At Play in the Fields of the Lord

  He lay back on his bed and closed his eyes. He would go again to where men shot arrows at airplanes, but how, or even why, he did not know.

  8

  A DOG TURNED IN ITS CIRCLE AND LAY DOWN IN THE SHADE, AND A vulture swung up and down in a short arc above the jungle, as if suspended from a string. In the heat of the siesta, the street below was hollow as a bone.

  He took the cork out of the bottle, and holding his breath to kill the bitterness, drank off half the brown fluid in a series of short gulps, gargling harshly when he was finished and spitting the residue into the street. The aftertaste made him gag. He sat down on the window sill and in a little while the nausea receded, leaving only a thick woody taste and a slight vagueness.

  A half-hour passed. Maybe the Indian had watered the infusion. A voice in the salon below sounded remote to him, and he nodded; he was on his way. A little more ayahuasca, Mr. Moon? He took up the bottle and drank off another quarter of it, then set it down very slowly. You’ve made a bad mistake, he thought; already he knew he did not need it. The effects were coming very suddenly, and he stood up and stalked the room. In overdose, he had read somewhere, the extract of Banisteriopsis caapi is quite poisonous and may bring on convulsions, shock and even death.

  How silent it was—the whole world was in siesta. He glanced quickly out the window, to take time by surprise; the dog slept soundly, and the vulture still swung up and down its bit of sky, dark as a pendulum. From the far end of the street, a solitary figure was moving toward him, down the center of the street—the last man on earth. There you are, he thought, I have been waiting for you all my life.

  Now he was seized with vertigo and apprehension; his heart began to pound and his breath was short. He went to his bed and lay down on his back. He felt a closure of the throat and a tension in his chest, a metal bar from chin to navel to which the skin of his chest was sewn. Breathing became still more difficult, and a slight pain in the back of his head became a general, diffused headache. He turned cold and his teeth chattered; the hands pressed to his face were limp and clammy.

  I am flying all apart, he thought; at the same time his chest constricted ever more tightly. Let go, he told himself aloud. Let go.

  He rolled over on his side and blinked at the other bed. The man on the bed retreated from his vision, shrinking and shrinking until he was no bigger than a fetus.

  Color: the room billowed with it; the room breathed. When he closed his eyes, the color dazzled him; he soared. But there was trouble in his lungs again, and his heart thumped so, in heavy spasmodic leaps, that it must surely stall and die. He broke into a sweat, and his hands turned cold as small bags of wet sand …

  He sat up, aching, in a foreign room. He could breathe again, although his heart still hurled itself unmercifully against his chest: how thin a man’s poor chest was, after all; it was as thin as paper, surrounding a hollow oval space of wind and bitterness. Thump, thump-ump, um-thump; it would crash through at any minute, and what then? Do I greet it? Introduce myself? How long can a man sit holding his heart in his hands?

  Or was that thump coming from elsewhere? The thump of a bed—were the missionaries making love? The male missionary making love to the female missionary? The Courtship of Missionaries: the male missionary, larger and more splendidly plumaged than his shy dowdy mate, hurls his head back joyfully and sings “Praise the Lord,” upon which he rushes forth, tail feathers spread, and mounting in a decorous and even pious manner, inserts his tongue into her right ear …

  You are the Lost Tribe of Israel, and therefore you must pray especially hard, for the Lost Tribe of Israel is under God’s everlasting curse. Do you understand? Why don’t you answer me? What is the matter with you children—do you wish to remain accursed? Now you answer me, Lewis Moon, or I’m going to beat you. Lewis? Lewis!

  Now his body cavity felt hollowed out as if cold sterile winds were blowing through it … loss, loss, loss. Loss.

  Look into the sky and think of nothing, said Alvin Moon “Joe Redcloud,” but do not look into the sun, for the sun will blind you. Face east on the first day, south on the second, west on the third, north on the fourth, until you are at the center of the circle, and then you will know the power of the world.

  After the first day his stomach hurt and he felt foolish, all alone on a rock lookout above a river bend of box elder and cottonwood; all that night he shivered. He was not like the old men, nor even like his father; he spoke American and raised the American flag at school; he wore blue jeans and looked at magazines in stores and stood around outside the movie in the town, searching his pockets as if he had real money; and he did not believe in visions. Like all the children, he killed his hunger at the mission house on Sunday and afterward felt ashamed. Once he went hungry, telling the missionary that Cheyennes never ate on Sundays.

