The Last Western (12 page)

Willie tried to think of something to say, but the music floated around them and he felt himself in a sort of mist.

Out of his pocket Robert ‘Bob’ Regent brought a thick packet of printed clippings. He called for a candelabrum.

“Look here,” he said sadly. “See what they write of me. That one, for instance.” He pointed to a clipping from The New York Sun.

Under a garish caricature of Robert ‘Bob’ Regent, the caption said, FRANTIC FREAKISHNESS OF FRIENDLY BOB.

Willie’s eyes fastened on a single paragraph.

Regent, whose properties include television and radio stations, wineries and publishing houses, theaters and nightclubs, plus the New York Hawks baseball team, throws parties that rival those of Jay Gatsby. But no one calls him friend.

“Who is Jay Gatsby?”

“A character in a book,” said Robert ‘Bob’ Regent. “And God knows, they’re right. That’s the way I often feel—like a character in a book, someone they made up but didn’t make a friend for.”

These last words were said so mournfully, Willie felt the stir of a profound pity. His host seemed utterly broken, bereft and alone. Willie tried to think of something kind to say. Finally he said, “I—I’ll be your friend.”

The candelabrum had been removed, so he couldn’t be sure in the darkness, but Willie thought he saw Regent’s shoulders move. He wondered if the man might not actually be crying.

“Sir—”

Again that pathetic little wave of the hand.

Finally Regent lifted his face.

“My boy,” he said huskily, “those are the happiest words I’ve heard—in years.”

The music rose and fell from the darker room. Willie felt the fever of it, the insinuation of another world that he both knew and did not know.

Regent’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“Take this.”

He handed Willie a small box.

“Open it.”

Willie opened it. There, gleaming in the light of the guttering candle, was the ruby ring of the New York Hawks.

“Put it on, my boy,” said Robert ‘Bob’ Regent.

Willie slipped the ring on the third finger of his left hand. Its dark red stone flared and flashed, throwing a ray of red across the silver hawk perched above it, diamonds for its eyes.

“It feels—”

“The sign of our alliance.”

“I didn’t think a ring could… .”

Regent’s voice went on in time with the odd drifting music, “… symbol … friendship … indestructible… “

Willie turned the ring on his finger, trying to account for the feeling it gave to his hand, his arm, indeed his whole body. As he looked at that red stone, he felt the pull of a solemn, alien strength.
There was a camp fire, torches, the sound of a primitive chant. Faces gleaming in firelight, bodies moving in a circle. Someone had a knife.

He stood up suddenly. He felt himself perspiring.

“I’ve got to get back,” he said. “We’ve got a game tomorrow. Where’s Clio?” It occurred to him that he was shouting.

“Clio’s all right, my boy. Let us talk awhile.”

“No, really, Mr. Regent—I mean, Bob. We have the training rules and—”

“Ah,” laughed Regent. “How refreshing to meet a man who relishes the rules.”

“What about Clio?”

“We’ll take the carriage back to the hotel, then send it back for him.”

On their way out, Willie looked for Clio on the dance floor where couples moved slowly, like mannequins set to music. Clio was gone.

“Don’t worry,” said Robert ‘Bob’ Regent. “Gide will find him and bring him back safely.”

In the night air Willie realized how drunk he was. He looked up at the stars swimming about the sky. Robert ‘Bob’ Regent spoke of friendship and honor and devotion and things Willie could not concentrate on.

At the hotel Regent took his hand.

“You cannot know how happy I am.”

“Good night—Bob.”

“Remember our motto:
Unity through obedience
.”

Then the carriage clattered off into the darkness.

In the lobby Willie met Mr. Grayson.

“I know I’ve broken the rules,” Willie said. “We were with the owner.”

“I know,” said Mr. Grayson. “Did he give you the ring?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s Clio?”

“I don’t know. At some restaurant.”

“Go to bed, son. We go to Chicago after the game tomorrow to open the season.”

“Yes sir.”

“You got to pitch that opener.”

“Yes, Mr. Grayson.”

