At Play in the Fields of the Lord (6 page)

“Caramba!”
Wolfie said, judicious.
“How’m I doin, Lewis?”

Moon said, “We have no money, and apparently there is no work we can do here.”

The Comandante nodded.
“I much regret it, of course, but even if there was work that you could do, I am not empowered to issue work permits to foreigners.
I am sure you understand my position.”

“You own the hotel, you own this town.
We are living at your expense; therefore we figure you have something in mind.”

The Comandante sighed.
“If you cannot regulate your accounts in a very short time, you will force me to confiscate your property.”

“The airplane.”

“The airplane.
Precisely.”

“And you know what the plane is worth.”

Guzmán grinned.
“As a matter of fact, I do.
I have made inquiries.”

“We are American citizens.
Suppose we complain to our ambassador?”

Guzmán grinned still wider, a grin that shot straight back along his jaw without curling upward.
“I beg of you,” he said, “please do so.
Your embassy will advance you funds and you may regulate your accounts, no?”
His tone changed, and for the first time he spoke to Moon directly.
“I have been waiting for you to do this,
piloto
.
Why have you not done it, eh?”
When Moon was silent, he continued, “Because you do not wish to do it.
Because you are fugitives, perhaps, or criminals.”
He banged both hands flat upon the table.
“All the more reason why I must protect my country!”
He waved his hand toward the door, dismissing them.
“I will give you three more days,” he bawled, and jammed his face into his glass again, surfacing a moment later with a blast of air.

“Hey,
momentito
,” Wolfie said.
“Hey, Lewis, remember what we heard about them Indians?”

“Guzmán,” Moon said.

The man whirled on him.
“Mestizo!
You will call me Comandante Guzmán!”
he shouted.
“Be very careful!
I can send you back where you have come from, do you understand?
And there you will be shot!”

Moon was listening to his partner, his face expressionless.
Then he said to Guzmán, “It is your job to develop this region, no?”

“Eh?”
Guzmán placed his fingertips on the table, as if about to spring.
“What is it?”

“The Niaruna are still not pacified, and the news is getting out, and yet your hands are tied because the law prohibits you from sending your soldiers in to kill the Indians.”

Guzmán nodded, looking carefully at Moon.
“I am quite able to take care of our poor Indians.”

“We were just thinking that a foreign plane loaded with armaments …?
On its way elsewhere …?”

Guzmán kept on nodding.
“Claro,”
he said.
“Sí.
Claro.”

L
ATER
, on their beds upstairs, they discussed it further.
They were both irritable, Wolfie because he felt Moon had not really told him what had been decided with the Comandante, and Moon because he did not want to think or talk at all.
He lay on his back and stared at a huge moth pasted on the ceiling.

“Lewis,” Wolfie said.
“I ain’t as stupid as I look, so level with me.
Something happened there right at the end, I seen his face.”
He heaved over on his side.
“That bastard’s got a plan he didn’t have before, now ain’t that right?
He kinda likes the Old Wolf’s idea about goin out and leanin on them poor motherin Indians we heard about, the ones that’s buggin him out to the east.
Right?”

Moon was silent.

“Oh that murderin bastard,” Wolfie said.
“Like, shame on’m.”
After a while he said, “Listen, Lewis, I don’t blame you, not wantin no part of this.
I don’t
blame
you, only did you stop and think, if
we
don’t do it, somebody else’s goin to, and if we
do
do it, we don’t have to make no direct hits, just maybe like a little napalm upwind, know what I mean?
Just run ’em the hell out of there.”

“Um.”

“Well, there’s always the diamonds, Lewis.”

“Yeah.”

“These greasers run a lousy jail, Lewis, and how about the aircraft?
And also, these Neo-rooneys ain’t real Indians, Lewis.
They ain’t like Blackfoots or Apaches or Cheyennes or nothin.
They’re just a bunch of starvin jungle rats, just like you told me.
This is
South
America, remember?
It ain’t like they was your own people or nothin.
So maybe you could kind of think of it like a
mercy
killin, huh, Lewis?”

Wolfie cocked his hip and cheerfully broke wind.
“I said, huh, Lewis?
You ain’t startin to go soft on me, I hope?”

Moon was staring at the moth so hard that it blurred and became two.

