At Play in the Fields of the Lord (16 page)

The crowd at the airstrip cheered
El Lobo
as he tuned the motor—
“Ole!
Muy macho, hombre!”
—saluting the beard and the gold earring, the mechanical genius and the revolver.
It was commonly assumed, and confirmed by the infernal clatter of the engine, that
El Lobo
would disappear in the wake of Moon and die a hero’s death before the sun had set.

“Introit et Kyrie …”

Quarrier turned.
Here was the priest again; he had not even noticed him.
Xantes was everywhere, hands folded behind his back, observing.

“So … the Requiem commences.
Inevitable, eh?
And I, for one, will miss him.
Such a strange man, this Moon!
A soldier of fortune, and of the classic type, and yet—how shall I say?
There was something likable about the man, did you not find?”

“He’s dead, you mean?”

“Do you not think so?”
Xantes cocked his head.
“
Y usted?
I understand that you are a student, like myself.
You have read all the laws of this land, for example—?”

Quarrier laughed; they walked on a little way together.
“Oh
yes, I love to read.
I wish I could read Spanish well enough to borrow—” He stopped short.

“By all means; one must do what one can to help dispel ignorance.”

Quarrier knew that he was being jeered at, and he particularly disliked being jeered at in a kindly manner.
But the priest was too adroit for him, and he exclaimed, “But why are
you
sympathetic to Moon!
These men are mercenaries, very probably criminals …”

“How is it, then, that we pass so much of our time in talk of him?
Do you deny it?
If he is the ordinary bandit he appears to be, why can we not dismiss him?
Surely you have noticed, Señor Quarrier, that the people we dismiss most vehemently are the very ones we find it necessary to dismiss most often?
And let us be honest, it is not the banditry of the late Moon that so unsettles us.
We all sit up, we call old names at him; we cannot be comfortable while he is there.
Yet we circle in uneasily—what is his secret, what does this man wish to know that we do not?”
He paused to cough.
“And now, alas, he is gone away, and with him some sort of—
possibility?
For all of us.”
Xantes smiled, bowed, and set out toward the town.

“What is it you want with me?”
Quarrier called, despairing, and the priest turned toward him, his brown cassock snapping in the dull wind of the airstrip.

“I would talk to you, Señor Quarrier, even if I had no better reason than the following: I have learned all of my English out of books, and I speak it very well, do you not think?
But I have not many chances to practice it, and so I avail myself of every opportunity of … communication?”
He smiled gaily and bowed again.
“Good day, señor.”

W
OLFIE
was back while the sun was still high, careening down to a bad landing, out of gas; he took off a second time as soon as he had refueled.
He left again at dawn the following morning and flew until dark, and he did this again on the following day, the
same day that Hazel Quarrier, without warning or note, without even packing a bag, took Billy on the commercial flight and fled back across the mountains.

On the next flight, two days later, Quarrier flew out to fetch her.
She and Billy were waiting for him on a bench at the main airport.
Her plan, such as it was, had been to return to North Dakota, but she had neither luggage nor sufficient funds, nor had she applied to anyone for help.
She had simply sat there in her foolish hat, as if awaiting divine intervention.

Billy, sensing something to be feared in her, sat at the far end of the bench.
Quarrier picked up the silent child and touched Hazel’s shoulder, saying, “Now come on, Mother, we’re going back.”
She rose without a word and followed him.
Later she said, “Well, I had a hot bath, Martin.
Oh, I
needed
that bath so.”
In the plane he kept looking at her—had he ever really looked at her before this moment?

At the airstrip in Madre de Dios, Wolfie was preparing to fly out again for the second time that day.
He looked tired and gaunt, and did not respond to Quarrier’s nod.
He seemed to feel that if he did not find his partner soon he would not find him at all.
All his movements had grown stiff and hurried, and he kept dropping things.
But to Hazel he muttered, “I’ll tell ya somethin, lady—if
I
ever ex-cape from this Christly jungle the way you did, they won’t get
me
back,
never
.”

Hazel did not answer him.
For the benefit of Huben, who had met them at the plane, she hung her head; at the same time she was smiling to herself, for she felt no shame at all.
She was playing the game that they required of her—displaying a seemly penitence, yet dealing firmly with the little boy in proof of renewed stability.
When the child shied from her, she seized his hand in warning.
Only he, who had gone with her, knew her secret: she had not come back!
She had found a glass sphere full of sun and flowers sailing high above the fair, and all this world beneath was a world of games.

The child watched her.

No
, she thought, and she squeezed his hand so fervently that he squeaked in pain: I loved you in that other time, and I love
you still.
She peered close into his eyes and saw his tears; the sphere burst, the air rushed in, and a terrible mixed joy and sorrow overcame her.
What would folks think!
She pulled herself together and set off after Martin and Leslie, still squeezing Billy’s hand.
“Oh I’m so sorry,” she implored Billy.
“Oh don’t look at me that way, I beg of you!”

