Robert Sheckley - The Never-ending Western Movie

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The Never-Ending Western Movie

Robert Sheckley

The name is Washburn: just plain Washburn to my friends, Mister Washburn to

enemies and strangers. Saying that I've said everything, because you've seen me a

thousand times, on the big screen in your neighborhood theater or on the little pay-tv

screen in your living room, riding through Cholla cactus and short grass, my famous

derby pulled down over my eyes, my famous Colt 44 with the 7 1/2-inch barrel strapped

down to my right leg. But just now I'm riding in a big air-conditioned Cadillac, sitting

between my agent-manager Gordon Simms, and my wife, Consuela. We've turned off

State Highway 101 and we're bouncing along a rutted dirt road which will end presently

at the Wells Fargo Station that marks one of the entrances to The Set. Simms is talking

rapidly and rubbing the back of my neck like I was a fighter about to enter the ring,

which is more or less the situation. Consuela is quiet. Her English isn't too good yet.

She's the prettiest little thing imaginable, my wife of less than two months, a former Miss

Chile, a former actress in various Gaucho dramas filmed in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

This entire scene is supposed to be off-camera. It's the part they never show you: the

return of the famous gunfighter, all the way from Bel Air in the jolly jittery year of 2031

to the Old West of the mid-1900's.

Simms is jabbering away about some investment he wants me to come in on, some

new seabed mining operation, another of Simms's get-richer-quick schemes, because

Simms is already a wealthy man, as who wouldn't be with a thirty-percent bit on my

earnings throughout my ten biggest years as a star? Simms is my friend, too, but I can't

think about investments now because we're coming to The Set.

Consuela, sitting on my right, shivers as the famous weatherbeaten old station comes

into view. She's never really understood The Never-Ending Western Movie. In South

America they still make their movies in the old-fashioned way, everything staged,

everything faked, and the guns fire only blanks. She can't understand why America's

famous Movie has to be done for real when you could contrive all the effects and nobody

would get killed. I've tried to explain it to her, but it sounds ridiculous in Spanish.

It's different for me this time, of course: I'm coming out of retirement to make a

cameo appearance. I'm on a no-kill contract—famous gunman to do a comedy bit with

Old Jeff Mangles and Natchez Parker. There's no script, of course; there never is in The

Movie. We'll improvise around any situation that comes up—we, the commedia dell'arte

players of the Old West. Consuela doesn't understand any of this. She's heard about

contracts to kill, but a no-kill contract is something new in her experience.

And now we've arrived. The car stops in front of a low, unpainted pinewood building.

Everything on this side of it is 21st-century America in all its recycled and reproduced

gory. On the other side is the million-acre expanse of prairie, mountains and desert, with

its thousands of concealed cameras and microphones, that is The Set for The Never-

Ending Movie.

I'm in costume already—blue jeans, blue-and-white checked shirt, boots, derby,

rawhide jacket, and 3. 2 pounds of revolver. A horse is waiting for me at the hitching

post of the other side of the station, with all my gear tied aboard in a neat blanket roll.

An assistant director checks me over and finds me in order: no wristwatch or other

anachronisms for the cameras to find. “All right, Mr. Washburn,” he says, “you can go

through whenever you're ready.”

Simms gives his main-event boy a final rub on the back. He's bouncing up and down

on his toes, excited, envying me, wishing he were the one to be riding out into the

desert, a tall, slow-moving man with mild manners and sudden death always near his

right hand. But Simms is short and fat and nearly bald and he would never do, certainly

not for a heroic gunman's role, so he lives it vicariously. I am Simms's manhood, and he

and I have ridden the danger trail many times and our trusty 44 had cleared out all

opposition, until we reigned supreme, the absolute best gunslinger in the West, the one

who finally retired when all the opposition was dead or lying low... Poor Simms, he

always wanted us to play that last big scene, the final definitive walkdown on some dusty

Main Street. He wanted us to go out high, wide and handsome, not for the money, we've

got too much of that as it is, but just for the glory, retiring from The Movie in a blaze of

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Robert Sheckley - The Never-ending Western Movie

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