The Last Western

by Thomas S. Klise

  “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.

  Chapter six

  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.

  “A new kid in school.”

  “Are you black?” George asked.

  “Partly,” said Willie.

  “His mother or somebody is a Mex,” said Clio.

  “Who is his father—Santa Claus?” George asked.

  The other boys laughed. Willie, not understanding what George had said, laughed too.

  “I’m teaching him how to fight,” said Clio.

  “He looks like he’ll need it,” said George.

  Clio and Willie went back into a small room where a great steel generator roared under a single very bright light. A dead rat lay in the center of this room. Clio tossed the rat into the corner.

  “Now let’s try to get down to the fundamentals” said Clio. And so the second fighting lesson began.

  It went on for almost an hour. Clio showed Willie how to hold his left out and keep his right in, guarding his face. He showed him how to jab and counterpunch. He showed him how to move on his feet.

  Willie was not a fast learner. He would hold his left out so far that Clio just pushed it aside. When Willie tried to bring his right in, he would move his body so far in advance of the punch that Clio said he could write a letter and mail it before the punch landed home.

  Twice, three times, four times Clio knocked Willie down, but once Willie luckily landed a hard right that shook Clio and sent him against the wall.

  “You’re beginning to catch on,” said Clio.

  Without any warning he slapped Willie across the face with his open hand.

  “Nigger!” he shouted.

  Forgetting what Clio had just told him about leading with his left, Willie suddenly shot his right fist across Clio’s jaw and Clio went down.

  At that moment George and the other boys came into the generator room looking for something.

  “Who’s giving the lessons here?” said George.

  Willie was helping Clio to his feet.

  “See the way he threw that?” Clio crowed, happy at the progress Willie had made. “Can we make him a member, George?”

  “He’s too little,” George said.

  “He’s a
s big as I am,” said Clio.

  George looked at Willie.

  “You want to be an Apache?”

  “I guess so,” Willie replied. “What is an Apache?”

  George’s face became very serious and tense.

  “An Apache,” he said slowly and thoughtfully, “is someone who sticks up for black people. An Apache will never let a black person down or ever do anything to hurt a black person. At the same time an Apache will never do anything to help a white person. Apaches are united against white people.” Here George faltered in his speech. He seemed to be trying to remember how it went.

  “Anyway,” he said, “that’s all I can tell you now. After you become a member you can learn some of the secret rules we have.”

  Willie didn’t know what to say.

  Clio said, “He’ll be a good member.”

  “Do you want to be a member?” George asked.

  Willie just smiled.

  “What does he have to do?” Clio asked.

  “He has to go across the street,” George said, looking at Willie but talking to Clio, “and go into that white man’s store and lift a package of Tareyton filter-tip cigarettes and bring them back here to the clubroom.”

  “Simple,” said Clio. “Come on, Willie.”

  But Willie stood as before, smiling.

  “It’s stealing,” he said.

  The other boys laughed.

  “So?” said George.

  “You can’t steal,” said Willie. His father had told him long ago that was one thing you couldn’t do.

  “The white man has always stolen from the black man,” George said. “Even from Mexicans.”

  Willie thought this over. Finally he said, “It’s still stealing.”

  George shrugged his shoulders.

  Clio took Willie into the corner where the dead rat lay.

  “It’s just a pack of cigarettes,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

  George overheard this.

  “He has to do it himself,” he said.

  “He’s never even been in the store before,” said Clio. “Come on, Willie.”

  “You can go with him, but he has to make the lift himself,” George said.

  So Willie and Clio crossed the street to Sprague’s Drugstore. Inside, Mr. Sprague was busy with a customer. Willie walked up to the shelf where the cigarettes were neatly stacked. He had never seen so many different kinds of cigarettes.

  “Go on,” Clio whispered. He pointed to the Tareyton filters.

  Willie looked at the stack of Tareytons with the red strip at the bottom of each pack and a little seal that made the cigarettes very official-looking. He knew he could slip one pack out easily. Still he stood there, just looking at the red strips and the little seals. Then he turned to Clio.

  “It’s no use,” he said. “I can’t do it.”

  Clio then reached for the bottom of the stack, but at that moment Mr. Sprague came out from behind the counter.

  “You boys looking for something to buy?”

  “No,” said Clio.

  “Then get out of here,” Mr. Sprague said. Without a doubt he meant it.

  Out on the street Clio said, “You had all the time in the world—a day and a half. Why didn’t you do it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Willie.

  In the clubhouse George said, “I’ll take the smoking tobacco.”

  “There isn’t any,” Clio said. “Sprague was on us like a hawk.”

  “I couldn’t do it anyway,” Willie said.

  George turned around and looked at Willie with anger showing all over him.

  “You must be a chicken,” said George. “Chick-chick-chick.”

  “I can’t steal,” said Willie.

  “You can’t be an Apache then,” George told him.

  Clio said, “We can give him another chance.”

  “I don’t want any chicken members in this club. Especially somebody whose mother is a … .” Here George used a word that Willie had heard before, and though he did not really know what it meant, he knew it was something bad.

