The Last Western (66 page)

He peered out into the light. The faces of the men were hard to see. Somehow they looked not like men but statues.

Tell them you forgive and ask to be forgiven.

“I forgive any of you who have wronged me,” Willie said.

Or will wrong you.

He saw Herman Felder not twenty feet away, a strip of film in the blazing sun.

“I forgive those of you who will wrong me.”

When he said those words, the statues became men; he felt his senses return to normal.

He saw the men and the blank desert and the mountains in the distance and he felt the nearness of the unequivocal stranger.

Nausea. Loathing.

Then as he looked at the men, a reckless passion took possession of him.

Lifting his arms to the sky, he said in a loud voice, “I tell you the truth—I know that one of you will betray me tonight. Tonight—in Illinois—one of you will try to stop me!”

An immense silence settled over the circle of men. Then whispering, more whispering, movement.

A man behind Willie shouted, “We are your protectors!”

“You cannot think such a thing,” said one of the celebrants of the Mass. It was Taroni, a portrait of dread.

Willie, stretching out his right hand, said in a still louder voice, “I am not dreaming—or perhaps I am dreaming instead of thinking. But what I know, I know. There is a man among you who has a grand design—a plan greater and grander than L-Day. That man is here among you and he is against me!”

The men moved, their dark silken suits rippling in the sun and forming a reptile around the place where Willie and his concelebrants stood.

The men stirred, waving their arms.

The air rang with unintelligible cries and protests.

Thatcher Grayson and Father Benjamin approached Willie.

“You are ill, son!” Grayson cried. “You can’t mean these things!”

The old red-rimmed eyes of Benjamin burned into Willie’s.

“You know it to be the truth?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you not speak earlier?”

Willie, seized again by that unexpected passion, called out to the men once more.

“But I tell you this. No plan will succeed that begins with death and killing. What begins with death and killing will itself be killed. And those who wish to create new arrangements by killing men are enlisted in the class of death and are sitting at the feet of the headmaster!”

The men became statues again—except one, Herman Felder, who had turned about quickly and walked back to the plane.

The men, murmuring among themselves, began to tell one another that the pope had become disarranged because of his long fast. But a few were stricken with fear; they had felt death move across the white sand and begin stalking about the aircraft.

Father Benjamin, embracing Willie, said, “Go on with the holy meal.”

Willie, looking over Father Benjamin’s shoulders, strained to see the men; he had not seen Felder leave the crowd.

“Please,” said Benjamin.

Willie went on with the Mass.

At the Kiss of Peace, he went into the midst of the men. Coming up to Patrick Henry Joyce, he held out his arms.

“The peace of Christ be with you, Brother Patrick,” he said.

Brother Patrick stood very still, letting Willie’s arms enfold him. He said nothing. Willie embraced the other men of the group, looking for one man in particular. When he came to a very young man trembling with fear he said, “Where is Brothet Herman Felder?”

“On board, Holiness,” the young man whimpered. Then with a loud cry, “The end is coming!”

Willie said, “But not for you, young man. Calm yourself and have courage.” Then he went to the plane, up the ramp, through the long funnel of the fuselage.

Felder, drink in hand, was in the forward cabin; he froze at the sight of Willie.

“The peace of Christ, Herman,” said Willie, reaching for Felder’s shoulders.

“Don’t,” Felder said, sucking in his breath.

“I wish to give peace and love,” said Willie. “And forgiveness.”

“There is no need for forgiveness.”

“Even so.”

Felder’s eyes were enormous; the red veins were strange forlorn roads in a chaotic land.

“Don’t,” he said. “I don’t want—”

“You don’t want love or peace, Brother Herman? Why, then, have you made this trip?”

Felder was still holding his drink; it was like a burning coal in his hand. He tried to put it somewhere and at the same time move farther back into the plane. But he was up against the door of the pilot’s cabin now and there was no more room.

Willie advanced toward him.

Felder dropped his drink on the floor of the plane. Standing rigid, arms pressed against his sides, he allowed Willie to embrace him.

