At Play in the Fields of the Lord

  The unfairness of this remark infuriated him—what had gotten into her? It was not until suppertime that he trusted himself to answer her with composure. Sitting at the table, he regarded her sternly for a while, to impress her with his seriousness even before he spoke: There had never been any question of not going back; he had simply expressed disappointment that once again the Tiro and Mintipo believers would be left defenseless against the evil influences of the Opposition; he had simply been annoyed at her presumption, at her entire attitude, in fact, since his return from his dangerous journey to attend poor Billy’s funeral in the wilderness.

  “You didn’t go there for the funeral,” she reminded him. “You went there to tell Martin that his work was unsatisfactory; Billy died while you were there.”

  Leslie struggled to maintain composure, but his voice cracked under the magnitude of his grievance. “Now wait, now see here, honey, you’ve been acting out of sorts ever since that night you went and followed that outlaw out there to the airport—the fact is, you never did give me any kind of decent explanation of how you came to do a thing like that! Good Christian women have no business—”

  “Why were you so afraid of that man Moon?” she said. The question was put calmly, as if his fear of Moon was a fact well known to both of them, and it took him entirely off guard: it had never occurred to him that she might think that her husband was afraid of anything! He sat there aghast, all the more upset because Xantes had entered the salon and taken a table near by, so that he could not reprove her. Had Xantes heard? Leslie’s passion was such that he must tear his hair or beat his breast or bang his head against the wall, but because of the bandages on his hands he could not even clench his fists, much less crack his knuckles under the table.

  Moon! Would that man never cease to plague them? Well, darn it all, he hadn’t been afraid of Moon exactly, what was there to be afraid of, he just knew right from the start that a man like that meant trouble. Two or three times before in life he had seen a man with Moon’s expression—a hitchhiker once, and another time a man standing on a street corner—and they always made him feel exposed and wretched. Until Moon came everything was perfect, what with the Niaruna station just opened up and the defeat of Fuentes; far be it from him to wish any man’s death, but the Lord had surely intervened against the Opposition at a key moment, and the proof was when He sent the Quarriers to help out in His work while those Romans were short-handed. Before that man’s arrival he had felt triumphant in the Lord, and brave, and Andy was proud of him. But the very first time he had seen Moon, right here in this hotel, and Moon had looked him over with that funny flat expression of his, he had gotten a kind of nervous feeling, kind of silly or unmasculine or something, and here he was, bigger than Moon and an ex-athlete, and morally in the right!

  When he got his breath, he spoke to Andy from behind his water glass so that Xantes wouldn’t hear. “How about ‘love, honor, and cherish’?” he said. Maybe a rebuke like that was a little hard on her, because probably she felt bad already about what she had said to him. Still, this was no time for her to be disloyal! Recalling the Espíritu and his own escape, his mouth went dry and he put his fork down, food untasted. She hadn’t even been there, she hadn’t seen those wild ones! The image of Tukanu’s brutal attack constricted his whole chest: what had led the Lord to forsake him at a time like that? He had kept his head, but he couldn’t go through such an experience again; and it stood to reason that if the Lord could forsake him once, He could do it twice.

  If only Martin hadn’t done so poorly, everything would be just fine. There would be an established Niaruna contact, and he could stay right here in Madre de Dios and set up his regional headquarters and win through to victory over those Romans, the way he was supposed to. Perhaps staying here was his foremost sacred duty—he pressed his glass of ice water to his forehead and prayed for Divine guidance. He was a little shaken up, who wouldn’t be, and there was no one but the Lord to turn to. Under his breath he tried to pray, but his mind raced on ahead of him. He couldn’t confide in Andy. Why, Andy and the Quarriers, they had always been frail reeds, dependent on him; if they thought Les Huben was afraid, what would they do?

  He and Andy were still tense and silent when Moon’s partner approached their table. The bearded brigand of the year before was now merely unshaven, the sanguine cheek olive and thin, the flashing teeth tobacco-broken and protruding. He looked at his feet as if unable to meet Leslie’s hostile glare. “I was very sorry to hear about the decease,” he mumbled. “This was a very nice kid.” Wolfie’s cigar was gone, and the gold earring and beret, though he still wore his huge dark glasses.

