The Last Western (69 page)

“You crazy bastards!” he screamed. “You damned near hit me.” He dared not lift his head.

“This is GOLDENBLADE!” he shouted.

The laughter broke, then resumed—louder, closer. He looked up. On the snow-covered slope, waving bottles and shotguns, their hunting clothes spattered with blood, stood Cole and Ware. Goldenblade jumped up.

“You goddamn idiots! You goddamn near killed me. Goddamn your mothers and fathers immortally. All your offspring. Your goddamn—”

“Why, it’s Mr. Goldenblade,” cried Cole, weaving down the slope.

“Famous communicator, famous industrial giant,” said Ware.

Ware, whose face was blotched with blood and snow, crunched Goldenblade in a wet, feathery embrace.

“Idiots! Morons!” Goldenblade cried. “Don’t you know what’s happening here?”

“We’re hunting, Mr. Goldenblade,” crooned Mr. Ware, still holding the industrial giant in his arms. “Hunting the prey.”

“Let me go, you drunk son of a bitch.”

“You insult my mother, Mr. Goldenblade. Did I ever insult your mom?” said Ware, releasing Goldenblade slowly.

“
My
mother—
”
 Goldenblade sputtered.

“Mothers, all mothers—necessities of invention,” said Ware, and he fired his shotgun a few feet above Goldenblade’s head.

“Goddamn you!” Goldenblade shouted, frightened and backing away. “Don’t think I’m not going to report this to Bob Regent. Bob Regent is a close friend of mine. He doesn’t like drunken slobs working for him.”

Cole and Ware steadied themselves against one another.

“Wha’z Mr. Robert ‘Bob’ Regent got to do with it?” Cole asked.

“Bob Regent’s wine we’re drinking, in’t it?” said Ware, waving a magnum of Regent champagne.

Goldenblade, half crouched in the freezing snow, saw that the men were drunk beyond the use of reason. He decided to try another approach.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “it’s been a grand day of hunting.”

“Not over yet,” said Ware.

“Not by a long shot,” said Cole, and he and Ware doubled up with laughter. Cole fired his shotgun again.

“In a few minutes,” Goldenblade said in a forced, friendly, pacifying way, “just seconds really, our Holy Father, the pope, will be here. You know, to meet Mr. Regent and start L-Day?”

Cole and Ware were still laughing.

“We are all looking forward to seeing His Holiness. And of course, Bob Regent is especially looking forward to seeing His Holiness. That’s why I came out here, fellas. To find Bob Regent.”

Cole wheeled and shot into a sudden flight of ploves. Four fell, two of them flapping wildly, spurting blood on the snow.

The men shrieked with laughter, then blasted away at the wounded birds. The birds exploded and disintegrated. Feathers, a small rain of blood, the falling flakes.

“Kill 17,000 birds today,” Cole sang.

“Another 17,000 tonight,” sang Ware.

“Kill all birds in here.”

“Kill till it’s all birds—everything,” said Cole, waving his shotgun over the fields.

“Okay, fellas, sure. Ha-ha. We all enjoy sports, fellas. Good clean hunting sports. But where is Regent, Mr. Bob Regent?”

The men were still laughing.

“Fellas,” said Goldenblade, “it’s Mr. Bob Regent that the pope is coming to
see
.”

Cole reloaded his gun. “Mr. Bob Regent, did you say Mr. Goldenblade? Mr. Robert ‘Bob’ Regent meeting pop?”

“
Pope!
” Goldenblade shouted. “The Catholic pope.”

“Pope, pop—whazza dif’rence?” said Cole.

“Pop a pope, papa poppa,” said Ware. “Pop pop pop pop,” and he fired his automatic shotgun four times.

They doubled over with laughter once more.

Goldenblade, his teeth chattering, looked down at the lodge. Beyond it he could see the fields stretching down to the high fence around the entrance gate. And now he spied the first lights of the papal procession.

“He’s here!” he cried. “Look men, for God’s sake! He’s here! The pope!”

“Pop pop pop,” said Ware.

Cole fired straight up into the air.

In the lights of the moving cars, Goldenblade could make out the tents that had been erected in the area near the gate, the row of faint bonfires struggling in the snow, the modular cabins that had been erected in the afternoon.

