The Last Western (44 page)

Then occurred that strange, unexplained event, with all its consequences and interpretations—that legendary incident, which Willie himself never afterward discussed and Felder only once, a few short hours after it happened when the newsmen came rushing through the gray streets propelled by that lust for the extraordinary which, according to some, was the cause of the event itself and which, within a few hours, created the largest, boldest headlines since the Six Wars period and made for the most dramatic telecasts since the assassination of the last U.S. President and everywhere made it possible for men to have new poles of cynicism and superstition to fix bright banners to and for people of faith to gleefully renew that special superiority they had always cherished in their hearts.

The earliest new
s came from the hospital workers.

When the head night nurse, a man named Sergio Pinza, looked in on Herman Felder a few minutes after four o’clock in the morning, he found the patient out of bed and fully clothed, pacing the floor.

“Signor Felder! What are you doing out of bed?”

“I would like to check out,” Felder said calmly.

“You are dangerously ill—dying, signor!”

“Test my heart, my blood pressure, breathing, all the rest. I am perfectly recovered.”

Pinza dashed into the corridor, calling for the emergency team.

The team came, took the tests. Felder was unquestionably restored.

“You will tell us what has happened,” said the chief doctor, who had been called from a sound sleep.

“I am hungry,” said Felder. “Could you get me something to eat? I will make a statement at seven o’clock on the steps of the hospital.”

“Who treated you?” said the doctor.

“One statement—at seven. Take these instruments away for people who need them.”

By five o’clock, 150 hospital personnel had jammed into the corridors around Felder’s room. The word miracle went up and down the hallway, a verbal balloon that danced among the heads.

The superintendent of the hospital came to Felder’s room, an aged nun who had baptized 5,000 dying unbelievers.

“God has saved you.”

“Perhaps, Sister. I am hungry. Could I have a steak, some eggs perhaps, bread?”

“It will be done. I shall do it personally,” said the nun. “It is said the American bishop—the Chinese Negro man—that he accomplished this?”

“I shall speak of the matter at seven.”

“Where is the bishop?”

“Went back to his apartment, I think.”

The nun fell on her knees and kissed the floor that Willie had walked on.

Felder lifted her up.

“If you would get me a little food, Sister, and then go back to bed and rest. There are many sick people here who need you, I’m sure.”

“It is the first miracle I have ever seen.”

“If I should die now, would you have seen a miracle?” said Felder.

“You will not die, you have been saved.”

“I could be killed.”

“Impossible. God has saved you for some purpose of His Own. Please. Tell the particulars of the miracle.”

“At seven, Sister.”

At seven o’clock a crowd of nearly 500 thronged the entrance to the hospital. They were hospital employees, a few patients, relatives of patients, people from the neighborhood and newsmen, who had heard of the cure from the hospital workers.

It had been raining through the early morning hours and was still misting as Felder came out of the hospital and stood at the top of the stairway.

Felder smiled; he looked very fit. Later in the day when his picture appeared on television in the United States, people who had known him in the early days said that he looked almost as young and handsome as when he had married Maybella Thebes. He was wearing his white raincoat, and as he stood on the step gazing at the crowd, he looked, people said, like the French writer of older days, Albert Camus. His fabulous camera hung in its holster around his neck—he was once again the great director of films.

“Last night,” he said speaking into a dozen microphones, “I died and came back to life. I don’t know how it happened but I am certain that it did happen. After I came back to life, I was still very ill. The various parts of my body—heart, liver, lungs and other important organs—were functioning very poorly, how poorly the doctors of this hospital will tell you. I felt very cold. I was conscious of being in a frozen territory between life and death. I felt my body turning to ice and I wanted to go to sleep, which is to say, I wanted to die. Then a man came into my room—”

“Weelie!” someone shouted.

“A man came into my room. He sat down on my bed and began to speak to me. I could not see him but I could hear him. I could not quite understand him at first. He said something like, All men are one, and so for a little while let my spirit speak in the name of your spirit. Then this man put his hand on my head, and I felt something happen there—a sort of warmth spread over my head and face, though the rest of me was still freezing.

