The Last Western (64 page)

“You spoke strangely,” said Father Benjamin, leaning over Willie. And Willie saw then not only Benjamin but all his brothers. The strange conversation echoed in his mind.

“We’ve been giving you food intravenously,” said Thatcher Grayson. “You feel better, son?”

“I do, Mr. Grayson, dear friend, I do feel better. Where are we?”

Herman Felder came near the cot where Willie lay.

“We’re over Ohio,” said Felder. “We’re headed southwest.”

“We’re going to Illinois?”

“It’s a day or two early for that,” said Felder. “We’re going to a desert in Arizona. The others are waiting for us there.”

“What others?” said Willie.

“The Vatican guards and the others making the trip. You remember the discussion we had about this?”

Willie tried to remember.

“If we were to go to Illinois now,” said Felder, “the crowds would gather. It would be impossible for you to meet Mr. Regent. In the conversations I had with Mr. Goldenblade, he assured me that Regent wanted to meet with you alone. He said that you insisted there be no publicity.”

“It’s something you and Goldenblade arranged?” said Willie.

“Following your own wishes,” said Felder. “Remember the day you told me it would not be good for us to get there too soon because the crowd would come and wreck everything?”

Willie tried to recollect. He could remember taping last minute pleas for reconciliation which would be aired from Rome on the day of the twenty-third. He could remem ber dictating a telegram instruction to every bishop in the world to encourage priests within their dioceses to preach upon the subject of love and peacemaking on the last Sunday of Pentecost. He could remember many conversations and plans and late-night sessions with the brothers. But all these things came to him dimly because of what had happened in the place of the icons and because his mind, now in the last phase of the hunger, was getting cloudy and he knew things better when he slept than when he woke.

Joto seemed to be trying to assure him of something.

“Willie brother,” he said, “you spoke night before last of prayer—of being necessary that we prepare our hearts for L-Day in some quiet place.”

Yes, he could remember saying that. He looked at Felder again, and it was impossible to look at him now without the horror coming to his mind.

“Where is the place exactly?”

“It is a true desert area north of a small place called Nogo, Arizona. No one knows we’ll be there—not Goldenblade or Regent, not anyone. It’s a perfect place that I know well.” Felder’s voice dropped a little. “Once many years ago I made movies there, Western movies.”

Willie got up shakily.

“You’re not strong enough to walk,” said Thatcher Grayson.

“I’m okay,” said Willie. “Herman, I want to send a telegram to someone.”

“No problem,” said Felder. “One of the guards can take it into Phoenix. It would be better to wait until we’re ready to leave though.”

“All right.”

They set up trays of food then, but the sight of food sickened Willie.

“Some warm food, even a little, would help so much,” said Thatcher Grayson.

Willie managed a laugh. “Whatever Joto got into my arms from his bottles over there—that will keep me going a long time.”

Throughout this conversation Benjamin sat quietly, watching Felder’s face. He seemed to ask many silent questions, but Felder did not look at him.

“I’m going forward,” said Willie. “Just for a little while.”

He was weak moving up the aisle, and when he reached the cabin, he had to grab the back of the seat and the overhead rack to keep from falling. And when he settled in his seat and let down the little tray in front of him and when he put the paper on the tray and tried to write words on the paper, his hands shook and the words were not readable.

He tore up the first paper and started another, then another, and then another.

Each time he changed the wording. He knew what he wanted to say, but what he wanted to say could not be put into words—even if you had a good brain, he told himself, it would be impossible.

At last he settled for something that was less untrue than the other things he wrote.

Dear Clio. I have always loved you as my dearest friend.

I hope you are ok. I am going to die. I wish i wasn’t but there is nothing i can do about it.

Give my love to Martha and the Child.

Clio only love makes any difrence.

Maybe that is a sermon. Its all I know.

Clio if you ever loved me as a friend you will not shoot or kill anyone on L-Day. You will go and make peace with others, whoever

they are, they are people too. It will be hard to do this Clio but you can do it because you believe too everybody ought to be together instead of apart. I love you Clio. I have loved many people. I loved Carolyn back in Houston. I should have married her and never played ball. No, that is not right.

