Gods Go Begging (19 page)

“Mendez, you been at the morphine again?” asked the medic. “You better save your feel-good Syrettes for the beast, my man.”

Mendez was silent. When the laughter died down, the grunts somehow realized that Jesse, though silent, was actually pondering the ridiculous question. It was the chaplain who spoke next. With the particulars of his crazed and sweating face fading away in the darkness, he repeated Mendez’s odd query.

“Do you suppose there will ever be Mexicans in space?”

“Yeah,” joined in Cornelius, eager to discuss anything but the Nam. “Let’s do some more supposin‘! Let’s suppose on something real crazy, something wild as shit, like a bunch of Mexicans flying around in outer space! Low-rider rockets and pachucos on Pluto. Jesse, listen here, man …”

Cornelius had just caught a whiff of gook Camels, those bitter NVA cigarettes. It was a strong and disconcerting smell. As his eyes scanned the perimeter, he finished his question slowly.

“… do you suppose there will ever be Mexicans in space?”

The sound of movement beyond the outer holes and the far treeline was growing louder and louder. There were so many enemy troops out there that they didn’t give a shit whether the boys on the hill heard them.

“Supongamos, mis amigos!”
cried Jesse with a tone of forced enthusiasm mixed with desperation. He had to speak up to be heard over the disdainful sound of enemy voices not a hundred yards away.

“Supongamos, amigos.
You’ve never heard of the exploits of
los estrellanauts?
You’ve never heard of MASA?” said Jesse with a feigned look of pained astonishment, “the Mexican Aeronautical and Space Agency? Frankly, I am appalled at your unforgivable ignorance. Personally, I’ve always believed that Mexicans should have been in outer space decades ago, maybe a century ago.”

As he spoke, Jesse did not notice that the background noise beyond the outer berm had all but disappeared.

“Hey!” It was Lopez who had gone back to his starlight scope. “I can’t see any of them. Maybe the zips pulled out.” His voice was filled with hope.

“Ojalá que sí!”
sighed Mendez, who crossed himself twice.

“They’re gone, but the little fuckers will be back.”

It was the voice of the black sergeant, who had just left the Salon des Refuses, the huge metal cargo container that held the long-distance radio equipment. He knew something. He had good information, and it wasn’t from any of those fools from army intelligence.

“I’ve been scanning the frequencies up in the Salon. There’s
beaucoup
contact about thirty clicks to the east. They’ve got zips in battalion strength coming at them. Sounds like our boys are catching some heavy shit.” What he didn’t say was that it was an identical radio installation and LZ that was being hit. What he didn’t say was that the installation had gone down and that this hill was the only working relay now. Things had not gone according to plan. They never did.

“God willing, we’ll di-di outta here long before the zips know we’re gone. In the meantime, keep your hats on. There are snipers out there.” The sergeant was glad that the dark skies and his dark complexion had worked together to hide his concerns, his fear. He composed himself, then grinned a wide, visible grin.

“Mais dîtes-moi, mon frère,
how in hell could Mexicans be in space?”

Despite his own warning, the sergeant had removed his helmet and was pouring potable water from a canteen over his face and neck. Like the others, his skin was raw with heat rash and his arms and hands were covered with scars and open cuts. Even after sundown it was over one hundred degrees. He toweled himself dry, then began to dust himself with antifungal powder. In the few moments that he had his arms exposed, more than a dozen mosquitoes had landed and were plumbing his skin for a meal. Just then a new breeze came up from the south and every face turned into the blessed liquid force of it.

The breeze grew into a severe gust of wind that rattled the sergeant’s precious hand-painted sign above the door of the radio installation. One of the wires gave way and the sign dangled from a single corner. The sergeant sighed. He would have to rehang the “Salon des Refusés.”

“There’s your answer, sergeant,” said Jesse. “The wind.”

Jesse lifted his sweating face to catch the full effect of the breeze, then he loosened his belt and zipped down his fly to allow the cool air to circulate inside his pants. He sighed gratefully as the eternal burn of crotch rot subsided for a few precious moments.

“Suppose the wind had been blowing just right back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The world would have been a very different place today.”

