The Last Western (29 page)

“If the police come, we must tolerate them, but the real peacekeeping must be our job. We must show them that we do not really believe in violence as a solution to the problems of this neighborhood or of the great sinful city itself.

“Then, from each block, a person should be elected to go to see the authorities about the housing, the conditions—”

“All that has been tried before!” a man shouted in disgust.

“With the power,” Willie went on, “with the power you have of bringing about results nonviolently, you can have the neighborhood you want.”

“It has been tried before, all of that,” the man called again.

“It has never been tried with faith. It has never been tried with any sense of hoping for a better result. A man must believe he can be free before he can act to make freedom possible.”

“Those are just words,” the same man said. “And what power do we have to back them up?”

“If they want to see the power, if they cannot change without a show of power,” said Willie, “then there is the power of unified numbers acting in nonviolent protest. Look at it this way. If a million black people of this city were to lie down on the thoroughfares of Chicago bringing to a halt all its so-called business and making it impossible for men to go on as usual, then you would see a change.

“Consider what I tell you. If a million black people were to suddenly place their bodies in the way of all commerce and business, they would not be able to cope with it. Not be able to build enough prisons. Not be able to handle the numbers and the persistence of it. They would exhaust themselves trying to deal with the peaceful presence of so many black bodies getting in the way of things and breaking up the arrangements.

“In the end, out of regard for themselves and for the sake of their precious life-styles, as they call them, they would choose justice as the easier course of action.”

The crowd was silent, doubting what he said but still captivated by the picture.

“If you cannot act as one, then you will never have justice. Your power comes from your unity and your unity comes from your acceptance of one another. This is all you have but it is a lot. It is enough to break up the mold that keeps you captive.

“Once you get justice here,” he said lowering his voice a bit, “who knows? Perhaps you can teach them something about the greater justice—what is beyond justice. Perhaps some of those dead men might come back to life.”

He had them now. The crowd was in the thousands, stretching out as far as the eye could see.

The shouting was gone. There was only the low roar of the fires.

“We must begin with the fires,” said Willie. “I am going back now in this truck, going back to the access streets. I am going to ask the officials to come here and put out the fires. I will ask you to cooperate with the people who come here, the firemen and the policemen, working with them as if this had been a natural disaster, like a great storm.

“When the peace has come, form into a body and march to the office of the mayor. Make the demands that need to be made. Make them particular and specific, not just so many angry words.

“Tell the mayor and the city council that finally you are fed up and that if the demands are not met, then you will nonviolently interrupt the city of Chicago, causing it to stop operations, until it does something about human living.

“You must believe you can choose to have better living, more living. If you do not believe this in your hearts, you will never be able to convince the powers.

“If you believe, they will believe.”

At that moment a nine-year-old boy, playing on the roof of a tenement across the street from the park, picked up the rifle his older brother had set against the chimney.

He sighted down the barrel as he had seen men do on TV.

For a moment he thought he was a soldier fighting for freedom in a far-off land.

He took careful aim at the figure standing on the ladder of the truck.

He pulled the trigger.

The shot entered the cab of the truck and struck the girl in the shoulder.

The bullet passed through her heart.

She fell over dead.

The crowd broke and panicked, shrieking.

Then the people saw the child. Arms swung upward.

A profound hush fell over them.

Willie held the dead girl in his arms.

She appeared to be sleeping but she was dead.

He stood stone-still; the horror had made him a statue. Then he looked up.

With a voice that was already breaking, he spoke his final words into the microphone: “Go now to your homes.”

Where had she come from
?

She appeared to be sleeping so then the Lord touched her and she awoke.

Willie brushed a lock of hair from her eye, and she was dead and she would always be dead and she had chosen it or taken it in marriage, preferring the old professor to—

Do you Carolyn take Professor Death to be your lawful husband?

And now as he turned to go, with the people clearing a way for him, in awe of the dead burden in his arms, Willie felt the old lesson-master proceeding before him, making the poor words he had spoken just so many currents in the air.

He began to make his slow march back through the streets.

The streets were calm, filled with people, speechlessly watching his slow funeral procession, overcome by the truth of the ancient lesson, that tired argument that had no answer.

Willie wept as he walked, but with that weeping that is without tears.

So you have your bride this night, and so your family grows, and ah, how proud you must be
, Willie said to Death.

Professor of the world that isn’t, master of the final arrangement.

The mouth, the eyes, exactly like hers.

We have that card we hold back,

Why don’t we play it? I don’t know, I don’t know.

Christ.

“Christ!” he said aloud.

But Death did not take notice.

Willie walked up to the police and firemen at the barricades.

“Go in peacefully,” he told them. “And do what you must do.”

He walked on with the girl limp in his arms.

Soon she would be stiff, he thought, stuck firm in the last arrangement.

At the great thoroughfare of Michigan Avenue the TV cameras picked him up.

The traffic stopped.

For twenty minutes Chicago watched that lone figure walking up the center of Michigan Avenue, his red hair blowing in the wind, her black hair whipping in the wind. The eyes of people were riveted on the final humorless arrangement.

It was that picture, that strange slow-treading figure, more than any words that had been spoken in the park, that broke the riot.

And it was that picture, carried on national television that night, emblazoned on the nation’s magazine covers that weekend, that imprinted itself on the starved imagination of the death-marveling people and made Willie for a magical moment the fleshly sign of what man had once wanted in his best dream, before all had been known and tagged and put into plastic containers.

But now there was only the long, long march.

