The Last Western

by Thomas S. Klise

  Struck by his sheer immateriality, Willie peered at him a moment more. Then he saw that gleaming blue device—the great camera-gun that seemed an extension of the man’s arm. He squinted uncertainly.

  “You are a photographer, Brother Herman?”

  “In the old days, I used to—used to fool with those things,” came the voice.

  Now Felder moved, or rather the camera moved.

  Willie again had the feeling of watching a movie. Cigarette twitching in the hand, trench coat whitening, then dissolving in shadows as he swayed in the lamplight, the man was less a person than a filmic ghost with all the life played out and only the flickering images of some earlier life shining through, giving him such a thin reality that if the sunlamp were snapped off, he would cease to exist.

  “You are why I am here,” said Felder. “I have a message to give you.” (Was not even the voice something spoken on a sound track?)

  “From the Servants?”

  Felder nodded.

  “Benjamin and the others will be released soon from the jail in Atlanta. Another group—is taking their place.” Felder seemed to grope for words. “You are to get ready—prepare yourself in the spirit of the Servants for a larger mission that—” and the voice trailed off.

  “I do not understand, Mr. Felder, but I am ready to do what the Servants think best.”

  “It will be something—it will be similar to what you are doing now but in other—territories.”

  “I see.”

  “Most important to prepare.” These last words were barely audible. Now the odor of roses became stronger. Felder groped in his coat. He seemed to take something into his mouth from a flask in his coat pocket. He coughed, cleared his throat and straightened up a little. In a stronger voice he said, “You will have to prepare.”

  “I will listen most carefully.”

  “Absolutely essential,” said Felder in an even brisker tone. “Especially now with so many arrangements breaking up and the temptation being so strong to clear out as Thatcher has done and so many others.”

  “Mr. Grayson is still a very good Christian.”

  “Oh, don’t misunderstand. I love Thatcher like a brother,” said Felder in a voice that seemed the voice of a new man. “I truly do. But let’s face facts, Brother William. Thatcher has checked out and there is no way to reach him.”

  Felder began to pace back and forth in an animated way. It was as if he had been stricken by some awful disease, then having taken the medicine, had come back to perfect health. Willie saw black hair, a smiling, almost handsome face.

  “I’m going to a prayer meeting tonight with Mr. Grayson,” said Willie. “Maybe you would like to come with us?”

  “Oh no,” said Felder decisively. “Many things to do. Many, many errands and—things to mind. Besides, I don’t go in for that sort of thing. Too much the earthly, worldly Servant.”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t let temptation drag you under.”

  “Under what?” said Willie.

  Then the players came in, cursing over their lost game even while Thatcher Grayson praised the Lord, and when Willie turned to speak to Herman Felder again, he was gone. On the training table was a book, which Willie recognized as the Guidebook of the Society. He picked it up. There was Felder’s name on the inside cover.

  But as he glanced at the title page, he saw that it was not the Guidebook after all but a tract called The Decline of the Hero by J. Armstrong Manbult.

  * * *

  The prayer meeting that night was held at the home of Howard Arthur Amboy, a seller of Martha Washington dolls.

  About fifty people gathered, most of them long-time charismatics or Pentecostals, or, as they preferred to be called, Spirit people.

  “I want you to meet one of my dearest friends,” Mr. Grayson told the group, “Bishop Willie, whose great works in the Spirit are known throughout the country.”

  Willie smiled uncomfortably as the people applauded.

  The meeting began with the testimonial of Howard Arthur Amboy, the host, who said that since he had received the Spirit four years ago, he had sold more than 150,000 of “what we in the trade call the top doll, the one that says more than a thousand different things, some funny, some sad, some stupid, just as in real life.”

  Mr. Amboy, a balding man of about fifty, with thick black brows, produced one of the dolls, a perfect miniature of the wife of the first president of the United States. He squeezed it gently.

  My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, the doll piped.

  “The patriotic first lady,” Mr. Amboy explained. He squeezed again.

