Behold a Pale Horse Read online

  The battle raged all night. Cobra couldn’t see much because of the thickness of the canopy, but he could hear and feel the bombs and rockets dropped by night-attack aircraft flying from the airbase at Da Nang and carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin. The attackers withdrew near dawn around Cobra’s tree as he sat still as a mouse. There seemed to be many fewer than the night before, and many were being carried in ponchos. No one looked up until the last man—it had to be the last man—looked straight up at Cobra, pointed, and let out a startled squeak.

  There was nothing for it. His tree surrounded, the sharpshooter corporal slid down and surrendered his weapon. His hands were roughly bound behind him at the wrists and elbows and he was marched into North Vietnam, and later sent to one of the remote camps in the limestone mountains in Laos where prisoners of war grew opium poppies for the heroin processors in Hanoi who supplied cheap smack to the American soldiers in the South. Weakened by poor food, parasites, and disease, the prisoners wasted, went mad, or slowly starved to death.

  RUPERT JUSTICE TOLLIVER completed his studies at Divinity School at Houston Baptist University in February, and was ordained the same month. His draft board in Uvalde had kept tabs on his progress, prodding him whenever it appeared he was taking less than a full academic load. Rupert hated the studies, hated the way the Bible had become his life while loving its words, both comforting and frightening. More, he hated his dreary life of night-clerking in a Piggly-Wiggly store and living in a tiny furnished room over some mean old gal’s garage.

  Now he was ordained, a real-live minister of the Gospel, and the draft board wanted to know his plans. His deferment could be extended or he could be excused completely from the draft if, and only if, he had a permanent preaching position. Churches were hard to come by with divinity schools cranking out many graduates much like Rupert, who heard their calls suddenly and late. The little country churches couldn’t pay, and the big, prosperous churches in the cities filled their junior positions easily. Rupert despaired; he had never expected Lyndon Johnson to hang on to this dirty little war so long, but the end seemed nowhere in sight. Five hundred fifty thousand men, Westmoreland wanted, and every day the television news was full of dead and wounded being shipped to the rear as the army and marines fought fierce battles to take back the cities and bases overrun by the Vietcong during what was being called the Tet Offensive.

  Nothing for it, Rupert thought. Either find a church and continue starving, or surrender to the draft board, the last two years wasted. Every day he went to the placement office at Houston Christian and looked through lists of openings. He drove around south Texas in his rusty pickup, looking at weathered clapboard churches with leaky roofs and broken windows. Today he was on his way to tiny Batesville, in nearby Zavala County. Batesville, population 632, had a church whose pastor was ailing and wanted to retire. The pay was two thousand dollars a year, and housing in a tiny rectory behind the church. Rupert parked the truck and got out, greeted as he pushed open the door by the rising strains of quite a good choir singing “Amazing Grace,” a hymn Rupert knew was written by a repented Scottish slave trader.

  Rupert listened to the choir as his eyes became accustomed to the dim light. He saw a stooped, gray-haired man sitting in a pew in the middle of the church. He wore a threadbare suit of black serge, and Rupert took him for the pastor. Seated next to him was a man in a fancy western-style shirt fastened with mother-of-pearl snaps. He had a tape recorder beside him on the pew and held a boom microphone pointed at the choir.

  When the hymn ended, Rupert bent and identified himself to the minister. The man smiled, got up, and led Rupert back outside as the choir began to sing “Shall We Gather at the River?” “Very sweet choir,” Rupert said, as the door closed behind him.

  “Yes, we’re proud of them,” the Reverend Lovelace said. “Man in there taping is from KSAN in San Antonio. They’re considering putting on a Sunday morning gospel hour.”

  “On the radio?” Rupert’s interest shot up suddenly.

  “At first. You give a good sermon, boy?”

  “I believe I have the makings,” Rupert said modestly.

  “Man in there says they like the preachin’, they may do it on television. Myself, I got the emphysema, can’t hardly make myself heard any more.”

  Television! Rupert thought. A way to get noticed, to get into politics. What a windfall! “You suppose you’d let me preach beside you this Sunday? I’d be glad for your opinion.”