In anticipation of Jesse’s story, new, extra-large joints had been hand-rolled and fired up. ‘They looked like Cuban cigars. Taut shoulders, tight with savvy, were allowed to slump a bit. There was
beaucoup
contact going on thirty kilometers to the east. That could mean a quiet night here. For a moment, young men were no longer soldiers. For a moment they were all gathered like enthusiastic students around a noisy table in a coffee shop in Berkeley.

“Just imagine what would have happened if Hernán Cortez and his men had been blown far off course and landed at Plymouth Rock instead of Veracruz. On the other hand, imagine that the pilgrims had been blown south by a terrific gale and the
Mayflower
had run aground in the Yucatán peninsula.”

“What would be different?” asked the chaplain, suddenly intrigued by the unusual scenario.

“Think about it, padre. What is the primary difference between Mexico and the United States today?” countered Jesse. He waited a moment before answering his own question. No one spoke.

“Mexico is a mestizo culture, a racially mixed cultura and the United States is not. Both the Roman Catholics and the Puritans had their stupid debates about whether or not the indigenous people were human, but in the meantime the Catholic soldiers went ahead and got it on with the native girls anyway.

“Those conquistadors were damned sex fiends, and they went nuts over all those bare-breasted women! Hell, it was Magellan’s dick that got his ass killed. He got caught messing around with Lapu-Lapu’s wife. To a man, the Spanish soldiers asked themselves, ‘Why should the pope have all the fun?’ ”

There was a general consensus among the grunts that the horny Spaniards had posed a supremely logical and valid question. After all, there were so many beautiful women here in the Nam. Everywhere in this country there seemed to be slender, dark-eyed women lifting their blouses for passing GIs while begging for C-rations.

“The Puritans, on the other hand, were revolted by the carefree spirit and nakedness of the Indians.” Jesse smiled in the direction of the Indian troops. “So much so that they made it a capital crime to have sex with them. Since they believed that everything earthly was necessarily evil, they believed that people close to the earth must be evil, too. So it must be all right with God to take land away from evil people, to let evil heathens suffer disease and starve to death.

“Just after the Puritans massacred the entire Pequot tribe, they held a prayer meeting! They could’ve been killing vermin or termites instead of women and children. Those people saw everything in terms of their stern, joyless beliefs. They interpreted cultural difference as religious difference. So the prayers of an Indian priest became heresy.”

In the dark the Indian soldiers were moving in closer to hear. Wary of snipers, they cupped their enormous joints in their hands or beneath their helmets as they passed them back and forth.

“You mean to say we ain’t a melting pot?” sneered Jim-Earl sarcastically.

“There was melting, all right,” said the Creole sergeant with a laugh. “All them European folks melted into white.”

“This simple idea of cultural difference as blasphemy is the very foundation of American racism. It wasn’t much of a leap from the Puritans to the Aryan Nation. It wasn’t much of a leap from their laws against consorting with the Indians to the Jim Crow laws in the South and the antimiscegenation laws in the West. You see, back in the world, racism is a sacred thing.”

“You know,” said the Creole sergeant thoughtfully, “a large percentage of the membership of the Ku Klux Klan in the forties and fifties was made up of preachers and pastors. I think I read that each chapter has its own chaplain. I think they call him a Kludd. I imagine the name comes from the sound that shit makes when it hits the floor.”

There was laughter from everywhere on the hill. Other groups of men had ceased their talking to listen.

“What are you saying, Jesse,” asked the chaplain, “that the sixteenth-century Catholics were benevolent degenerates·”

“Hell, no, padre!” answered Jesse. “I think they were more civilized than the Puritans, but only a little more. The difference was that the Spaniards believed that all the sins of the flesh could be forgiven in the end. During your life you could lust and get laid all you wanted. All you needed to get into heaven was an act of repentance before you died. It was a perfect system. Check out all those celibate popes with their Vatican concubines and scores of illegitimate kids. Think about it, padre, you’re out here giving the Last Rites to men who have probably just killed another man.

“The Puritans, on the other hand, abstained from just about everything that was any fun at all: tobacco, cigarettes, coffee, dancing, singing. They believed that forgiveness and redemption lay in the next life, not this one.”

