The Last Western (50 page)

Who were you
?

When he closed his eyes, he saw first her face, then the other, the face that was forever young and blooming in the square of the Richard M. Nixon Park. Then the faces melted together.

He woke up in the middle of the night. When he remembered the strangeness of Felder’s expression, he felt the prickly sensation of the skin that he had felt when he pitched in New Orleans, the day he and Clio knew the owner was in the stands.

There was great rejoicing
in the papal apartments the day that Thatcher Grayson arrived from New York, or rather from the jail of Saint Paul the Apostle in Rome, where he had been detained for seven weeks on charges of deranged conduct.

Mr. Grayson had reached the eternal city the evening of Willie’s election but had come off the plane in what the police described as a delirious state shouting over and over again, “O mi tegurithi—the Spirit blasts us away!”

At the airport he had drawn a large crowd and caused a considerable disturbance and had not improved his situation when he told the Roman police magistrate that he had come to Rome to be with the pope so that together they might clear out.

Now, seven weeks later, Grayson came to trial and again spoke of clearing out.

“The court does not comprehend,” said the judge.

The court-appointed lawyer tried to explain.

“Signor Grayson believes that the present dispensation of things is coming to an end. He expects the return of Christ.”

“Not Christ!” Mr. Grayson shouted. “You’ve got it wrong, young fella. Christ has already come. Now we are going to get up to his level and jump.”

“Jump where?” the judge asked.

“Out,” said Grayson.

The court considered this answer briefly, then asked to speak to Mr. Grayson’s lawyer.

“His intellectual cogs slip,” the judge observed.

“Correct. However, he is harmless.”

“He could create nuisances, public scenes, tumults.”

“No more than the queens of the Veneto,” said the defense counsel.

“He is a drinking man?”

“He is scarcely an eating man. He talks only of spiritual things.”

“Jesus,” said the judge.

“Jesus and the Spirit and the others,” said the lawyer.

At that moment Herman Felder arrived in court.

“O mi tegurithi lama curi!” Thatcher Grayson crowed.

“
Ça va
, Thatcher,” said Felder shaking his hand. He turned to the court. “You make a practice here of arresting people for their religious belief?”

The judge looked at Felder with the confused memories of ten years ago.

“Signor Felder, I have seen you before? Please identify.”

“Movie mogul, financier, all-American winner,” said Felder with a cocky air.

The prosecutor rose. “If there is anyone in any position in this city who still has the faculty of human memory who does not know that Signor Felder is an illegal human, then that man lives with his head injected into the anal tract. With all due respect to his honor.”

“Lama curi—and blast off!” Grayson cried, jumping up on a table and scattering the brief prepared by his counsel.

“Relax, Thatcher,” said Felder. He handed the court a letter from Willie.

The judge read it twice. “It appears His Holiness expects this gentleman at the Vatican. Who am I to argue with the pope of the church. Release the man.”

“It is a fraud,” said the prosecutor. “The man is insane and Felder himself is a criminal.”

“O mi tegurithi,” Thatcher Grayson assured him, and handed the prosecutor a card. The card said, PLEASE ADMIT THE BEARER TO THE SOJOURN.

Grayson began distributing similar cards to all in the courtroom.

“Come on, Thatcher,” said Felder. “We’re holding up a convention.”

Twenty minutes later the old coach met his pitcher, throwing his arms about him, and speaking rapidly in tongues. Though Mr. Grayson did not know it, they were in a large, most magnificent chamber, filled with splendid paintings and other objects, including people.

Mr. Grayson began to weep and even his glad gasps were of the spirit type. Willie was moved to tears himself.

“Old friend, you are such a good man, isn’t that enough? Can’t we talk as men do?”

“Li mi salornia curi!” laughed Thatcher Grayson, conniving with the spirits he thought he saw drifting among the sculptures of dead saints.

There were of course no spirits in the magnificent chamber—only ninety-one men and women, strangely dressed in odd bits of costume, rags and tags and shabby sandals. They were the most wretched-looking men and women to have ever assembled in this splendid room.

