The Last Western

by Thomas S. Klise

  “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were goals established by our Founding Fathers,” said the President, trying to collect his thoughts. It seemed to him that the pope might indeed be disarranged, as several of his advisors had warned him. It occurred to him also that the pope might be drugged or seriously ill. Smiling even more aggressively, he plunged forward with his speech.

  “Here in our country, which of course is your country, we have a beautiful old folk song which says This is My Country. I think of that beloved song today when I look upon this great assembly of Americans who are proud that this country is theirs—which is to say ours. My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” the President said, still smiling and trying to figure out what he should do if Willie should run amok as some churchman in Rome had done only yesterday, he had been informed, “which of course is the fundamental faith of my land, your land, her land, our land, their land, which all adds up to—amok.”

  The officials of the city of New York and the aides of the President who were standing around the platform shifted their gaze from Willie to Clyde Shryker even as Shryker continued to search Willie’s face for some sign of sanity.

  “This great land of ours—yours—whoever’s—is the land of Jefferson, Disney, Henry Ford.”

  “Is that man babbling or is that man babbling?” Goldenblade muttered into the ear of his brotherin-law, General Maxwell A. Harrison, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who stood ramrod straight by his side.

  “Of Thomas Edison, Saint Billy Graham, Samuel Goldwyn.”

  “By God, he is babbling, Maxie!” said Goldenblade, verging near a microphone.

  Moving only his lower jaw, not even looking at his brotherin-law, Maxwell Harrison replied, “Te logo rumi tegurithi.”

  Goldenblade’s face purpled.

  “Jesus Horatio Christ!” he groaned, and lifted a hand to his brow.

  “And of course,” President Shryker continued, pondering a possible route of escape in case of violence, “it is the land of that great American, Jesus Horatio Christ.”

  To Willie, President Shryker seemed a cardboard cutout figure that someone had brought into the park for a game or festival of some sort. Or maybe it was an ad.

  He did not hear any of President Shryker’s words, though he was aware of a sharp metallic ringing that came from the speakers at the top of the grandstand.

  What game was it? he wondered. Had Mr. Regent arranged to have this figure brought here as a joke?

  There were other figures behind the cutout man. Were they men or were they cutouts too?

  One of the figures moved then, and Willie recognized Father Benjamin. Father Benjamin was coming toward him but in a slow-motion imitation of his usual method of walking.

  You are going to pass out, he said to himself. No, he said, you cannot do that; they don’t want you to do that.

  Try to sort this out.

  Now—now—this is the ball park.

  I am not in a dream.

  There is some sort of ceremony going on. We were in a plane. Then we came through the people.

  This cardboard figure—and at that point the cardboard figure pronounced the name of Christ and Willie came to quickly.

  This is a man, he thought. He wants to pray.

  Father Benjamin was a few feet away, moving so slowly that he was many still pictures of himself, one upon another, as if someone had taken hundreds of pictures of him to show as a demonstration of an old man walking.

  As the name of the Anointed One went into Willie’s heart, his hands moved spontaneously to take the hands of this prayerful stranger who stood before him.

  “Huh-uh, huh-uh, huh-uh,” said the President, and backed off the platform.

  General Maxwell Harrison, as if on cue, stepped between the pope and the President.

  Grabbing Willie’s hands, he said in a solemn voice, “Te liri morganatha lu miri soo.”

  Like an ancient incantation, the Only-Therefore hymn of G. D. Goldenblade drifted through the microphones: hum, humm, hummm… .

  In the glass booth high above the field, the veteran newscaster Zack Taylor provided a commentary on the proceedings.

  And so, as you’ve just seen and heard, ladies and gentlemen, the President has concluded his address of—ah, welcome—a most warm, albeit informal address we must say—and now General Harrison, acting in behalf of our military forces around the world, has added his welcome—in a liturgical gesture of some sort which our advisors tell us is part of the revised Roman rite for the greeting of a pontiff in a sports arena. The language, we are told, is Syro-Chaldean or Aramaic—or possibly Croatian. Our research staff is busy at the moment trying to establish just what language it is exactly. But whatever the language, the gesture of the general’s clutching the pope’s hands was most moving.

  So far the pope himself has said nothing. As you can see, His Holiness appears to be somewhat fatigued. We have been told that the pope has been fasting for the success of L-Day for many weeks now—how long we don’t know.

  Personally, if I may be so blunt, ladies and gentlemen, the pope looks like a very old colored gentleman today—a far cry from the youthful miracle pitcher whose games we had the pleasure of commenting on just a few short years ago.

  It is indeed hard to believe that this is the same person.

  Now … now you see one of the papal aides talking to him—an old priest with a flowing white beard, dressed as indeed all the visitors are dressed—in—what would appear to be—some sort of sackcloth. Our vestment research department has been trying to dig out the dope on the garb, and I want to assure our viewing audience here and around the world that when we find out what the pope is wearing, we’ll pass it along pronto.

