The Last Western (63 page)

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.

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.

You’re playing the mystic. You’re mistaking the—

Ah, how you fight and how you name-call when your privacy and pride are at stake! You can’t stand the coming together with just everybody. You’re afraid of going under.

As if you weren’t going under! And all for this mystic plan of a vague coming together! And at the hands of one of your own! One of your own dreamers!

You are a temptation, I know, but I will answer you, Reason. You are speaking of Herman, of course.

Your brother, your fellow dreamer.

He is my brother, yes, as is every man. But he is not my fellow dreamer. Once he walked with me, but he walks with you now.

I don’t claim him.

Be true to yourself, Reason. Be faithful to your friends and servants. Herman once shared the dream—yes, I believe that. I think he tried to go beyond what he knew for sure. But he could not stand the loss either. Or else he could not believe that other people would share our faith and our trust, our insanity if you will. So he began to think in the old way again. He went back to your way.

Not my way—to some other way.

Let us compromise. He is up to some artistic business. He is up to the creating of a pageant or sign or some such thing. A kind of movie maybe but a real movie without film—a movie made to do your work, to instruct people, to give lessons that people will remember. Which led him to take the reasonable practical sensible step of planning a murder.

To provide a martyr for the dream?

A martyr for the lesson that he wishes to make out of the dream.

Be truthful, Dreamer. This whole business is as much your doing as his. You looked for it. You have been looking for it from the beginning.

That is not true. That is a temptation.

You cooperate with his plan. You haven’t made one move to escape. In a way, you are planning your own murder.

I cannot interfere with Herman’s freedom, or anyone else’s.

What of your own freedom, man! You are free to escape and if you love life you will escape. Otherwise, how are you any different from him, except that where he is active and powerful, you are passive and powerless? It is like a sex act. You and death fornicating.

I fornicate with life. When I meet Robert Regent, I will have sex with life because I will be removing that one thing that between people kills life.

Poetry, romance, sentiment, bad versions of all three.

Even if I die, I do not die in the truest part of me. I do not die in the dream but only in the body and in you, poor Reason.

I am going to search for an escape.

Naturally. Only know what you are trying to escape. Is it the death of the body, or is it the death of that pride and that specialness that you fear?

Even in the Scripture it says one must love oneself.

But what self—the self that stands only as a part or the self that is part of the one being which always is and for which there is no name?

You refuse to make sense.

Yes.

You are irrational, crazy, just as they all say.

The Mad Pope.

It is time to wake up. But do not think I am going to sit in my corner and wait to die, saying nothing, only meekly waiting. I will plan an escape.

I am aware of that. But you must be aware that what you call an escape, I call a trap.

We are coming out of this conversation, up to the world where you and I are one. Remember, we are one. We stay or we go together.

I should have done better by you, poor Reason.

Some consolation now.