And as he walked, carrying the girl, Willie felt he had made the journey before.

And these people watching and staring and placing the whole effort of their shocked and overloaded brains into the act of marveling at the old lesson—had he not seen them before, caught in this very trance?

Where?

At the Entirely New Life Insurance Company building, they were waiting for him like frightened acolytes—the mayor and the governor and the cardinal.

Willie approached the cardinal.

“The victim, Your Excellency or Eminence or whatever they use instead of your name,” he said, holding the girl out from his body. “A little victim of the joke and lesson plan.”

“He’s wigged,” whispered the governor.

The cardinal’s face went white.

“Glory be to God,” he said. “What is it you want, Father?”

“See how light she is,” said Willie, and he thrust the body of the dead girl into the arms of the cardinal.

The cardinal, aghast, looked down at the girl’s face.

Immediately her red blood ran in a streak down his red silk robes.

“So light,” said Willie, “like the feather of a bird. Something for the great beast of power to wear in his hunting hat.”

The cardinal’s gold-rimmed glasses fell down on the girl’s breast, teetered and then fell to the floor.

Everybody scrambled to retrieve them.

“Your Eminence,” said the mayor, and he directed a policeman to relieve the cardinal of his burden.

Willie went out of their midst, taking the elevator into its deep plunge, and then he went into the city to pray, alone.

Alone but for that solitary figure, fantastic and white, moving slowly along the thoroughfares and carrying in his arms the world’s most expensive camera.

They flew
him to St. Louis then. They flew him to Los Angeles. They flew him to Memphis in Tennessee.

To put out the fires.

To end the violent striving.

A witches’ Pentecost had begun—a fury of flame and madness.

Who could explain it? No one. Everyone.

A swarm of pictures and choices had come as a plague upon the people.

Too many pictures for the eye to behold, too many choices for the mind to consider.

Like locusts swarming, the million-pictured choices came in the hot July night.

America could not stand it.

America said, Let us have the quick and the simple.

A clear resolving of intricate difficulties.

A clean release from the intolerable tension.

A way of saying yes. A way of saying no.

Something silver-certain. Now.

The poor had waited too long.

The black-skinned had waited too long.

The old and the blind and the hungry too long.

So in their ragged clothes they rose up with a slogan of stone and a message of fire.

After so much progress, people said.

After all we have done, people said.

But with stone and flame and shotgun fired from nighttime rooftop, the poor said no to all that had been attempted.

They struck at the cages of the great cities, driven on by the intolerable pictures that had come to them in the night.

And the tall avuncular silver-haired nation, old-healthy color drained quickly from fixed-smiling face, trembled and shook.

Click
went the key in the door latch.

Handsome, healthy men cleaned their hundred million guns in their polished colonial kitchens while video cassettes retold the history of their forefathers on huge screens that encircled the tables where they ate.

The authorities gathered in dim rooms of faint oak gleam-ings and old pictures of heroes who had created the honored arrangements of unremembered ages.

Let us have law, they said.

Let us have reason, they said.

Let us be fair, they said.

Revised editions of old versions of unexplained arrangements.

Death.

The authorities with their shocked, benumbed brains could not think new things.

Too many pictures, too many choices for the frail, electing heart.

The authorities made excellent speeches that said, Death.

Under the limp flags they talked until they knew they too would die.

Let us survive, they said at last.

Low cheers. General agreement.

So they clutched the available stop sign.

Eagerly, gratefully, fumbling over one another to secure their homes, their cities, they seized the willing stop sign.

The stop sign that could be moved by fast jet from flash point to flash point and bring the blessed trance.

The stop sign of Willie.

The stop sign that was the red blood of Ella Monterey that stained his tattered sweatshirt.

When the black and the poor and the desperate and the crazy saw that red flag, they would turn from the burning of their life-binding cages.

For a time.

For how long no man could tell.

*  *  *

In gray gunpowder dawns, in tiny late-night rooms that were temporary TV stations, from trucks that swerved through streets where every building was a pillar of fire, Willie prayed and wept and showed his stop sign flag of peace.

He had no more speeches or suggestions to make.

Chicago was the end of suggestions.

He did not know what to think of what he saw—except that it had to be stopped.

Sometimes he thought an old order was being burned away, as Clio said.

Just as often it seemed to him the nation was committing suicide.

He knew an answer but he had no words for it.

Everywhere he went, there were the great image-crazed crowds, and with the crowds, the feeders and leaders: reporters, televisioners, politicians, churchmen.

Everywhere he heard his name, as in those few days so long ago when he had been a pitching great.

Across the nation, the legend of his baseball feats was everywhere being revived.

People wanted his autograph—a mile from a burning neighborhood.

In Boston, while people died, a promoter insisted that he pitch a benefit game.

“Think of what it would mean to the poor,” the promoter said. “A spectacular now would save everything.”

But Willie knew no spectacular would save the cities that were exploding one by one.

There was one answer, he knew.

Still he had no way to put the answer into words.

For the moment he was the word, he and the red sign.

The answer was a secret he carried in his heart, and if he could not reduce it to suggestions, he knew it was there.

It gave him hope in the worst of troubles.

In spite of everything he still smiled, he still laughed, he still marveled at the goodness of people, even at their unfinest.

“We will win through,” he kept telling the crowds.

When they shouted back happily, he thought they felt as he did, believing the secret he believed.

*  *  *

To Philadelphia, where the bewhiskered men in the old pictures had once tried to think a brand new thing and had faltered in the middle of their thoughts, came Clio seeking to buy more arms.