At Play in the Fields of the Lord (7 page)

Wistaria, that was her name.
Wistaria dancing naked in her cottage.
Wistaria, who cried when he went away, was the only one he remembered.

De single life, doss de way it go
.

I
N
the bar the atmosphere had changed; a dim figure had moved into the corner of Moon’s consciousness.
Turning his head very slightly, he saw a man poised in the doorway.
It was a gringo; in the remote corners of the world the short-sleeved flowered tourist shirt, the steel-rimmed glasses, khaki pants and bulldog shoes had become the uniform of earnest American enterprise.
Moon recognized the man as the new missionary.
His head was cropped too close, so that his white skull gleamed, and the red skin of his neck and jaw was riddled with old acne; his face was bald with anxiety and tiresome small agonies.

Coming up to the table, the missionary bumped nervously into a chair; it screeched on the tile floor.
“Buenas noches, señor,”
he said.
“Puedo sentarme?”
He sat down on the edge of the chair.

Raising his eyes without raising his head, Moon contemplated him while he rubbed his ear, which was already numb with drink.
After a moment he said, “Why don’t you sit down at my table?”

“I have,” the man exclaimed, flushing.
“I mean—” he stood up, knocking the chair backward.
“I didn’t mean—” He restored the chair.
“It turns out we’re both Americans!
Imagine!
I mean, the way you dress and all, someone could take you for—”

“—a gook, a wog, a spic, a spade—”

“Excuse me?
No, a local fellow.
Of the town.”

“Because of my clothes, you mean.”

“That’s right.”

“And because I look like all these local halfbreeds, these mestizos.”

“Well, yes, in a way,” the man said, gazing frankly at Moon’s face.
“Look, I was just trying to get acquainted.
I knew all along you were Mr.
Moon.”

“Well, I know who you are too, friend, and if you sat down here to save my soul, forget it.”

“How could you tell I was a missionary?”

“Are you serious?
How do you tell a hunchback or an elephant?”
Moon whistled in derision.

“I don’t understand why you’re so angry—I just got here!”

“All halfbreeds, as you must have heard, are violent and treacherous, especially when under the effects of alcohol.”

The man laughed aloud, controlled himself, and sighed.
“Personally, as an American, I’d be very proud to have Indian blood.
I think most Americans would be proud to have it.”

“They would, huh?”

“I should think so.”

“How much Indian blood would most Americans be proud to have?”

“Oh.”
The man sighed again and shook his head.
“But you’ve done all right, it seems,” he said, unruffled.
“Probably your education is better than my own.”

“Probably.
I’m very well educated.”
Moon, nodding, finished his glass.
“When you walked into this room just now, you not only knew my name was Moon but you knew that I was educated.
You knew exactly who I was, isn’t that right?”

The missionary tried to bluster, then waved his hands and groaned.

“
How
did you know?”
Moon said.

“It was just that Andy … Mrs.
Huben … she remembered reading something … she was very sympathetic with your position.”

“She was, huh?
Let me ask you another question.”

“Why, certainly.”

“How would you like a short kick in the nuts?”

The man stood up.

“Sit down,” Moon said, taking his arm.
“They say that Indians can’t hold their firewater.”
He grinned stupidly, and the man sat down.
“Last question,” Moon said.
“How would you like me to marry your sister?”
He burst out laughing, leaning back in his chair, hands in his pockets.

“I would like to ask
you
a question,” the man said.
When Moon only shrugged, he said, “With that education and everything, how did you end up in Madre de Dios?”

“Why, I’m a missionary,” Moon said.
“I’m at work in the fields of the Lord.
Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature
.
Mark, Chapter 16, Verse 15.
You want to get preached to?”

The man looked angry but said nothing.

“You don’t believe I’m a missionary?”

“Of course not.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

The man said, “I deny your right to speak this way, even in jest, because you’re not a missionary.
You are a vicious, drunken man, and a blasphemer.”
He mopped his face, very upset.
“The Niaruna you intend to murder are the ones I will be working with.
I mean to go to them whatever you people do.
If you bomb them, machine-gun them—”

“It will make things hot for you, is that right?”