I had to be whatever I am and I felt myself becoming what I am and let it be. I am afraid to die.

People i love are with me but there is no one can help you die. The only thing that helps is to know that in one part of me i am still alive.

That is the only part of any of us that holds together, everything else goes. When everything else goes in me that part will still live and the love that is there, in that part, for you and for so many others, it will go on too and for always.     Willie.

When he had finished, he wept because of the memories of Clio and of their wrecked friendship and because, hard as he tried, the words would not come right and the words could not say what was in his heart and because as he finished the telegram, the plane broke out into the clear sky and there was the western sun that God had made, as sure and fine a fire as ever, and down below, the neat farms were laid out in little brown squares so tidy and careful that it was heart-breaking to look upon them—so bravely did people go on living most of the time, or try to, anyway, when they did not think about it so much. How lovely the world was in spite of everything. The evil in it was no match for the good—
except so few of you know it truly, thinking yourselves bad and being unable to stand it, and then you try to be less or more, and then it is wrecked, like me, like Clio, and then they kill like they killed you, Carolyn, and Carolyn it is time now for me.

The desert town
of Nogo was named after an Indian who had tried to lead a revolt against the United States Army in 1858 and who had lost his life in the try and whose people after that had been moved to a reservation in New Mexico and had slowly died away so that afterward no one could remember what the name of the tribe had been, if it had had a name at all, and later on, on the flat ground where the battle had been fought with the great mountains in the distance, the U.S. Army had put up a monument to the bravery of Sergeant Cooper Longfellow, of Concord, Massachusetts, who had lost his life in the fighting, but the monument was gone now and the shacks that people had built setting up shops to sell genuine Indian jewelry and authentic Indian pottery, they were gone also, abandoned and sunken in the sand, and even the old movie town that Herman Felder had built twenty years ago and where many epic Western movies had been filmed, was gone, with just a few falling-down unpainted buildings still visible on the sandscape and there was nothing or no one within twenty miles except for Carbon Crocker who operated a gasoline station on the old road that no one traveled anymore now that the freeway was in, and the plane came on, landing smoothly on the runway that had been cleared off a week ago, and no one saw it coming down but Carbon Crocker and the men on the other plane that had landed an hour before.

This second plane glittered in the sun, and there were many men, 100 or more, standing around it. They were strange-looking men wearing fine dark suits and they were motionless as they watched the pope’s plane land. Some of the men had removed their coat jackets and some stood under the wing of the aircraft that had brought them and because they were all wearing sunglasses, they all looked very much alike in their dark clothing and it was hard to think of them as the Swiss guard.

When Willie and his brothers got off their plane, a trio of the men came forward, and Willie recognized one of the guards, named Paulo, and Willie nodded to Paulo, and Paulo smiled and nodded a little stiffly in reply.

“His Holiness is very tired,” said one of the guards.

Paulo spoke to Willie. “We have sun tents that can be put up, Holiness.”

“For yourselves if you like,” said Willie. “I am all right. Do you have food enough for all?”

“All that has been attended to by Signor Felder,” said the first guard, whose enormous sunglasses shaded the lower half of his face.

“We plan to eat on the planes, Brother Will,” said Felder.

“Who will take my telegram?”

Felder took the letter Willie had written to Clio and handed it to Paulo.

“The fuel truck comes in a little while. Give this to the driver and tell him to take it to the telegraph office in Phoenix first thing in the morning.”

“Just as you say, Signor Felder.”

Willie blinked in the hot light. There was a thin, balding man standing near the tail of the plane, and when the man saw Willie, he came forward. It was Monsignor Taroni, looking pale, almost white, in the intense sun.

He knelt to kiss Willie’s ring, but Willie brought him to his feet. He saw that he was shaking.

“What is wrong, Pietro?”

“I do not know, Holiness. I have prayed earnestly for courage, but fear clutches my heart.”