  He remained on the rock a second day and a second night, just out of stubbornness, and because he was proud of the rifle that Alvin Moon had laid beside him. No bear nor cougar came—the animals would not bother him, his father said, if he sat still—and on the third morning he did not feel hungry any more and sat there motionless, letting the sun and wind blow through him. He was as firmly rooted in the ground as the young pine. By afternoon he was growing weak and became filled with apprehension: something was happening. The jays and squirrels had lost all fear of him, flicking over and about him as if he had turned to stone, and the shrill of insects crystallized in a huge ringing silence. The sky was ringing, and the pine trees on the rocks turned a bright rigid green, each needle shimmering; the pines were ringing and beside him a blue lupine opened, breathing. Then the river turned to silver and stopped flowing. The jays trembled on the rock, their eyes too bright, and the squirrel was still, the gold hairs flowing on its tail. He stared at the enormous sky, and the sky descended and the earth was rising from below, and he was soaring toward the center—

  Then, in the ringing, far away, rose a flat droning. The airplane unraveled the high silence as it crossed the sky; it disappeared without ever appearing, and when it had gone, the sky no longer rang. He sat a long time on his rock, but the sky had risen, leaving him desolate.

  Light-headed, he went down to the river, where he drank. He found mushrooms and fresh-water mussels, and some berries, and when he had eaten he laughed at his three-day vigil, pretending that he did not feel a dreadful sorrow.

  On the fourth day, waiting for Alvin Moon to come, he hunted. He killed a wild goose on the river, and boasted of it to his father.

  His father gazed at him. And where is the goose, his father said.

  I could not reach it, the boy said. It came so close, and then it drifted far away.

  HE reeled from the bed and drifted to the window, but the figure coming down the street was gone; again he had missed some unknown chance. The street was void, a void, avoid. Dog, heat, a vulture, nothing more. A dog, a vulture, nothing more, and thus we parted, sang Lenore.

  Singing. Somewhere, somewhere there was singing. His whole body shimmered with the chords, the fountainhead of music, overflowing. The chords were multicolored, vaulting like rockets across his consciousness; he could break off pieces of the music, like pieces of meringue.

  You’re sleeping your life away, he told the dog.

  Do you hear me? I said, Do you hear me?

  Meri-wether, Sheriff Guzmán said. That’s some name for a red nigger, ain’t it? You’re the smart one, ain’t you kid? Ain’t you supposed to be the smart Cheyenne? Done good in the war, and now they gone to send they little pet Christ-lovin Cheyenne to college, ain’t that right, kid? Well, kid, if you’re a real smart Injun, you won’t even go and look at me that way, you’ll keep your Injun nose clean, kid.

  Oh, to be an Indian! (Now that spring is here.) Big Irma: Be a good boy, Lewis. Do not fight so much. You come back and see us now. Alas, too late—the world is dead, you sleepyhead. The Inn of the Dog and the Vulture. There are voices, you see, then singing voices, then strange musics, hollowed out, as if d
rifted through a wind tunnel, these followed by a huge void of bleak silence suggesting DEATH.

  THE STORY OF MY LIFE, by Lewis Moon.

  Now … something has happened, was happening, is happening. BUT WILL NOT HAPPEN. Do you hear me? I said, DO YOU HEAR ME?

  A softer tone, please.

  To begin at the beginning: my name is Meriwether Lewis Moon. Or is that the end? Again: I was named Meriwether Lewis Moon, after Meriwether Lewis, who with Lieutenant William Clark crossed North America without killing a single Indian. So said my father; my father is Alvin Moon “Joe Redcloud,” who lived up on North Mountain. Alvin Moon still traps and hunts, and in World War I, when still a despised non-citizen, exempt from service, joined those 16,999 other Indians as insane as himself who volunteered to serve in World War I. Alvin Moon is half-Cheyenne; he went down South when he came home and took up with a Creole Choctaw woman named Big Irma and brought her back up to his mountain. The worst mistake that Alvin Moon ever made was trying to educate himself; his information about Lewis and Clark was the only piece of education he ever obtained, and it was wrong. He used to joke that he couldn’t educate himself unless he learned to read, and how could he learn to read if he didn’t educate himself? So he left off hunting and trapping and came down off his mountain and took work near the reservation to keep his children in the mission school, to give them a better chance in life.