She hurried onward, struggling to keep up.
But she felt nagged and pulled by some outward force which kept her off balance and stumbling.
Billy was yanking at her hand, desperate to free himself, and was filling the air with loud and nerve-shearing protest; now the random clatter of his words fell into place.
For some time he had sought permission to walk along by himself, and had only cried out when, distracted and oppressed, she had squeezed his hand all the more fiercely.
She was about to comfort him when Billy fetched her a kick in the shins.
He had never done such a thing in all his life; and because the people behind her were sniggering, because Martin and Leslie Huben were gazing back at her in perplexity—because, finally, she could not permit an eight-year-old this outrage even if he was in the right, she smacked him across the face.

In the silence that followed, while she gasped for breath, Billy stared at her, his eyes filling.
It would have been better if he had cried, but he only shook his head back and forth in condemnation, saying, “Boy, Ma, that’s not fair.
Boy, Ma!”
She slackened her grip, feeling very weak; coldly, he yanked his hand from hers and went forward to join his father.
Over his shoulder he said, “You were hurting me.
You hurt me.”

Martin said to him, “If I ever see you do that to your mother again, you’re going to get the hiding of a lifetime.”
But as he spoke he gazed reflectively at Hazel; when he turned around he placed his hand on his son’s shoulder and they went on again as if she were not there.
She fell far back, to make them feel bad—had they already forgotten that she was sick, that she needed love and care?

No, I can’t bear it—She suppressed a scream.
Folks always turned their backs to her, they always pretended she did not exist.
Wait for me
, she groaned,
oh for pity’s sake wait
.

Alone!
She was alone—they’d left a sick person to walk alone!
Whimpering, she picked up her skirt as Momma used to, crossing the barnyard in the rain; she began to run, crying and laughing at her own fright, at the big frightened white knees pumping along.
But there, the folks had stopped, and seeing their stern faces, she hastened to compose herself.
“Goodness, wait for me!”
she called out gaily, as if she were carrying the picnic basket.
Their silence was awkward—did they think her too forward?
She tried again, gasping in pain.
“Goodness, I forgot about that
smell
,” she sighed, twirling a little.
“This is surely the domain of Satan, Mr.
Huben, I can smell sulphur in the very air!”
Leslie cried out, “Why, that vomit smell, that’s the sawmill, Hazel, you remember that!
Why heck, you won’t hardly call that a smell at all once you smell Remate de Males!
‘Culmination of Evils’!
How’s
that
for the name of a town?”

Awaiting her reaction, young Mr.
Huben glanced uneasily at Mr.
Quarrier.
Their uncertainty gave her a grip on herself—she would confound them.
“I reckon it’s as good a name as any,” she said primly, “in
this
neck of the woods.”
Now Martin Quarrier laughed boisterously in relief, this coarse-looking fellow who imagined that he understood what he was pleased to call Miss Hazel’s “quirky” sense of humor.
But she had not fooled that child.
He kept his distance, walking backward, as if skirting some ominous beast.
They almost nodded at each other.
I
know
, his face said.
You have gone away again.
You have forsaken us.

Y
OYO
had been sent to contact the Niaruna; he returned a week later with word that the plane had crashed and that Lewis Moon was dead.
How had he died?
Yoyo shrugged and smiled.
He knew no more.

Wolfie, once he had understood—“What’s he sayin, c’mon, what’s he
sayin?
”—picked Yoyo off the ground and shook him like a rat.
“Since when don’t a bush pilot follow the rivers?
Huh?
And if he piled up along the rivers, I woulda found him—I seen every lousy river from here to Bolivia and halfway across Brazil.
So where’s the aircraft, huh?
Where—is—the—aircraft?”

But Yoyo did not answer, not out of recalcitrance but because he spoke no English; instead he smiled enthusiastically.
Though of neither an enthusiastic nor a smiling turn of mind, he had learned early in the game that gringos—and especially the
evangélicos
—responded favorably to eagerness of any kind.
When Wolfie’s question was translated for him, he smiled again.
It was true that he, Yoyo, had not seen the wreckage; it was far off—he pointed vaguely eastward.
The plane, he said, had disappeared in the far country of the Yuri Maha, the People to the East.
The Yuri Maha, he explained, were of the same clans as the Niaruna, but now nobody went that way; the trails were lost.

Wolfie lowered him to the ground, but he kept his big hands clenched for a few moments on the front of the red shirt, glaring at Yoyo and breathing harshly, as if considering how best to dispose of him once and for all.