  “Why, sure,” the old man said. “Let the deacons and the search committee have a look at you, and also the TV people; they’ll be here.” The minister looked cunning. “Mighty fine opportunity for a young man starting out.”

  “Well, as long as the television thing didn’t take a man away from his duties to his flock,” Rupert said humbly.

  The Reverend Lovelace gave him a look of a man not easily fooled. “Not just local television neither. You know who owns that station and half the rest in Texas?”

  “No, sir.”

  Lovelace smiled, a twinkle in his eye. “Why, Claudia King Travis, of the famous King Ranch family that once owned a ranch bigger than some eastern states.”

  10

  June 2000

  THE TOLLIVER CAMPAIGN swept toward the convention in Orlando on a ragged wave of unpredicted triumphs, but increasingly vocal critics said it was a dirty wave. Justice won primary after primary in the West while Donahue remained strong in the Northeast and Midwest. There were stories of intimidation in battleground states, of ballot tampering and outright fraud. Joseph Donahue denounced Tolliver for running goon squads disguised as Get Out the Vote campaigns, and many of Donahue’s rallies were disrupted. Justice Tolliver ignored the charges and pounded his principal theme: Washington was a cesspool of corruption and Donahue was a comfortable man of Washington.

  The primary campaign went all the way to the fifth of June with Donahue once again leading in the seesaw battle for the nomination. Donahue had 951 delegates and needed 40 more to be nominated. Tolliver had to take all the big states with small populations to overcome Donahue’s strength in liberal California, which he won in late March to leapfrog over Tolliver’s lead after Super Tuesday.

  There were 119 delegates up for election on June 5, and Justice needed essentially all of them. He had 892 delegates in hand, needing, like his opponent, to finish with 991 or better. He needed 99, Donahue only 40, but geography was likely to help as it had on Super Tuesday. Primaries on June 5 included Alabama, Montana, and New Mexico, 71 delegates believed secure for Tolliver. The other primary on that summer day, the battleground, the toss-up, was New Jersey, one of the hardest states to read politically because in many ways it wasn’t a coherent political or economic entity at all.

  Wags said New Jersey had no head, because that was New York City, and no asshole because that was Philadelphia. In the grimy north were container ports, old, smelly refineries, shuttered industrial plants and blighted cities. Moving south one found bucolic market gardeners and some new high-tech labs and small businesses near Princeton University. Further south were more farms, inhospitable pine barrens and salt marshes, bedroom suburbs and rusty docklands fronting Philadelphia across the Delaware, and the island of glitter and skin-deep prosperity that was Atlantic City.

  New Jersey should have been an easy win for Joseph Donahue, with its urban concentration of blacks and Catholic ethnics. Baptist and Evangelical churches, organizing points for Tolliver’s campaigns in southern and western states, were few and far between. The rural vote was too small and market gardening was sure and profitable, not like cash-commodity farming of the South and West with its crop failures, poverty, and government subsidies. Justice Tolliver visited the state five times after Super Tuesday gave him life, and he sent the Witnesses in to spread the word house to house. Justice knew the grass-roots campaign wouldn’t be enough; that he could still have his victory snatched away by that smooth prick Donahue.

  Find out who hates that prick in New Jersey, he instruc
ted Ezekiel Archer. Archer gave the job to the Mormon, Jim Bob Slate. The answer was deceptively simple.

  Archer waited in the New Jersey capital of Trenton on the eve of the climactic primary after Tolliver left the state and flew to Mobile, Alabama, to be among friends for good television if things went right. Archer remembered the morning after Super Tuesday when he and a tortured-looking, sweaty Jim Bob had awaited the candidate’s wrath at seven-thirty in Justice’s formal office in the mansion. Justice appeared at eight, looking gray and haggard, but his eyes and hands were steady. He’d demanded an explanation of the incident in Baton Rouge: who had ordered the attack on the black ministers and who had carried it out.