“I wasn’t thinking about that—”

“Better start right now, then.”

“I’ve thought about it.
I have a wife and child.”

“You have faith in the Lord, don’t you?”

“There are limits to what we can ask of the Lord’s mercy.”

“Well, I never thought I’d live to hear one of you fundamentalists admit
that
.
Look, what are you hanging around for?”
Moon said.
“Why did you sit down here in the first place?”

“When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand!”

“Okay, I’m warned.”
Moon gazed at him.
“You have faith then.”

“Yes, I do.”

“When you are out there in that forest, with the savages behind those trees—how much faith will you have then?”

“In God?”

“In your own faith.”

The missionary began to speak; he faltered and stopped short.

“I’ll bet you’ve asked yourself that very thing quite a few times.
Let me ask you something else.
Did you earn your faith, or were you stuffed with it, like a big turkey?”

“My faith is a question I’ll have to work out without your help.”
The man got slowly to his feet.
“I wanted to talk to you, Mr.
Moon, but I see it’s impossible.
Perhaps you could tell me where I could find your partner.”

Moon picked up his glass and drank.
“You want to see Wolfie, you’ll find him at the cat house.
Only he hates being interrupted while he’s in the saddle, so while you’re waiting you can screw one of the pigs.”
He finished his drink and stood up.
The serenity in the missionary’s face incensed him; yet he wondered if he really knew what he was angry at.
Was it the distemper he felt whenever he had talked too much, or was it only
that flat ugly voice of Western white America that to this day he could not hear without a twitch of shame and hatred?

One time, drunk, he had taunted his father for volunteering as a soldier in World War I, taunted him as a mongrel white.
Alvin Moon had whipped him so badly that he had finally drawn a knife.
They were in a saloon, the first and last time they ever had money enough to get drunk together.
Alvin Moon told him to put down the knife, and he had done so without blustering.
They returned to their bar stools and went right on drinking.
After a while, when the onlookers had gone, Alvin Moon said, “That meanness.”
He had it all thought out.
“You tote that there meanness around with you just like you tote that big heavy old-time war knife that the old men give you.
There ain’t no real use for a knife like that no more.”

To the missionary he said, “South Dakota?
Or Nebraska?
New Tribes Mission?
Far Tribes Mission?
Or S.I.L.?”

“North Dakota.
Far Tribes Mission.”
He paused.
“Well, Mr.
Moon—”

“Lewis Moon.”
He gave his hand.

“My name is Martin Quarrier.”

“Well, Martin, you got the call, is that right?”
He closed his eyes, resting his face in his hands.
“Care for some
ayahuasca?
”

“If that stuff’s
ayahuasca
, you better be careful.
That’s a poisonous narcotic drug.
The Indians call it nipi.
Why, it gives you hallucinations!
It can kill you!”

“That’s right,” Moon said.
“Care to try some?”
He sat back, stretched his arms, and sighed.
Without bringing his arms down he opened his eyes and looked at Quarrier.
“What can I do for you?”
he said.

“I’ve heard what you men are going to do.
I hoped you would tell me it’s not true.”

“To tell a lie,” Moon told him, “is a sin.”

Quarrier’s laugh, though genuine, trailed off into a squawk of desperation.
Moon laughed too, in drunken glee.
“This Indian, Uyuyu—Is it true that he’s working both sides of the street?
I mean, I was talking to the padre.
Uyuyu’s a Protestant
and
a Catholic, isn’t he?”

“Do you mean that Indian who was just here?
The one we call Yoyo?”

“Yeah—Yoyo.”
Moon laughed softly, steadily.
“That’s beautiful.”

“Yes, he’s been both.”

