The Last Western (67 page)

“He has the look of a loco,” said another officer. “Note the eyes. He sees another territory, not a real one.”

Clio was shocked at the appearance of Willie. Gaunt, white-haired, exhausted, he had become a man of eighty in three months.

A man named Talazar, who had once been a general in the regular army of Peru and who had defected to the rebels within the last month, stood quietly at the doorway, watching the telecast.

The officers scoffed and cursed, but Talazar stood there listening, smiling curiously. At last he said, “For all that, he presents us with a difficult situation.”

They turned around, looking at him doubtfully. He moved into the room, sat down and filled an elegant carved pipe.

“The archbishop speaks the truth,” Talazar said. “Peruvians are Catholics. They revere the pontiff. In terms of public support here in the country and throughout Latin America, it will be very bad to fight tomorrow.”

The younger officers sharply disagreed. One of them said Talazar had been a staff officer too long and had forgotten what war was about and now lacked the boldness.

“Boldness is something for the very young,” said the general, smiling indulgently, “for those who wish to make movies or write books and for romantics who wish to be heroes. Here, our cause is rather commonplace. We wish to take over the country.” Talazar lighted his pipe. “General Russell, you see the political aspects of the situation.”

Clio walked to the window of the farmhouse and looked out over the fields. He could see the churches of Lima in the distance.

“We have won here,” he said. “A day one way or the other would not matter.”

“Exactly,” said Talazar.

“I tell you they have reinforcements coming down from the North with many U.S. weapons,” said the youngest of the officers.

“It still does not matter,” said Talazar calmly. “Better to fight soldiers for a few days more than the people for a century.”

“You are not going to make a peace gesture to them!” the young officer said furiously. “To compromise the cause of freedom!”

Clio looked at the young officer sadly. He had not heard the word cause in a long time.

“General Russell will not of course meet them,” said Talazar. “We are speaking only of a short truce that will serve us politically.”

“It serves them better,” the young officer insisted. “They will get the same political advantage that we would get and they will get the reinforcements besides.”

“Please,” said one of the other officers turning to Clio. “Let us keep up the fight, General Russell.”

Clio said that he wanted time to think the matter over. Then he dismissed them and went to the small room he kept in the back of the house.

The officers went out to the yard, continuing the argument on the front lawn.

General Talazar walked into a flower garden a short distance from the house and smoked his pipe. He strolled there and dreamed of a villa on Ibiza and of a woman with green eyes.

In the pocket of his jacket he had a pledge signed by the president of Peru that guaranteed him 10 million sols for the murder of Clio Russell.

Clio sat at the small table and tried to write his letter.

I suppose you heard him—and saw him, he wrote. Maybe you have decided to

He stopped there and could not go on. He looked at the picture on the bedside stand: his wife and son and baby.

He had taken the picture himself on the last day in Rio. Martha’s mouth was not happy in the picture because they had quarreled, and he had left her that way even though they had made love while the children napped and the quarrel was with them all through the lovemaking and the lovemaking did not remove the quarrel that had been with them almost a year.

He crumpled up the letter and started a new one, glancing now and then at the picture. Through the window he could see the soldiers sitting under the trees arguing and, in the garden, General Talazar strolling among the flowers.

I know you feel I have left you, but I haven’t. I miss you. I can’t even tell you how much. I can’t express it. I am sad thinking about the last time when we said those things. And when you said I put all this ahead of you and the children I was mad, because maybe that is what I have done. I can’t help it.

He stopped there and looked at the picture again.

And now watching W. on the TV I am even sadder thinking of what happened. Why didn’t you say those things before—afraid of what I might think? Don’t you know I love you and if you believed something that doesn’t matter but is just personal and wouldn’t affect us? Just like what I am doing is personal—can’t you accept what I think? Maybe this is my religion?

