The Last Western (3 page)

He set to digging a second grave.

Just then the neighborhood police officer, whose name was Harlowe Judge, came strolling by on his first round of the day.

“What you got there, boy?” Officer Judge asked.

“A bird. Two dead birds.”

“What you doin’ with two dead birds, boy?”

“I found them.”

“Where is it you found them, boy?”

“In the back and one here on the walk.”

“What is it you fixin’ to do with two dead birds, boy?” said Officer Harlowe Judge, who wore thick goggles whenever he made his rounds.

“Bury them.”

“Where you goin’ to bury your two dead birds, boy?”

“Here, in the grass.”

“That’s where you are wrong, boy,” said Officer Harlowe Judge. “Diggin’ holes in city property is against the law. Give me your birds, boy.”

Willie gently picked up the small light brown and black bird and then the larger orange-breasted bird and handed them to Officer Harlowe Judge.

Officer Judge studied the birds, turning them over and squeezing them in his huge hands.

Then he said, “Birds dyin’ all over, boy. Which does not cut any ice. Understand, boy?”

“No sir.”

“What I am sayin’, boy, is that I catch you diggin’ again, there’ll be Jesus to answer to all over this zoo.”

Then Officer Harlowe Judge said, “You take right good care of yourself, old redhead, and keep it straight,” and walked away.

At the corner he stopped and put the dead birds in a rubbish bin that stood there with strange words painted on its sides in great red letters.

Willie could not make out the words, but Carolyn said that the words were, A FREE WORLD IS A CLEAN WORLD.

*  *  *

Willie and Carolyn watched the television shows and visited the people of the tenement, and Willie found more dead birds. He asked his mother and Cool Dawn and Carolyn and Mrs. Sarto and Mrs. Morgan what was happening to the birds. No one knew.

The summer was very hot and Houston was a strange place to be, but it was full of wonders too, and Willie was happy.

Then one night there was the sound of an ambulance and a great commotion in the hallway, and Willie awoke and Cool Dawn and Willie’s mother were at the doorway, and there were many people in the hallway and Mrs. Sarto was crying, and then they were carrying someone out on a stretcher, and

Willie saw the red stain on a blanket and the hook dangling down from the blanket, and Mrs. Sarto was screaming, “He tore his eyes out! Out of his own head!” The women made Willie go back to bed, and he lay there a long time thinking about what he had seen. The next morning Cool Dawn told him Mr. Pitt had died, and Willie thought of Mr. Pitt often after that and wondered what he knew, the secrets he possessed, and he asked his mother and Cool Dawn why he died, but neither of them knew, and neither did Carolyn know.

Willie’s mother found a job in the Rib N Rum Room, a magic place illuminated by green lights that stood near a highway where cars went whizzing along at ninety miles per hour.

Every night at 6:30 she took a bus to the Rib N Rum Room, and she did not get back to the apartment until sometime in the night when Willie was asleep.

With her first paycheck Willie’s mother bought him some clothes and told him it was time to get ready for school.

And then the summer ended and Willie was seven years old and Carolyn and he went to be enrolled in the Saint Martin de Porres School five blocks from the William McKinley Arms and life changed again.

Willie still thought very often of Sandstorm and of his father, but sometimes at night he would fall asleep and wake up suddenly and see the silver hook dangling from under the white shroud, and he wondered when they would tell him the secrets.

The utter mystery
of school began, and Willie went into it like a frail vessel going into a storm at sea, and the vessel was buffeted by many waves and nearly sank.

In the first place, in all of the population of Saint Martin de Porres school, Willie knew no one but Carolyn Sage.

In the second place, Willie could not even speak with most of the boys and girls of his class or understand things they said to one another.

Then there was the matter of his strange looks. The students would ask him what had happened to him and where he came from and how he came to be the way he was. Even when he understood the question, Willie did not know how to answer.

Finally, Willie did not know anything the school taught, even simple things everyone else seemed to know before school began.

