The Last Western (60 page)

Profacci concluded that the Russian also was insane and instructed the Vatican physician to give the man a pill that would prevent his becoming violent.

Willie walked up to the stanze and touched it and rubbed the figures of bronze and gold with his fingers, and they were watching him very closely, in silence.

He felt himself coming back to plain things a little; the rubbing made things less luminous and intense, and things became only themselves and he saw now clearly what had happened and he made himself understand what had happened and he began to see the world in the old painful way.

For an instant the stanze tipped once more in his head and he could see the cardinal coming back but he said Be with me now just as the screen came down again and then he felt the calm and pain come into him simultaneously.

He made the surrender and the turnover and the total gift and he felt the strength of the Other, and then he turned slowly to the men who stood before him, watching.

“He was a very good man,” he said quietly. “Very late in life he saw how things were, but what he saw was too strong for him because he was old. So he died.”

The men were standing there and Willie saw them all and he saw his brothers, Benjamin and Felder and Thatcher Grayson and Joto and Truman, and he saw them very clearly and it was very nearly the last time he would see them so plainly.

Addressing his brothers, he said, “He made a fast passage. The fortress of evil looked like something he could break, but instead he was broken.”

Benjamin nodded.

Then Willie, looking at Orsini, said, “Now it is the advent time for L-Day. I travel to the United States in a few hours. You too will travel,” Orsini’s eyes did not move, “so that what will happen may happen.”

Monsignor Taroni went to him and said, “You are so very worn, and tired. Please rest.”

“You are a good man who loves God,” said Willie.

The Russian priest, having taken his peace pill, began to keen softly, “Is there no one here to fix the head?”

* *  *

Willie went to his room and fell into the old flight dream, going very far out until the earth had dropped from view entirely and there were no points of direction and he was in pure space with only vaporous shapes floating obscurely in the distance which he supposed might be planets or on the other hand might be shadows of huge beings somewhere behind him in the world that he had left.

He was hurrying—he could not explain why. He seemed to be on an errand but an errand whose purpose had been forgotten.

His nondream self told him of a ship he had left behind and of how he was to find a sprig of green to bring back to the others so they could take hope and know the good earth was near.

But that was only the old story from the Bible, he told himself, and it did not apply.

He heard a voice then, very near, a voice he had not heard in months. Once the voice had been friendly, but it was not friendly now.

“Fool dreamer, you run with murderers. You call yourself a hero, yet you do nothing but sentimental gestures.”

“Clio!” he called.

But what was the point of expecting him to answer in a dream?

And do you remember when she looked at you, her eyes went to that soft brown and her mouth opened a little and she was firm and definite and more real than anything that—why did you go from me?

But how could she answer from death’s other kingdom?

He felt pain spreading across his forehead as if someone had tightened a rope around his head. He was sweating.

“Water,” he said.

“Here,” said a voice.

Here was Herman Felder holding a cup and leaning over the seat of the plane, and Willie saw that they were airborne and it had begun.

Ahead was Benjamin dozing just behind the cabin where Truman and Joto piloted the plane, and now coming up from behind was Mr. Grayson. Willie stirred restlessly, and Grayson and Felder moved as if to restrain him.

“It’s eight o’clock, son,” said Grayson calmly. “That’s eight o’clock in the morning. There was a commotion at the airport. People wanted to see you off.”

“You should have awakened me,” said Willie, feeling dizzy and tired.

“We couldn’t bring you around,” said Grayson. “It’s just as well anyway. They were excited and started to tear at the plane.”

Willie drank the coffee Felder had given him.

“Son, you got to eat more than coffee,” said Grayson. “You have to have your strength.”

Felder, wearing his old raincoat and looking like the man of film once more, nodded in agreement.

“What happened—finally?” said Willie.

Felder handed Willie the early edition of the
American Tribune
. The paper carried both the obituary of Henri Liderant and the interview he had granted the reporter the previous afternoon when he had come up from his long meditation in the place where the popes were buried. Willie’s eyes fell to the middle of the interview:

What was it like, the conversion experience you speak of?

Words cannot describe it. In the Scripture there are the stories of blind men seeing for the first time. I used to try to imagine what that sensation must have been like. I think I know now.

You compare this to a miracle from the Gospel?

It is a similar experience I believe.

Could you be specific?

It was as if all my life I had been walking upside down, walking on my hands—then suddenly something took hold of me and turned me over and I started to walk as men are supposed to walk. (Laughs.) That was when I got dizzy and fell. The fall hurt! Yet I knew I was all right. I felt a sense of tenderness and warmth.

A doctor said you had a fever and your blood pressure was up.

Perhaps my body fought against the new way I had chosen.

Now that you’re reborn, as you said before, what do you expect to do?

It is more correct perhaps to ask what a man expects to be. I expect to be a lover of God and all his creatures.

Would you continue in your legal profession? After all you are considered the greatest lawyer of the church.

(Laughs.) In the days that remain, I hope I can do better than that. I would like to serve the poor.

Willie could read no more of it.

“He is with the Lord now,” said Thatcher Grayson.

“He would still be alive if it were not for me,” said Willie.

“You don’t know that,” said Felder, and Willie smelled the scent of roses. Felder’s face was the face of the old Felder for a moment and then it became the mask of a handsome film gangster, a map of journeys yet to come.

Father Benjamin came back to Willie’s seat and urged him to eat.

“Truly, I am not hungry. The coffee is enough.”

Felder was refilling Willie’s cup.

“Surely it’s not enough. How can you expect to see things with clear eyes unless you eat?” Father Benjamin said.

They were all watching him as he took another sip of the coffee, spilling a little of it. When he looked at their watching, he laughed a little, and Father Benjamin laughed in return.

They all began to laugh then; something about their watching him drink coffee struck them as funny.