He stopped again, seeing that he was only continuing the quarrel. After a while he tore up the second letter and drank from the brandy flask that he always carried now, and then he stood by the window for a long time looking down on his soldiers, who seemed very young.

Beyond the trees, between rows of bright flowers, the neat tan uniform of General Talazar moved back and forth, catching many small moving spots of light and making the general look like a leopard.

Anyone could fight, thought Clio, but not everyone could do the other things. And watching General Talazar, he was aware of the pitiful quantity of his own store, of how much he needed and would never have. To be like this silver-haired general, to be able to talk well, to lead and preside and rule in all those other ways… . Into his mind came the picture of a great African diplomat who had led a revolution for his people. In his youth the leader had been the greatest guerilla fighter of his day, but after the fighting he had been able to put aside his guns and don rich clothes and meet with men in splendid reception rooms. That man offered incontestable proof of—what was his name? Or was it only something he had seen on TV long ago?

He called for his orderly.

“Tell General Talazar that I have decided to respect the truce.”

“The men will not listen to him, sir.”

“General Talazar is the chief of staff of this army, sergeant. Do the men listen to their generals?”

“I will tell him what you have said.”

“What kind of soldiers are they if they do not obey their leaders?”

“They are not soldiers, sir. They are revolutionaries.”

“Go tell the general.”

Clio watched the orderly go, following his progress out to the edge of the grove, where the general had stopped to refill his pipe.

The general listened, then turning to the house, raised his arm to Clio in an approving salute.

Clio waved back.

Then he sat down at the table again and tried to write to his wife to see if what had been broken could be fixed. But it was a letter he could not write because he knew there was no way of answering what she had said that afternoon after they had made love.

In a room below he heard the old voice of his past once more. The guffaws of the soldiers. A curse.

You probably never guessed how much I wanted once to see it all differently—how much I wanted to feel as he did. Then I found out nobody believed what he did but only pretended to. So I found another religion if that is what it is. But even if I was crazy and believed what he did, and you believed what I believed now, I would still love you. I can’t stand to think you are turned against me. Or that you are not happy. Oh Martha—

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Clio kept on trying to repair what had been broken and General Talazar strolled in the garden and dreamed of the blue-shuttered villa he would buy on the island and the yacht that he would anchor in the harbor below and he thought how splendid it would be to awake in the morning and turn from her green eyes to the green waters below and see the yacht and the palms along the shore and smell the mimosa drifting up from the terrace. And Clio kept trying to repair what was broken and Willie’s voice came once more from the radio in a lower room of the farmhouse and the soldiers were getting drunk under the trees and the voices of the soldiers grew angry because victory was there before them, just beyond the hills, but General Russell listened to fools and bargained with tyrants.

The two jets
hurried on and they passed over Kansas and they passed over Missouri and then they came upon that river that the Indians had named so strangely—the long, strange river whose name had been a spelling exercise for many school children, the river that the old-time writer Mark Twain had used as a metaphor of the world and that the old-time poet Thomas Stearns Eliot had called a dark brown god.

And when the planes came to the river, the air grew colder and the snow came driving down from the northwest and it was not easy to see the river clearly but they did finally see it from the planes and it was not a metaphor of anything and it was not a god and if it was something other than a river, then it was a fat, surfeited bull snake sleeping through the winter among the whitening fields where it had fed during the lush summer, and the fields were very flat and the snow spread out across the fields and then the pale half-dollar sun slipped swiftly from the sky and the night came on and they were in darkness.

Soon the lights began to twinkle on the ground below and Truman swerved the jet sharply and headed for a blur of lights struggling to be one light under the storm and Willie looked down at Springfield, Illinois, where Abe Lincoln had considered many serious matters and quarreled with his wife Mary and told stories men considered wise and funny.

“Lincoln lies there,” said Thatcher Grayson pointing. “And over there—that’s New Salem. They have reconstructed the village where he lived as a young man. It is an interesting place.”