  He went up to George, who was a foot taller than he, and hit him as hard as he could in the stomach.

  George fell back a little and Willie jumped on top of him. He got in one good punch before George pushed him off.

  Then George clipped Willie twice behind the ear and went to work on his face. Willie started to bleed badly.

  When the fight ended, Willie was thoroughly beaten up.

  Clio helped him wash up and then walked him home.

  “Why are you so dumb?” he asked Willie. “He is the toughest kid in this whole neighborhood.”

  “He shouldn’t have called my mother that name,” Willie said through his puffed lips.

  “You are the dumbest kid anywhere,” said Clio. “Man, you’re hopeless.”

  Carolyn, skipping rope in front of the tenement, saw Willie when he came home.

  “Fighting,” she said. “That’s brilliant.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Look at your eye. It’s all puffed up. Why do you do such a stupid thing?”

  “Go back to your rope, little mama,” Willie said, acting disgusted, but he was happy that Carolyn cared that his eye was puffed up.

  After supper Willie and Carolyn watched a television program about a cowboy policeman of the unremembered times who was kind and good, except to men who did evil things. These men he killed. The cowboy did not want to kill them, but in every program it turned out that he had to kill them, usually by shooting them or sometimes by beating them up and taking them someplace where they would be hanged.

  Willie always watched this program most attentively. He did not understand it but he was fascinated by it.

  On this particular program the cowboy had been badgered into a fight by a man who had called him a yellow-bellied horse thief.

  Regretfully, the cowboy drew out his gun, waiting a second or two for the badgerer to draw his gun first. Then he shot the man between the eyes,

  “It had to be done,” a doctor friend assured the cowboy.

  “I wish there were a better way,” said the cowboy.

  “It had to be done,” the doctor said once more.

  When the commercial came on, Willie said, “Why did it have to be done?”

  “It’s just a program,” said Carolyn.

  Carolyn’s father, whom the people in the neighborhood called Flexer, said, “It’s kill or be killed, boy.” He cuffed Willie lightly on his red head.

  Then, seeing Willie’s swollen eye, he said, “And today it looks like it was be killed for you.”

  Willie went to bed that night thinking of fighting and killing and trying to understand it. He thought about it a very long time and was still thinking about it when he heard his mother come in.

  “Twelve dollars. For that they get to tear your dress up.”

  “We should move.”

  “Where? Paris, France? We haven’t got enough to get back to Sandstorm. How’s the boy?”

  “Fighting today.”

  “Oh God, why did we come?”

  As he lay listening to them talking, he wished his mother did not sound so sad, and he wished he could understand things that happened that others seemed to understand .and take for granted but to him had no purpose for happening, except that they happened and people did not seem to think anything about them.

  His eye hurt, but it had been a good day because he had met Clio.

  “What’s the use?” his mother said in the next room.

  “He is the use,” Cool Dawn replied.

  They were still talking when he fell asleep.

  Chapter seven

  When the news of the fight between Willie and the chief of the Apaches spread through the neighborhood and school, Willie became famous. And suddenly everybody wanted to be his friend.

  Granted he was dumb, perhaps the dumbest boy in Saint Martin de Porres school, but still he had courage, as Clio kept telling everyone he knew.
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  And he was so good-natured and happy that the students could not help liking him—even though he looked funny with his red hair and slanty eyes and black-red-brown-gold skin, and even though he was such a bad student as to be a laughingstock.

  Some of the students felt sorry for Willie.

  Others were glad to have him in school because when grades were averaged in class, Willie could always be counted on to lower the average by several points.

  With Willie at Saint Martin de Porres, the usual F students were D students. Willie was absorbing the F’s of practically everybody in the class.

  There was another thing that made Willie popular.

  He turned out to be excellent at games.

  Even though he was frail and still quite short, he was fast and surprisingly strong in football.

  He could shoot the basketball well and could dribble the ball so fast that it made a solid blur of tan between his hand and the court.

  But it was baseball where he really shone.

  The first day he picked up a baseball and tossed it to Clio, he felt something wonderful happen. He could throw hard—harder than some boys in the sixth grade.

  In the afternoon after school, the boys would choose up sides and play ball. And Willie, young as he was, would always be one of the first boys chosen because he could pitch, hit and field.

  Sometimes older boys would come by, sometimes even grown men, and they would say: “That funny-looking red-haired kid—where did he come from? Look at him throw.”

  In the classroom, though, it was a no-hit game with the teachers pitching and Willie batting.

  Willie was technically held back in the first grade and technically held back in the second. (Only students who were classified educable by the school district’s central computer were really and truly held back to repeat failed grades. Computer-certified noneducables, such as Willie, were technically advanced through all eight grades, on the grounds that repeating grades would produce no significant educational benefits and only cause administrative confusion).

  Carolyn and Clio and many of Willie’s other friends were also technical holdbacks, but Willie was in a class of failure all by himself. Sister Assumption, the oldest of the Sisters at Saint Martin de Porres and the one who kept the records, said that he was the worst student in the history of the school.