“What is he now, a Seventh-Day Adventist?
A Jew, maybe?”
Moon frowned.
“Forget it, man.”
He waved Quarrier off, or rather, Quarrier’s expression.
The steady stupid honesty of the man’s face annoyed him; he felt somehow exposed.
“Yoyo,” he muttered.
“That’s beautiful.
Who thought of that?”

“Andy—Mrs.
Huben.
Leslie’s wife.”

“Oh yeah, the one who sympathizes with my position.
So that’s Leslie’s, huh?
The pretty one.”

Quarrier nodded, flushing.

“Yours is the big girl, with black hair.”

“Yes.”

“You think Leslie’s little wife is pretty, too, I bet.”
He studied Quarrier, then made a guess.
“You think you’re in love with Leslie’s wife, is that right?”

Quarrier started to protest but was too upset to find his words.
His face lost color.

Moon heard his own voice say, “You screwed her yet?”

“You coward!”
Quarrier stood over Moon, holding his fists up like a child holds up two broken toys.
Tears came from behind his glasses and rolled down his cheeks.
“You have a demon.
You’re a drunken coward!”

Moon laid his hands flat on the table.
“I guess you could say that, all right,” he said.
“I guess you could say that.”
The rage had collapsed, subsiding in a sour self-dislike.
His peaceful admission took the other man aback; Quarrier stood there, fists still clenched, still crying, as if behind those heavy lenses his eyes had melted.

“Your fists are clenched,” Moon observed quietly.

“Well, come outside!
If you are man enough!”

The naïveté of this jibe pained Moon worst of all; in the excess of his spleen, he longed to slug this stupid-looking hick in his thick glasses, but he made himself say, “I am not man enough,”
and not only that but—lest the missionary imagine that he was being treated with contempt—“I am too drunk.”
And finally he said, “I’m sorry.
Please sit down.”

“You mean you’re just going to sit there and let me call you a coward?”

“You’ll get tired of it after a while,” Moon said.

W
OLFIE AND
G
UZMÁN WERE FIGHTING TO GET THROUGH THE DOOR
together; each dragged after him a giggling and frightened girl.
Neither girl had left puberty far behind, and each had the small potbelly and high wide breasts, the flat face and delicate limbs of the jungle Indians.
The pretty one wore her black hair pulled behind her ears, showing cheap earrings, and her bright red dress was tight; when Guzmán brought her to the table she winked at Lewis Moon, and slowly stuck her tongue out.

“
Se llama
Suzie,” Guzmán said.
“Qué quieres aquí?”
he jeered at Quarrier.
“
Misionero!
Misionero
want woo-mans!”
But when Quarrier glanced at the girl, then back at Guzmán, the Comandante removed his hand from her behind and placed it over his heart.
It was not to be thought, he assured the room at large, that the girl was for himself; El Comandante Rufino Guzmán, as the world well knew, was the honorable husband of the beautiful Señora Dolores Estella Carmen María Cruz y Peralta Guzmán.
The
indio
girl was for the North American mestizo, Señor
Moon.
At this Suzie giggled, stroking Guzmán’s upper leg.
She too was very drunk.
“Rufi-
ni
-to,” she said, and winked at Moon again.

But Moon and Guzmán paid no attention to her.
The Comandante was smiling triumphantly at Moon, and Moon smiled back at him until the Comandante, looking confused, stopped smiling and began to glare.

Moon thought, Well, there’s going to be trouble.
Any time now.
Casually he checked Guzmán’s hip; the pistol belt was missing.

At the bar Suzie’s friend had broken loose from Wolfie, who was addressing her affectionately as Fat-Girl; with his beard and beret, his loud meaningless sounds, his erect cigar and huge dark glasses, he had frightened her out of her wits.
She had an open stupid face, with pockmarks and missing teeth, and was barefoot beneath her printed frock of mission gingham.
Nevertheless, seeking to emulate her friend as well as to better her own lot, she addressed herself to the third gringo.
Arms straight at her sides like a child reciting, she smiled and winked, stuck her tongue out very slowly, and said to Quarrier, “Ay yam Mercedes.
Ay yam vir-geen.”