Thatcher Grayson knew Willie was not interested in New Salem but he had felt the alien brother moving about the plane and thought that the alien brother might depart if they talked and thought of natural events.

“What is it you call him?” asked Joto, who had also felt the presence of the stranger.

“Who?”

“Lincoln.”

“The Great Emancipator,” Grayson said. “Once I visited the tomb. It was a very hot day but it was cool there. My father took me by the hand to the place where the body rests and—you are all right, son?”

Willie, looking down at the lights, shivered.

“Tonight,” he said, “I shall make peace with him.”

Grayson moved nervously in his seat.

“Where are the fields, Mr. Grayson?”

“North of town,” said Grayson, his voice becoming sorrowful. “Son, let us rest before we go there. It is snowing hard—look there. See? It will be very cold. You are not in condition.”

“Good enough condition,” said Willie, and now he looked more Chinese than any of the other nationalities and races that he was.

Grayson felt the estranged, scheming brother again but he could not be sure he was not being dragged back into his spiritist condition so he tried to put matters in the old terms they both understood.

“Would I let you pitch if you had the flu or a sore arm and the weather was cold and the game sure to be long?”

“I have not flu, dear friend,” said Willie, looking at Mr. Grayson with love. “And the game will not be long.”

“When the score is tied and it is late September and the game is in the seventh or eighth and the pennant is at stake, the sun goes down early and everything worsens. Even the young pitchers are old, the relief is worn.” Grayson did not know what he said and he spoke not to Willie but to the invisible stranger, all cold and bloodless, who moved about the darkening cabin.

The plane banked just then, struggling in the storm, its icy wings shuddering against the straight, hard wind. They buckled their seat belts.

“The fences are dark,” Grayson went on in his doom-struck voice. “The ball coming in stands out for the hitter. The elements are with him now, not the pitcher, weary from the long season, too old for the fast ball and feeling the winter already coming into his body. Go to the strong relief but even the relief is weary and weakened. If the relief has lost its strength, what shall ye be strengthened with?”

The plane touched down, its engines roaring, the purple-blue lights of the airstrip rushing past them, the wind gusting the snow over obscure buildings in the distance.

Truman taxied to a small dimly lit terminal. Willie strained to see.

Over the speaker came the voice of Herman Felder.

“Other plane’s landing behind us. They’ll be getting off first. We have vehicles and supplies waiting for us. You can see the vehicles just beyond the fence out there.”

Up the aisle, moving very slowly, came Benjamin. His eyes were fretful and very old when he spoke.

“You must not get off the plane,” he said to Willie.

“Recommendation 40,” said Willie mechanically as if from a memory drill.

“It cannot apply to this.”

“Nothing else applies, Father Benjamin.”

Thatcher Grayson, sensing the danger and the fear and the presence of the hated brother and seeing how ill Willie was, broke into tears.

“Father Benjamin is right!” he cried. “It is wrong for you to be here. There is evil on this plane and evil ahead! And you are sick, dear son, so sick!”

Willie unbuckled himself in the seat and stood up.

“You must go on,” he said to them. “What is to happen will happen, and I, for my part, must try to do what I ask others to do. But you must go on.”

Joto and Truman joined them now.

“Why does Brother Thatcher weep?” said Joto.

Truman put his hands on Thatcher Grayson’s shaking shoulders as if to ask the same question.

“The time is come for the plan to begin,” said Willie, looking to the forward cabin.

Benjamin whispered, “Don’t you see? It will all be lost in romance.”

“What can I do to change that?” said Willie.

“Escape.”

“Not possible, Father Benjamin.”

“This plane could take us away in minutes.”

Willie shook his head sadly. Benjamin attempted to argue further, but Willie didn’t hear or if he heard would not listen. Finally he told Benjamin that it was too late and then he went to the forward cabin, leaving Benjamin still arguing, Grayson weeping, Joto and Truman trying to make sense out of what had been said in the desert and what now had been said on the plane.