Leslie talked with Yoyo separately, but made no more headway than had Wolfie with this flexible personality; it seemed quite possible that Yoyo had gone no farther than the Tiro country and had concocted the whole story, making it as dramatic and final as he could in an attempt to please his listeners.
Leslie did learn, however, that his own small band of Niaruna was most anxious that he return, as they were under constant threat of violence from their wild brethren and had been forced to take shelter in Remate de Males.
A few days later the Hubens flew out to Remate, leaving the Quarriers to wait for the supplies.

A
T THE END OF HIS LONG NIGHT OF UPROAR AND HALLUCINATIONS
, Lewis Moon had a dream.
He dreamed that he walked homeward up the bed of an empty river and out onto a blasted land of rusted earth and bones and blackened stumps and stunted metal, a countryside of war.
In the sky of a far distance he saw a bird appear and vanish; but no matter how far he walked, the world was one mighty industrial ruin, a maze of gutted factories and poisoned ground under the gray sky.
He came finally to a signpost, and the signpost had caught a fragile ray of rising sun.
He ran toward it, stumbled, fell and ran again.
The signpost pointed eastward, back toward the sun, and it read:

Very tired, he turned back along his road, crossing the dead prairie.
Though he had not noticed them on his outward journey, he now passed a series of signs all pointing eastward.
Each was illuminated by a ray of sun, and each bore the same inscription:

The terrible silence of the world made him move faster, and soon he saw, on the eastern horizon, the dark blur of a forest.
He ran and trotted weakly, bewildered by the crashing of his feet upon the cinders.
Another sign, and then another, pointed toward the wood.

As he drew near, the wood became a jungle, a maelstrom of pale boles and thickened fleshy leaves, shining and rubbery, of high dark passages and hanging forms, of parasites and strangler figs and obscene fruited shapes.
But even here there was no sound, no sign of movement, not even a wind to stir the heavy leaves, sway the lianas; there was only the mighty hush of a dead universe.

He started forward, stopped, started again.
Too frightened to go on, he turned around and saw what lay behind him; then he sat down on the road, and this time he wept.

When at last he lifted his eyes, he saw a signpost at the jungle edge; it was obscured by weeds and leaves and the tentacle of a liana, and at first he thought that its inscription was identical to all the rest.
But this sign did not point anywhere, and as he drew near and stared at it he saw that its inscription was quite different.
It read:

Astonished, he ventured on into the darkness of the jungle.
Soon he came to a kind of clearing cut off from the sky by a canopy of trees, a soft round space like an amphitheater, diffused with sepia light.
Everything was soft and brownish, and the ground itself quaked beneath his feet, giving off a smell of fungus and decay.
In the center of the clearing he strayed into a quagmire; very quickly he sank, too tired to struggle.
But as he passed into the earth and the warm smells of its darkness, he was still breathing without effort, and soon he dropped gently into a kind of earthen vault.
Though closed off from the sky, this cave was suffused by the same soft brownish light as in the clearing far above.
Here was a second sign, which read:

The passage through the soil had cleaned him of his clothes, and he was naked; as he stood there, small black spots appeared in pairs upon his skin.
He pressed at them and discovered to his horror that the black spots were the tips of snail horns; at each touch a naked snail slid out through his skin and dropped to the cave floor.
His hands flew wildly about his body, and the snails slid out and fell, until finally the earth at his bare feet was strewn with slimy writhings.
Now, from the darkness near the wall, numbers of salamanders crept forward; each salamander grasped a snail behind its head and writhed in silent struggle with it, the soft bodies twitching back and forth in rhythm.

He backed toward one side of the room and fell into a tunnel.
He ran along the tunnel, no longer afraid, for there was light ahead.
He ran like a boy.

The tunnel emerged like a swallow’s nest from the side of a high bank.
Far below he saw a jungle clearing in a huge sunlight of the world’s first morning, and in the clearing the Indians awaited him.
Naked, he leaped into the radiant air, and fell toward them.

M
OON
awoke.
He lay in a half-world between the dream and his narcosis, growing gradually aware of where he was.
Though the room was dark, he could see the moth’s white eyes above the door, and the glint of the bottle on the window sill.
The man on the next bed was missing.
In the background he heard singsong voices, a wailing and keening like a ringing in his ears.

The night air of Madre de Dios was fragmented by insect-singing and far barking, by the tocking of frogs in the puddles and ditches, the murmur of voices behind walls, by sounds of breaking.
But the street below was rigid in its silence, and he wondered if he was not still in the dream.
He rose slowly; though his head was light, he felt intensely strong and sure.

There was no question in his mind about what he was going to do.
He would not wait until it was light; he would go now.
He
lifted his watch to his ear; its tick was murderous.
The numerals of the watch face, reading five-fifteen, glowed with chinks of light, as if time burning had been forced into the casing; its metal swelled and shimmered with constraint.
At this, his chest began to tighten, and his breathing hurt the cold wound in his heart; he removed the watch, and holding it by one end of the strap, rapped it sharply on the sink until it broke.
Then he dropped it out of the window.

