The Last Western

by Thomas S. Klise

  A new shrill voice came over the radio.

  “Your Holiness, this is President Shryker. Welcome to the United States. I’m sorry there’s this mix-up in our meeting. However, we’re sending a police escort out to your aircraft. There’s a special white limousine for yourself and your companions. This car will take you down through Manhattan and then on to the Regent Complex where we hope to have a more formal welcoming ceremony. There will be Secret Service men in the cars before you and after you, of course. We understand your own service personnel are arriving very shortly. Is that correct?”

  “What is he talking about?” said Willie.

  Felder took the microphone.

  “Mr. President, this is an aide to His Holiness. Yes, the security service and other members of the papal party will be arriving in a large aircraft in the next twenty minutes. We look forward to seeing you in the complex.”

  Joto, Felder and Benjamin talked animatedly among themselves. Are they arguing? Willie wondered. He felt faint again.

  Felder, smiling a little, leaned over the seat before him, holding a bowl filled with broth.

  Willie looked at the broth for a time, trying to decide whether to take it.

  You are fainting, he told himself. You have to be awake or it will all be lost.

  So he took the broth and very slowly sipped it. It was hot and it tasted like beef broth, and he sipped a little more and he did not taste that other substance that was in the broth that was not beef, but when he looked out at the crowd once more he saw them with great clarity as if they were actors in a movie spectacle.

  Flashing red lights came up to the plane, and he felt himself walking unsteadily out of the plane on the arms of others. He did not hear the crowd shouting as a crowd but only individual voices and he tried to wave but it seemed a great effort to raise his arm.

  He was in the big white car now and sirens were screaming and they were streaking across a field.

  Someone handed a thermos to Mr. Grayson, who opened it and held it for Willie so that he could drink.

  “Dear Mr. Grayson,” said Willie. “We are only in the third and I am going all the way.”

  Thatcher Grayson’s eyes lighted.

  “You are pitching wonderful,” he said. “As always. Drink this. It will keep you throwing hard.”

  Keep throwing hard, he thought. Keep throwing the hard high ones, or no, low. He sipped the broth again and felt the warmth come into him and also the detached feeling.

  “Six innings more and keep throwing hard,” he said. “Who’s up in the fourth?”

  “He does not sound good,” said Joto.

  “He is tired,” said Thatcher Grayson. “So tired.”

  “Need only enough to finish,” said Willie from far away.

  “Finish what?” said Joto.

  And Willie’s eyes, which had started to close, opened and fastened on Felder’s.

  “Brother Herman,” he said. “Who knows if you do not know?”

  Benjamin, Joto and Thatcher Grayson looked at Felder, as if to ask a question.

  “His fast has taken its effect,” Felder said.

  On each side of the car, the people lining the streets shouted the quick, unthought expressions, releasing feelings that were in them that they did not know were there. And some who came to mock and taunt the Mad Pope, seeing him, became speechless. Others found themselves shouting things out of their childhood that later they could not remember and would deny having said.

  Many wept openly. They saw him for a second, two seconds, the car was moving so fast. He looked like a thin red-gold old man, withered and ill, and seeing him moved them to cry out those unexpected things, and Willie tried to see them but the car was going fast and the broth had caused him to see things differently.

  He tried to figure out what had changed but it was too difficult and he thought perhaps he was only passing out from hunger.

  He saw Benjamin in the jump seat very clearly and he knew Benjamin was praying the Silent Prayer, and there at Benjamin’s side was Truman and the noise made Truman tremble and the noise was building as they went on into the city.

  Willie let go of the thermos but Grayson caught it and handed it back to him.

  “Do you remember Chicago, Mr. Grayson?” said Willie. “Chicago? I mean when we were there, when Clio doubled off the right center field wall the day they said in the newspapers he couldn’t hit?”

  “So well,” said Grayson.

  “In right center it is hard to hit the wall. Do you remember how glad he was?”

  “I shall never forget,” said Grayson. “And you, dear son—that day you threw pitches such as men have never seen before or since.”

  “Poor Clio. How can we see Clio again?”

  Willie started to let go of the thermos again, and Thatcher Grayson took it from him and then took Willie’s hands and folded them around the cup.

  “What is this soup?” Grayson said.

  “Just beef broth with some vitamins I put in it,” Felder said without turning around.

  “It seems to be helping very little, Herman,” said Grayson.

  “I have lost my pitch now,” said Willie in a sleepy voice. “I have got to finish with ordinary pitches.”

  “You can do it,” Grayson said. “Besides, you haven’t lost the pitch. No one can hit anything you throw.”

  “Never learned the curve,” said Willie. “Never learned anything—only what I started with. Now… .”

  The crowds were thickening along the walks. The big car slowed down. The high city was suddenly before them.

  Opening his eyes, Willie struggled up from his seat in the back of the car.

  “Look at them!” Felder said with awe.

  As far as they could see, there was nothing but people—millions of people, more people gathered together than ever before in the history of the city.

  They were massed along the great avenue where the heroes had once ridden in triumph. They hung from the windows of the once-proud skyscrapers. They swarmed over fountain and monument. They packed themselves deep and thick from the edges of the avenues to the glass panes of the airline offices and brokerage firms and fashionable shops.