He was still irritable when Uyuyu knocked on the door; he snapped it open, and the Indian leaped back toward the stairwell.
In the cheap red shirt that the missionaries had given him,
Uyuyu’s neck looked thin, and his face twitched in his attempts to smile.
This Indian happened to have a bright red shirt with bright blue rockets on it, but otherwise he was identical to his counterpart in every frontier river town from Puerto Maldonado in Peru to Pôrto Velho in Brazil, from Riberalta in Bolivia to Bahía Negra down in Paraguay: the native with the bright smile and the Christian humility, the sharp eye and the crucifix.
Moon demanded, “Did you bring it?”
He did not know which gave him most shame—the stupor of the Indian defeated by the white man, or the hunger of the convert like Uyuyu, with his base imitations of the white man’s way.

Another door opened down the corridor, and a girl appeared in a shaft of light.
She closed her door and came toward them.
Uyuyu tried to slip past Moon into the room.
Perversely, Moon deterred him.
Uyuyu was still pushing gently as the girl approached the stairs.
She greeted him—“Uyuyu,
buenos días
”—and smiled inquiringly at his discomfiture.
Glancing at Moon, she nodded politely, then looked carefully again.
She was a small girl with straight brown hair to her shoulders and a clear open face, sunburned, in hide sandals and a dress of pale blue faded linen.
Moon had noted her nice legs while waiting to see her face, but it was the face that struck him.
The skin was warm and clear and the mouth full—the line of the upper lip was a soft arch and white teeth touched her lower lip in a wistful way.
So certain was he that she smelled good that his belly glowed and tingled, and at the same time he was overwhelmed by nostalgia for something lost.
Frantic, he cleared his throat.
She was turning toward the stairs.
“I don’t guess we’ve met before,” he said.

She gazed directly into his face.
“No,” she said, “no, we haven’t.”
She went on downstairs.

“Misionera,”
Uyuyu said, grinning tentatively.
The Indian was prepared to speak of her with reverence or obscenity, according to the whim of his new master, but Moon only scowled at him and sent him off; Uyuyu was to seek out his friend, the
ayahuascero
, and bring Moon a fresh bottle of the drug by the next evening.

Moon went back into the room.
Wolfie lay flat out on his
bed, his beret propped on his huge dark glasses, his gold earring on the pillow, snoring.
At the rust-flecked mirror on the fly-specked sink Moon curled his lip at what she must have seen.
Once, at a police hearing, he had heard a tape of his own voice, and the sound had seemed just as foreign to him as the face which now confronted him: a lean face, yellow-bronzed with sunburn and malaria, carved close around high cheekbones and an Indian’s broad mouth, a weathered face, so set in its expression that the dark eyes seemed to burn through a leather mask.
The face was capped by a hood of blue-black hair as thick and solid as a helmet—a bad head, he thought, a
dirty
head, as the French say.
It looked too big for the body, though the body was strong and quick enough—or had been before he had worn it out with lush and tail and junk, and now malaria.
Well, he was scarcely a parfit gentil knight; as Wolfie said, he looked like some Hollywood Geronimo trying to kick a ninety-dollar habit.

Moon toppled backward over the end of his own bed and blew a long sigh at the ceiling.
Wolfie was sighing, too.

“I’ve had a hard-on for three days now,” Wolfie said.
“You think I ought to consult my physician?”

And they lay there laughing for a long time, Wolfie hiccuping for joy, while the vultures circled in the dull gray sky beyond the window, crisscrossing the black crest of jungle, and the enormous moth on the ceiling gazed down upon them with the white eyes on its wings.
And then Lewis Moon sat up again and brought both feet down hard on the floor between the beds.

O
N THEIR WAY DOWNSTAIRS THEY WERE INTERCEPTED BY THE
Comandante, who bought them a drink.
Moon emptied his glass and banged it down on the table between himself and Guzmán, contemplating his host until the latter, caught by the sound in mid-pontification, withheld a frown, smiled that long smile that seemed to move straight back instead of moving upward, and asked Señor Wolfie if he and his … friend?… would not have another.
Moon raised his eyebrows, shifting his gaze to a fourth man who had joined them at the table.

“I would be happy to join you,” the priest said in English; he had come in late.
He smiled, affecting innocence of the Comandante’s irritation, and bowed almost imperceptibly to Moon.
He was a small spare figure with a shrewd frugal face and stiff white hair standing straight up on his head, and this evening, despite the heat, he wore his black robe and a crucifix on a long chain.

