The Last Western (8 page)

What Clio saw and felt and heard, Willie too saw and felt and heard but he had the signs that he believed and he knew for sure that in the world there were more lovely things than terrors and that the terrors were not finally greater than people, and he knew too, because of what had happened according to the one trusted sign, that the world was holy even in its terrors.

Because he had that knowledge, Willie was joyful. That was what everyone remembered later, while they could still remember.

One day a sign went up over the Nagasaki Zero—a neon sign of pulsing green that said, REGENT WINE—AND THE WORLD IS FINE.

Willie thought this sign to be magically beautiful. The green pulse was like a code message coming through the night. He adopted the words of the ad as his motto.

His joy
was natural to him and came from the deepest part of him.

It came from the trust he had in the signs, but of course the people of the neighborhood did not know that.

They saw only his joking and clowning and what they called his good nature.

He found many things funny and nothing funnier than himself.

Gangling and tall with his flaming red hair and his slanty eyes that he could do many funny things with, he loved to play the clown—especially for the children of the district.

Sometimes he would come to school in a black stovepipe hat and a long black coat that he had found somewhere and he looked on those occasions like a clown Abraham Lincoln.

He joked about the new low records he was establishing at George A. Custer Memorial High and he openly declared himself King of the Stupids, a title no teacher ever challenged.

The joy was in him and of him and it drew others to him, like a magnet drawing filings, so that people loved to be with him, especially in times of trouble.

He drew the troubled at first because the people having troubles were cheered up by just being with him, his condition being so much worse than their own. He was not only stupid, as he admitted, but he was a mixture, a mongrel of races and nationalities, so that people pitied him as an outcast.

He was black, yet not black enough to be truly of the black people.

He was Chinese, yet too black and too Mexican to be considered a Chinaman.

He was Mexican and Indian, but too redheaded and too black to be called either a Mexican or an Indian.

He was Irish, but no Irishman in the world would call him Irish.

He was everything, which made him nothing; he was a mistake of some sort.

So, pity brought the troubled first. But when the troubled people came, they found the calmness and the joy, which brought them back a second time. And then they found the gift he had for listening.

He could listen to a person talk for hours without interrupting. He was as good at this with old people as he was with the students of the high school and the children around the William McKinley Arms tenement. He was even good at listening to Officer Harlowe Judge, who took one whole night telling Willie what he had done in a war and how he wished he had never left the army and how his wife had left him and what he wanted to do to the man who had taken his wife from him and many other things, all the while calling him Sam.

After the troubled people had told him all that was wrong with their lives, they would invariably start in on Willie, trying to counsel him. It happened with them all. It was a pattern.

They would go on and on, repeating themselves five times over. And then coming to a stop, they would say, “Why don’t you dress up a little?” or “If you transferred to the Tech School right now, you could apply for a job at. … “

There was always a mixture of exasperation and pity in this advice from the sorry. In the face of his ridiculous patience, even the most troubled people seemed to sense in him something that went beyond all normal limits’—some intricate, abnormal piece of gear that would sooner or later get broken.

No one felt this more than Carolyn Sage and no one else, not even Clio, understood that slow as he was in books and studies, still there was something special inside that was a gift, and she tried to protect it and she did not like to see him clown so much and she resented it when others took him for granted.

When Willie finally succeeded in convincing Mrs. Sarto that he was Willie and not Colombo and when Willie found out that Colombo was a mutual funds salesman living in Boulder, Colorado and wrote and telephoned Mr. Colombo Sarto to come and see his mother, Carolyn resented it. And when the son came to the William McKinley Arms and treated Willie “like a shoeshine boy,” as Carolyn put it, she resented it even more. But Willie was only grateful that Mrs. Sarto had seen her son again.

He prayed the rosary with Mrs. Sarto two or three times a week, even though the rosary was not his favorite method of praying, and Carolyn resented this also. When she found out that Mrs. Sarto used Willie as an errand boy to pick up her groceries, Carolyn’s resentment turned to outrage.

“She’s crippled,” Willie would say.

“She’s been paying the Brisson kid all these years. You she gets for nothing.”

Willie would make a face and Carolyn would get even angrier.

Carolyn and Willie were often together now. They went together as people said in those older days, though Carolyn sometimes went with others, especially when Willie seemed to ignore her or treat her like a sister.

Carolyn wanted to be serious but Willie was hardly ever serious, though in the spring of the year when everything changed, he came to be serious very quickly.

One night especially he wanted to be serious suddenly and completely and in a way he had never been serious before.

That was the night he knew for sure that he loved her and that he had always loved her and he felt totally and in every part of him different, and she was not the same and he was not the same.

It happened in the Richard M. Nixon Park, a short distance from the William McKinley Arms, on a spring night just before life speeded up and was different forever for both of them.

*  *  *

The Richard M. Nixon Park was a small affair, only two blocks long and very badly run down, though once it had been quite beautiful.

There was a little lake in the middle of the park and on it in the old days long-necked swans used to swim about in their wonderful aloof way.

But the swans had died long ago of the Pond Plague, that mysterious disease that had ravaged most of the ponds of the country, killing the fish and the water birds too.

There were no live birds of any kind in the park now, only the new mechanical birds that had become so popular in the cities of the United States and that flitted through the air swiftly and cleanly and were guaranteed to not reproduce or do other disorderly things.

Once there had been trees ringing the Richard M. Nixon Pond, cedars and maples and tender ash, but they too were dead now, replaced by the artificial trees that had been planted in most of the neighborhoods of the city.

The little red and yellow flowers that had once bloomed along the walkways had all died mysteriously in a single summer and had been replaced with Plasti-Bloom, the new artificial flowers that had been the great American invention of two years ago.

