Gods Go Begging (33 page)

“We certainly won’t start with me. That would be insane. But perhaps, by the end of my sermon, you can tell me who I am or who I have become. You see, I’ve forgotten completely.”

The chaplain suddenly stopped his monologue. Because of the rain, he had been shouting. Now the rain had stopped and the silence around him was stunning, thrilling, as though the Mekong River was resting.

“I was once a man,” he continued in a lower voice. “I was once a combat chaplain, I do know that. I was someone who trod the fields down alongside the troops. Now I am only grass, and look here, there are even drops of blood on my face. But have a care! If you think my story is about death, you have another think coming.”

The chaplain’s body, saturated by water to within an inch of his bones, traversed a small rapids, his back and chest striking several sharp rocks. A rib cracked beneath his fatigue jacket. Like so many other injuries, this wound would not heal for years. Perhaps it would never heal.

The Mennonites of his youth refused to tell him of his origins, nor would the disdainful nuns and priests of the local cathedral. But the old men and old women who spent their last days in front of or within the local cantinas were more than willing to speak.

As he bobbed in the wake and backwash of a passing rice boat, the lieutenant wondered if the pain he was feeling was the deep ache of a broken rib bone or the sad pang of memory.

In a land of heat and distance, in a land where even the most obvious things are hidden, each moment that lapses into the past lapses into legend. In the tiny towns and villages of Chihuahua, legend has it that the boy was left alone to work for his keep with an insular, hermetic community of Mexican Mennonites. It was said that he was left completely alone to unravel the knotty intricacies of English and German from his small Spanish perch. Some seemed to recall that a seemingly impoverished cripple abandoned him on the front porch of a German family that had made its way south from Pennsylvania. Still others relate that the child was dragged against his will to an apple farm north of Pedernales and left to be the houseboy for an old-maid sister of the order.

The padre’s true father was a man called Papa Guillermo, after his own father, the venerable Tata Guillermo Calavera.
Los dos,
both grandfather and father, were reputed to be
ermitaños y avoros muy famosos,
famous hermit-misers that pretended to suffering abject poverty but who in reality possessed wealth beyond Midas. Old Tata was said to be one of those fabled Mexican dirt farmers whose niggardly peso-pinching eventually resulted in the accumulation of a vast fortune. They say that he hid his wealth in the steep, grassy land around his farmhouse. His savage distrust of the banks eventually metastasized into a hoarding disease of staggering proportion. In time the disease became congenital.

Old Tata had never drawn a map of his treasures. That
viejito
was far too
cauteloso,
far too wary for that. That rumor was quite incorrect. Using a sharpened ice pick, the old man had scratched the precious map onto the lenses of his only pair of reading glasses. When reposing in the outhouse, in one of his famous marathon bowel movements, the
viejito
would sit with his chin resting on the heels of his hands, his lungs and lower abdomen burning with exertion. From this position, he could see the precise location of each treasure trove. The left lens spied upon the north side of the hill and the right lens covered the south, the line of demarcation running down the center of his nose.

Unfortunately, the old man passed away in that outhouse, his withered body falling down through the wooden toilet seat into thirty-five years’ accumulation of human waste. The secret glasses with their cryptic message went with him, never to be found.

After his death, his only son, Papa Guillermo, kept the farm going for a few years, but local mythology has it that he finally gave in to the persistent tales of buried gold and silver coinage. He auctioned off all his bags of seed and his draft animals. He sold the entire grassy lowlands to those stupid Mennonite farmers. Papa told himself that the bottom land was far too rocky to farm and the soil far too acidic. No corn or lettuce would ever grow there. He took great pride in the fact that he had driven a hard bargain for that useless, barren land.

All that he kept for himself and his family was the small hill that overlooked the parcels and the rights to the stream that ran along its base. Papa Guillermo would dedicate himself instead to a life of excavation. The family home had always been precariously perched at the top of the hill. After years of incessant digging, its foundation had tilted severely to the northeast. Anything placed on the floor would roll or slide to the north side of the house. In an effort to maintain some semblance of stability, all the chairs and the tables had to be nailed down to the floorboards. The last thirty years of Papa’s life were spent cutting and reinforcing a thousand sinkholes and the narrow, water-filled tunnels that ran beneath the family homestead. Old
revolucionarios
would swig on pulque and whoop at Papa’s ingenuity, his military genius. To defend his secret gold mine from legions of claim jumpers, the old man had crisscrossed the entire surface of the hill with a web of strings and wires on which were hung bottles and empty cans that clinked and tinkled in the smallest breeze.

“No one would ever sneak up on him,” whispered the old
soldados,
their voices filled with grudging respect, “not even the wind.”

Two hundred miles down the Mekong the wind had pushed the lieutenant toward the bank, where he was rudely prodded by oars. He responded with half-groans and semi-gestures that spoke the whole truth about war. It was his death moans that would shield him from the curious. The living would abandon him to the currents and allow him to float out to landless sea with all the other dead. In the South China Sea there would be floating islands of once living persons who had turned to clay—coves, peninsulas, and archipelagos of flesh bobbing on foam, shaken loose from life by unwitnessed forces. Above all the bodies were the pungent, swirling fumes of remembrance. A bird landed on the chaplain’s forehead and began to peck at insects that clung to his hairline, and still, the padre dreamed of Chihuahua….

But even all those cruel whispers and twisted tales about his family were not the end. More arcane and slanted rumors began to circulate about the chaplain’s ancestors. The gossips in the Pedernales
lavandería
swore that, in truth, Tata and Papa Guillermo Calavera were not even human at all. If the truth be told, the two men had begun life as lowly
insectos,
as burrowing spiders,
arañas
who had been magically transformed into fully grown human men only after having made an unbreakable pact with Satanás, the devil himself.

