Fish fought him on that one. He denied it, banished it, made it go away, thought of his own scabbed, scarred flesh, not of the women's. He fought him on all the temptations: freedom, sex, juju weed and Uncle Horse, wealth, pleasure, all offered in various stages between the whippings, so in his mind, he went from pleasure unimaginable to pain unfortunately too imaginable.
He howled and screamed and begged for mercy.
Mercy came in but one form, however.
'What does it mean, Fish? What does ' horse coming' mean? You have to tell me, you know. You will, in the end. The only question is when. Tell me, Fish. Save us both trouble, and the warden worry. Tell me, Fish, tell me now.'
Fish did not and paid for his disobedience.
He paid, he paid, he paid.
And then he paid some more.
But he never opened his lips.
Now, at last, death dogged him. He could smell it, taste it, knew it was here at last for him.
Ha! That would be his victory.
But Bigboy wouldn't surrender.
'Even now, Fish, when you are so close to passing. Even now I can jack you with yet more pain, and I will, too. You know I will.'
The old man tried to spit in his face, but could not, because of the bit in his mouth.
'Okay, Fish. Then here we go again. Now it gets bad again. Now it comes again.'
He heard the man stride back. He heard him lift the whip from the table.
He heard it unroll, then hiss as the whip man snarled it gently through the air, then made it snap and pop, so that the old man could actually feel the airwaves where the supersonic flick at the end pushed them aside.
'Fish, here it?'
From close by came the rattle of what could only be machinegun fire. A few seconds later, more shots filled the air.
Bigboy dropped his whip and ran to the old man, pulled the bit out of his teeth.
'What is it?' he screamed urgently. 'What is that? What is happening?
Goddamn you, Fish, Goddamn you, tell me!'' Fish smiled.
'Pale horse be here, motherfucker,' he said. 'Pale horse done come for yowl.'
He laughed in the second that he died. they watched him. He was a stubby old fellow, and he sat in the flickering candlelight of the bar, and the two Negroes were behind the bar. They were nervous as hell. You could smell their fear.
But the old man seemed unperturbed, merry even, and that's what upset the deputies. He just sat there with a mellow grand pappy look on his face, in his three-piece black suit with his tie all neatly tied up in a bow, his huge Stetson down to his ears and he drank.
He drank, he drank, he drank.
'Don't know how a fellow swallow that much dad gum white lightning and stay sittin' up,' said Opic.
'He must have the constitution of a horse,' said Skeeter.
'He drink more, we don't have to whap him none a-tall. No sir, he'll just fall over blindy drunk.'
'Yes, sir.'
But that wasn't what had them so spooked. That wasn't why they'd sent their third member, Darius, to get the sheriff.
What spooked them was: Where'd he come from?
The old man was just there, sitting in the bar.
No boat had arrived, no horsemen had fought their way through the piney woods, no automobiles had suddenly come roaring up a suddenly cleared road. So where'd he come from? How'd he get there? Who was he? What was this all about?
'I say we go in there and thump him hard.' This was Skeeter. Skeeter was the master of the billy club. Skeeter could beat a tattoo on your arm so fast that arm would be dead for a month. He could slap you upside the ear hard enough to kill, to stun, to daze, to annoy, all with the flick of a wrist. His club hung on a leather thong off his supple right wrist.
'Hmmm,' grunted Opic.
'Just go in, do it. He's a old man. We cool him out, handcuff him, and then off he go to the station. That's all that is. And we git to the bottom.'
Opic chewed this over. It seemed okay. But he didn't want to make the wrong decision.
'Pret' dad gum soon the sheriff be here. He'll know what to do.
Meantime, this op boy just filling himself with rotgut, getting blurrier and blurrier. Let him drank himself to perdition, that be all. That's what the sheriff would want.'
'I don't like it none.' 'I don't like it none nohow neither,' said Opic.
'But that is what we going to do, dad gum it.'
And dad gum it, that is what they did. In forty minutes or so, Sheriff Leon Gattis himself arrived, to find the scene the same. His two deputies were outside, peering in. Inside, the old man sat merrily by himself at the table, drinking jar after jar of white lightning, getting himself all lit up to hell and gone.
'Don't see how that boy is still standing,' reported Opic. 'All that corn shit he got in him.'
'That ain't the problem. Whar'd he come from?' asked the sheriff.
'Don't know. He just come from nowhere, out of the air. Sheriff, I say we go in and thump him hard and brang him down. Then we git to the bottom of this.'
Why was the sheriff reluctant? Why did he have an odd feeling in his gut? It was that the whole thing was so ghostly, somehow. It had the feeling of the remembered, or the previously glimpsed. He had already seen it, in a movie or a book or something. Very strange feeling.
The old cowboy sat there in the saloon. The funny part was, there wasn't a twitch of fear on him. He's either crazy or goddamned stupid as they come, and he didn't look neither. There was something bull goose loony about the man, and the sheriff, at one time a New Orleans detective (a long, tragic story), had seen it on a few of the big-gun boys of the thirties. The Pretty Boy had it and the Babyface had it even more.
Johnny D. had it best of all, that sense of masterly command, that sense of self-regard of the truly dangerous.
'Goddamn, Sheriff, he just a old man. A drunk old man. A very drunk old man.'
Besides Skeeter and Opic and Darius, the sheriff had brought two more boys. That meant six.
'All right,' he said. 'We goin' do it this way. Ray, you go ' back. Work in that way. Gun out. You stay just inside the doorway, cover that old geezer from the rear. That's just in case. The rest of us wait five minutes, then we go in and brace him good. Listen up, y'all. This boy look old and drunk, but to me, he also looks a little salty. He been around some. He may still be fast, some men don't never lose their quick. He may have some quick on him still. So you got your hands on your revolver grips so you're ready for your own quick, if it comes to that. It don't hurt none to be all set, all right?' 'Yes, sir,' said the boys, and Ray peeled off for his back shot. Then it was only a question of waiting. they didn't come slyer than old Ed Mcgriffin. He had a diamond ring on his pinky, given him by the president of Smith & Wesson in 1934, when he had set a world speed record, firing six times in four fifths of a second and hitting a man-size target in the gut thirty feet away in a group small enough to be covered with one hand. As he sat in the bar in Thebes, he held the jar in one hand, and slid his pinky underneath.
It didn't take much grinding. Diamond always beats glass. In less than five seconds, he had drilled a hole in the bottom of the jar.
What commenced thereafter was a little old-salt theater. He plugged the hole with his finger, raised the glass to his mouth, let the foul stuff touch his lips, but did not admit it. Christ, it would blind a white man in three sips and put hair on his palms to boot. Then, he moved the jar to the edge of the table, let his finger slip off the hole and in that fashion bled out a gulp's worth of lightning. He'd done this through five jars now, and his left boot was sodden with the corn alcohol. Drop a match down there and he'd explode in flames. But otherwise he was just fine.
He picked up on the deputies right away. Subtle boys they wasn't, no, sir, not by a long shot. One, particularly idiotic, kept pressing his nose against the window, flattening it even further. He was the big dumb blond one. The other one was furtive, feral even; looked like a weasel, dark and skittery, with tiny teeth.
