.

“Hey, I see the kid,” shouted Bill.

And, yes, there he was, Audie paddling furiously in a yellow Navy raft. When the sound of the engines reached him, he turned and saw Bill waving wildly from the prow of the craft, and waved back. He steered out to the stream, and Earl guided the launch toward him.

“Hey, you fellows.”

“Look at him, out for a Sunday boat ride.”

Again, Earl came close and went to idle, and Audie transferred. He left combat knife slashes in the raft before he made his move, ensuring that it would deflate and sink in time.

“Where’s the old fellow?” Audie asked.

“Didn’t make it through the night,” Elmer said.

“Oh, Christ,” said Audie. “Sally, I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, Audie. I will be fine.”

Upstream they went, for another half an hour, until they were lost in trackless piney woods and silence, as if no other humans existed on earth. Earl retook the wheel and navigated to the pickup site, and checked his watch. He saw they had some time.

“We’ll just lay up here,” he said. “I think we’re home free.”

“Home free,” said Charlie. “Goddamn, how I like them words.”