In exchange for this miraculous transformation, the two spiders had, in turn, agreed to live lives of depressing loneliness and to years of digging in the soil. In their original form—the form that God intended—both men had been what modern entomologists call a Mexican brown recluse, a small nondescript arachnid that spends its entire life spinning its silken traps in the hollows of trees and in earthen holes.

But even this dark slander was not the worst of the malicious tongue-wagging. It was said that both men, though by no means handsome specimens, had somehow managed to woo and to marry women who were renowned throughout the land for their stunning physical and spiritual beauty. The same savage tongues that went on and on about brown spiders recounted in whispers that the two men had trapped the women in their hideous webs, then dragged them, kicking and screaming, down into the darkness of their subterranean lives.

Both of these beautiful women had once been delicate
mariposas,
butterflies, lovely Mexican painted ladies. It was whispered that both women, at their wedding ceremonies, had been adorned with voluminous, flowing gowns in order to hide the eye spots beneath their armpits and the wide red bands than ran across their lovely breasts.

The world just below the Rio Grande had been both revolted and amazed when the younger set of mismatched
insectos
somehow gave birth to a human son. He looked like a child in every way, but could the boy truly be human? Madre de Dios! Beneath his skin, wasn’t he little more than an
abominacíon,
a creation of
mágico obscuro,
black magic? One midwife whispered that this bawling infant had never seen the inside of a womb, but rather had been a wriggling pupa carried in a bag beneath his mother’s dress.

There were those treasure hunters in the village who swore on the blessed eyes of their departed mothers that they had penetrated the perimeter of the hill and slid soundlessly past the sensitive web. These people proclaimed over and over that they had heard the occupants of the house on the hill humming and buzzing an insect’s babble. There had been ear-splitting, sibilant sounds like the ones that sprang from the legs of giant crickets and the mandibles of the largest butterflies.

Some had actually glimpsed the man and the woman levitating and dropping down to the floor inside their dining room. They related that the woman, like her sisters the monarch and the moth, was drawn again and again to a flickering line of golden candlesticks that dominated the room. And in the darkest corner of that room the boy’s bed hung from the ceiling like a gigantic egg sac, swaying back and forth to the high strains of an unearthly music. It seemed to all who had eyes to see and ears to hear that the Calavera boy had descended from a line of insects … and now he has gone to live with unsuspecting Mennonites. If the gossips only knew. The truth behind all their suspicions was far more bizarre.

The chaplain floated past banks of torched homes and tiny villages that had been ravaged by one side or the other. There were hungry hollow-eyed people everywhere, quietly cleaning up the mess left behind by the warriors. At times he was joined on his journey by travel mates. For a while a dead girl kept him company, but she sternly refused to share his upended view of the world. She preferred instead to stare downward at the muddy riverbed, her unblinking eyes forsaking the sky altogether.

Once a beheaded Korean ranger joined him, and for a time the two were trapped in a shallow whirlpool, circling endlessly with the shards of a boat rudder, slivers of a broken oar, plastic bottles, and a burned flotation device from a downed helicopter. The two became caught up in a hopeless discussion. While the chaplain’s mind swam with bullocks, butterflies, arks, and shattered tablets, the Korean had few original thoughts, if any at all. Their trip together ended abruptly when the wash of a passing gunboat released the living man to follow the river.

Tides of considerations, like brine, rose and fell upon the half-drowned man, slapping his body and wearing away his outer layers of skin. He slowly began to find in the river new beliefs to believe: the sperm in the fallopian tube will defeat the loaded mortar. The hoe will surely slaughter the tank. The glance between lovers will rebuild all that radar and artillery can detect and destroy. He came to believe that someday, a legion of one-legged men will proclaim the fields of grass to be free of land mines, their absent limbs the first step into the future. It would be armless girls who would undo the tangled nets of war. Somewhere between a tiny rope bridge and a small, isolated colony of lepers, the chaplain came to believe in all of the small people who would come out to rebuild when the machines of war were stilled.

Five hundred miles downriver his body was used for target practice by a newly formed platoon of Viet Cong. One bullet pierced his bloated thigh, but exited without drawing blood. A thousand miles and a million thoughts later, his body chanced to foul a fishing net, and an exasperated, cursing fisherman was forced to haul the carcass on board. Now released from the waters, the padre was free to dream of the years beyond Chihuahua, beyond the hill near Laos, and he dreamed of a long sea voyage in an overcrowded boat. He had visions of salt burning in his wounds, of thin chicken broth, wretched seasickness, and the acrid smell of living bodies pressed one against another.

He dreamed of urine and rice, the cry of a child that decayed from an embittered wail, past a delirious whimper, and finally, into stark silence. He dreamed of breasts drained dry and of burials at sea. He dreamed in color and saw the red rash and bright pus of his own wounded thigh. He suffered an unending nightmare of concertina wire and tents, of overseers and of the overseen. Somewhere he heard the careless rip of clothing and saw the cruel dominion of male flesh over female flesh.

He had lied to the colonel in Da Nang. He had never really been a Unitarian. He had never been a Mennonite or a Catholic. Had he confessed as much? There had never been gold nuggets and silver coins hidden in the hill of his childhood back in Chihuahua. His ancestors had not been misers. It had all been a ruse, a decoy.

Things of much greater value had been buried up on that precious hill. But most important of all, he had never been a
recluso Mexicano,
a spider. When, after an unknowable time had elapsed—perhaps months or perhaps years—and he finally woke from his drowning dream, he was sweating, naked, and breathless, his erect male member inside a woman who called herself Cassandra.