“They should have abstained from long ocean voyages,” said Jim-Earl, while exhaling a thick curtain of smoke. The other Indians grunted.

“They believed that if you tortured the body into submission,” continued Jesse, “the soul would certainly follow. It was the complete reverse of the Catholics. The same naked Indian girls that drove the Spaniards wild with longing were branded as satanic by the Puritans. One group was oversexed; the other was totally repressed. We drew the short straw on that one. We got the repressed group. That’s why America is filled with an equal number of censors and sex fiends. It is both compelled and repelled by breasts.”

“Fucking—A,” said a voice in the dark. “I love breasts.”

“The confessions of a serial masturbator!” said the voice of a buddha-head, a kid from Hawaii that the troopers called Spam Boy.

“Last night, Jesse, when things were bad, when you were scared, did you say a prayer?”

It was t he chaplain. After the last two days on this hill, his own religious education had begun to seem naive and insulated. Even here, in hell, he needed some reassurance. Jesse said nothing. Silence was his answer.

“Isn’t it lonely?” added the chaplain.

“If I get out of here alive,” said Jesse quietly, “then someone else doesn’t.” He nodded toward the small, burned harness and rucksack of a North Vietnamese soldier. “I’m no better than him. The God that built that sky up there, padre, does not choose between people down here. If I survive, it’s because of these guys right here.” There was a gesture in the dark that no one needed to see in order to understand. “If we get out of here, it will be because we lucked out.”

Jesse’s face lit up as he pulled on the burning mota. Fuck the snipers. He smiled as he acknowledged its beneficent effect on his brain and his speech.

“So anyway,” he began again, dispelling the lull that the padre’s question had caused, “the
Mayflower
washes up onto the beach at Veracruz and those cold-blooded pilgrims suddenly find themselves in a genuine tropical paradise. This sure as hell ain’t England, and it ain’t the Netherlands. There are no snowdrifts here, no frozen toes, no begging from the Indians… and no Thanksgiving. Now they’re really pissed off because there’s nothing there that they can use to mortify the flesh. After months at sea they find themselves in the garden of Eden and the damn place is filled with brown people.”

“There goes the neighborhood.” Cornelius laughed.

“Now they’re completely at a loss for what to do. They came here to live the New Testament, and they find themselves in the first pages of Genesis. How could they possibly bemoan their lot in life in this land of milk and honey? Ah, but the Puritans were resourceful folks. They considered their options. They could import tons of snow or set sail for the frigid shores of Iceland or they could reach out and pick some of the fruit that’s hanging everywhere around them.

“They might have heard the same rumors that Cortez had heard about a city of gold, but they lacked the military power and experience to strike inland for Tenochtitlán and the land of the Aztecs. So they would have convened a prayer meeting, killed a few of the locals who had come to visit, and finally decided to stay where they were. Maybe they would even move out to Isla Mujeres to escape all those sex-crazed Mayans. Only now the natives would call it Isla de los Lerdos.”

Mendez, Lopez, and the other Latinos broke out laughing at the name. Island of the dullards.

“Isla
de
los pendejos,
” one of them said spitefully.

“Do you remember the story of La Malinche?” Only the two Mexicans nodded their heads.

“She was the Indian woman who became Cortez’s sugar mama. She cooked for him, gave him kids, and incidentally, helped him to betray and annihilate her own people.”

“Then he left her for another woman,” said Tiburcio Mendez with a smirk.

“There’s no way that La Malinche would have fallen for a sexually repressed, tight-assed pilgrim,” said Jesse. “No way! Pocahontas must’ve been blind or really hard up to fall for a wimp like John Rolfe. Anyway, the Puritans would have done well for themselves out there on the island. More pilgrims would have arrived and today there would be a huge self-mortification theme park on the island and a body of water to keep the dreariness and the Protestant work ethic away from the shores of Quintana Roo. The Mexicans would have established a Border Patrol to keep those stern, pasty-faced people at bay.”

“Keep those bastards from taking jobs away from the Mexicans!” exclaimed Mendez.