“So you need the rest,” Mr. Grayson said, fumbling his words a little. In truth, it appeared that it was he who needed the rest.

“But don’t let things worry you, son,” he said. “And remember, be faithful to yourself.”

Mr. Grayson hesitated. He gestured with his pipe as if he wanted to say more but didn’t know how.

“I’ll be okay, Mr. Grayson,” said Willie.

“That’s what I been praying for,” said Mr. Grayson.

Willie spied the
Vest Pocket Ezee Bible
in Mr. Grayson’s jacket pocket.

“I been reading what the Lord Jesus told the players in his day,” said Mr. Grayson. “Do not store treasures for yourselves on earth, where moths and woodworms destroy them and thieves can break in and steal. But store up treasures for yourselves in heaven. I been praying in that vein tonight. Now, son, go to bed and you too try to pray.”

Willie thanked Mr. Grayson and went to his room, promising to pray.

But that night his prayers were fretful. Clio did not return.

Willie lay awake listening to the tolling of a bell somewhere in the city. He kept thinking of all that had happened that night and once, after dozing off a little, he awoke with the feeling that it had not really happened, that Regent and the whole night on the town had been a dream. Then he felt the ring on his finger.

He tried to understand what had happened—
had
it happened?

He thought then of his mother and Cool Dawn and of the people of the William McKinley Arms. He thought of Carolyn. He called the desk—it was three in the morning, too late to phone her. So he lay awake and tried to make the shadows of the room go together to make a picture of her face. The bell tolled again.

At dawn the key turned in the door, and there in the gray light stood Clio. He looked wan and dazed. Willie got out of bed.

“Are you all right?”

“She works for him,” Clio said from a long way off. “He owns that restaurant. Everybody there works for him.”

“Where did you go?”

“To her place. Her name is Martha and she—she’s—she works for him. He’s got something on her father, and the manager of the restaurant says she has to work there. She has to do all sorts of things because they have something on her father—it’s terrible!”

“We’ll help, Clio,” said Willie. “Tomorrow we’ll go see Mr. Regent and—”

“He’s a crook!” cried Clio. “Why, he owns people all over. Martha says he owns the tenements where she lives.”

“He doesn’t own people.”

“Yes he does. He controls them. Like Martha,” and Clio’s voice broke. “We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to help her.”

But there wasn’t time to help. After the game the next day, the team boarded an airplane for Chicago to start the season.

Earlier, a cab had brought Martha to the ball park, and for a little while before the game and a little while after it, she and Clio talked.

Willie watched them from his place in the dugout and tried to think of what to do.

Martha seemed very beautiful to Willie, much more beautiful in the sunlight than in the restaurant the night before. But there was a sadness about her; she looked tiny and helpless in the stands.

After the game, Clio nearly missed the bus. He stood holding Martha until the last minute on a little platform outside the ball park, under a sign that said, REGENT WINE—AND THE WORLD IS FINE.

Willie saw them there. Clio seemed to be reassuring her.

But there was no reassuring Clio on the plane hurrying up the great Mississippi Delta.

“I love her,” he kept saying, “and he owns her.”

“We’ll work it out,” Willie would say. “We’ll work it out with Regent.”

“It’s impossible,” said Clio. “He doesn’t have a heart.”

The next day
the baseball season opened in Chicago, Illinois.

The President of the United States opened the season by throwing the first ball to the catcher of the Chicago Cougars.

It took the President several throws to accomplish this feat. He was tired and worn and had a bad arm besides.

One of his pitches hit the Vice-President of the United States, who was dozing in a box seat under the presidential pavilion.

The Vice-President, dreaming that someone had nudged him at some banquet, stood up and said: “My fellow Americans, I believe in JERCUS, I believe in God, I believe in reason.”

An aide told him he was at a ball game.

“Where?” said the Vice-President.

“Chicago,” said the aide.

“I believe in Chicago,” said the Vice-President.

The President, having finally got the ball to the Chicago catcher, moved to a bank of microphones.

“Fellow Americans,” he said, “it is good for us to be here on this beautiful day to observe our national pastime.