Once they started, they could not stop.

The more Willie laughed, the more coffee he spilled, which in turn caused them to laugh all the more. They became as children giggling over some trifle in a classroom, who then begin to giggle at the phenomenon of their giggling, which only builds the laughter until they are helpless.

Soon they were in a fit, a paroxysm, of laughter.

Thatcher Grayson, whose frame was old and thin and long, jerked up and down, back and forth, and he laughed harder than he had ever laughed in his life.

Father Benjamin, laughing in his wheezy old voice, grasped his beard and hung on, acting as if he would come apart if this went any further, which it seemed likely to do.

Benjamin’s manner had the effect of doubling up Herman Felder, whose laughing was of the convulsive type. He held a hand over his stomach as if the laughter hurt him badly inside.

But it was Willie who laughed the hardest and most helplessly. He stood up and the coffee went flying over the cabin, spraying all of them, which threw them into another stage of their fit.

They tumbled into the aisle like drunks, the four of them shrieking, and they were so gripped with the laughing madness that they were truly hysterical or ecstatic, or both. They had left their senses completely and come together at some nonsense point of understanding that united them as they would never be united again.

Hearing the uproar, Joto entered the cabin, and the sight of him sent them into the last and most intense phase of the absurd chaos.

At first perplexed, Joto slowly joined the game, adding his throaty guffaws to the general chorus, and when they saw him step by step being caught up in the helplessness of it, they reached a climax that seemed to actually rock the plane.

So they roared on until they wept, and the plane swept forward to the dark comedy that was building before them, where the waves beat up against the old land of dreams and lies and farther on, in the white fields of Illinois, the man-made birds ate the man-made grain and stretched fast wings that their blood might be bright on the shroud of earth and cheer the heart of the hunter.

BOOK SIX

ZACK TAYLOR:
As for your new film, Mr. Felder,

COWBOYS AND INDIANS—

can you tell us what you’re striving for this time?

HERMAN FELDER:
Ah wanna ride to the ridge where

the West commences—

‘N gaze at the moon till ah lose mah senses.*

ZT-HF Video interview

Undated

Hollywood, California

*©1944 Harms, Inc. Copyright renewed.

All rights reserved. Used by permission

of Warner Bros. Music.

To America
then they came. The towers of New York rose up to meet their plane. The red eyes of television cameras blinked wide in amazement. There was a rushing of feet, a riot of shouts and finally, like the cry of a starved lover, that million-throated moan that was the tribute of memory to a dream that was dead.

Once there had been real heroes, garlanded and ribboned, and men could remember exuberant parades and marching bands and silver trumpets flashing in the sun and confetti swirling down from skyscrapers, making a blizzard in July.

That had been long ago when people believed in celebration and when, even in unhappy times, there was a bustle in the air and one could hear an elusive song whispering along t ie avenues—
tomorrow, tomorrow
.

Now tomorrow had come and now hopes were only ragged newspapers scuttling along dark alleyways and each new sunrise prompted a sort of jeer and no one held his breath in contemplation or enchantment or wonder.

Everywhere now a secret burned in the brain of the nation and this was the secret:
We are the last. With us the line stops.

The secret had been in the people a long time and they did not talk about it, but still it was there. Sometimes they did not think about it, but still it was there—like the knowledge that the employees have when a firm is going bankrupt, like the knowledge that a man has when he is suffering a cancer that cannot be stopped and he goes through a pretend life for the benefit of the onlooker of his soul, if he has a soul and if he cares to play to it.

And with the secret came the special pride that the first have when they have become the last, and with the pride came the cynicism, that definitive apathy that had caused them to endow not just their country but the cosmos itself with a tragic triviality, so that once-splendid, once-sacred, once-loved things—all that they had called their dreams, their hopes, their honor—were now bad jokes that produced a single, unvarying response:
So what?

And yet. And yet, there was time still for a last golden hour, and of those millions who thronged the old island of Manhattan, some thought,
This will not happen again
. And some wanted to see, just once, what it had been like to be awed or thrilled by the sight of mortal man raised to an extraordinary eminence. And some did not know why they came, except they sensed that a dark red circle was somehow being closed.

So they put on the old masquerade costumes of hope and innocence once more, beast and spirit alike, and they formed a mob set for a death spectacle, something to release the secret they carried in their hearts, and no one knew what might happen—perhaps a catastrophe unhoped for in their common terrible dreams, something that would deliver them all from the monotony of having to pretend any longer.

When Willie saw them breaking through the police lines that had formed at the edge of the waiting area and when they came rushing ten-thousandfold toward the plane, the old, vicious pity took possession of him.

“They will hit plane!” Joto shouted.

Truman taxied off, pulling away from them, though they kept coming, their mouths opening and closing like fish as they shouted their emotionless cheers.

Over the radio in the cabin came the voice of the tower control supervisor advising them to depart the field and come down in New Jersey.

“No,” said Willie. “Let us meet them now.”

“They will be hurt,” Joto said. “Look—they are crazy!”

Willie went forward into the pilot’s cabin.

“Taxi forward a little more, Truman, then swing around. I’ll speak to them.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Felder said. “They’ll mob you.”

But Willie was already on the radio asking the tower for a speaker system.

“We can plug you in from the plane, Your Holiness. You won’t have to get off.”

“They want to see the pope,” Willie said. “They need to see.”

“We can’t protect you, Your Holiness.”

Another voice came over the radio. “Your Holiness, this is the archbishop of New York, Archbishop McCool?”

“Archbishop McCool, how are you? It’s—it’s good of you to come out to meet us.”

“Gol-
lee
, Your Holiness, the President of the United States is here, President Shryker, the mayor of New York and many other officials and diplomats. We’re gathered here at concourse B? We’re set up ready to welcome you. Are you there, Your Holiness?”