They had been in Rome three days now after Benjamin had called the meeting of the Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up. Benjamin had asked for a convention of the total membership, but these ninety-one—black and brown and white and red and yellow and olive—were all who could attend. The other brothers and sisters were in jail or involved in substitution activities that could not be escaped.

Grayson moved among them, thinking their rag tunics to be odd clothing for spirits.

“O mi tegurithi,” he whispered to Brother Andrei, a Russian brother who had once been a philosopher at the University of Moscow.

“Who is this spirit-crazed person?” said Brother Andrei.

“He’s a brother,” said Felder. “His head is broken here and there but he will be all right in time.”

A sister Servant asked if she might perform the Servants’ version of exorcism. Benjamin shook his head. Then Benjamin walked up to Grayson and gave him the sign of homi-ney, the thrive sign appropriate for a human being who had elected to be more or less than human.

Grayson said, “Tegurithi?”

“I command you in the name of man to be man,” said Benjamin solemnly.

Mr. Grayson looked at Father Benjamin as if from a great distance. Benjamin repeated the formula of words.

Grayson saw a vague, white shape that he took to be a messenger of God.

“Man cannot be anything but man,” said Benjamin.

The ninety-one brothers and sisters held out their arms in prayer for Thatcher Grayson.

“Let the human be,” said Benjamin.

Little by little the vision Grayson saw changed, materialized in a white-bearded semihuman who reminded him of a figure from his college years when he had read the poetry and the novels of Old America.

“You are Mr. Whitman?”

“I am Benjamin, living human, and you are Thatcher Grayson, also living human. There is no getting around either of these two facts.”

Grayson slowly began to see that the strange-looking men and women around him were after all—strange-looking men and women.

“What needs—what needs to be done?” he asked.

“That depends on you and your understanding of your humanness,” Benjamin said.

“We 11,” said Grayson, seeing now that the ninety-one men and women were really distinct from the statues of the dead saints and popes, “Well, I think first I would like to visit the men’s room.”

At this the ninety-one members of the S.S.U.A.U.S.U. burst into applause.

The two cardinals watched the outrageous visitors from the window of Saint Lucy.

“They are criminals, most of them,” Profacci said. “Orsini is preparing briefs on them all.”

“Such strange-looking people,” Liderant said.

“I mean the original group. The dumb man has served innumerable jail terms in America. The Japanese thug, though it is beyond my belief, was once an artist of considerable renown. Orsini has an Interpol file on him that runs 100 pages. Felder—”

“What does he see in them? What do they give him that we cannot?”

“Birds of a feather,” Profacci said. “They are his
sort
.”

“I came upon him in the gardens yesterday. He was crying.”

“He is a disturbed young man, Henri. A dangerously disturbed young man.”

Liderant sighed. “He kept saying,
So won’t you let them go? Can’t you let them go?
What do you suppose he meant?”

“He is insane. And he will bring insanity to the church.”

 *  *  *

4:00 a.m. The brothers and sisters of the Society sit silently in a circle in the great aula, listening.

Willie sits with them wearing the ragtag tunic he had first donned at the Servants’ camp near Houston.

From time to time the others turn to him with a questioning gaze as if to acknowledge that while Benjamin is father of the Society, this man is the true leader, for he is pope of the utterly screwed up church. If anything can be done with that ancient sign, the doing of it will come through him.

The listening period followed a long discussion in which many proposals had been put forward. The discussion concerned the spirit-beast division of humanity, the boxes men had created as structures of life, the stupor and numbness of the JERCUS populations, the starvation and disease and suffering within the non-JERCUS southern nations.

Brother Sell of San Francisco, one of the more violence-prone members of the Society, argued that the papal buildings, the papal treasury, the papal properties and the papal art treasures should all be destroyed immediately.

This proposal was defeated on grounds that it would give the privileged and powerful the illusion of being persecuted.