“Ha, ha, ha, ha,” cried El Comandante Rufino Guzmán.
“
Misionero
luff Indio gurls!
Ha, ha, ha, ha!”

Moon gazed solemnly at Guzmán, then bent his head and began to laugh, and Wolfie, rushing up with his cigar and giant beer bottle, saw Moon laugh and began laughing too.
He sat at the table, grabbed his Fat-Girl onto his knee and howled until the tears came, out of sheer empathy.
After a time he subsided into spasms, snorting and crying, as the laughter rose and burst in high little sounds out of his nostrils:
snee, snee, snee, snee
.
From along the bar and at the windows, beneath the display of hand-tinted Virgins and flamenco dancers on
aguardiente
calendars, soft-drink signs and plaster crucifixions, the laughter clattered without mercy.
Sweet Suzie laughed straight into the face of Moon, her dark eyes mirthless, and fat Mercedes, who imagined that she was the mother of the joke, laughed modestly as best she could, for on Wolfie’s knee with both of Wolfie’s hands clasped hard upon
her breasts, it was hard for a girl to get a breath.
Moon recognized her as the girl who worked in Guzmán’s kitchen.
He smiled at her sympathetically, in response to which she winked at him again, and again stuck her tongue out.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha,” shouted the Comandante, hurling himself backward; he believed himself to be the witty one.
“Snee, snee, snee, snee,”
the Old Wolf whimpered, doubled forward.
Yet Guzmán, surrounded by laughter, laughed alone; and as for Wolfie, at no time during his entire seizure did he know or care what he was laughing at.

“This is a madhouse,” Moon said approvingly to Quarrier, who looked like a man on whom the sky was falling.

Suzie, following Moon’s gaze, leaned back and nestled her elbow in the missionary’s groin; cocking her head far backward so that she stared straight up into his face, she cried out the identical words that Mercedes had spoken with such success a few minutes before.
She kept her head that way for several moments, frowning when her remark was disregarded, and at the same time aware that something better was afoot: for Quarrier, who had jerked back from her elbow, was helplessly peering down into her dress.
The girl raised her hands beneath her breasts until they swelled like buttocks in the neck of her dress, and said to Quarrier, “
S-ss-t, s-ss-t, misionero, s-ss-t!
”

Recoiling, Quarrier uttered a little cry.
His sweating tormented head swung back and forth, back and forth.
“What do you seek here?”
he said to Moon.
“What are these lost souls laughing at?”
Moon took his wrist and pulled him down onto the bench beside him.
“Be quiet,” he said, “you’re not here to save us.”
But Quarrier persisted, waving his free arm about.
“You are lost souls, can’t you realize that?
You have Satan in you, every one of you!”

Moon squeezed his wrist so hard that the man faced him in surprise.
“She’s got nice tits,” Moon said, “wouldn’t you say?”
Quarrier opened his mouth, then closed it, reddening so violently that his whole face seemed to swell.
Moon said to him, “Now listen, friend, you’re welcome here, but never mind the Gospel lessons.”

But Wolfie, in violent antipathy to Quarrier, was repeating, “What are they
laughin
at, he says!
What are they
laughin
at?”
louder and louder; then he reared up in his chair, shoving his Fat-Girl aside.
“What are you, some kind of a religious
fanatic
or somethin?
You don’t like people enjoyin theirselves, or what?”
He smashed his fist on the table.
“At least that Catholic, at least he’d take a
drink
with us, for Christ sake!
Hey”—he turned again to Moon—“hey, Lewis, you remember them big spade girls we had in them rum-and-drums up in Barbados?
Did I ever tell you them whores was devout
Catholics
, for Christ sake—
and
Protestants?
And I bet every humpin one of them, Catholic and Protestant, had the clap.”

Now what tam you mus go, sweet honey.
Coss when you go, you woan com bock
.

“I was in Barbados once,” Quarrier said.
“On a freighter.
We came down here by freighter from Fernandina, Florida.
In Barbados my boy Billy and myself went up the street and had ourselves a very nice chicken chow mein dinner.”