“And so may the peace of our Lord Jesus be with you always.”

Felder whispered, “All right.”

Willie stepped back and looked into the eyes and he stood in this way for half a minute, and Felder was like a man who had been pinned to the door.

Then Willie turned away and went back to the men outside and they communed in the Body and Blood of Jesus, and Herman Felder sat in the private cabin and drank four morphinis, until what had happened was something that had not happened.

An hour later the planes flew up from the desert toward the sun.

Ahead, the storm clouds were already forming over Iowa and Illinois and Indiana.

“You cannot mean an actual plot,” said Benjamin.

“Certain things will happen that are not of my doing,” said Willie, making ready for that fact that there was no real preparation for. His eyes saw things in a soft, luminous haze, and the events of the past began to mix confusedly in his brain, and even now he could not remember what had happened in the desert.

He drank a little sugared tea because he wanted to be clear-headed when he met the old teacher, though his mind was even now like the earth when clouds sail over it in fast succession. In the dark moments, when his brain worked, he saw shadowy, obscure men against shifting, mysterious landscapes, architects or builders of some fantastic structure. In the quick openings of light and brightness he was flying high above the world, and all was well, even if the flight was nearly over. He was inside his dream and outside it, and there was only a little energy left for listening.

As he slept, Benjamin, Joto and Thatcher Grayson tried to argue away that persistent cry still echoing across the desert. At last they persuaded themselves that his fasting had induced a state of hallucination. Joto prepared another intravenous feeding and Grayson went forward to pray with Truman. Only Benjamin sought to understand the meaning of the hallucination, knowing that hallucination was not only vision but judgment and knowing too that there was a presence in the plane now that had not been with them before, a sullen, slouching presence that he tried to picture.

When he closed his eyes, he saw only the dim figure of some sly official, a teacher possibly, engaged in a tiresome explanation without beginning or end. “Begone,” said Benjamin in his spirit, but the figure took no notice. “Name yourself,” he said again, but the figure went on without a pause in a lifeless singsong voice that finally merged with the monotone of the plane.

In the other plane the genius of the drama reviewed the shooting script for the last act. He saw the movie clearly now, saw the great theater of the world thrilling to his all-explaining spectacle. There was a burst of applause, a spreading warmth, a sigh, then a sorrowing understanding. A new myth was burning the old away. He saw history swing out from its rutted rails, the rabbling demons fleeing before it. Time now was a chariot, and he was the driver. As he lurched on, he felt himself a titan—king, conqueror, conjurer of a million dreams, salvific herald of an immortal age.

But as the plane hurried on, a smaller definite picture intruded itself on the brimming vision. There was a whirring in the back room, the fitful sputter of a take-up reel. Lights. Flickering images. Suddenly he was in the past of thirty years ago. Palms. A long lawn going down to sea. Coming up to camera, a boy on horseback dressed as a cowboy and twirling a lariat. The camera closed in swiftly, awkwardly, on the boy’s grinning face. The screen went white for a second, then the crude hand-lettered lines came up: HERMAN—WINNING THE WEST. DIRECTED BY GUNNER AT SAN RAPHAEL.

 *  *  *

The planes flew on, like two silver bullets, while on the earth below men prepared for L-Day.

A few minutes before noon the United Nations issued its long-debated Declaration of Universal Peace, which called for a truce “between all warring elements in the world with said truce commencing at midnight November 23, wherever the pope of Rome shall be, and lasting for a period of twenty-four hours.”

The statement, with ninety-six amendments, ran more than 500 pages and would not be published in final format for several weeks.

“What it provides,” said the Secretary General of the United Nations, Jack E. Stonewell, “is that any nation stepping out of line on this thing is going to get the living hell pounded out of it whether it be a peace-loving superpower or some upstart country that isn’t worth the powder to start with.” Secretary Stonewell went on to explain that certain revisionist monist freaks had introduced amendments to the truce that were designed purely for selfish national gain, and he told his press conference that he was proud that he, as an American, had succeeded in getting Amendment 24 into the document, which called upon the responsible member nations to implement aggressive neutralization of all dissident elements acting against the spirit of the truce, through such means as thermonuclear punitive reprisals. After his press conference, Secretary Stonewell went on a family retreat at Camp Saint Billy Graham in Maryland.

