At Play in the Fields of the Lord (12 page)

Even this one, Moon concluded, glancing at the violent man beside him.
Even this one must be handled like a baby.

His mind strayed back to the strange sights of the morning; he wanted to think about what he had seen and why it had so excited and unsettled him.
To Quarrier, who stared at his bloody shirt from the salon doorway, he refused conversation, saying enigmatically, “Nice country,” and continuing upstairs.

Wolfie lay down on his bed without taking off his boots and fell asleep, a surprised expression on his face, mouth slightly open, and the handle of his knife protruding like an iron nose between the buttons of his twisted shirt.
Moon sank down slowly on the edge of the other bed and contemplated the round face and the roistering beard, the inseparable earring and dark glasses and beret like grotesque toys, the knife made specially down there in Mexico.
In all the time that he had known this man he had never seen that knife before when it was not in use, and the fact that Wolfie had gone to sleep without sliding its sheath beneath his arm was the bleakest evidence of his defeat and new dependence.

He reached across and removed Wolfie’s beret.
Wolfie’s hand flicked toward the knife, stopped, settled back upon his stomach.
He sighed like a sleeping child.
Moon nodded in regret.
From now on, in some way, he was responsible for this human being; the partnership was over.
And though he knew that this new relationship could have come about at any time in their common past, he was sorry that it had happened.
Since he himself would refuse responsibility for this man—for any man—he and Wolfie had better part company, and the sooner the better.
He made the decision without turmoil; he had made it before with other men and with twenty years of women.
But the decision did not spare him sadness.
A fine old kind of friendship had been killed, and a fine old freedom.
How often in life, it seemed to him, he had come to this place before.

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.

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
.

H
E
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 drifted 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.