More drinks came, and still more drinks, and the Comandante paused briefly in his discourse to display soiled photos of
his forlorn fat wife, taken head on, at attention—Señora Dolores Estella Carmen María Cruz y Peralta Guzmán, he proclaimed—and of his son Fausto, whose head at this moment was just visible behind the bar.
El Comandante did not dispense salaries to strangers.

“The Indians, in my heart I love them, they are my brothers, but this great land must be made safe for
progress
 …” Guzmán had already made his point obliquely, confidentially, demanding and eliciting an occasional “
Sí, claro
” from Moon and from the padre; swollen with drink, he was now prepared to start again.
Even Wolfie, who had caught little or nothing of the address, sensed that they were in for a reprise.
“Oh man,” he groaned, and rolled his eyes.
Clearly, he felt that an interjection in another language could scarcely be taken amiss—or not, at least, by a drunken greaser.
And it was true that in an access of self-hypnosis, El Comandante continued to speak with furrowed brow, his eyes shut tight in psychic pain; he seemed oblivious of them all.

“Los indios, quiero decir, los salvajes bravos—”

Wolfie whistled.
“Even him payin for the drinks, it
still
ain’t worth it.
I mean you boil down all this gas he’s blowin which I don’t even understand a word of it, and what he still wants is that we swing out there and blast the crap out of the redskins, right?”

Moon nodded, and the padre’s smile flickered a moment, like a tic.

“Jesus, why don’t he spit it out then?”
Wolfie said.
Then he yelled, “Get your ass out there, boys, and blow them little brown pricks to Kingdom Come!”

The silence that followed caused all three to turn toward Guzmán.
He had stopped talking some time before and was watching Wolfie with a hatred so huge and silent that it bathed the entire room in apprehension.
The faces gathered swiftly in the windows.

Wolfie nodded his head, impressed.
“Look at them eyes,” he said.
He kept on nodding.
“Like he don’t understand a word I said and this jungle beast wants to massacre the poor old Wolf.”
To Guzmán he said, “What are you, some kind of an anti—
See
mite?”
And he laughed into Guzmán’s face, in honest delight.

Moon caught a glint in Wolfie’s eyes which, coupled with the cheerful tone, meant that his partner wished to fight.
And Guzmán himself, who had also attained that plane of drunken perception on which all languages are understood, turned his gaze from Wolfie to Moon and, making no headway, to Padre Xantes; the priest lowered his eyes, though calmly.

“Bueno,”
said Guzmán ambiguously, and cleared his throat.
The padre, chin on chest, nodded minutely.

“No bread, no bombs,” Wolfie told the Comandante.
“You got that, Duke?
So let’s cut out, let’s go get laid.”
Jumping to his feet, he clapped Guzmán on the shoulder; Guzmán’s hands dropped down below the table, and Moon’s own hand slid inside his shirt.
“How about that, Stud?
Chicas?
Mujeres?
” The hands appeared again, first Guzmán’s, then Lewis Moon’s, and were placed carefully on the table edge.
Moon almost said, “He’s got a knife,” but watching Wolfie, he knew he did not have to.

Guzmán decided to smile.
The smile slid back along his jaw, more like a split.
“Gurls,” he said.
“
Woo
mans.”
He laughed: “Ha, ha, ha, ha.”
It occurred to Moon that Guzmán was the only man he had ever heard who actually said “ha, ha,” when he laughed, heavily and separately like that: “Ha, ha, ha, ha.”
While Guzmán laughed, he stared at Moon.
“Indio,”
he said.
“Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

Moon did not join them when they left.
He sat quietly, facing the padre, and after a while the priest lifted his head and returned his gaze.
“You think I am humiliated, do you not?”
the padre said.

“Why do you care what I think?”

“You don’t answer my question.”

“It’s not my problem, Padre.”

“I am humiliated, of course.
It is humiliating to have to sit here and listen to cold plans for taking life and know that one will not raise a hand to stop it.”

“Why do you sit here then?”
Moon said.

“I was told to come.
Our Comandante intends to break the
national law, which forbids the killing of Indians except in self-defense.
But as long as he compels the representative of the Church to give tacit agreement to what he is doing he can always spread any blame so thin that—”

“Yes, I guessed as much.
I asked a stupid question.”

“The question you intended to ask, señor, is how a priest such as myself, willing to sit here and drink with villains, may call himself a priest.
But is he then to turn his back on the other tribes who need his help, to abandon the work that
can
be done, to do nothing but creep about an empty church?
For that is the alternative, should one contest the word of El Comandante.
And so I must choose what seems to me the lesser of two sins, and pray for forgiveness in the eyes of the Lord.”