“Do not fear, Pietro. Give your fear to the Lord.”

Coming around the tail of the plane from the other side was a stocky young man whose suit fitted him badly. Willie felt his stomach turn at the sight of this man. The man stopped, hesitated, and turned to go back around the plane.

“Brother,” Willie called.

The man reappeared.

“You are speaking to me, Holiness?” The voice was a voice Willie had heard before and the sound of it was like a hard-thrown punch.

“I am Willie, called the pope.”

Awkwardly the man came forward and in a half-crouch shook hands with Willie.

“Pat Joyce—Patrick Henry Joyce,” the man said.

“I’ve not seen you before, Brother Patrick. You are of the guard?”

“One of the special ones hired by Mr. Felder.”

“You are an American?”

“Originally, yes. I move around a lot,” the man said. Then quickly, with a little smile, “It’s very warm here.”

Willie said, “Pray for the great day, Patrick.”

The man, looking over Willie’s head and then to his side, smiled and said, “Yes, Holiness.”

“Tomorrow we shall have Mass for all who are here before we depart for Illinois.”

“That will be very fine,” said Monsignor Taroni, whose face grew whiter by the minute.

Then Willie went back to the plane, making himself walk as correctly as he could, even though he was sick and faint with fear.

The afternoon blazed on.

The officials and guards milled about their plane. When the sun went down over the western mountains, they boarded the plane to eat.

Willie and Thatcher Grayson sat under the wing of the papal jet.

“I would like to go to those mountains,” said Willie.

“That would be a long journey, son.”

“Too long for me, I know.”

“Why did you not eat with us just now?”

“I do not care for food now, Mr. Grayson.”

“You have had only what was in the bottle. That is not true food.”

“I feel better though, dear friend. After I make peace, I will eat true food.”

“If you make peace,” said Grayson.

“He will meet me, I know now,” said Willie.

“I do not mean him,” Grayson said. “I mean those others. The men on the plane. I do not like the things I heard this afternoon. There is something wrong with them.”

“Do not worry, Mr. Grayson.”

Grayson looked at Willie as if trying to make up his mind whether he was strong enough to hear really bad news.

“Herman,” he said. “Herman is drinking again.”

“It’s all in God’s hands,” said Willie. “Trying to change things would be like trying to pick up one of those mountains.”

At that moment Felder dropped down from the hatch of the pilot’s cabin.

“Bloody international manhunt going on,” he said with a laugh. “We sent a third plane on to Rome, you see. They’ve now found nobody aboard but two pilots from China who can’t speak a word of English, Italian or French!”

Grayson stood up. “Herman, where did these men come from? Some of them appear—”

Felder clapped Grayson on the shoulder. “Thatch, you’d worry about a legion of angels.”

“They’re—they’re drinking, some of them. Some of them are talking crazy,” said Grayson whispering. “One of them has a starry swastika tattooed on his arm.”

Felder laughed again; the scent of roses. “Don’t be so squeamish, Thatcher. They’re cops, not altar boys.”

Willie gazed at the mountains, but the presence of Felder was just then larger than the mountains, and there was a demand growing strong in his heart and a summons that he knew he had to answer sooner or later if his dream was to hold up even for him. For if he had to forgive and be forgiven for something that had happened in the past, did he not have to forgive what had happened in Rome, and did he not have to deal with this man standing before him blocking out the enormous mountains and filling the night air with the odor of the mortuary and did he not—

“Every man in that crowd has been checked,” said Felder, and Willie heard Death scratching something on a blackboard.

Then Felder went away, joining the men under the wings of the plane.

When the stars came out and the air cooled, the feeling of a men’s stag or smoker or beer party came to the desert. There was music coming from a radio, and some of the men were playing cards.

Willie, Grayson, Joto, Benjamin and Truman strolled a little distance from their plane. The mountains were still visible, but now they were great prehistoric animals that had fallen asleep on the desert.

“We have just heard weather report for that part of Illinois where we go,” said Joto. “Radio predictor says it will be very cold with snow falling.”