The Last Western (53 page)

In his hotel suite in Santiago, Chile Clio left the meeting of the Peruvian Liberation Council to watch a rebroadcast of Willie’s speech.

He was very tired now. Brazil had been won, Peru lay ahead of them, and after Peru there was Mexico and after Mexico there was the new front—he had forgotten what it was.

The voice coming from the television set made him sad for a moment. He made himself remember what they had told him of Angola and he felt the anger again. But when he looked at the face of the pope, he found himself unable to keep it up. He hated many things now but the hatred was an effort and sometimes he did not have the energy required.

He listened to the voice out of the past and he thought of Martha and of the night they had met and he thought of many earlier things when he and Willie had been boys together.

“You listen to that fool?” his aide asked.

“Yes.”

“His silly plan will cause us trouble, you are aware? Peru is Catholic. The peasants—”

“I know.”

“A reactionary idiot.”

“Yes.”

“I realize he is a countryman.”

“It is all right.”

“Look at him,” the aide said. “The man is insane.”

At that moment the strange thing happened to Willie’s face and Clio saw the shining and the glowing of his face and he remembered how his face had looked when he found he had the pitch.

He looked at the face and was moved by it because the past was something that still was precious in a way that he did not like to admit and because his hate was spent just then and because it had been a long time since he had seen a man’s face transfigured by a dream.

Once, he thought, he too had a dream, he and his fellow revolutionists, and the dream was still there but it never did anything to their faces anymore if it had ever done anything to their faces. He did not know. The dream he once possessed had changed and he did not think so constantly of the long pull of the future, though he told himself he did, and he and his comrades talked frantically, sometimes through the night, trying to capture the sure old faith that they had once shared, but it was getting harder and there were so many things to get rid of.

Yesterday someone had told him that 228,000 people had been killed in the liberation of Brazil.

That did not seem possible to Clio, but he knew it was the truth whether he wanted to believe it or not.

The country was liberated, and now the trials were going on for those who did not share the dream that Clio and his comrades had had of the future, but the 228,000 would not have to worry about the trials and would not have to pay anything for the lack of a dream or for the many sins they had committed; they had paid all that could be paid.

No, the faces in the other room would not light up again. Once they had in common the splendid vision of a future and now the future had come and it was time to create still one more future. But the faces were gray and that would be the color from now on because their eyes had seen some of the 228,000 who had met death and the scent of death was in their nostrils and they carried the scent with them in their clothes and in their hair and it would not wash off their skins.

Willie’s face had gone back to normal and he had reached that point in the speech where he said “Have faith in this simple idea,” and Clio saw that the exultation was gone and thought that he, too, must fight to keep dreams living and that perhaps he too struggled with the necessities of death.

“You can imagine what we shall face in a city like Lima, where the superstition is high and people feed on such things, having no food.”

“Yes,” said Clio and rejoined his fellow generals in the plotting of the liberation of Peru.

*  *  *

When they came to him that first time, two days after the speech, those trappers and custodians and museumkeepers and cage attendants, Willie was prepared in the best way he could ever be prepared—with nothing but his innocence to defend him, with nothing but his ignorance to speak, with that openness that could not be shouted down or argued away—and he was ready in the sense that he was always unready and he saw them only as people, and he greeted them warmly even as they set themselves against him.

Profacci acted as their spokesman—there were twelve of them in all—and Nervi was there, enveloped in blue, and Tisch and the canonist, Cardinal Liderant, and Orsini, the swarthy moralist.

“You intend to leave the city then?” said Profacci.

“Yes.”

“You are the bishop of Rome. You cannot vacate your see.”

“I am the vicar of Christ. You yourself called me that on the first day. And Christ had no home.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Think of the scandal to souls! The agitation and the doubting and the harm!”

“My dear cardinal, perhaps there has been scandal all along.”

“You pass judgment on your predecessors?”

“I ask only that you not pass judgment on me.”

“But the problems of the Vatican… .”

“You can handle those as well as I, even better.”

“We are not the pope.”

“Cardinal, you do not need a pope to solve these paper problems that are sent to me.”

“Many, many things only you can decide.”

“I can decide them anyplace in the world.”

“Do you not love the Vatican?”

“Love? What is there to love? Buildings? Art pieces? Treasures? How can I love these things?”

“You would just turn away from them?”

“I would give them away.”

At this, Profacci turned to the other officials and said, “You heard this? He wishes to destroy it all.” Then to Willie: “You don’t have the right to give it away.”

Willie laughed. “Even if I did, who would want it?”

The officials murmured. They did not like the laughter.

“You will take good care of the Vatican,” said Willie. “You can keep it for my successor.”

“You are aware of the ancient tradition that the pope is the bishop of Rome?”

“A pope can travel about.”

“You speak of leaving the see of Rome.”

“I would have to leave in order to travel.”

“But to leave for good—”

“It is good that is the reason for my leaving,” said Willie.

Then Cardinal Profacci and the other officials went away, and from that day on, they began to plot against him, to find some way to depose him on grounds of insanity because he had scoffed at sacred treasures, laughed at the treasure of Rome.

*  *  *

The general convention of the Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up had ended and the members had returned to their far-flung homes, or nonhomes, to make ready for L-Day. Only Joto and Truman and Benjamin and Felder and Thatcher Grayson remained. They talked and planned together and prayed with Willie, and together they thought of the things that needed to be done to make the L-Day a success. One night they came together to discuss the date of L-Day.

“Christmas has its advantages,” said Father Benjamin. “To burn the present Christmas away and to create a Christmas of the other coming.”

“Easter,” said Felder. “Much more appropriate.”