But by the time the Secretary General gave his press conference, few citizens of any nation were paying any attention to the U.N. and its pronouncements. By now Willie’s final TV tapes were being broadcast across the globe—in China, Russia, Europe, Africa, the Americas.

By the hundreds of millions, people watched the telecasts or heard them on radio. Immediately many went to churches and synagogues for special L-Eve services.

L-Eve had become a Holy Day of obligation in many Catholic dioceses around the world, and even bishops and priests who did not approve of the pope or his plan tried to encourage people to join in the spirit of the day ahead. This was an act of loyalty to the pope, who, even if he was crazy, was still the leader of the church, as the archbishop of Paris reminded his clergy.

The day had begun with the usual round of suicides, but there seemed to be no more than on any previous day over the past two months, and perhaps a few less. Those who had stayed this long had decided “to be there when it happened,” as
Second Wind
said in what it called its final, final edition.

The spiritist forces of the world were staging spectacular rallies everywhere. In Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and in many parts of the Americas, people were already gathering in open country or at mountain retreats to be taken up to heaven with the triumphant returning Lord.

The largest of these rallies was already drawing thousands to the Grand Canyon where, according to Earl Cardinal Goldenblade, “at precisely 11 p.m. Rocky Mountain time the Spirit would plunge a flaming sword through the center of the earth, pick it up and eat it like an olive.”

In London, Big Ben tolled ten times every quarter hour, reminding citizens, as the London
Times
noted, “of the grandeur of the Judeo-Christian tradition and of the spirit of moral renewal.”

There were bells tolling in every city of the world. Preachers preached, sinners prayed, the fearful wept. Even the most beastly of men found themselves in church or temple to await—something. The feeling of world catastrophe was in the air. Anything could happen. Everywhere there were rumors of assassinations, conspiracies, plots, violence. Heads of state went into hiding. In the great cities the streets began to empty, until by midafternoon many had the look of cities under air siege.

In only one nation of the world did the L-Day truce seem in serious jeopardy. In that nation, in the words of the Defense Minister, “Instead of being a day of peace and reconciliation, November 24 could well be the day when the hatred of war reaches fever pitch.”

That nation was Peru, where the Green Canary Army, under the command of General Clio Russell, had pressed to the very edge of Lima and was about to seize the government.

Willie’s televised plea for L-Day was broadcast in Peru three times on Saturday November 23, and after each broadcast the aged archbishop of Lima came on the air and spoke directly to the leaders of the revolutionary army. Each time he asked the rebels to cease their war-making for at least the period of the truce.

“You have heard our pope,” he said after the noon broadcast, “our pope, whom the people of Peru love and venerate as their spiritual father. I ask you in the name of God to stop the fighting. Please, gentlemen. After all, what difference will one day make?”

When he was off the air, the loyalist leaders congratulated the archbishop.

“They cannot refuse your plea, Eminence,” they told him.

“The man who took the True Cross, Clio Russell—you have located him now?” the old man asked.

“We know where he is. There is a handsome bounty on his head. In this twenty-four-hour period, if they stay in place according to the truce, we shall settle his account and at the same time regroup our forces and drive them back.”

“It is a very small chip but it has a dark stain upon it,” said the archbishop.

“The man who captures or kills him receives 10 million sols,” said the loyalist general.

“I have often wondered if it is not truly a drop of the Precious Blood.”

“Many of my men would kill him for nothing. With the incentive of 10 million sols we cannot fail.”

“I used to hold it in time of temptation. I conquered my flesh with it,” said the aged archbishop.

Clio and his staff watched the telecast of Willie’s speech.

“They say he is mad,” said Clio’s aide-de-camp. “Last night in Rome before he flew to the States there was a fracas and a churchman was killed.”