The priest stood up.
“I suggest,” he said, “that you and your colleague must do the same.”
He bowed very slightly.
“Buenas noches.”

“
Buenas noches
, Padre.”

Xantes hesitated.

“What kind of men are you?
Could I plead with you?
No!
And if it is not you, then it would be somebody else.”

“That’s right.
You’re not a stupid man, Padre.”

“Quite true.
I am the only man of—is it this word?–
sensibility
in the entire state of Oriente; that makes me
some
body, no?”
He paused.
“And who are you, Mr.
Moon?
Are
you anybody?”

Moon looked at him; he had been taken by surprise.
“Me?”
he said.
“Why, I am the great halfbreed of the world.”
He paused and drank; the priest awaited him.
Moon seized a fold of his own skin.
“The color of modern man!
In a few centuries everybody is going to look like Lewis Moon.”
He burst out laughing.

“You are not truly amused,” the padre told him coldly; Moon stopped smiling.
“You did not answer my question—
who
are you, Mr.
Moon?
I did not ask
what
you were.”
Xantes considered him a moment; they nodded at each other.
“You are an educated man.
In the times we have talked, I have found it entertaining.
It is too bad we work against each other, no?
In a stupid world?”
He bowed.

Moon rose drunkenly and returned the bow, lifting his glass, but the priest, in elegant distaste, paid him no heed.
For all his drink, he was as ascetic and erect as he had been three hours before, though he had to shuffle now to keep his balance.
Turning slowly at the door, he contemplated Moon for nearly a half-minute.
“These Indians that you wish to kill …” A faint smile emerged on his face, and he nodded his head up and down, up and down.
“Yet it appears that you are part Indian yourself, señor?”

Moon was silent.

“How sad,” the padre sighed.
“Does it not strike you as rather
sad
, señor?”

Then he was gone.
Moon sat down heavily.
His ill humor was compounded by the appearance of Uyuyu, even though it was Uyuyu whom he awaited; the very sight of that red shirt annoyed him.
The Indian must have lurked outside until Xantes departed, not wishing the priest to learn of his business with Moon.
And since Moon did not feel guilty, Uyuyu’s guilt annoyed him further.
According to Xantes, Uyuyu had come to Madre de Dios in search of an education so that the Indians of the Remate de Males region would be less easily cheated by the traders.
He had sold his service to the priest, who taught him to read and write, and he became a fanatic Christian: within the year, Xantes had made him the mission teacher at Remate.
But when his Catholic prayers for his people went unheeded, Uyuyu had switched to the Protestant prayers of Leslie Huben.
He had also applied his education to the exploitation of the very people he had set out to defend, and was now so little at ease with himself that as he approached Moon’s table, his grin and grimace were not readily distinguishable.
But he had brought it, a large wine bottle full of the thick brown fluid called
ayahuasca
, which he placed on the table, patted, and relinquished.

“Uyuyu.
Ésta muy fresca
, Uyuyu,
no?
”

“Muy fresca, señor—ayahuascero amigo mío.”
The Indian backed out of the room.
The distemper in his narrow face reminded Moon of James Mad Raven, one of the last full-bloods on the reservation.
James Mad Raven had called the halfbreeds
“white trash” because the halfbreeds, in recent years, had taken to calling James Mad Raven “nigger.”

Up in Barbados lived a big brown nigger girl in a big plain dress with a round white collar.
Moist-voiced and obscene, with a languorous warm tongue and a breath of candy, she had tried hard to evangelize him, wagging an earnest finger with one hand while with the other she explored his lap under the table.

She was an Anglican, very devout.
“Mahn, you got to
know
Jesus.
And how you gone know Jesus if you wuh-shipin dat May-ry?”
It did not occur to her that someone who was not Anglican might not be Catholic either.
When he said nothing, she had mourned a little.
“In de day, you see, it be all right, but in de night, mahn …” She sniffed painfully.
“De single life, doss de way it go.”
This big sweet girl took him home with her to a world of chickens and poinsettias.
Now what tam you mus go, sweet honey.
Coss when you go, you woan com bock
.
In the morning, her little boy clung to him all the way to the bus back to the port, calling out joyfully to children who jeered him, “See mahn deah?
He fath-ah to
me!
”