“I cannot find the words to tell you what I experienced in the next few minutes. It was as if my own brain had stopped working and the brain of this man had taken its place. I felt new thoughts pouring into my brain, thoughts that I had not had before, or perhaps once had and then lost—strange, fundamental thoughts such as we take for granted or ignore most of the time. These thoughts came in a rush and with strange images and pictures out of our past life. I say owrpast life because during this time, this man and I were one person. I do not know how this happened but I tell you that it did happen.

“I do not know the meaning of some of the images I saw. One of them was especially vivid—an American city that had caught fire. It looked like a war scene. It was a city I had never seen before. It looked like it might have been a city in the South or Southwest.

“I began to feel warmer after a while. I had a picture of a fire and I had the sensation of standing before a fire, a great roaring bonfire set upon a plain. I was standing before the fire and I could feel the heat warming my feet and legs. At the very moment I had this picture, I opened my eyes and I saw the man holding my feet with his hands and then placing his hands on my legs. But in my mind, when I closed my eyes, the other picture was still there, the picture of the bonfire and I remember wanting it to go on because the bonfire—how should I put this?—the bonfire was life.

“I found myself fueling the fire, throwing things into it—pictures and papers and strange things that I knew I had possessed earlier in my life. I burned so many things, everything I could think of. I remember burning money, a carload of money, and laughing wildly as the flames shot up to this very cold, dark sky.

“I felt tremendously happy, as I have not felt since I was a child. A simple thing had taken possession of me—the idea of living. That’s the one thing we kept shouting into the fire, LIVE! LIVE! LIVE!

“While I was in the ice world, there had been a voice whispering to me day after day,
Die, Go ahead and die. You know that is what you want. So do it. Go ahead and die
.”

Felder’s voice dropped here. On the tapes, which were repeatedly played in the weeks and months afterward, he seemed to mutter an indistinct sentence.

Voice experts, playing the tapes at reduced speed and with the amplifiers turned up, said that Felder said,
We pay the rent when it’s due and only when we’re forced
. A language expert in London said the words were,
Pain or rent is a due (do)
. Only what a weird farce. A team of language experts at the University of Michigan said the words were not the sounds of human language.

The vast majority of television viewers believed Felder had merely cleared his throat.

Felder went on, holding his hand over his heart. “When the man put his hand on my chest, I felt a terrific—a terrific joy, a feeling of wanting to live. I remember saying
I want to live
. I mean, I remember saying this out loud. Then we began to talk—I began to talk—to my body. I started talking to my legs first, then to my insides—liver, stomach, heart and lungs. I started with the feet and worked up. I can’t remember everything I said but I remember giving this special encouragement to my liver. I said, My liver, be a good liver, what the hell is the percentage in screwing up? I—we—would concentrate completely on the organ we were dealing with and we would try to cheer it up, scold it a little, or tell it to have courage, and we ended each little speech with a sort of set formula of words. The formula went like this: Be a liver, the rest of us need you. Be a lung, the rest of us need you. And so on.

“Finally I got to my head, my brain. It was like looking in a mirror, only it wasn’t a material mirror, but a special mirror which let you see your own thoughts. My mind—or maybe it was his—was talking to my mind. I remember only fragments of what was said but I clearly recall one complete thought. He said, or I said, to my mind,
Herman, you are a screwed up son of a bitch but so is everybody else, goddamnit
. Then I thought,
Okay, life baby, let’s roll
. My mind came back to a single track again and the man was gone. I said to myself, Herman, pal, go to sleep for a couple of hours and let these good messages run around in the corporal body. I looked at my watch; it was exactly four minutes after two. I fell asleep and woke up at four, feeling better than I had since my sixteenth year. Only I was hungry, starving even. I went through some medical examinations and then I had a good breakfast. And that—that, good folks, is the story.”

Felder, nodding and smiling, started down the steps. The newsmen with their portable cameras and microphones followed him.

