At Play in the Fields of the Lord

  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.

  5

  WOLFIE AND GUZMÁN 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 b
ench 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?”

  HOLDING 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.

  In the dark corridor leading back into the bar-salon, Guzmán’s son Fausto lay in wait; he swung open a door for Moon’s inspection. Inside was a table and a cot; there was no window. “S-ss-t, señor, s-ss-t.” The boy’s eyes flashed; he pointed vigorously at the door to the bar, through whose glass pane the head of fat Mercedes swam in a garish light. Then he pointed at Moon, then at the bed. When Moon only shrugged, Fausto scuttled ahead of him to the next door, jerked his thumb at it and grinned. There were murmurings within. Bending forward a little, the boy made a basket of his arms and then, rolling his eyes, moved his hindquarters in and out spasmodically, in the manner of a dog.

  Moon entered the bar, disregarding the urgent tugging at his sleeve. As he suspected, it was none other than the perfidious Wolfie who was missing. Moon found himself face to face with the fat girl in mission gingham, who stuck her tongue out very slowly.

  “We arr es-spik Ingliss,” said the Comandante. He looked disgruntled, and was scratching his armpit inside his shirt. Across the table Quarrier was still present, his hands clenched on his knees, his face pale and rigid behind the dull thick lenses.

  “Okay,” Moon said. “The pen of my aunt is on the table.”

  “You fren fock woo-mans,” Guzmán retorted. He was glaring at Moon with an artless hatred that grew with every drink. When the fat girl reached over and stroked his arm, he drove her off with a backhand blow across the breasts. “Vete al diablo!” commanded El Comandante. “We arr es-spik Ingliss!”

  Quarrier said, “Did he tell you he’d stolen my letter to the government about his methods with the Indians, in which I reported that he makes money in the slave trade? Because I’ve learned just that from our Mintipo believers here in town.”

  Moon put his glass down. “You just got here a few days ago, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right.” Quarrier nodded up and down, aggrieved. “That boy Fausto showed him the address, and he read my letter and then tore it up, right under my nose.”

  “Send another letter,” Moon advised him. “This time accuse him of tampering with the mails.” He shook his head. “Take it from me, you’re a born loser.”

  After a pause Quarrier said, “Do you really think attacking the Indians is going to pacify them?”

  “No,” Moon said, “but killing them is.” He reached over and seized Wolfie’s abandoned glass and drained off what was left in it. Wolfie came and signaled to his Fat-Girl. “That Suzie of yours, for Christ sake,” he complained to Moon. ?
??She’s too damn drunk to move.” Mercedes got up and wandered toward him, clutching her arms to her hurt breast and glaring over her shoulder at the Comandante, who was drinking even more heavily than before. He glowered evilly at Wolfie and the girl, nodding his head as if to indicate that a moment of dreadful reckoning was at hand. When Wolfie yelled at him, “So what’s with you, you spic sonofabitch!” Guzmán gulped at his beer, protruding his lower lip at Moon and expelling noisy puffs of air, like a blowing horse; after a time he disappeared toward the latrine.

  The place had emptied; Fausto was sleeping behind the bar. An occasional head poked furtively through the door, but the window clientele had vanished. Somewhere a rooster crowed, and a pig snuffled in the mud street; a light of the oncoming jungle dawn soured the bad light in the room.

  Quarrier tried doggedly to interest Moon in the Niaruna, showing him a crude dictionary compiled by Huben and Uyuyu. “They seem to use the same stem for verbs and nouns and adjectives, with just a change of affixes, and they have genders, and their second-person pronoun is ti. All this suggests an Arawakan stock, the only one in this region. Perhaps you know that some tribes in our own South may derive from the Arawak as well. And I remember something else: the Sioux word for the Life Force, the Great Mystery, is wakan; in certain jungle tribes a word of quite similar meaning is pronounced waka!”

  “The Great Mystery, huh?”

  “You probably know much more than I do—”

  “You are trying to tell me that there are similarities between the Plains Indians and these Indians we are going to bomb, isn’t that right? Well, there were much greater similarities between my people and the Crow, between my people and the Shoshone, and even when the one real enemy was the white man, we killed Crows and Shoshones whenever we had the chance.”

  Moon was silent for a time. Then he said suddenly, “I know all about you, Quarrier. You’re a pain-in-the-ass type, a nosy … Listen, we had one just like you when I was a kid, always appealing to our primitive nobility. He was all read up on the proud Cheyenne in paint and eagle feathers, and all he found was a pack of ragged halfbreeds chewing dog meat. ‘Can’t you see we’re trying to help you people—?’ Christ! The Indian didn’t need help until the white man came along, and here was this poor sonofabitch looking for gratitude–”