After school started most of the students of Martin de Porres could read at least a few words. They learned to look at the letters printed in books and make words out of them. They came to know something about numbers. They could write words on the blackboard or call them out when Sister wrote them there. They could print their names at the top of their papers. They could follow the tele-lessons on the miniature TV screens beside their desks.

Willie could do none of these things. He turned his papers in blank, with nothing written on them. He watched the tele-lessons carefully but couldn’t understand what the TV teachers said.

When one of the Sisters would call on Willie in class, he would smile uncertainly and say in Spanish, “I don’t know.”

He said this in a soft little singsong voice that made the other students laugh.

For three whole months the only thing Willie ever said in his first classroom was, “I don’t know.”

On the playground the other children would tease Willie.

Some of them called him “I-don’t-know.”

One day on the playground, an older boy from another class picked Willie up and held him above his shoulders.

“What’ll you give for a redheaded nigger?” he shouted.

The children standing nearby laughed.

“Mama,” said Willie that night, “what is a nigger?”

Willie’s mother stood still at the stove for a moment. Then she put her hand on Willie’s red hair and kissed him on the cheek.

“Grandmother,” said Willie, “what does nigger mean?”

“It is only a word,” Cool Dawn replied.

“But still it has a meaning,” said Willie.

Willie’s mother said it was a stupid name people sometimes gave to black people.

“Why?” Willie asked.

Neither the mother nor the grandmother had the answer to that.

The next day Sister Juanita was telling the class about God. She said that God was all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good. She said that God loved all people and was the father of everybody in the world. She said that God loved the world so much that he sent his son into it so that he might die on the cross for the sins of man.

When the class was over, Sister Juanita came down to Willie’s desk and spoke to him in Spanish.

“Willie, do you understand what I have been saying?”

“No Sister,” said Willie.

“What don’t you understand?”

“I don’t understand anything,” Willie answered.

“Then let’s begin to learn,” said Sister Juanita. “After all, you will have to learn your catechism so that you can make your First Communion.”

“Yes Sister,” Willie said.

“Each day I will help you to learn the English. That is your problem. You do not understand the words in the books and on the TV.”

“Yes Sister.”

“Each day we shall take a new word and learn it. Soon you will catch up with the others and know what all the others know.”

Willie could hear the other children out on the playground.

“Let’s begin right now,” said Sister Juanita, pushing a button on her tele-teacher. “Look at this picture and let us see how many things we can name.”

The picture on the screen showed a boy named Dick and a girl named Jane with a dog called Spot.

Sister Juanita pointed to Dick.

“We just saw this story today, so I know you know who this is.”

Willie looked at the white-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed boy.

“Dick,” said Willie.

“Very good,” said Sister Juanita. She wrote Dick’s name on the blackboard.

“What did we say Dick was doing?”

Willie could not remember.

“We just had the story an hour ago,” Sister Juanita said.

Willie looked at the screen and tried to remember. He wanted to please Sister Juanita, who was trying to help him learn. Then it came to him that he knew something about Dick, though he had forgotten whether it had been mentioned in the story or not.

“Well,” he said, “Dick is not a nigger.”

*  *  *

After school one night Willie found Mrs. Sarto sitting in the chair in the hallway. She looked like she had been waiting for him all day.

“You would deceive an old lady?” Mrs. Sarto asked.

“No Mrs. Sarto.”

“Then why do you change so often?”

“I—”

“You used to be my little Colombo. Look at what they have done—changed my own son!”

“Missus—”

“It is what they planned in advance. To deceive me. An old lady like me!” And Mrs. Sarto wept.

Willie tried to think of something to say to make the old lady feel better.

“I am not little Colombo,” he said finally. “Just Willie.”

This made the old lady weep even more.

Cool Dawn, hearing the crying, came into the hallway.

“Don’t come near me, pagan!” Mrs. Sarto cried.

Cool Dawn took Willie up to their own flat.

“She said strange things,” said Willie.

“She is a very old lady.”

After supper Willie told Carolyn what had happened.

“She is a witch,” said Carolyn.