  George, you know that girl Patrick Henry’s chasing? Her name is Liberty.

  “The comedic, human Martha.” Another squeeze.

  Before you came along, George, what was I? Just another girl trying to find some meaning in life out there on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  “The loving, dependent Martha,” Mr. Amboy said, wiping his black brows. He held the doll up for all to see.

  “And people, do you know that when this doll first came on the market, I’d go up and ring a doorbell and think, They’re going to laugh, they’re going to throw up, they’re going to slam the door on my face. The doll is too tricky, it costs too much, it’s not relevant. I talked myself into failure, my brothers and sisters in the Spirit. I was a hopeless man, a figure of despair. Then one day, over on R Street, I heard a voice saying, I believe in you Howard Arthur Amboy—the doll believes in you. Why don’t you believe in us?

  “Right then, right there,” Mr. Amboy said, “I got on my knees for the first time since my childhood. I felt the Spirit coming into me, I began to pray. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember crying. Really blabbering. My partner, Fred Groove, who since unfortunately blew his brains out, came across the street and said, Howard Arthur Amboy, what are you doing? I said, I’m praising the Lord, Fred Groove. I’m going to turn Martha Washington over to the Holy Spirit. Then, though I don’t remember this, I guess I started squeezing all the dolls I had with me, maybe fifteen or twenty of them with the amps turned up on each one, so that all these sayings came out in a jumble and a crowd started to gather. That day I sold 300 dolls alone.”

  “Alleluia!” someone shouted.

  “Praise to Jesus!” came another voice.

  Amboy raised up the doll once more. “Since that day, brothers and sisters in the Spirit, I sold enough dolls to bring me in more than $400,000 net, and that is just the beginning. Our district manager, Mr. C. A. Chrisser, is putting me in charge of our new Nathan Hale Firing Squad Program next month. That job, which I owe to the Holy Spirit of God, is sixty big ones per annum and a percent of the flow besides.”

  “Alleluia!”

  “Amen, and praise to the Lord!”

  “Maybe,” said Mr. Amboy, looking angry all of a sudden, “maybe it is crazy, a grown man selling dolls. But I would rather sell dolls than guns! And there are people making their livings today in less honorable ways than I am, and all I can say is, God forgive them and show them the light of the world before it’s too late!” He looked at the doll, fondling it for a moment before he went on. “So I’m a slob. Does that matter so much? Doesn’t God love slobs? Is there anyone in this whole world who is not a slob?”

  A few halfhearted alleluias answered this question. Then Mr. Amboy sat down, and an old man with turkey lines running down from his quivering chin stood up.

  “I am Horace, age eighty-one. I did not know the Spirit until four months ago. I am Greek and always have been. It is better to be a Greek than many things. One could be Italian, for instance. Or Irish. One could have syphilis. My wife is dead. My children are gone from me. I voted all my life after I become citizen. My life was given over to sin and wrongdoing. Much drinking. Many messings with women, even though my own woman was good and worked like a crazy person. My wife died, perhaps I forgot to tell you. I fell into riotous living. Then one night in the bad district, I was hit by a flying bottl
e. My head became unfastened almost. I walked around for five days trying to find home. There was buzzing in my head. Then the buzzing stop and this voice say to me, Horace you are unholy, impure man who is going to burn forever for fooling around all your life. I think first maybe I am losing my reasoning. But the voice say, This God talking and you better hark to what I say. The voice says, Since nothing you ever done is good, do everything different—do exact opposite of everything you did. I go see man of the church who is believing in Spirit. He lays his hands on my head. Like a lightning flash I get Spirit. Since then, I pray in tongue and do not mess. Many women try to drag Horace into sin but Horace say, Foolish virgin, turn your ass around or Spirit will condemn you to hell. Women laugh at Horace, men too, but time will tell. Praise to Jesus and the Spirit!”

  “Alleluia!” the group shouted.