Now that, thought Moon, makes
two
sad things that happened in Barbados.

Wolfie winced.
“Oh man,” he said.
“Lissen.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, I was gonna say, like where the hell do you get off tryin to tell us about sin?
That’s what you’re hangin around for, right?”

“Yes,” Quarrier said, and Moon watched Wolfie twitch under the steady gaze that the missionary fixed upon him.

“Well, you got nothin to look so holy about, am I right, Lewis?”
When Moon said nothing, Wolfie turned back angrily to Quarrier.
“You and them Catholics both.
Some
holy
men!
All this lousy backbitin and knifin over people who maybe they don’t want no part of
neither
of you; well, maybe you ought to think of
that
before you come sneakin around here criticizin!
Maybe them people are better off bein run back into the jungle where they got a little human
dignity
, for Christ sake, and not where you bastards can make beggars out of them, not to mention all the booze and slavery and syphilis”—Wolfie jerked his thumb at his female companion—“that comes after.
How long
do you think them Neo-rooneys are gonna last once you’ve softened them up for all these jungle cons?”
He jerked his thumb at Guzmán.
“Ten years?
Thirty years, maybe?”
His voice rose.
“So don’t come runnin to us about our business.
‘Physician, heal thyself’—right, Lewis?”

“Fa-Cry-sek,” the Comandante said.
“Fa-Cry-sek.”

“Rufi-
ni
-to,” complained the whore called Suzie.

“
Silencio!
Nosotros hablamos inglés
.
We arr es-spik Ingliss!”

To Wolfie—though looking straight at Quarrier—Moon said, “You forgot the part about robbing the Indians of their own culture and then abandoning them”—he raised his voice in mock outrage, as if he were making a speech—“leaving them with nothing strong enough, neither their old culture nor a new one, to support them against the next group to come along.”

“Oh yeah,” Wolfie said, “that’s right.
Neither their old culture or a new one,” he yelled angrily at Quarrier, “and then you come runnin to us about our business.
Well, all I can say is, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ ”

Quarrier said mildly, “They say that every sin has its justification in the mind of the sinner.”

Pleased that he had acquitted himself so well, Wolfie had leaned back in his chair, relighting his cigar; now he slammed forward once again.

“Jeez!
You’re a smug sonofabitch, now ain’t you!”
he said to Quarrier.
“And I’ll bet that kid of yours you mentioned a minute ago, the chicken-chow-mein eater, for Christ sake—I bet you already made another smug sonofabitch out of that kid already, am I right?
Well, let me tell
you
somethin: I never sinned in my whole life—I don’t
believe
in sin!”

“Smuk snuffa-bits,” Guzmán repeated.
“Smuk snuffa-bits.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

Quarrier opened his mouth to speak, then closed it.

Moon got to his feet and made his way around the table.
Behind him he heard Wolfie say, “Well, it just so happens I
seen
your kid, I run inta him on the street.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s a real nice kid, Reverend, no shit.
Listen, Reverend, you ain’t really
a
bad
sonofabitch or nothin.
It takes all kinds to make a world, know what I mean?
Know what I mean, Reverend?”

H
OLDING
his breath, swaying drunkenly beneath a bulb which illumined little more than grime and moisture, Moon stared awhile at the cement wall; it took just such a hopeless international latrine in the early hours of a morning, when a man was weak in the knees, short in the breath, numb in the forehead and rotten in the gut, to make him wonder where he was, how he got there, where he was going; he realized that he did not know and never would.
He had confronted this same latrine on every continent and not once had it come up with an answer; or rather, it always came up with the same answer, a suck and gurgle of unspeakable vileness, a sort of self-satisfied low chuckling: Go to it, man, you’re pissing your life away.

Standing there, swaying pleasantly, he grinned.
I do not care, he thought.
I no longer care.
If I can just stay where the action is, I never
will
care, never again.