But Willie could only wonder what secrets Mrs. Sarto knew and if they were the same ones Mr. Pitt had known, and that night the hook was like a light shining in his room and he heard the name Colombo whispering in the shadows.

Then he was saying to Sister Juanita, “Colombo is not a nigger.”

And Sister Juanita smiled.

*  *  *

The weather turned cold and there was frost on the cement courtyard behind the William McKinley Arms tenement and the grass on the narrow strip of front lawn had died and turned brown and was flecked with frost.

In the chill mornings Willie got up to see the sun and think things over, and every morning there were dead birds in the courtyard and sometimes on the front walk.

“Ain’t diggin’ are you, boy?” Police Officer Harlowe Judge would ask.

“No sir.”

“That’s good, boy,” Officer Harlowe Judge would say. “We don’t want Jesus comin’ down, do we?”

The birds were of all colors and sizes and species.

Carolyn said that a bird plague had come and all the birds were dying everywhere.

One afternoon
while Willie stood on the steps of Saint Martin de Porres school during the recess period, a black classmate named Clio Russell came along and said, “You are the dumbest person in the school.” “I know,” Willie said.

“What’s worse, you let people call you a nigger.”

“What am I supposed to do about it?” Willie asked.

“Fight,” said Clio Russell.

“I don’t know how,” said Willie.

“I’ll show you,” said Clio. “Put up your hands—like this.”

Clio clenched his fists and began to dance in a circle around Willie, looking for a moment like the fabled Sugar Ray Robinson who had been middleweight champion of the world back in the unremembered times.

Willie tried to imitate Clio. But with his face set in that sad smile that was natural to it, he did not look like a serious prizefighter.

“Hit me!” Clio cried.

“I can’t do that!” Willie laughed.

“Nigger!” Clio shouted.

Willie only smiled.

Suddenly, flicking out his black fist like a snake striking at a bird, Clio struck and Willie went down.

“Why did you do
that!
” Willie asked, rubbing his jaw, more amazed than angry.

“I’m teaching you how to fight. Are you going to stand there and let someone call you a nigger?”

Willie got back on his feet. His face hurt.

“Come on and hit,” Clio pleaded.

Willie doubled up his fists and swung at Clio. But Clio blocked the punch with his left arm and a second later threw a right cross which landed on Willie’s unprotected jaw. Willie hit the asphalt again.

“You’re not defending,” Clio told him.

“I don’t know if I want to learn fighting,” Willie said.

This time he got up more slowly. His jaw throbbed.

“You have to fight,” Clio said. “You can’t go around letting people call you a nigger.”

“Why not?” Willie asked.

Clio said, “You are not only the dumbest person in this school, you are the dumbest person in the city of Houston.”

Willie was still rubbing his jaw, which was beginning to swell.

“I’m going to have to teach you extra,” said Clio. “You are a hard case, maybe the worst I have ever seen.”

Willie nodded.

“Meet me here after school,” Clio said. He looked at Willie’s jaw. “I didn’t mean to hit that hard.”

“It’s all right,” Willie said. Clio was the first boy at Saint Martin de Porres school to take an interest in him, and though his jaw hurt he was glad to have someone to talk to.

After school Willie and Clio went over to the tenement where Clio’s family lived, a big gray building that looked like a silo that farmers used to build to store their surplus grain.

“We’ll go down to the clubhouse,” said Clio.

“What is the club?” Willie asked.

“The Apaches,” said Clio. “It’s only for black kids, and if you ever break the secret, you’ll wish you had never been born.”

“What secret?” said Willie.

“You’ll find out when you get to be a member,
if
you get asked to be a member.”

The clubroom was a place of cement walls and cement floors and many pipes running overhead. On the walls the members of the club had put up colored posters and sayings which Willie did not understand.

The club had a table, some folding chairs and two or three long benches which looked like they had once been in a church.

Some older boys were sitting on the benches smoking. One of the boys was George, Clio’s older brother.

“What’s that?” George asked Clio, pointing to Willie.