“Pentecost,” said Thatcher Grayson. “After all, that is the day of the Spirit.” Mr. Grayson still saw spirits from time to time and he tried not to look at them and he tried to keep concentrating on people, but often he did not succeed.

“Maybe it’s better to find a new day entirely,” said Willie. “All these days have so many memories.”

“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” said Felder.

Truman, watching the conversation, made rapid hand signs that were hard to follow.

“Again,” said Felder.

This time they saw what Truman said.

The day should fall on a date when men behaved most wretchedly—a day when hate prevailed.

They listened for a half hour about Truman’s recommendation, days of horror swarming in their minds. But in Willie’s listening, the days of horror were obliterated by a coming day, and he saw the ice fields stretching before him and the shadows of men weaving across a strange terrain and he felt the confusion coming upon him again and he tried not to look at Felder and tried not to think about certain pictures that came to him persistently in the times he was alone.

Earlier that day, he had felt an impulse to speak of the matter to Father Benjamin, but something told him to wait, and he prayed then, as he did now, for a message that would help him handle what he had seen, but there was no message and there was no method of handling what he had seen. Yet there was a thing, a fact, a truth, a faith building slowly in his heart, like a pillar of ice on the floor of a cave, and it was an assertion and a gloat and a cry of despair, and if it could be put into words, the words would be
The man with the slide rule is coming and you cannot change it and you will be in when he comes.

His eyes met Herman Felder’s now. He saw with a little shock that Felder was looking at him. He was smiling that strange smile once more and seemed to be asking a question. Willie thought he said
What difference does it make
?

But what Felder actually said was, “The date of the American bombing of Hiroshima. That was in the summer of 1945.”

“Let us listen,” said Benjamin.

So they listened once more. And this time Willie, hating his fear, tried to think only of the date and when he thought of the date, he knew that August 6, 1945, or any date like it was wrong because such a date rendered a sort of tribute to death and would cause people to forget that evil was everyday and seldom spectacular.

They discussed this point and at last decided to choose a date at random. Truman closed his eyes and stabbed at a calendar. His finger fell on November 24, a Sunday, the last Sunday of the liturgical year.

“That’s the feast of Christ the King,” said Felder. “My God, it couldn’t be better.”

“Most fitting,” Benjamin agreed.

Joto opened a missal and searched out the feast.

“Readings from Daniel, Revelations, John,” he said.

“The Spirit moved the hand of Truman,” said Thatcher Grayson.

“Ah well, Mr. Grayson,” said Willie, “maybe the Spirit moves everybody’s hands all the time if you really get down to it.”

It was late in the summer and November 24 was less than three months away, and the next day the announcement of the date went out to the world. There were many interpretations given to the choice of date.

“A Sunday, a nonworking day!” George Doveland Goldenblade crowed.

“Yes, but the unions have already declared the next day as a holiday,” said his executive vice-president. “And the banks are closing too. Good will.”

“Good will!” shouted Goldenblade. “You goddamn traitor, get out of here!” And then Goldenblade broke his own record for taking the name of the Lord in vain, and he fired the executive vice-president and brought charges of defamation of character against the man when he tried to protest.

That night Goldenblade called his brother on the videophone.

“Eminence Earl, this nigra pope is goin’ to wreck the business if we’re not careful. And what he is doin’ to Holy Mother Church is something that should not be done to a goshdarned diseased chicken that should have its neck wrung several times over for a lesson.”

“O mi lugi telirithi,” said Earl Cardinal Goldenblade. “Cui logo mi melithi?”

Willie began his secret fast.

He told himself that in the detail of Herman Felder he had been wrong.

He found a gloss in the Guidebook which he memorized:
To distrust even a known enemy serves the kingdom of death
.

The world
hissed with rumors.

They came like snakes into the cities of man.

They coiled around the plan of L-Day.

Soon the plan could not be perceived, only the twisted creatures around it.

The rumors were of many kinds: the pope was insane; the pope and a few cardinals had a thermonuclear device with which they planned to terrorize and conquer the world on November 24; Pope Willie was not the true pope—the true pope was Les Garfield of Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

The rumors were more than rumors.

They were symptoms of what Herman Felder had called the fundamental schism.

They were epiphanies of man’s oldest choice.

“Beast or spirit,” Felder had told Willie.

On that either-or axis the world creaked slowly, like a Ferris wheel in a nightmare.

To the beast people of the world, here was proof positive. An enormous deceit was in the making, a vast betrayal. A magnificent dream was about to die.

In their kinder moments, the beast folk spoke of the L-Day Plan as a money-making venture, a promotional stunt, a program designed to win converts to the church.

In their true beast character, however, they reacted with fear, anger, derision. Many beast people called the plan a direct attack on the fundamental tenets of the free enterprise system.

Spirit people saw the plan in a different light. Bishop Mae M. Frapple of the United Heavenly Church of the Holy Paraclete Descending in Fire All Over spoke for many spirit folk when she told a rally in Madison Square Garden: “The Holy Spirit has sent this col-yured pope into the world to tell us the show is over! Come November 24, and Jee-sus Chee-rast is ridin’ in on the clouds and is gonna break asses all over the nation. Alleluia!”

Crowd: “Alleluia!”

In the beginning only the most literal-minded spirit people took the L-Day announcement as a prophecy of the end of the world.

But once the idea got into the hands of the ministers of the United Heavenly Church of the Holy Paraclete Descending, it began to spread to religious groups once considered moderate.

Had not the pope himself prophesied that the world would be consumed by flame?

Repent before the twenty-fourth!
became the theme of a hundred thousand radio spots sponsored by the International Council of Charismatic Churches.

IS YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER? asked 10,000 billboards erected along the major highways of the United States.

Similar announcements, proclamations and questions were printed, broadcast and televised in every nation of the world.