Early the next morning Cool Dawn awakened him.
“Are you prepared then?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Willie.
Through still, dim streets they went to a strange church called The Church of Saint Stephen the Martyr, and there Willie made his First Communion.
When he came back from the table of Eucharist, having swallowed the body of the Lord, Cool Dawn whispered, “We must try to love.”
Willie replied, “We must try to love.”
Outside, the morning light had come to the earth. The city was blue and magical, like a town in a children’s story or a dream.
Walking alongside his grandmother, Willie felt that he too might be in a dream.
BOOK TWO
Mr. Thoreau brought in a fugitive slave this
night, gangrenous in both legs and
advanced in tuberculosis. He asked me to
deliver a letter to his mother in
Mississippi. As Mr. Thoreau commenced
to take his dictation, the man observed
that his mother could not read. He then
expired in my arms. I buried the body in
the embankment near the Monument
where, I fear, it will surface in the
Spring. Mr. Thoreau in the meantime
retired to his Pond.
From the diary of Thomas Felder, M.D.
November 24, 1845
Concord, Massachusetts
Chapter one
Now, as he grew older, Willie learned many things. He learned that the capital of the state of Maine is Augusta.
He learned that the great planet Earth has five oceans and seven seas.
He learned that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.
He learned that George Washington did not tell lies and that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.
But for each thing he learned in his slow fashion, there were ten things, twelve things, twenty things he could not learn or understand.
In the world there were lovely things and there were terrors. But neither the lovely things nor the terrors were anything like what the teachers said in classrooms or what men wrote in books or what was shown on the desk-top TV screens.
In the city of Houston, in the neighborhood of the William McKinley Arms, there were strange and terrible things that people did to one another, and then there were even worse things that people did not do out of not caring or paying any attention to one another.
And in the great world beyond Houston, there were brutal, violent, ugly things that were happening, like the wars that were reported on the nightly telenews. Wars in Africa. Wars in India. Wars in the Philippines. Wars in the Middle East. Wars in Latin America.
“The sad wars of freedom,” a TV man in a dark blue suit said one night, “where the brave men of JERCUS fight on for you and me.”
“Who is that man, grandma?”
“The President.”
“What is JERCUS?”
“An alliance, it is called.”
“What is an alliance?”
“An agreement between nations.”
“Why is it called JERCUS?”
“J is for Japan. E is for Europe. R is for Russia. C is for China. US is for United States.”
“They are all fighting?”
“Yes.”
“Who do they fight?”
“The others.”
Besides the wars, there were what people called civil disturbances going on in certain cities of the United States.
These disturbances were strange happenings that took place at night, usually in the summertime, and the TV men were grave and sad-eyed when they spoke of them.
One summer there was even a civil disturbance in Houston, not far from the area of the William McKinley Arms, and a man named GoPaw North was killed.
The books did not speak of these matters, of the wars that were reported on the telenews or the civil disturbances that were going on, nor did the teachers.
When the tele-teachers on the desk-top screens talked of the lands where the wars were going on, it was to point out the minerals that were in the ground or what they called the natural resources or sometimes to tell what the annual rainfall was.
It was the same with the cities. The cities were important for having railroads or certain industries or for having large populations. The school cities were not connected with the civil disturbances or with anything else that was going on in the real cities.
Willie could not make sense of what the teachers said. He could not make sense of the books of the school. He could not make sense of the tele-lessons. So he continued to do poorly in his studies.
“He is a little retarded,” said one of the Sisters to Willie’s mother when he was in the sixth grade.
“His mind is not right?”
“According to the testing computer,” the Sister said. “It is a birth accident perhaps. He is not abnormal but he will have trouble even technically passing his high school work.”
Willie’s mother, working at the Rib N Rum Room, would weep when she thought of her son’s slowness. But Cool Dawn told her that though he was slow, he was learning many things all the same and that he was good, which was more important than being bright.
In the mornings Cool Dawn and Willie went to the Saint Martin de Porres church, and there Willie found those certain signs that made sense to him and heard readings from the one book he came to trust.
And when he was in the seventh grade, Cool Dawn took to reading this same book to him after supper in the evenings, and Willie listened to the stories that were told. He did not understand all the things that were told in the stories but he trusted this book to be a true sign because of the things he believed. He learned especially the Book of Gospels and came to love the Book of Gospels and put his confidence in it.
Still, he wondered about the things he saw and heard and he wondered especially why people did not choose to be the way that the signs showed them to be and why people did not seem to care one way or the other and why so many preferred to be nothing.
One winter in Willie’s last year at Martin de Porres, Cool Dawn came down with a bad cold and he had to go to Mass alone. That was the winter that he began to see the men lying in the streets, in certain doorways, where they had fallen—men who had preferred to be nothing rather than choose to be whatever they might have been.
Willie would try to speak to them, but usually they would only mumble and turn over on the pavement and go back to sleep. Sometimes they could not even mumble, and the police, responding to the phone call Willie would make, would come in their shiny black truck and cart them away like dead dogs.
“Dust to dust,” Officer Harlowe Judge would say. Or sometimes, “In the father’s house, Sam, there are many mansions,” or “If at first you don’t succeed, Sam… .” That Officer Harlowe Judge for no reason at all took to calling Willie Sam rather than Willie was one of those unfathomable things no book could teach but was all the same a true fact of the world.
In Willie’s first year at George A. Custer Memorial High, a boy from his class took a powerful drug so that he could fly, as he told a friend, and the drug killed him, and the vision of the boy lying in his coffin haunted Willie’s dreams and presented another fact that the book-school teachings did not present, yet it was a thing that had happened, and was a terror and truth that had to be reckoned, like the wars and the civil disturbances.
Once when he was sixteen he came across a copy of a news photo magazine. In the magazine there were pictures of children, babies even, with swollen stomachs and enormous white eyes. They were starving in some small country in Africa.
Willie carried this magazine around with him for days, asking his teachers to look at the pictures.
“Something has to be done,” he would say.
But his teachers told him there was nothing he, Willie, could do—the government was doing all it could.
“They are starv
ing,” Willie said to Clio.
“What did you expect?” Clio replied. “They’re black. They’re poor. Who gives a damn what happens to them?”
“You do and I do,” said Willie.
But Clio said that rich people did not care anything about poor people, how it went with them or if they ate or starved.
Then Willie would tell Clio of certain priests and Sisters and ministers of the church who spent their lives bringing food to starving people and he would tell him of certain doctors who worked hard in strange places helping people get rid of diseases that were taking the lives of children. He had read of these ministers and doctors in a magazine called Mission that he found one day in a pew of Saint Martin de Porres.
Clio would say, “How can you believe that jive?” And then he would make a speech saying that the church was a lie and religion was a lie and Willie was crazy to believe what he did.
What Clio thought, the way he felt, saddened Willie. But still Clio was his best friend, and Willie knew that suffering and anger made him say the things he did.
Clio’s brother George was in jail now and his father had died in prison and Clio spoke bitterly of the way things were arranged in the country.
“Look at their houses, their cars, their clothes,” he would say, referring to white people. “Look at us. Where are you, man? In a dream world!”
It angered Clio that Willie was not angry, only puzzled. He did not know how much Willie got from the trusted signs of the book and from things that were not in the book but were in the world because of what had happened and what was still happening.
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.
Chapter two
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 p
onds 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?”
The Last Western Page 6