Sister Nicole, the very beautiful weathercaster of Paris, declared that the pope should go on international television and infallibly pronounce that the world was conical, thus creating a trance-snap.

This proposal was considered to offer too many procedural difficulties and would merely be interpreted as a sign of the personal insanity of the pope.

An old one-armed brother, named Al-Tick, who worked as a maker of sweetcakes in a village of North Africa, said that the entire Society should travel to the most forsaken region of the planet and suffer a truly radical, unfathomable substitution experience in order to create, Al-Tick said, “a newer fire.”

Al-Tick mentioned the fate of ninety-nine monist guerillas of Italian nationality who had destroyed two dozen JERCUS missiles in Germany and who had been exiled
in perpetuo
to the wastes of the Arctic as punishment for their crime.

Herman Felder, leading a passionate discussion of this idea, called Al-Tick’s plan admirable in intention but pointed out that the world would soon conclude that the men who did such a thing were deranged.

“We must create a challenge that attacks society’s understanding of sanity since it is the standards of sanity that are the principles of death. If the challenge does not defeat the first principles,” said Felder, looking like the great Camus, “then what are we doing but serving those principles? Remember, each repulsed attack strengthens the case for death.”

Thatcher Grayson, wearing his tunic now, had no proposals to make and had difficulty in following the discussion. From time to time he grabbed his head to make sure he was truly man. Spirits were still calling to him and he fought to stay in place.

Joto, with wonderful chopping and dividing movements of the hands, explained that the boxes of the world had to be broken most deftly and expertly so that the persons inside them would not be hurt, and yet the boxes had to be broken decisively so that it would be impossible to go back to them later on.

Not quite apropos of this observation, Joto proposed that the pope should establish his residence in the sewers of Paris or some other stinking and inaccessible place of the earth.

“Pope quit—people go mad trying to find him,” said Joto excitedly. “Pope nowhere. People trample everything in path to get to pope who run away. At last find in filth. People say, Why? Pope say, Church toilet of universe. Pope only doing job. Big scandal. Very big!” And Joto’s face became the shocked expression of the face of the earth.

The membership applauded and whistled in agreement with Joto’s picture of things, but the discussion quickly turned to the question of how such a tactic would be interpreted in the long run.

Once again Felder’s view held.

“They call
him
, the
pope
, mad, don’t you see? Not their standards. When the pope,” Felder gestured to Willie “passed to Easter, there would be the swing back to normalcy again, and the case would go down as one of Rome’s crazy popes, like Celestine V. The
idea
of the gesture is correct, it is the specific that is wrong.”

Brother Andrei suggested that the pope declare himself a Marxist and lead the church into communism.

“It is impossible to think of new structures while private property continues. The ownership of the goods of the earth by a handful of private individuals is the greatest evil in the world today,” said Brother Andrei. “How can we create the conditions for true life as long as this demon reigns as king? Mind you, brothers and sisters, I do not deny that Marxism is also a box. I do not say that life flourishes in the Marxist states, which, as we all know, show many of the same tendencies of the old capitalist states and which are also today streaked with monist tendencies. I say only that the church cannot be a sign of human community as long as it condones and encourages and dignifies the concept of private ownership of the lands and the sources of production, since this ownership inevitably falls to the clever or the brutal or the strong or the acquisitive and makes most men slaves.”

A long discussion followed Brother Andrei’s proposal. Brother Lang Ti of Peking said that while communism in the short run seemed to solve what Lang Ti called the surface problems, it created in the long run a pseudocommunity with a new set of false standards, all the worse for claiming to be radically new.

“Look at the Marxist states of the world,” said Brother Lang Ti. “Can you tell me that in those states people are any happier, any more self-accepting, any more loving of one another? Those poor people, so used to thinking of themselves as economic units and ever holding before their minds the goals of production and the aims of the glorious revolution—who can call them free? They are still in their chains.”

“But the chains are not as bad as the other kind,” said Brother Andrei.

“A chain is a chain,” said Lang Ti.