Willie and Carolyn liked to go to the Richard M. Nixon Park when it was just getting dark and there was a little breeze in the air so that they could hear the water rippling in the pond and when there was just enough moonlight to cast a sheen of silver across the water surface and yet not so much as to show what the water looked like underneath.

Here one night, in the spring when everything changed and everything speeded up, they came and sat down on a bench that had a slogan painted across it—JERCUS OR ELSE—and the moonlight was just enough and the breeze was just enough and Carolyn asked Willie what he would do with his life.

“Some work,” said Willie. “I don’t know.”

“You must like something?”

“Well—there is astronomy, is that what they call it? Then, to be a brain surgeon—”

“There are lots of jobs.”

He laughed. “Garbage collector?”

“Why do you say that?” The wind shifted a little, perfumed and warm. He turned to her, to something in her voice.

“What?”

“Why do you always put yourself on the bottom rung and then make fun of being there?”

That was what she said, but Willie, looking at her and seeing her face so brown and beautiful in the faint, suddenly trembling light, could scarcely hear the words for the racket starting in his heart.

As she sat there, she seemed slowly at first, then quickly, magically, transfigured, a creature he had never seen before, yet had always known.

His mouth opened a little but he was dumb as a lamppost.

“… of whatever you wanted to be.”

What was she saying? He could see her eyes and her mouth and the soft shoulders and her arms. The definite lovely curve of her breasts. Her lips.

“… what you think yourself… .”

I love you
, he wanted to say. But she had numbed and stunned him, and he could only look at her with the wonder pumping and pouring in his heart.

“… technical schools… .”

His mind raced through the riot of his feelings, looking for words. Insanely, the name of Isaia Corales came to him. Isaia Corales, who had come by the tenement that very afternoon to show her a camera he had bought. Isaia Corales, who was very handsome and had a wonderful singing voice and played the classical guitar and got straight A’s without even reading the books. Carolyn and Isaia. Isaia and Carolyn.

Carolyn.

Overwhelmed, confused, somersaulted, he put his hand in his shirt like the emperor Bonaparte of long ago and said, “Maybe I’ll be the President,” clowning because he did not know how to say what he wanted to say more than anything else.

“Don’t you think I know how you feel—about serious things?” Carolyn said, faltering a little herself, and feeling a somersault in her own heart—the one she had felt before and had not known how to handle.

They had been friends so long they were like brother and sister, and Carolyn did not understand the new bewildering, aching, sometimes frightening feeling she felt for him when she saw him at school, or coming up the stairs of the tenement.

She knew no way to break through the old intimacy to make room for the new one.

And on top of everything else, she feared that Willie loved Sara Miro, the beautiful girl who had every boy in the class crazy about her for one reason or another but mostly for the one reason.

Willie’s wonder kept searching and groping, trying to ground itself on something definite.

“I don’t know what—” he began. “I don’t think much—of what I should do.”

She felt the aching, frightening, wonderful feeling then more powerfully than ever.

Love me
, she wanted to say, but Sara Miro and her own bewilderment would not let her.

“You will become the first lady President,” Willie said, not paying attention to this tumble of words, “President Carolyn.”

She loves Isaia Corales
, his brain babbled.

The moon sailed up orange and huge before them.

Willie reached for her hand and that was his moment, his only moment, to be completely serious, and it was wrecked even as it was born, exploded by the blue-white light that hit them from the street where the police car had driven up under the gaudy moon.

Across the dead pond the voice of Officer Harlowe Judge came rasping through the beam of blue light:

“Curfew Sam, curfew Jane—ah mean,
na-ow!
”

The light was still on them as they left the Richard M. Nixon Park, taking their shattered moment with them, with Harlowe Judge’s voice trailing after them, “Break curfew and it’s Jesus comin’ down.”

So they went back to the William McKinley Arms, Willie joking and bending his tall, funny frame this way and that and Carolyn laughing, each of them caught in their incommunicable love, unable to speak to one another those simple words that are the best in the books of man.

If they had had one more night like that in the Richard M. Nixon Park, or only one more hour, or even twenty minutes, they might have managed to break through the things that were in the way.

But there were no more nights like that.

The next day Carolyn went with Isaia Corales to think things over, and that was the afternoon that everything changed with Willie, and the world itself seemed to speed up, and nothing was the same again.

Willie and Clio
had long been the best athletes at George A. Custer Memorial High—Clio in football and baseball, Willie in basketball and baseball. They played first string on all the Custer teams, and people said that sooner or later one or the other of them would reach what they called the Big Time.

Still, no one was prepared to say in what sport or which boy. And no one was prepared for the events that took place that warm spring afternoon when the Custer baseball team opened its season against Sam Houston High.

Willie, by far the best pitcher on the team, had been picked to start the first game. Clio was his catcher.

They had been warming up on the regular diamond for about ten minutes when Willie threw a pitch that broke upward and hit Clio’s mask.

“What was
that!
” Clio hollered.

“It slipped,” Willie called back. “Sorry.”

“Do it again.”

“It was a mistake.”

“Try it anyway.”

So Willie gripped the ball between his thumb, index finger and middle finger and tried to repeat the pitch. This time the ball went over Clio’s head and into the screen.

Clio came out to the mound.

“You sidearmed it too much. The first time you threw it slower, from the top.”

“It was a curve that slipped,” said Willie.

“Just try it, will you?”

Willie tried the pitch again. This time it came into the plate like a fast ball, then swerved up, tipping the edge of Clio’s mitt.

“It’s a new pitch!” Clio shouted.

Coach Moss Gideon, who had been watching all this on the sideline, came out to the mound.