  We want to remind you that this entire telecast is being brought to you by Doveblade Communications, which has forgone all commercial messages during this special telecast. The president and chairman of Doveblade Communications, Mr. George Doveland Goldenblade, is on your screen, standing to the right of the ensemble. The gentleman who would appear to be holding his—that is, placing his hand over his—the man with his hand (cough). Mr. Goldenblade is at the right there.

  It’s chilly here in New York today, folks, with the weather holding at about twenty-eight degrees and with a strong easterly wind. However the emotion generated in Regent Park is such that hearts are warm indeed, if we may say.

  Whether or not the pope will speak at this time, we don’t know. It would be reasonable to expect him to make some sort of response to the warm and gracious words of President Shryker. But—

  But now, the pope is turning—and walking away.

  You see it, ladies and gentlemen, the pope with his aides seems to be heading for the limousine.

  Yes—yes. The pope is definitely leaving this great stadium. The crowd—the crowd, as you can hear, is beginning to react.

  We here—we here in the broadcasting booth are at a loss to explain the pope’s sudden departure.

  But as you see for yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, the pope and his entourage are getting into their car.

  The crowd, very stormy now… .

  Truman had taken the wheel of the limousine. Felder was in the seat beside him.

  “That way,” said Felder, pointing to an open elevator in the left field corner of the park.

  The car shot forward.

  Willie had fainted again. Slumped against Benjamin’s shoulder, he dreamed the flight dream, but it was a difficult, turbulent dream this time, and he flew in a storm and fought to keep his wings moving.

  “Give him soup,” Benjamin said.

  “I have none,” said Thatcher Grayson.

  “Give him something as soon as we get to plane,” said Joto. “We do go to plane now, Herman?”

  Felder was too busy directing the car to even hear Joto.

  As the car sped across the field, people jumped out of the stands and ran toward it. A man in a blue uniform stepped out of the shadows of the left field corner and
darted to the elevator. The car swerved sharply and then skidded to a stop.

  Felder jumped out of the car and shouted something at the policeman. But the policeman had already pushed the elevator button and the door was coming down.

  Felder grabbed the man’s arm, then pointed wildly at the crowd pounding down the left field foul line.

  When the man turned around, Felder struck him sharply on the side of the head, over his ear, and the man went down.

  Felder frantically pushed the elevator button and motioned the car forward. When the car had moved onto the platform, Felder stepped in behind it and pushed the button. The door came down only seconds before the crowd piled into it, screaming.

  They shot down the elevator shaft in five seconds.

  When the elevator door opened, they faced an empty street. The crowds were massed on the other side of the complex.

  “Move it!” Felder said, and Truman pushed the accelerator to the floor.

  Willie, waking from time to time, saw steel, glass, colored lights—all in a blur. He supposed they were in the plane once more, but then decided drowsily that there would not be so many things out the window.

  Felder kept up a stream of instructions to Truman. At the sight of a helicopter, they swerved down an alley and pulled up beside an empty hearse. The hearse belonged to the Smedley Butler Updike Funeral Home. The hearse’s owner and driver, Smedley Butler Updike, a distant descendant of the old-time author Nathaniel Hawthorne, had parked it in this out-of-the-way spot so that he might enjoy a quiet beer in the Fair N Square Lounge on East 48th Street.

  Felder handed Truman a ring of keys. The seventh key worked.

  It took all four of them to transfer Willie, now unconscious, to the hearse.

  They discarded the hearse ten minutes later near the Holland Tunnel, exchanging it for a beat-up Chrysler. They exchanged the Chrysler for a German-made sedan after only a few miles. When they had crossed the Hudson River, Felder, using the name of Christopher Albright, rented a Plymouth station wagon. By the time the police in their helicopters had traced them to the theft of the Chrysler, they had arrived at the deserted Woodrow Wilson Airfield near Iroquois, New Jersey.

  It was dark now. The wind blowing down from the north was piercing. Felder led them to a sorry-looking hangar.

  “He will freeze, Herman,” said Thatcher Grayson, holding Willie with his arms locked around his chest.

  “We’ll be on board in a minute,” said Felder. “The plane has everything he’ll need.”

  Truman, Joto and Felder rolled back the doors of the old hangar. There stood Felder’s other jet, fueled and ready for takeoff.

  “Just get it going,” Felder said to Truman and Joto. “I’ll give you directions when we’re up.”

  When the plane climbed up over the green lights of Iroquois and swung westward, a captain-aviator of the Swiss guard gunned the engine of the escort jet at Kennedy and headed down the runway.

  In the control tower, men shouted madly into microphones warning of the 146 aircraft in the skies above the field. But the pilot managed the takeoff.

  He headed out over the Atlantic, and everyone in the world except the 126 passengers he carried and the six men in Felder’s jet believed the pope had suddenly decided to return to Rome.

  Over the Atlantic the escort jet turned south, and the flight crew opened envelopes directing them to a region northwest of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Chapter two

  Joto fed Willie intravenously. Benjamin and Thatcher Grayson prayed. Herman Felder, sipping a morphini, said, “We’ll be in the desert in a few hours. Let them find him there.”