“It was Willie who cured you—the American?”

“You were drunk when you came to the hospital, Signor Felder?”

“Are you a member of the Silent Servants of—”

The crowd, thickening and growing excited, closed in on Felder. People reached out to touch him.

“Lord Jesus, cure me!”

“In the name of Saint Anthony of Padua!”

An old woman tried to wave his attention to a wheelchair at the edge of the crowd.

Felder, moving toward a taxi, spotted the old woman, stopped. Then, taking the world’s most expensive camera by the straps of its holster, he moved to the twisted figure in the wheelchair. The old lady began to scream.

The twisted wheelchair person was a paraplegic of twenty-five, all bones and eyes.

“Here,” said Felder gently, and he rested the world’s most expensive camera on the coverlet over the youth’s useless legs.

He turned back into the crowd and fought his way to a taxi.

An exquisitely dressed man grabbed his arm.

“
Lawson!
How are you, Lawson?”

“I have some papers for you, Herman.”

Felder said, “I burned all those last night, Lawson.”

“Then you won’t mind signing them over to Maybella.”

“How is Maybella?”

“She’s fine. She’s in London and she’s going to marry Monte Stonechap.”

Felder took the papers and held them on the hood of the cab. He was still smiling but not in the same way.

“I didn’t know she even knew Monte Stonechap.”

“She didn’t until last week at Palm Springs.”

Felder started signing his name to the fourteen documents, surrendering control of fourteen corporations and giving his wife $59 million.

“Someday Maybella will burn these a second time,” said Felder. “If Monte gives her the chance.”

Lawson Thebes smiled for the first time in two years.

“I imagine the certificate of my incompetence is in here someplace,” said Felder.

“Yes.”

“Well, I never went in for competence much.”

The crowd, screaming and shouting, pressed the men against the taxi.

“A miracle,” said Thebes. “That must do a great deal for your ego.”

“It does,” said Felder. “You ought to try it yourself. By the way, I think I’ll keep this.”

He showed Thebes the transfer document for his film company.

Thebes laughed. “Go ahead and keep it. It’s worth four million in tax losses. It doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did,”

Felder smiled. “It’s funny, I don’t remember burning it last night.” He looked at Thebes but spoke to himself, to a joke that had formed suddenly in his head. “Maybe I was filming the whole thing.”

He handed the papers to his ex-brother-in-law and got in the cab.

“Give Maybella my best,” he said through the window, but Thebes had melted into the crowd.

The people began beating on the car. Felder gave the cabbie the address of Willie’s apartment and the car began to move.

“Miracle! Miracle!” the crowd shouted.

“Save me, Jesus!”

“Signor Felder, save… .”

Felder smiled and waved; the cab pulled away.

The newsmen, scurrying through the rain, got into their own cars and followed the taxi. Along the way other newsmen and a few police cars joined them.

In the little apartment on the Via Scossacavalli Willie and his brothers saw the procession spilling over the old stones.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” said Willie.

“I stall them at door,” said Joto. “Truman, come please.”

“Go down the back stairway,” said Father Benjamin. “Go to the Vatican and ask the cardinal prefect to admit you early to the conclave. I shall join you shortly.”

Willie escaped them there, but when he reached the piazza of Saint Peter, the people who had come early to gaze at the doll-pope caught sight of him as he made his way across the pavement.

Over their transistors they had heard news of the miracle and they rushed toward him, trapping him among the columns of the great arcade.

Willee, Willee, Willeee!
The piazza resounded with his name.

Willie tried to run but they caught up with him fifty feet from the first column. By the time the plainclothesmen of the Vatican could reach him, he had lost the jacket Joto had given him, his shirt was torn, and there were scratches on his face and arms.

As the security guards, forming a tight circle around him, led him away, the crowd grew more excited. Arms broke through the guards and fingers grasped at his clothing. The shouting grew louder, until it seemed the 162 statues on the frieze of the basilica of Saint Peter would topple from the roar.