  “Orithi mega lui migosa!” a frail young man cried.

  Then a young woman, very beautiful, with blonde hair cascading down her shoulders, rose in a corner of the room. Very quietly she began to speak in tongues, then to sing in a sweet, clear voice.

  The group fell silent to listen to her song.

  Willie thought that the girl looked like a maiden princess out of a childhood storybook. Her eyes, very blue with the blueness of Sweet William, seemed to see a lovely vision somewhere in the distance.

  When she had finished, the frail young man who had cried out just before she started to sing, came before the group to explain her song.

  “Helen has given us a special message from the Spirit. The Spirit says that more riots and violence and troubles will come to America if people do not come back to God and to the ways of virtue. The riot in Baltimore, the Spirit says, is a punishment for sin such as is predicted in Revelations. Many more bad things will happen if America does not pray. Helen says that the Spirit is mostly discouraged by the lack of faith people have shown in the old principles. The Spirit says people now think whatever they want, seldom praying or even thinking about God. The Spirit mourns that many men and women today think they are gods themselves. The Spirit says that if we wish to have an end to our troubles we must all be reborn—rebaptized in Him. The Spirit says that unless we are baptized in Him, then nothing will go right—no matter how much money we spend on welfare, no matter how hard we fight to make things better. It is the heart that needs to be purified, not just cities. This is what the Spirit has told us tonight in Helen’s song.”

  “Alleluia! Alleluia!”

  “Praise to Jesus!”

  “Praise to the Spirit!”

  Thatcher Grayson turned to Willie. “Spiritual truth such as this is seldom heard, eh? It is worth all the sayings wise men ever uttered and much more than that. I rejoice you and I are here together to listen to it.”

  Willie closed his eyes and tried to think of something to say.

  He had seen the Spirit phenomenon before and he was seeing more of it all the time—people going back to a religion that had no truck with the world.

  Some of them had turned to it out of boredom.

  Some of them had turned to it because they needed some hookup with the sacred and could not find the hookup in their churches.

  But many of them, he thought, maybe even most of them, had been shocked and wounded and numbed by the happenings of life.

  Their nervous systems could not hold under the storm of so many new and dangerous signals; so they chose to leave the world, closing their eyes to all but the invisible.

  The world to these people was a hideous dream, getting more hideous all the time, and it was getting more hideous because of something called Sin.

  The wars, the riots, the suffering and the hunger and the tiredness of those millions of faces they had seen at night before the news blackouts and saw even now from time to time in documentary films—the few that circulated in what were called the revolutionary cinema houses—or in the occasional news clips broadcast by guerilla TV, all these were but signs of justice at work. God was laying it on man for the mischief of Sin.

  If you wanted to end the punishment, the people said, then get rid of Sin. But no one could define what Sin was.

  So when Willie looked at the faces of the people gathered about the living room of Howard Arthur Amboy, he could not laugh, he could not cry, he could only feel the welling up of that emotion that had become the permanent and dominating feeling of this past month—a pervasive pity, for all of them, a pity even for God.

  Then he realized they wanted him to talk, to say something about “the workings of the Spirit in your own life,” as Howard Arthur Amboy put it.

  As he got to his feet a single thought burned itself into his brain, He buried himself in all this.

  He wanted to speak of whatever this last was—for all he knew, it was an idea. But at the precise moment he opened his mouth, there was a crashing sound at the end of the living room, the French doors flew open, and there stood the forlorn figure of Herman Felder, more ghostlike than ever and obviously in trouble.

  “Peace,” said Felder thickly. “Joy—benediction—happiness.”

  He extended his arms with a sort of amazed grin. The world’s most expensive camera dangled from his shoulders.

  “Brother Herman!” cried Willie.

  “Lord God,” said Thatcher Grayson, going to Felder immediately.

  Felder glided unsteadily into the room, the Spirit folk falling back at his approach. There was something frightening about his every movement.

  “It’s all right, Herman,” said Thatcher Grayson.

