Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter

to his surprise, almost as if awaiting him, the old mama lady stood nearby. How had she approached without his hearing? Was she magical?
    Don’t be a ridiculous fool, he thought. This isn’t mumbo jumbo voodoo hoodoo, it was the blasted, backwater South, up some sewer of a river, where folks had degraded out of loss of contact with an outside world. He was in no danger. Negroes did not attack white people, so he would be all right.
    “Madam, I have in my pocket a crisp ten-dollar bill. Would that be sufficient for a night’s lodging and a simple meal? Unless there’s a hotel, and I suspect there’s not a hotel within a thousand square miles.”
    He held the bill out; she snatched it.
    He followed her.
     
     
    T HE house was no different from any other, only a bit farther into the woods. It was another dogtrot cabin, low, dusty, decrepit and tar-paper roofed like the others. A few scrawny pigs grunted and shat in a pen in the front yard, and a mangy dog lay on the porch, or what passed for porch, but was just floorboards under some overhanging warped roof.
    The dog growled.
    She kicked it.
    “Goddamn dog!”
    Off it ran, squealing. It clearly wasn’t her dog, only a dog she allowed to share space with her, and when feeling generous rewarded it for its companionship with a bone or something.
    “Ou’ back. You go where de chickens be.”
    “Why, thank you,” he said, wasting a smile on her, a pointless exercise because she had no empathy in her for him, and was only interested in minimally earning that ten spot.
    He walked ’round back, and there was a low coop, wired off from the rest of the yard, and a few chickens bobbed back and forth as they walked onward.
    “Home, sweet home,” he said to nobody except his own ironic sense of humor, then ducked into the place. All the rooms were occupied, and the innkeeper, an orange rooster, raised a ruckus, but Sam, sensing himself to be the superior creature, stamped his foot hard, and gobble-gobbled as he did for his youngest children at Thanksgiving and the bull bird flustered noisily off in a cloud of indignant feathers and squawks.
    Sam took the best bedroom, that being a corner where the straw looked cleanest and driest, and sat himself down.
    Dark was falling.
    He wanted, before the light was gone, to write out an account of his day for his employer. He filled his Schaeffer from a little Scripp bottle in his briefcase. Then he set to work on his trusty yellow legal pad, soon losing contact with the real world.
    He didn’t hear her when she entered.
    “Here,” she finally said. “Sompin’ eat.”
    “What? Oh, yes, of course.”
    It was a foil pie plate, her finest china, filled with steaming white beans in some sort of gravy, and a chunk of pan bread. She had a cup of hot coffee with it and utensils that turned out to be clean and shiny.
    “Thank you, madam,” he said. “You keep a fine homestead.”
    “Ain’t my home,” she said. “Used to be. Ain’t no more.”
    “It isn’t your home?”
    “It be the Store’s.”
    “The Store?”
    “The Farm Store. Onliest store dese parts. Da store own everything.”
    “Oh, you must be mistaken. If the Store is part of the state government, it can’t loan funds against property, calculate interest, and foreclose, not without court hearings and court-appointed attorneys. There are laws to prevent such things.”
    “Da Store be the law here. Dat’s all. You eat up them beans. Tomorrow you go about your bidness. I could git in trouble wif dem. Dey don’t like no outsiders. You won’t say I told you nuffin?”
    “Of course not.”
    After that, she had nothing left to say, and he scraped the last of the beans off the plate. She took it, and left silently. He saw her heading back to her cabin, stooped and hunched, broken with woe.
    Lord, I cannot wait to put this place behind me.
    He made his plans. He’d clean up tomorrow as best he could given the circumstances, then go to the Store or the office of the