  Clarissa had come into the office with her husband and stood beside him. Jim Bob caught her eye but her bland expression didn’t change. The Mormon thought he was about to be forsaken, and he thought he deserved whatever the governor might mete out, and would accept it without protest. Jim Bob cleared his throat. “I anticipated disruption at that rally, and in future rallies. The Witnesses are too identifiable to do more than protect your person, Governor; I had to find another instrument to defend you from just such an attack as those niggers intended, in front of television. Those boys what attacked the preachers are good Christians; I tell them to look a little rough.”

  “African-Americans,” Justice grated. “We in the big leagues now, boy.”

  Jim Bob gulped. “Yes, sir.”

  “Who are these people?” the governor asked.

  “They like to call themselves the New Zealots. None of their names are on any of our paid or volunteer lists.”

  Justice looked at the clean-cut, muscular young man, a New Zealot indeed. He was intelligent and devoted. Justice had thought of the Mormon as a blunt instrument, but perhaps he was more capable. “If any damn reporter ever got wind of this, it could erase this campaign overnight, Jim Bob.”

  “Yes, sir.” The boy hung his head like a twelve-year-old who had lost his homework for Sunday school.

  Justice slammed his palms down on the solid wood of his desk hard enough to rattle pens and pencils in an old artillery shell and make the phone give off a startled ring. “How the hell you take something like this all on yourself, boy?” he shouted, flushing scarlet.

  Jim Bob looked up at Clarissa with entreaty. She smiled at him, and placed her hands on the governor’s flaming, stiff neck. “Jim Bob came to me, Rupert,” she said soothingly, caressing his tension. “He was concerned, and he didn’t want to bother you when you were so busy getting ready to bust out on Super Tuesday. I thought I mentioned it to you, but perhaps I forgot. Anyway, I told him to go ahead, so it’s my fault.”

  Justice didn’t turn around. His wife had been running him for years and was de facto manager of all his campaigns. She had the organization skills he lacked, and the ruthlessness of the Texas tort lawyer she was. Clarissa was cold brainpower to his passion. Justice loved his wife, but he also feared her. He wanted to push her hands away from their strangling caress on his neck, but did not. He addressed Jim Bob as though she had never spoken. “I should fire your ass, Jim Bob,” Justice said evenly. “But you got away with it and it made good television. I don’t want to hear any more about these New Zealots, and I don’t want you doing anything like that again without Zeke’s approval.” He stood, put his arm affectionately around his wife’s slender waist, and kissed her cheek. “Come on, honey,” he whispered. “Let’s have us a chat over breakfast.”

  ZEKE ARCHER HELPED himself to a glass of bourbon and flipped on the television. The polls would close in New Jersey in a few minutes; later in the West and South. The Mormon had found out who hated Donahue, the victims of his crusading Senate Select Committee on Organized Crime. Jim Bob had added the muscle of the New Zealots to the money and influence of the Mafia to suppress the votes in the northern cities, especially among blacks and Catholic ethnics, and to stuff ballot boxes in the corrupt south of the docks of Camden, across the river from the port of Philadelphia.

  The networks reported light voting in the north, and a near-riot in Newark when two polling places were torched. The south voted heavily, with busloads crossing the Delaware from Pennsylvania. Buses arriving at black churches to pick up voters throughout the state had mysterious mechanical failures. One was overturned and burned in the middle of the Newark disturbance.

  At nine-thirty ABC News called New Jersey an upset for Tolliver. Alabama came in ten minutes later, and Montana put Justice over the top at half past ten.

  Zeke spoke to the governor at his noisy party in Mobile, had another drink and packed his bag for the trip back to Austin in the morning.

  Now the serious shit begins, he thought. He had another drink, and another.

  What the hell have I unleashed? he asked himself, his eyes wet, his breath coming in gasps. He felt suddenly ill, feverish, and nauseated. He ran into the bathroom and vomited, shuddering and weeping until he was empty.

  On television, large fires continued to burn in downtown Newark.

  11

  December 1968

  COBRA FELT THE MOST oppressive thing about life in the camp in Laos was the silence of the men. The Vietnamese guards did not permit the prisoners to speak to each other as they went to slurp their never-changing, tasteless chow, or washed in the cold, rushing river, or worked in the NVA’s poppy gardens or the small rice paddies that provided prisoners and guards alike with their meager rations.