  “We’ll tell the Quarriers you sent them your condolences.” Leslie spoke in a military tone, then resumed eating.

  “Yeah. Condolences.” Wolfie glanced at Andy, placing his hand tentatively on the back of a third chair. “I was thinkin maybe I could sit down a minute; you know, get the news and all. It ain’t often I get a chance—”

  “Please do—” Andy began.

  “If you don’t mind, Andy,” Leslie interrupted. To Wolfie he said, “I’ve been away. We were looking forward to a family dinner by ourselves.”

  “Sure! Yeah, sure! Pardon me, I’m sure.” Wolfie was already retreating. “Like I said, I just wanted to send, like you know, my condolences.”

  “Thanks very much,” Andy smiled after him. “We’ll be sure to tell them.” Still smiling, she turned to Leslie. He frowned quizzically, a leaf of lettuce poised before his mouth; from her expression he knew that something unbearable was about to happen, and it did. “Do you know something, Leslie?” she said quietly. “You’ve shrunk.”

  “AH!” cried Padre Xantes, observing Wolfie’s dismissal from the Hubens’ table. “The excellent Lobo! Will you join me?”

  The gesture spared Wolfie an ignominious retreat across the whole salon; he sat down, shrugging, nonchalant, his back to the Hubens. “Thanks,” he said. “So how you doin, Padre?” But Xantes scarcely glanced at him, so intent was he on the table of the missionaries.

  “And what is your opinion of all that wonderful American wire?” the priest inquired loudly. “Imagine the cost of shipping it down here—why, the shipping expense alone would support my mission for six months!” He smiled ingenuously, hands folded before him on the table. “Imagine! And will it be used to hold the heathen in, do you suppose, or keep him out?” He gave Wolfie a roguish smile, at which Wolfie, disconcerted, cleared his throat and spat forcefully out the window.

  “Maybe they wanna raise crocodiles,” Wolfie said. He was wondering why he had not taken Leslie Huben and picked him up out of his chair and slapped him silly. What’s got inta me! he mourned. What’s got inta me! But the missionary’s rudeness had taken him by surprise—after all, you go up to people to hand out condolences, man, you don’t expect a kick in the face!—and he hadn’t had time to think. If he had had time to think he could have yelled, Well, you take your family dinner, you schmuck, and shove it up your ass, somethin salty like that to let ’em know what was what, only maybe change “ass” to “anus” on account of the girl.

  “Imagine!” Xantes exclaimed again; he shook his head. “Our friends—I could not help but overhear them—are still discussing your remarkable associate, Señor Moon. Isn’t it amazing how that fellow caught our imagination? I have a theory—I have still not got quite to the bottom of it—but I have a theory, I have a theory.”

  “You got a theory, am I right?” Wolfie gazed balefully at the priest, perplexed by the volume of the other’s voice.

  “Yes indeed!” the priest insisted, pausing to insure the attention of the Hubens. “Despite the opinion of our evangelical friends, I did not have the impression that Moon was … godless? At play in the fields of the Lord! Eh? These final words of Moon, the evangelicals found them sacrilegious, no? But might not they have been just the reverse? St. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican”—and Xantes modestly inclined his head—“St. Thomas spoke highly of ‘playing i
n the world—’ ”

  “Well, saint or no saint, he stole that from Proverbs!” Huben called, provoked beyond endurance.

  Slumped in his chair, hands in his pockets, Wolfie grunted disagreeably. “Look, I ain’t deaf, Padre.” He got to his feet. “You wanna make a speech to them people,” he said, “you better go sit at their table.”

  He went outside and around past the kitchen to the servant’s room where he had lived since El Comandante had put him to work with mop and rag at cleaning the hotel. The spectacle of the bearded knife fighter scouring his latrine had been a comfort to El Comandante in his hour of disappointment over the failure of his Niaruna program; he passed his days in supervision of his new servant, carrying a small chair about with him to ease these duties.