“Today, with so much trouble in the world and with so many people trying to destroy our American way of life, it is particularly good for us to come together, to put aside our cares and at the same time, to remember who and what we are.

“As I look at this beautiful new stadium and the new miracle grass that is so much greener and so much neater than the old regular grass, and as I listen to the chirping of the new mechanical birds that fly through the air so much more gracefully than the old sparrows and starlings we used to have, I can only think that if we can apply the same imagination, hard work and sacrifice that have brought these wonders into our lives to the problems we face in other countries, then ours shall be the inevitable victory.”

Here the people applauded.

“I have just returned from the battlefields of the six conflicts our nation, along with our JERCUS allies, is presently involved in. And though the news freeze, which I myself put into effect six months ago, prevents my speaking about those struggles in detail, I want to assure you today that our fighting men are representing you in the finest traditions of our country.

“I know they join me from the far corners of the world as I say,
play ball!
”

A great roar went up from the crowd.

As the President slumped back in his beribboned box seat, Willie began to think of the wars. In Uruguay. In Uganda. In India. In the Arctic. In the Middle East. In the Philippines.

He wondered not how the wars were going, as most Americans wondered then, but
why
they were going on at all.

The reason for the wars was never discussed.

Since the news freeze had begun, only good news could be printed or televised, so there had been no news of the wars for more than eight months and there had been no news of the civil disturbances in the cities either, even though it was rumored that the civil disturbances this year were the worst in the history of the country.

There were rumors of civil disturbances in Chicago, and on the way to the ball park, the players had seen a burning building. There were barricades blocking off certain streets, and the ball park itself was surrounded by troops of the National Guard.

Willie could see the soldiers patrolling through the stands and prowling about the top of the stadium, their rifles glinting in the sun, the mechanical birds whirling about them.

Mr. Grayson, seeing Willie lost in his thoughts, tapped him on the shoulder.

“You feel okay, son?”

“Yessir.”

“You ready?”

“Yessir.”

“So I pray,” said Mr. Grayson.

But Willie was not ready in his heart.

He could not get his mind off the wars or the civil disturbances. Nor could he get his mind off the war that was going on in the heart of his friend Clio who sat now on the edge of the dugout, scanning the box seats for a glimpse of Robert ‘Bob’ Regent.

A few minutes earlier, as they were warming up, a brilliant red, white and blue helicopter had come swooping into the stadium and Clio had cried, “That’s him!”

But a walkie-talkie in the dugout contacted the chopper, which proved to be carrying only Mr. Ware and Mr. Cole and other executives of the Hawks club.

And still earlier, that morning, Clio and Willie had phoned every hotel in the Chicago area, trying to find Robert ‘Bob’ Regent. He was nowhere to be found.

“Maybe he’s here in disguise,” Mr. Grayson told the boys. “He wears disguises so much I don’t recognize him myself sometimes even though I’ve known him all these years.”

“Why would he wear a disguise?” Willie asked.

A look of melancholy settled upon Mr. Grayson’s leathery old face. “That,” he said, “is a long story.”

The Hawks went down in order in the first half of the first inning, and Willie took the mound to perhaps the most tumultuous ovation ever heard at a sports event in Chicago.

It was a strange ovation that came from the stands, a mixture of cheers and jeers.

Some people believed that Willie’s miracle pitch was a hoax designed to sell more tickets and revive interest in the game of baseball. These people jeered Willie as he threw his first practice pitches to Clio.

Certain fans of baseball were set against the whole idea of a miracle pitch which destroyed so many records and memories of past events and upset things held in balance. These people also jeered.

Then there were those who could only be called enemies. Willie was too great a success not to have enemies.

There were enemies even on his own club—pitchers and other players who had once been superstars and who were now suddenly out of the spotlight. There were supporters of these other players in the Chicago ball park that day and they too were booing.

But most people had come to the opening game to see a marvel. It was a time of marvels, when people prized marvels more than anything else and would travel great distances to see some curiosity or freak of nature that would break the boredom of their lives and help them forget the civil disturbances and the wars.