Free The Last Western by Thomas S. Klise

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