  In his dark corner Wolfie lay down, thinking, If I spend any more time on this pad, I am liable to get bedsores, if first I am not gassed to death by the stink of garbage. How in the name of Christ did he get trapped in a jungle sink like this—he drove his fist against the wall so hard that he shook the whole hotel. It was too much! When he got so desperate for company that he went and let the marks insult him, it was time to make a break. He socked the wall again, and from somewhere in his rotten hotel big Guzmán bellowed.

  Moon wasn’t coming back, and that was that. The diamonds would take him home. But first maybe he would write Azusa and find out where home was these days. Right now, Wolfie said fiercely, and he sprang up and ran out to find paper, feeling decisive for the first time in months.

  DEAR AZUSA–

  This is me. Did you think I was dead? Ha, ha. Where are you living at. I am writing care of your mother, tell the old fart Hello (like hell). Zoose, I miss you and Dick, I am awful lonely, and if you will just let me know where are you living at I will come on home and settle down a while, all right? Don’t be sore at me, bygones are bygones, baby, right? I am kind of tired and lonely, like I said. Remember that time in the art movie I fooled you with that popcorn? Ha, ha. Well, baby, keep it hot for me, you always were a swinger, Zoose. Like maybe you been doing a few tricks on the side since I was gone—well, that’s okay, I mean, who hasn’t, right? Forgive and forget, okay, Zoose?

  So how is Dick? He ain’t no infint anymore, I bet. Since I last seen him, I been shot at in the Congo, Cuba—all over—and I’m just as broke and stupid as I ever was! Well we had some laughs, though, wait til I get home and tell you, you will break up. Only now my partner got hung up on some local kind of junk and went and got killed on me and crashed our aircraft along with it, and without him it ain’t a funny scene no more. Because before this happened, him and me made a lot of very comical scenes which I will save them to tell you when I get home. Write quick to the address below and let me know where are you at.

  Your wandering Jewish boy and common-law husband,

  WOLFIE

  He put his letter down, sighing with love. Dick! Imagine! He was going to see his very own flesh-and-blood! And good old Zoose—the memory of her big warm breasts made him twitch all over. Hastily he licked the envelope and pounded it shut, then yelled for fat Mercedes, who occupied the adjoining cell. Due to proximity or love of him—he had forgotten which came first—Mercedes washed his clothes and ran his errands and received him frequently and without charge into her flawed person; at his call, she came banging into his room. In the poor light, he decided, the moles, soiled teeth and stove-steamed hair could be forgiven, but a cooking odor of cheap olive oil pervaded her, and the lumpy form beneath the coarse black dress looked dirty even after she had taken her weekly bath. At seventeen, devoid of grace, Mercedes was long since disillusioned, and it was her chief aim in life to take offense. The permanent furrow on her brow stemmed not from despair but from an anger at the world that had doubtless commenced at birth; she grabbed at sex and food and drink as temporary and barely adequate consolations against the day of her demise and heavenly ascent, when she would be recompensed for the ultimate outrage of having been put on earth at all. Even now, she gazed suspiciously at Wolfie’s letter.

  “Aeropuerto!” Wolfie ordered. “Go and mail it.”

  “Quién es?” she growled, snatching it up.

  “My mujer!” Wolfie cried, ecstatic. “My niño! Me fly away to Estados Unidos!” He jumped around her, making wild flapping motions like a bird.

  “No!” She threatened to tear the letter up, and might have done so had not her beloved clapped his hand upon her crotch and in this wise propelled her backward toward his bed. For a Catholic, in his opinion, her morals were deplorable—not because she went to bed with him but because she felt none of the guilt, the mortal terror of damnation, that might have lent romance to her company. Mercedes had made some low bargain with her God, and she stuck to it.

  “Let go of that!” He knocked her hand away. “You catch me in that zipper, Shorty, you’re goin to be piss out of luck.” He turned his back on her, to finish taking off his pants in peace. Padre Xantes, at confession, must be derelict in his duty. These Christers—! Her avidity aroused him; standing there naked in his shoes, he saw the rampant profile of his trunk in the low mirror by the sink, and the hunched figure on the cot, intent on it. Human beings! He shook his head. Lookit the poor human beings!