  Any prisoner talking was shouted at, beaten with the long bamboo staffs the guards carried in addition to their weapons, or locked down in one of the reeking punishment pits dug into the soft, wet earth and covered with a grill of lashed-together bamboo. The guards talked constantly, in their singsongy language punctuated with giggles and laughter. Cobra learned that laughter, derision, was a great insult in the Vietnamese culture. The listless prisoners were ridiculed for how they looked, ate, slept, worked, and failed to resist. Cobra picked up a few words and phrases; all the prisoners did. Bui moi made savage, brute, and was a favorite taunt.

  Once the guards had locked the prisoners in their sleeping hootches and moved away, the prisoners could have talked, but mostly they didn’t. Cobra was used to working alone and wasn’t bothered by silence, but he felt that in the others the silence was a manifestation of surrender, of loss of will.

  Different prisoners reacted to the camp in different ways, but resignation was by far the most common response. Men who arrived sick or wounded often wasted and died in a month or so, despite the primitive but sincere efforts of the Pathet Lao barefoot doctor who made the rounds of the camps and stations with her knapsack of native herbal medicines and occasionally some captured Western antibiotics.

  One man was different. A huge, muscular man six feet three or four and over two hundred fifty pounds with sunburned skin, black hair, and hard black eyes, he had been brought to the camp from North Vietnam at the same time as Cobra. He wasted like the others because of the poor food and the ravages of parasites, and became gaunt and stooped, but his eyes remained hard and flat, giving away nothing. The Viets called him con trau, water buffalo, because of his great size and strength, and they stayed clear of him with their bamboos, though he never gave them cause to use them.

  The Viets gave all the prisoners the names of animals, another insult. They called Cobra con ran da, black snake, and that amused him.

  Water Buffalo’s real name was Moser. Just Moser, Cobra didn’t know if it was a first or last name. Moser spent a lot of time looking at the river running swiftly in its gorge below the camp, and one night he slipped out of camp, mounted a primitive raft, and joined the river on its journey south.

  Each day after the big man left, the prisoners did talk to each other, and took their beatings from the angry and embarrassed guards. Spirits long absent rose in the shambling men, and many tried to stand a little taller. Moser would get out, they told themselves. Moser would find his way to Thailand and send back rescuers to the camp.

  Nine days after he es
caped, Moser did return to camp, not with a rescue team but a ragged squad of Pathet Lao guerrillas, allies of the NVA when they got paid. The guards beat Moser, mutilated him, and strapped his body to the water pump that irrigated the rice paddy by the river. A greater gloom than ever gripped the horrified prisoners, and illness, madness, and black despair increased.

  Cobra drove himself deep within, resolved to keep his sanity and survive.

  RUPERT JUSTICE TOLLIVER preached side by side with the Reverend Lovelace for barely three weeks before the search committee and the deacons asked him to become pastor of Batesville Church of Jesus Present and granted Lovelace his pension and retirement to his poor, dusty ranch. KSAN radio broadcast the choir for a half hour, then decided they liked Rupert’s preaching and expanded the broadcast to an hour, forty-five minutes of hymns and fifteen for the sermon. By December the program had moved to television as well as radio, and expanded again to include the entire worship service, ninety minutes in a television market of over a million people.

  Rupert—Brother Rupert Justice on the air—didn’t give the uplifting speeches of sacrifice and reward or the fire-and-brimstone jeremiads of sin and inevitable damnation that characterized radio preachers who had grown out of the old tent revivals of the thirties and forties. He used the same lessons and stories from the Holy Scripture, but his message was increasingly political. The smug, Godless Eastern establishment, allied with the moneyed interests around the world who answered to no God or government, had stolen control of the world economy and the U.S. government, ruined the schools, bowed to the moneybags of big business and the corrupt, powerful leaders of the unions. Poor God-fearing people were left aside while the fat pigs controlled the trough. His message was populist: give the people access, take the foot of the bankers off the neck of the honest farmer, the laborer, the small businessman. Make the government the helpmeet of the poor widow, the helpless child, the good man down on his luck.