He moved quickly without turning on the light.
From his knapsack he took the last of the river diamonds, holding them a moment in his hands.
He had found these on the upper Paragua, in Venezuela, bright alluvial diamonds, burnished clean by mountain torrents, green and blue and yellow and red.
In the darkness, he could feel them burning, like fire and water of the universe, distilled.

He put one diamond in his pocket and slid the rest under Wolfie’s pillow.
His revolver, in its shoulder holster, he put on beneath his shirt.
An instinct nagged at him to leave the gun behind, to go forth unarmed and clean; he slung it into a corner of the room.
But after looking at it for a moment, his instinct weakened and he retrieved it.

He went out of his room and down the hall to where the missionaries slept; he opened the first door he came to, quietly but without hesitation.
In the bed, his back to him, lay Leslie Huben.
Beside Huben was the girl.
He crossed the room and looked at her, the long hair on the pillow and soft mouth; he could smell the warmth of her.
When he reached down and ran his fingertips from the corner of her eye along her temple, her eyes opened, widened.
Slowly her hands reached for the sheet and drew it to her chin.

“Come with me,” he told her, neither softly nor loudly.

She cried out faintly, like a child, which made him smile.
She turned her head toward her husband, turned it back again.

“No,” she whispered, “no, no, no.”

He went out the door again and closed it.
The next room was Martin Quarrier’s, and he found what he was looking for in the hip pocket of the missionary’s pants.
Quarrier awoke and
followed him out into the hall.
The man talked on and on, and at the end he heard his own voice say, “No, not now.”

He glanced back once as he turned down the stairs; the girl was watching through the door crack.
When she closed the door, he kept on going.

He walked down the center of the empty street.
On its last corner leaned a solitary man, a drunkard, attended by a dog.
The drunkard was singing a sad slow mountain song, gasping for breath, lungs cracking.
When Moon crossed his line of vision, he croaked,
“Dónde vas, amigo?”

He kept on singing while Moon stopped, swaying, and regarded him.
The drunkard’s face waxed and waned, in caricature of idiocy, of rage and misery and innocence, of sensibility and soul.
He sang softly out of his great mouth, his staring eyes and tear-eroded cheeks, his skull:

Was this man the solitary figure coming at him down the street?
Moon said,
“Yo voy a otro mundo.”

“Sí.”
The man paused again, contemplating Moon.
“
Sí
,

“Quieres venir?”

“No, gracias.”
And then the man said gently,
“Una copita, sí—ayahuasca, no.
Buen viaje.”

Moon emptied his pockets of his change and gave it to the singer.
The man demurred: it was not Moon but the
ayahuasca
that made the gift.
Moon said, “No, I no longer have need of it.”
The man took it.
“God will repay you,” he said; he looked uncertain.

Sí, sí.
Dios le pagará
.

Moon walked on, his enlarged pupils drawing in the faintest light; every sound and every smell enlivened him.
In the nostrils of a lunatic, he thought, the night air is just as strong … In this moment he could scent, hunt out, run down and kill the swiftest creature on earth.
Stalking the plane, he knew every sinew and muscle in his body, how each coiled and moved; in the darkness of the jungle night, he played cat, nerves taut, listening.
He heard
a small night animal and sprang for it, and was astonished when he missed it.
An instant later he stopped breathing; something was hunting him in turn.
He drew the revolver and ducked under the plane, rising silently behind the intruder.

The girl stood beside the wing.
“Where are you going?”
her voice said.
“Are you going to bomb the Niaruna?”

“No.”

“You must not.”

“No.”
He laughed.
He had not felt so happy since—since when?

“Are you sick?
You look so strange!
I suppose you’re very drunk.”

“No.”

“What is it then?
What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?
Why did you break into our room?”

“To say good-bye.”

“But we haven’t even said hello yet!”

“Let’s say it then: hello.”

Look, look, she’s smiling!

She said, “Your name is Lewis Moon.”

“Yes.
Your name is Andy.
What were you christened?”

“Agnes.
Agnes Carr.”

“That’s much better than Andy Huben.”

“I tried for days to place your name; then I remembered.”
She had been running, and she paused for breath; gazing at him, her eyes filled with tears.
“Your people, and the mission—they were all so
proud
of you!”

“Yes, they were.”

“Yet you disgraced them!”

“That’s what they said.”

“May God forgive you!”

“Why should He, when I haven’t forgiven Him?”
He laughed.

She looked disgusted.
“You’re not the least repentant, are you?”

“No.
Suppose I told you that I didn’t steal that money, that it was given to me.”

“Why didn’t you tell the truth, then?”

“Because the truth looked worse than what was being said.
A thief is one thing, but a betrayer—do you always talk like this?”

“Like what, Mr.
Moon?”