  I ain’t got nothin, said Joe Redcloud, and I don’t know nothin, not a thing. And the hell of it is, I broke my back, paid out every cent, to keep them kids into that school, and now they don’t know nothin, neither, only Jesus Christ. Now ain’t that somethin? They sit around here thinkin about Godamighty, I reckon, while they’re waitin on their gover’ment reliefs.

  All but Meriwether Lewis.

  Again: my name is Lewis Moon, and I am lying on a bed (deathbed?) in a strange country, and I hear eerie voices and a crack is appearing on the wall, wider and wider, and the bulb in the ceiling is growing more and more bulbous, and will surely explode—a crack (of doom?) of lightning down the walls.

  The extract of B. caapi is a powerful narcotic and hallucinogen containing phenol alkaloids related to those found in lysergic acid, and whether or not it finds a respectable place in the pharmaceutica of man, it has held for unknown centuries an important place in the culture of Indian tribes of the Amazon basin. At the time of my experiment I was lying in a narrow room with a corpse in the next bed, with God, a vulture and a dog as witnesses, wishing that Marguerite were here. Marguerite. I wish to tell Marguerite that the reason I did not make love to her that time in Hong Kong was not because I did not want her but because I had reason to believe that in the late, low hours of the week before, I had contracted a low infestation. I did not know Marguerite well enough to give her crabs—you understand? Marguerite had alabaster skin, triumphant hair, and an unmuddied soul, and a swinging little ass into the bargain.

  You listen to me, Meriwether Lewis: what the hell you sass that Sheriff for? He mighta kilt you. You stay clear of whiskey, then; long as you can’t stay out of trouble, you ain’t welcome back. And don’t you show your Mam that bad face, neither; I whupped you plenty times before, and I’ll whup you again, hero or no hero. Alvin Moon “Joe Redcloud” said, You’re all your people here got left to count on. You go get that education, hear me now? And then you come on home and learn it back to us as best you can. Because the way things are goin they ain’t no hope for none of us, lessen we don’t get somethin learned here to us pretty quick.

  I have opened my eyes again, to shut off all that blue. Color can threaten, overwhelm, whirling like that—an ant in a kaleidoscope might sense the problem. But out here the bed shudders, the chair sneaks, the bureau budges; they back and fill, about to charge. From above the bulb socket descends like a falling spider, leaving the bulb behind.

  B. caapi, which is named for the caapi of certain Brazilian Indians, is also the camorampi of the Campa, the natema of the Jivaro, the ayahuasca or haya-huasca of the Quechua-speaking peoples, the yage of Ecuador, the soga de muerte of most Spanish South Americans, names variously translated as “Vine of the Devil,” “Vine of the Soul,” “Vine of Death”: the Spanish term means literally “vine rope of death,” the soga referring to the jungle lianas used commonly as canoe lines, lashings, ropes, etc. In addition to certain medical properties, the vine can induce visions, telepathic states, metaphysical contemplation and transmigration; these conditions are used by the Indians for the reception of warnings, prophecies and good counsel. Among many tribes one purpose of the dream state is identification of an unknown enemy, and the use of it is thus related to the Jivaro practice of taking tsantsas, or shrunken heads …

  I am cut off, I feel both silly and depressed; it is the solitude, not solitude but isolation … Death is the final isolation, but from what, from what?

  I am trying to reach out to you, but I do not know who you are, I cannot see you. I only feel your presence in this room. Perhaps … I wonder … are you inside me? And if so … Now listen carefully: There is a lost reality, a reality lost long ago. Are you in touch with it: can you tell me—did you see?—the man with the blue arrow—

  Or … or are you the figure in the center of the street? So you came here, after all! Can you hear me? I said, CAN YOU HEAR ME? CAN—YOU—HEAR—ME!