Suddenly, overhead, came a whirring sound. Cole and Ware, roaring over their obscure elaboration of a joke, immediately fired toward it. They kept firing even after they saw the lights, the red and blue pulses of two, then four helicopters. The air was full of helicopters. .

“You crazy bastards!” screamed Goldenblade, striking the gun from Cole’s arms. “Those are choppers. That’s Bob Regent! Bob Regent!”

Cole and Ware swayed together, staring up.

“Pop a pope,” said Cole.

“Pop a poppa,” said Ware.

“Come, Bob!” Goldenblade shouted. “Here, Bob!” He lifted his arms to the first of the helicopters.

In the craft Zack Taylor, ace commentator of International Broadcasting, said, “Those men there to the side of the lodge—who are they?”

“Who knows?” his director replied. “Anyhow, that’s the procession ahead. But how do we light it?”

The network coordinator leaned forward and spoke to the pilot. “Radio the light crew to swing forward and try to get in from behind.”

“It won’t work,” the pilot replied. “Snowing too hard. He won’t be able to hold.”

“When do we take air?” Taylor asked.

“At 11:58, just after the Chicago cutaway,” the director said. “There’ll be light in the area where those tents are. They have search lights in there someplace.”

Even as he spoke, a half-dozen strong lights mounted on telephone poles switched on above the gate. The gate was opening now, and the first of the cars moved forward.

“Let’s get that,” Taylor said.

“There’s still not enough light from here,” said the pilot. “Besides this bird won’t stand still. Too much wind.”

Taylor turned to the director. “What are they showing now?”

“Williamsburg, Virginia. The President’s smoking a peace pipe with an Indian chief from Florida.”

“And we’ve got the goddamn pope!” said Taylor, who was known as an air hog throughout the industry and who was out to win his thirtieth award for excellence in broadcast journalism.

The car stopped
and Willie saw the fields of ice.

There was much talk in the car but Willie could not hear it. He was looking at the fields and trying to open the door of the car.

Truman and Joto made a chair with their hands and arms and Willie sat in the chair and they carried him to the entrance gates of Regent Fields. The wind was stronger.

“Please, let me walk,” said Willie.

So they put him down and he stood on unsteady feet and he saw the snow fields of his vision and he felt the ice wind that he had felt before and he saw the lodge and it looked like a castle or a church suspended in the air.

Grayson came forward to give him his arm and Willie passed through the gate and kept looking at the lodge and it seemed to be a place that someone had described to him long ago.

There were powerful lights flooding down on the ground around the entrance area and huge space heaters had been placed between the tents. The heaters had burned the snow away so that the ground was wet and brown and Willie thought that the ground was like sand strewn with seaweed.

They went into the first of the tents and Willie sat down on a folding chair and someone handed him a thermos of hot drink and someone patted his shoulders and there were many men in the tent and many more outside hurrying about and the men seemed far away to Willie and he kept looking at the lodge.

The strong lights made a liquid brown circle of grass and there was steam or mist rising from it and the snow falling into this circle continuously melted but beyond the circle the darkness fell like a curtain and on the curtain they had strung the electrical castle and Willie, looking at these things, felt his body begin to resign.

He heard the voices of Benjamin and Joto and he heard the whimpering of Grayson and Truman and he tried to unite himself with their bodies and draw strength from the sounds that they made but when he looked at his hands, his fingers were small strange snakes, and he was sick.

Benjamin held his head in a corner of the tent and he retched there and then came back to sit on the folding chair once more.

But now the helicopters swooped down over the moist brown earth and to Willie they were huge wasps with blinking red and blue eyes, and he was sick again.

They said various things to him and he tried to listen and he tried to think of those things he had always known and he tried to pray, but it was like another person listening and thinking and praying.

Someone took a picture then and the flash seemed to last a long time and he considered that the flash was inside his brain. When it finally burned away to a pinpoint and went out, he said Be calm to his body and then told himself that he must cross the brown circle and enter the black curtain and he must pass through the curtain and there on the other side—

Green tree
, a voice said distinctly.

“Where?” he said aloud.

Father Benjamin bent down.

“Where is what?”

“Where is the green tree?”

“You dream, young brother,” said Benjamin.

“The world is white and darkness but there is a green tree beyond the dark curtain.”