  The car moved more slowly still, and the crowd stirred and moved like a giant slug, and there was an emotion in the air that was like a scent.

  Suddenly Willie pushed the button that opened the glass dome of the vehicle and at the same time elevated that section of the seat in which he sat, flanked by Thatcher Grayson and Joto.

  “Put it down!” Felder shouted from the front. “There are maniacs out there!”

  Willie stood up and held out his arms and the roar of the crowd beat against him.

  Both Thatcher Grayson and Felder tried to pull him down gently, but Willie had become joined to the emotion of the people and with one part of himself he saw what they saw and felt what they felt and, strengthened a little, he waved his arms in an imploring way.

  As the car slipped farther into the uproar, the shouts of the people came faster—strange cries that had not been heard in streets before, except once, in a forgotten time.

  Lord Jesus, have mercy!

  Save us, Lord!

  Jesus, Lord, give—

  “You need to see with your own eyes,” he said to them, and he tried to look upon their individual faces, to reassure them one by one, but there were too many of them and the car kept moving and the noise echoing up and down the long, wide avenue was like a true storm that needed something to wear itself out upon, and he was that something.

  He made the sign of Jesus over all of them on both sides and then made it again very slowly and still a third time, trying to send something to them that they could use even though he knew they would not use crosses any more, ever.

  Willie! Willie! Willie!

  The old chant began somewhere behind them, and when it caught up to their car, Willie stretched out his arms, leaning to this side and that. Reaching up, the people tried to touch him.

 
; Leaning backward and twisting his body, Joto held fast to Willie’s legs, fearing that he would be pulled from the car. The crowd wailed and moaned like a beast starving.

  “Get down!” shouted Felder. “They will kill you!”

  Willie looked down at Felder and Felder seemed far away and all that Willie knew did not seem important, and Felder raised his arms, motioning him to lower the seat, but Willie paid no attention, and of all the pictures taken that day, there was one picture taken at that moment that was more interesting than others. It showed Felder lifting his arms like the leader of an orchestra, and he seemed in that picture to be directing a mammoth demonstration that only God could fully comprehend.

  Up Fifth Avenue they went, igniting each block into a new burst of noise, up past the great broadcasting studios and the old cathedral of Saint Patrick, and the sound swelled after them and rose up on either side and rose up before them until there was nothing now but a hurricane of sound, and they were in the eye.

  Willie! Willie! Willie!

  There were black people and brown people and white people and people of yellow skin and old people and young people and rich people and well people and beast people and spirit people, and he blessed them again even though the did not want to be blessed and did not want anything they could give name to—but only to see and if possible to touch, this madman, this saint, this freak, this joke, this devil, this fool, this something much greater or much worse than anything they would ever be, this something they could use as a target for the drifting rage that was their only vitality.

  But whatever they wanted in their million unknown hearts, whatever they had come to get, what they received was a different gift, a surprise that they could scarcely have hoped for and that gave their chorus its peculiar intensity.

  For as he rode on before them, the sad Oriental eyes roving this way and that as if trying to find a place to rest, the red-white hair turning in the sun, the thin, even bent frame swaying to the motion of the car, the arms little more than sticks waving under tattered cloth—they saw he too was doomed, a part of the hopeless cargo. He became, in their eyes, the confirming sign of what they had long looked for, the enfleshed captain of their guilty secret. A thrill went shivering through them: That he should go before them and the bloodred circle close exactly as it had begun.

  I know, he seemed to say, with slow-moving arms and the old sad smile forming and reforming on his drawn face, I know and I accept.

  Thatcher Grayson pulled at his arm and pointed ahead.

  And Willie saw that dream-driven structure once more.

  It was there, like a tree, like any plain thing, and the dream fell away from it. Abstractedly, with the detached feeling that he could seemingly invoke at will now, he thought that this immense place would one day be a burial ground and that men would come here to remember all that they had wrecked and even pay tribute to the act of wrecking.

  The sun slipped under a cloud so that the bulk of the structure was shadow and only its top rim showed life, and over the rim stretching away, sickly clouds roiled and scuttled in the sky as if this building made war against all that lay beyond it and could not stand on earth in any condition of peace with anything above or under or outside its own possessed presence.

  The crowd, coiling and pressing forward, forced the limousine to stop.

  A tall, tattered man whose face had been destroyed by a grenade tossed by an unknown enemy in a war that had been waged for the freedom of unknown persons, wriggled up through the crowd like a snake, begging unintelligibly for a miracle.

  Willie put his hand on the plastic shield that the doctors had fashioned as a make-believe face for the man.

  The man immediately touched the shell, and the people nearby crowded around him to see if a miracle had happened. When the man knew that no miracle had happened, he lurched forward and grabbed Willie’s arm. The car began to move again, and a policeman pushed the plastic-faced man away.

  “My brother,” Willie cried, but the man was already receding behind a cluster of blue uniforms. The car glided forward into an elevator. A door came down suddenly, and they were swiftly borne up to the roof of the complex.