  I cannot reach him through the sound and silence, distant sound and deepest silence, like a thick glass barrier between the world of the living and myself, as if I were wandering on an earth which had suddenly died, or in a Purgatory, myself already dead.

  There is something that you have to understand.

  Now look what’s happening—can you see? It’s Him, the Dead Man. Resurrection. Rising out of bed. Not suspecting that I am already dead, he will attempt to kill me.

  He speaks: StopshoutinforChristsake!

  Here he comes, intent on the kill. He has broken the glass wall. He drags me across the room. He has a costume, he is all dressed up like a soldier of fortune, he is very hip; but see the rosy cheeks behind that beard? An enormous child!

  “You are an Enormous Child!”

  Nevermindmejustlookinthemirra! Whatareyousomekindofaaddictorwhat? Gowanlookatyaself!

  See that pale face in the glass! The face is rigid, and the eyes are dark and huge. Over the left eye drifts a dark shadow, like a hand. There you are, I see you now, and the bearded man, your warder.

  He knew his lucidity could not last, and because he had taken too much, he dreaded going under again, and he started to ask Wolfie for help. “Hey,” he said. But he could not ask, he had never asked in all his life, and even if he asked, what could poor Wolfie do? There were no sedatives in Madre de Dios; sedation was superfluous in a graveyard. He pushed away and tottered toward the window, where he fell across the sill. The dog and the vulture were gone. The light was tightening in the way it always did before the sudden jungle night, and down the center of the street a solitary figure walked away.

  The bottle stood upon the sill; he drank it to the bottom.

  HE felt like crying, but did not. He had not cried in twenty years—no, more. Had he ever cried? And yet he did not really feel like crying; he felt like laughing, but did not. Stalking Joe Redcloud’s shack as twilight came, he waited to be called back, beaten, and forgiven, but with the clear prairie darkness came the knowledge that the call would never come, that the days of tears and comfort had come and gone before he had realized they would ever end. Dry-eyed, enraged, he crouched in the sagebrush for a little while, and then moved off like a lean yearling grizzly driven snarling from the cave, feeling very bad and very good at the same time, and spoiling for a fight.

  He crouched beside the window sill, his back to the world without, and far away he heard them coming, the marching of huge nameless armies coming toward him, and once again his hands turned cold. He felt very cold. On the wall of the room, over the door, he saw a huge moth with a large white spot on each wing. It palpitated gently; he could hear the palpitations, a
nd the spots were growing. And there was a voice, a hollow voice, very loud, and very far away, calling through glass, and there were hands on him and he was shaken violently. The voice rose and crashed in waves, rolling around his ears; it was getting dark.

  NowlistenI’mgonnatellGuzmánweflytomorrowawright? AwrightLewis? IsaidAWRIGHTLEWIS?

  He looked at the man and the man’s head, fringed with hair; the head shrank before his eyes and became a tsantsa. He could not look, and turned away. A figure crossed his line of vision, moving toward the door. The door opened and light came in. The voice said ThisisnowheremanI’vehadenough.

  Don’t go … I need … Don’t go. I need … But he could not hear his own voice, and he could not have said just what he needed. From over the man’s head the large white eyes of the moth observed him; they pinned him, like incoming beams. The music crashed, the wave … The door was dark again. He pushed himself to his feet and stared out of the window. The dark was rolling from the forest all around, and the sky was so wild as the sun set that it hurt his eyes. He reeled and fell, then thrashed to his feet and fell again, across the bed, and was sucked down into the darkness as the music burst the walls and overwhelmed him.

  His body diffused and drifted through cathedral vaults of color, whirling and shimmering and bursting forth, drifting high among the arches, down the clerestories, shadowed by explosions of stained glass. In the dark chapels of the church was a stair to windy dungeons, to colors rich and somber now, and shapes emerging; the shapes flowered, rose in threat and fell away again. Fiends, demons, dancing spiders with fine webs of silver chain. A maniac snarled and slavered, and rain of blood beat down upon his face. Teeth, teeth grinding in taut rage, teeth tearing lean sinew from gnarled bone. Idiocy danced hand in hand with lunacy and hate, rage and revenge; the dungeon clanked and quaked with ominous sounds, and he kept on going, down into the darkness.