  “If he lives,” said Joto.

  “He’ll live,” said Felder.

  “What is plan of all this?” Joto asked.

  Benjamin and Grayson raised their eyes.

  “Keep him safe until L-Day,” said Felder.

  “Does he—did he know of all this, Herman?” Grayson asked.

  “He knows the general outline,” Felder said casually. “He couldn’t have lasted in New York. We would have had a hell of a time getting away from there even if he were well.”

  “You have planned very carefully, Brother Herman,” said Benjamin. “You have reasoned things through thoroughly.”

  Felder started to say something but Benjamin continued. “You do not know what he knows, though. His dreams have taken him beyond knowledge and plans.”

  Felder pursed his lips. “This is all to protect him,” he said.

  “Of course, Herman,” said Thatcher Grayson.

  “What if he has chosen to be unprotected?” said Benjamin.

  As the food began to work and the substance that Felder had put into the soup burned out, Willie found the flying easier once more and his eyes saw the blue distances again and he searched for a place to land.

  His nondreaming, reasoning self, standing off to the side, began to speak to his flying, dreaming self.

  Back to the old Bible dream.

  Yes.

  You can’t live in a dream, you know. Why not wake up and see what’s going on?

  I know what is going on.

  What?

  I am dying.

  You should be awake for an event of such consequence.

  I have an obligation to my dream.

  Surely you know how it ends. The bird finds the green leaf and brings it back to the ship. It ends well.

  For the bird?

  Come now. Even you know you are not really a bird?

  I fly.

  Men fly. Many creatures fly—all the way to the stars.

  You do not fly, poor Reason. You have never flown. That is why I have never been able to explain anything to you. And why I cannot understand anything you try to explain to me. We never shared the main experience.

  But I am your true rational self. The most important, the indestructible—

  Yet, you are dying.

  So are you, Dreamer. When I go, you go with me.

  Not in the dream. In the dream there is no dying, and we are all together—the Diver, Carolyn, Papa, Mama, all my brothers and sisters everywhere. We go on afterward. Forever.

  You have lost me.

  You were never with me. What have you ever told me, poor Reason, in all my life that did any good, that helped?

  You never gave me a chance.

  Would one more below-average brain have made the slightest difference?

  How can you expect me to answer a question like that?

  You are the reasoning part. Isn’t the reasoning part supposed to give answers? Why is it, when I ask you a question, you just make up another question?

  You are not familiar with the way I operate, I who am your truest self and the only one who can help you.

  You are not my true self. If you were, I would be back in New York at the United Nations or someplace and I would be giving a speech and the people would clap their hands after I talked, and very fashionable people would meet in an elegant room later and there would be fine things to eat—and during that time, 1,200 children would starve.

  You never state my position truly. You make things utterly simple, more simple than they can ever be, and do not even try to see how complicated they are in reality.

  You break up; I unite.

  What is the dream, truly?

  You are a temptation to me, to what I am about.

  You’re afraid! If you were so sure of what the dream tells you, then why refuse to talk it over with me?

  You’d find some reason to hold back.

  I will keep silent if you will explain.

  That is the problem, you see. If I could explain it fully, you and I should have no quarrel. To explain would be to show causes, have proofs, evidences—all those things you need for food.

  Trust me just a little. Test my—my tolerance.

  You are a temptation, I know. But I will trust you, or rather the dream, to try to explain a little. It is true I am afraid. Afraid of many things. And I may yet go with you.


  That is the healthiest, sanest thing you have said in your lifetime!

  I will try to speak to you even though I know that you will pretend not to understand what I say. With your habit of breaking and destroying, I know that you cannot accept what I dream. But I will try.

  Good.

  Go back to the time when we were closer, when we were in school together.

  You’re off to a bad start. We were never together in school. You turned away from me from the start.

  Not in everything, poor Reason, not in certain things that were taught. Think now. Do the thing you are supposed to do. Think back to when we were in Einstein together and we were in the classrooms where they taught all those different lessons and we would go to the moral classes and to the Scripture classes together and hear the theories. Do you remember those days?

  I remember.

  What was the one thing that was taught that everybody agreed was the most important thing, so important that it was taken for granted and never argued about and never questioned, regardless of how we all acted? In the moral classes they said it made all things perfect and in the Scripture classes they said that it was the best of all that man could have and do and be—even in those most advanced courses they said it was everything. And there was the one very brilliant professor who came to the end of the course and found himself unable to say the word, though he had no hesitation in using the name of God. That word bothered him, and yet that professor had read John many times and knew that John said that God and the thing I am talking about are the same. I put the simple question to you, Reason: The most important thing of all—do you remember what they said it was, even the theorists?

  Of course, but—

  Wait. Let me finish. We agree on what the most important thing is. Now tell me, what does it lead to?

  Now you are asking the questions instead of giving answers.

  Choose your school, your theologian, choose your Gospel—what does it lead to?

  Not to false innocence, not to lies.

  It leads to what you cannot stand. It leads to the awful, the unspeakable oneness that terrifies you more than dying.