  When they reached the roof ball park, the driver motioned to two guards standing beside an enormous door. One of the guards touched a button and the door went up and the green carpet of the field spread out before them.

  The driver turned around and spoke to Benjamin.

  “He can be picked off from anywhere out there.”

  Willie stared at the unreal field.

  “You have got to get down,” Felder said. “The man says it is dangerous.”

  The surface of the field was too green. The crowd sounds, continuous and muffled, were like a growl. In the distance the name REGENT shone through the haze in faint blue lights.

  “To those who love God,” said Willie, “no harm—” He started to faint again.

  Benjamin pushed the button, lowering the seat a little, and the car slipped forward into the field.

  The crowd, seeing the car, came to its feet, roaring and shrieking and screaming the name of Willie.

  There were flags and banners in the stands, and placards and crude signs. People shouted slogans and catchwords that referred to L-Day.

  In Willie the sensation of detachment and disjunction deepened, and the people did not seem to be people but only pictures of people—perhaps, he thought, they had become pictures from watching pictures so much; and their shouting, perhaps it was a recording.

  “The President,” Felder or someone said, and the car came to a stop.

  “Still the third,” said Willie, looking up at the red, white and blue helicopters floating above the roof park. Then clutching Grayson’s arm, he said, “I’ve got to talk to Clio!”

  Grayson turned to Felder. “He is in no condition to—”

  Felder, standing up and leaning over the jump seat, brought his face very close to Willie’s. “Get hold of yourself. You are a sign. You cannot give up.”

  Willie saw Felder distinctly, but it was a man he did not know.

  “It is the third. I am losing control,” he said. “Nothing on the pitches.”

  Over the protest of Grayson and Benjamin, Felder half carried, half pushed Willie out of the car. Joto caught him.

  “I am a sign,” Willie said to Father Benjamin.

  He was moving now, with their support, to a cluster of smiling men wearing flags and other insignia in the lapels of their coats and holding papers in their hands. There was a little platform in the center of the field. There were microphones.

  “The real,” said Benjamin. “Let it enter you.”

  Willie tried to understand these words but got lost in the remarkable whiteness of Benjamin’s beard. The men, the platform, the stadium itself went up and down quickly before his eyes as he stepped uncertainly across the Plasti-Grass.

  The memory of the office came to him. He peered up at the stands where the artificial people waved their arms and shouted in faraway voices. The wind was suddenly cold.

  “Where is the office?” he asked a man whose smile he remembered from somewhere.

  “Brother Holiness!” George Doveland Goldenblade exclaimed. “It wasn’t the videophone—it’s you, your color—is it something inside you or what?”

  “Where’s Clio?”

  “The President? Why, he’s right over here, Father Brother. It’s Clyde Shryker but—well, most people call him Mr. President. Brotherhood, you have turned the color of a yam, which is not right even for an Oriental nigra, or whatever you were before.”

  “You’re Mr. Goldenblade,” said Willie.

  Goldenblade started. “You think I’d send a clone here—to this?”

  “I am a sign, Mr. Goldenblade,” said Willie.

  Goldenblade inspected Willie’s face, his own face blotching a little and working itself back and forth into a snarling grin. “I don’t know as I get your meaning there, Holiness,” he said.

  Felder, Benjamin, Gra
yson, Truman and Joto were shaking hands with the stiff smiling men, who seemed to Willie to be made of wax. A figure in scarlet detached itself from the group and came to where Willie and Goldenblade were standing.

  “I’m sorry things were so mixed up at the airport, your Holiness,” Archbishop McCool said. “Gol-lee.”

  “Do you know where Clio is?”

  “Clio?”

  “Clyde,” Goldenblade said sharply. “But call him Mr. President.”

  “Are you feeling all right, Your Holiness?” said McCool.

  “I am a sign,” said Willie.

  Goldenblade, taking Willie’s arm impatiently, said, “Come on, Father Brother, the President has a speech to give. It’s gonna be hell to pay if this crowd don’t get… .”

  Into the circle of officials, who stood uneasily with the disreputable Servants, Goldenblade led Willie, dragging him along like a reluctant child.

  “President Shryker, may I present the pope, the head of the Catholic church, a very close personal friend and a good old boy from Texas.”

  A pink-faced, pleasant-looking man, President Shryker smiled aggressively.

  “Your Holiness knows the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, I am told,” said the President through many white teeth. “Chief Justice Harlowe Judge.”

  Chief Justice Judge, standing in the row of dignitaries, waved an invisible nightstick at Willie.

  “How-yah, Holiness?”

  “Do you know where they put Clio?” Willie said to the President.

  The President’s face fell immediately into a maze of question marks.

  “For goodness sake, Holiness,” whispered Goldenblade.

  An aide nudged the President to a microphone. Eyeing Willie nervously, Shryker began to speak.

  “Welcome to the United States, Your Holiness. May the flag of freedom, reason and justice fly forever over the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

  The President’s voice carried to the vast throngs in Regent Stadium, and by radio and TV to the world. As he spoke, the President kept looking at Willie, whose dazed expression perplexed him, so that the words that came out now bore no similarity whatever to the speech that had been prepared for him.