“In the dream only. It is winter here outside the dream you have.”

“Look at the grass, Father Benjamin. See how brown it is.”

“Only because of heaters that were brought here. Look. The grass is dead—killed by the cold and snow.”

“There are many things that are dead here. We have come to a place of death.”

“Do you want to die?” said Father Benjamin.

Willie looked at the old man’s face. He considered this question a long time. And now he entered his dream fully and tried to borrow the life it had had for him.

He shook his head slowly. “No.”

“Then we must leave.”

“Not before I meet him. I have to meet him.”

He drank from the thermos and he felt warmth and after a time he felt stronger. He stood up, still gazing at the lodge.

“You wish to die and do not know it,” said Benjamin. “Have you learned so little from our teaching? Do you not remember that the enemy is always death?”

Benjamin spoke with anger in his voice and with pity and with sadness.

Willie saw things vividly now—the tents, the campfires where the men of the papal escort gathered to warm their hands, the faces of the men themselves, laughing, excited as children. A little farther on, he could see men spreading out their sleeping bags on the brown turf. The strong lights, the clamor of the men, the roaring of the helicopters, gave the scene a theatrical air, and Willie said softly, “I go onto a stage in a play I did not write.”

Then he saw Herman Felder coming toward the tent, moving quickly, carrying his body like something that might go off.

He is in a dream too
, Willie thought,
and perhaps it chose him as mine chose me, and he felt the pull of the old murderous emotion.

“He is in a sort of trance,” Benjamin said to the others, as if Willie were asleep and could not hear him speaking.

“So is Brother Herman,” Willie said, as Felder came into the tent.

Felder spoke quietly, quickly, like the director of an acting troupe just before first night.

“Regent is here. He will meet you on the pathway to the lodge. Just beyond the rim of lights.”

“Yes,” said Willie.

“He will be alone. At midnight. It’s 11:51 now.”

“Yes, Brother Herman.”

“He cannot walk that far!” Grayson protested. “He is very ill.”

“I can make it, Mr. Grayson,” said Willie. “It is no more than the distance between home plate and the center field fence in Cleveland.”

“Why it’s two miles, boy!” said Grayson. He turned to Joto, Truman, Benjamin. “He can’t make it.”

“Regent’s coming halfway, Thatcher,” said Felder. “He’s standing at the door of the lodge now, we are told. He will come right down the path. There is a little clump of trees about halfway. That’s the place of the meeting.”

Willie nodded.

Grayson said, “You have seen Regent?”

“His emissaries,” said Felder.

“Who are his emissaries?”

“Various officials in the organization, Thatcher. They’re not in the baseball world.”

“Who are they?”

“Why are you questioning me like this?”

“Because I don’t believe the man is here,” said Grayson, bringing his bent body up to Felder.

“You’re excited, Thatcher. We’re all excited. Representatives of the papal guard, Monsignor Taroni and the others of our group conferred with Regent’s aides not more than five minutes ago. They assured us Regent is here, waiting at the lodge. He just arrived.”

“You don’t know that,” Grayson insisted. “You don’t know anything about that—”

“I know Bob Regent better than you know him, Thatcher,” said Felder. Then in a softer tone, “This is supposed to be an evening of reconciliation, Thatcher. Can’t you trust anyone?”

Willie stood by the door flap of the tent. He was looking at the lodge.

“We have to stop it,” Grayson said.

Willie, turning around, said, “No, Mr. Grayson, we cannot stop anything. It cannot be changed now. I must do what must be done.”

“The Society teaches freedom—even from our own choices,” said Benjamin. “You act like a man in captivity. Has the L-Plan not enclosed you?”

“It is a chosen plan,” said Willie, stepping into the glow of the gas lamp that hung suspended from the center pole of the tent. “Even now I could escape, I suppose. But what do I escape to? This is what I chose and am choosing. I cannot think beyond that.”

“You do not wish to admit to a mistake?” said Benjamin.

“If it is a mistake, then it is a mistake I have wedded,” said Willie. “I can no more give it up than Truman can talk.”

Truman moved toward the door flap.

“You are my brother, Truman,” said Willie, going over to him. “But my belief is my brother, too. That brother calls to me now.”

“You can’t go out there!” Grayson cried. Willie moved toward him.