  Mercedes, happening to see the mirror, caught Wolfie smiling at her attentions. “Qué quieres?” she challenged him, rearing back. He turned around and pulled her face against him, but in his mirth, his belly made her head bounce. When she caught him peeping once again, she spat on him: “Sin vergüenza!” Clearly she was in no mood for tenderness, so without further ado he jumped on her, and away they went, smackety-smack. She came immediately—“SANta María!”—and, hell-bent on seconds, kept on going. In his mind’s eye he could see their struggle as the next act of the tableau glimpsed in the mirror, and he gave a great cough of laughter. At this she flung her lover out and cursed him vilely, then snatched the letter to Azusa and scuttled to the door, where, in a crouched position, she began jumping up and down like a tarantula.

  “Lobo! Mercedes love Lobo, entiendes? No irás a los Estados Unidos!”

  “Gimme that letter!” Wolfie roared, still throbbing. “That’s to Azusa and my infint, Dick!” Like a satyr he danced after her, for she had dragged the letter between her legs, then spat on it, and was now tearing it in half; it was in quarters by the time he knocked her sprawling.

  Clutching the remains, he tottered backward and sat on the bed. His head still spun with ruptured bliss, his missive of love had been destroyed, and El Comandante, pounding at the door, was threatening him with extradition and certain death for introducing immoral persons into the Gran Hotel. Wolfie hobbled to the door and opened it a crack and peered with despair at a brutish face mad with the scent of lust. “This is a human being?” he inquired rhetorically, over the wild rattling of the chain. To Guzmán he said, “I arr es-spik you In-gliss, Jack—you wan fock woo-mans?”

  “Ch-jack!” El Comandante said. “Ha, ha, ha, ha.” He came into the room. “You go, I stay,” he said. But when he saw that the prize was kitchen Mercedes, bloody-nosed and stinking in the corner, he lost his temper once again and called Wolfie a pig and seducer of children. He grabbed the girl by the hair and yanked her forward on her knees and kicked her buttocks with the instep of his boot; the quaking flesh produced a dandy jiggle and an intriguing sort of hollow thock, like a slab of meat slapped down on a marble counter, and he fetched her a second kick and then a third, each one more satisfactory than the last, upon which, after a moment’s reflection, he cleared his throat and ordered Wolfie out of his own room. “We arr es-spik In-gliss,” he told Wolfie. “Gurl mus be ponished!”

  Wolfie got dressed and went into the salon, where he ordered eight drinks set up in a row and drank them down as rapidly as possible, listening to Fausto whine for payment. When he had swallowed down the last, he gasped, grinned broadly and charged the drinks to El Comandante.

  “I es-spik you!” Fausto cried. “He be vair ongry!”

  When he we
nt back to the room, Guzmán was gone. Mercedes, looking murderous, was splayed out on the bed like someone crucified. “Move over,” Wolfie said.

  “Maricón,” Mercedes said.

  “Piss on you.”

  “I pees on tú mismo!” Mercedes said, and burst into tears.

  Wolfie undressed and lay down naked on top of the sheet, extremely drunk, and went straight off to sleep. Toward dawn he was awakened by a drone of flies, a headache, a charged bladder and a bad smell. He reached out with his hand; the girl was gone. In Madre de Dios, he thought disgustedly, the fresh food smells like garbage, and the garbage smells like … Oy! He leaped up out of bed.

  He cursed the girl but felt no rage against her; on the contrary, he marveled at a revenge so implacable and to the point and at the same time so unspeakable. Human beings! And recalling the mirror image of the night before, he tried to laugh.

  If only Moon was here to see how his old pal Wolf was making out in life! What I mean is, Lewis, he would say, this is one hell of a way to wake up in the morning, Lewis! When they take a guy and actually come and hunch over him like frogs, man, when they come in the night and piss on you, man, as a token of their esteem, man, it is time to take a hint, it is time to go and seek your fortune, you know! Like elsewhere!

  He stood barefoot on the gritty floor, stained, naked and in tears, waving his hands at the angry flies for want of a solution. He peered about him at his sallow cell, his funky cot, the depressed kitchen court outside his window. One thing, he thought, when you hit bottom, you sure as hell don’t mistake it for no place else. He took a deep breath, trying to smile.