  Felder raised his voice. “Thatcher, by Jesus Lord, how are you? How’s the Spirit treating you these days?”

  There was an embarrassed silence for a minute, then an elderly black man rose and began to pray for sinners, in tongues.

  “The music!” Felder said. Then he spied Willie. “The bishop, ah, the tragic bishop! Does the bishop fly out of the world or does the bishop swim with the rest of us?”

  “Help me get him to the kitchen,” Thatcher Grayson whispered to Willie. The black man prayed in a louder voice.

  As they half carried him into the kitchen, the scent of roses nearly gagged Willie.

  “What—”

  “Tell you in a minute,” said Grayson.

  “Tell many things,” Felder muttered. “Inner mystery lex eterna.”

  They found some coffee in the kitchen. Felder sipped from a cup, staring at Willie. He leaned back against a refrigerator, closing his eyes. Slowly he began to slide down the refrigerator. Willie tried to prop him up.

  Grayson grabbed his arm. “Let him be. Maybe he’ll sleep.”

  “He is very ill,” said Willie. “We should take him to the hospital.”

  “Ah, my boy, no hospital in Baltimore or anywhere in the world can cure Herman when he is this way. His soul is diseased.”

  “I saw him only this afternoon, Mr. Grayson. He seemed tired but—”

  Grayson reached inside the trench coat, dirty now—it was obvious Felder had fallen repeatedly—and found the flask that he knew would be there. He uncapped it. The rose smell filled the kitchen. Grayson poured a bluish liquid out of the flask into the sink.

  “What is it he has been drinking?”

  “The curse of his life—or one of them,” said Thatcher Grayson. “The morphini.”

  “Morphini?”

  “One part liquefied cocaine, one part liquefied morphine—and the rest gin and flavoring agents.”

  “That rose smell—”

  “Extract of tuberose,” said Mr. Grayson sadly, “the perfume they use in funeral homes. He thinks it takes away the smell of liquor. Lord! Think of his soul.”

  Willie looked down at the prone figure of Herman Felder. He felt the pity very strongly. He felt something else, a twinge of fear he would remember later and try to explain to himself, without success.

  “He is so much older than this afternoon, Mr. Grayson. Are you sure we shouldn’t call a doctor?”

  “We have tried all those things before,�
� said Mr. Grayson. “The doctors give him different shots which do not help.”

  “Is he this way often?”

  “He had been sober three years until quite recently, until he went to Chicago a few weeks ago. He showed up at the ball park and the demon was upon him.”

  “What is the cause?”

  “Who knows, dear son? The riots, the sadness of his family life, the troubles with his movies.”

  “He has a family?”

  “A wife—Maybella. I met her once, a lovely woman indeed.”

  “And they are having trouble?”

  “She went into a monastery in India. Then entered the space program.”

  “He has work? Friends?”

  “He has many millions of dollars, inherited mostly, but he made many more millions with his movies. Friends? In the Society only.”

  “Poor Scott,” Felder moaned.

  “What did he say?” Willie asked.

  “That is one of his movies—unfinished, I believe,” said Grayson. He bent down. “Herman, can you walk?”

  Felder groaned. Slowly he got to his feet. His eyes narrowed, then fixed themselves on Willie. He spoke in a rapid, confidential whisper.

  “Maybe give writers only five, six minutes. Show the great bullfighter mouthing that line about armed men—joy of armed men hunting armed men. Then cut to the Nobel Prize ceremony. They’re giving him a trophy with a guy’s head on it.”

  Willie turned to Mr. Grayson, but Felder grabbed him by the shirt, laughing.

  “Then, for the oracle of the South, we have a guy walking in an’ out of scenes talking backwards. At Nobel ceremony, says, Prevail but survive only not will man—however—see?”

  Still laughing, Felder slid to the floor a second time.

  “What—he said—” Willie stammered.

  “Lord God—a film—who knows?” said Thatcher Grayson.