At Play in the Fields of the Lord (23 page)

All this Moon understood later from Boronai and Pindi, but that day, standing in the mission clearing listening to Tukanu, he could not make head or tail of the Indian’s story.
When he finally understood, he had the explanation for the Indian genuflection he had glimpsed on the flight with Wolfie and on the day of his arrival.
During his praying lessons Tukanu had gathered from Taweeda that the white man’s god was Kisu, the Great Spirit of the Rain.
Taweeda said that the white man’s Kisu invited the spirits of good Indians to drink masato with him in his Sky House, and sent the spirits of bad Indians to live down in the mud like frogs.
Huben had told Taweeda—who told Tukanu—that Kisu was angry with those Indians who paid no attention to his anger, and although Tukanu found this idea of an almighty power rather foolish, the first appearance of the great bird in the sky had lent support to Taweeda’s silly story.
For want of a better course he gave his people praying lessons then and there.
The day of Kisu-Mu’s descent, they decided to pray again, but the trouble was that he had not remembered anything about the prayer except the physical position, and so they had remained silent.

“We wished to pray,” Tukanu said piously, “but we did not know what to say.”

O
N
the third morning after Moon’s arrival, another airplane had appeared out of the heavens.
At the distant sound, Aeore ran from the maloca and sprang in a bound to the center of the clearing; body tense, his bow and arrows in his hand, he knelt, pressed his ear to the earth, frowned, leaped up again and whooped shrilly in alarm.

Shouting and jabbering, the Niaruna in the village gathered at the edge of the clearing.
At a command from Boronai, a silence fell.
The sound of the airplane was unmistakable, and an uproar started; the women seized the smallest children and moved toward the shelter of the forest.
But Aeore, and then Boronai and Tukanu, had turned to gaze at Moon, who rose slowly and walked toward them.
He wondered if the plane was searching for him or whether it had been sent by Guzmán to attack; he could take no chances.

Pointing and gesturing, he had told Boronai that a great bird was coming to their village, that they must put out all fires and take their dogs and hide from sight.
Boronai shouted at his people, who scattered off into the jungle.
Moon himself hid at the jungle edge, and Aeore crouched just behind him, like a warder.

The plane was circling off to the west; the pilot was reconnoitering the mission station.
Then it came on again, passing to the north of where he stood.
In a moment it might spot the point where his own plane had plunged into the sea of leaves.
But the drone was steady, changing only as the plane came around in a wide arc; on this course it would pass eastward of the village.

Then the plane had turned.
When it came in, high over the trees, Moon recognized the Mustang fighter from the airstrip at Madre de Dios.
When the machine went into a sudden sideslip, losing altitude quickly, in a dangerous and peculiar “falling leaf” maneuver, like a wounded goose, Moon grinned; Old Wolf, he thought—I’ll miss that sonofabitch.

The plane flew briefly out of sight beyond the wall of trees.
Then it came on again, and he crouched down.
Crossing the village, very low, it seemed to fill the entire sky; its passage shook the treetops of the canopy, and nuts and twigs and bits of leaf rained earthward in its wake.
It came in with its left wing pointed to the ground, and Moon caught the blur of the pale bearded face.
While the Mustang was gaining altitude for its turn, he pointed at Aeore’s bow and arrows, then at himself, and made a shooting motion at the sky.
With a rude grunt, Aeore shoved the weapons at him.

Naked and painted, Moon stepped out to face the plane, and shot an arrow at his old friend Wolf.
The arrow arched weakly and harmlessly, but it was greeted with machine-gun fire.
The bullets tore into the canopy beyond the clearing.
Then the plane faded, strained, and circled round again to come in from the same direction; he made for the nearest tree trunk, waving at Aeore to follow him.

Wolfie came in this time on a low power-dive, preceded by a stream of bullets that whiplashed the thatched roof of the hut, danced in puffs of earth across the yard, and chopped to shreds the wooded edge where Moon had been standing.
The plane did not return again; it wandered far off to the west, quartering back and forth, then dying out.

Aeore fingered the shattered twigs, yelling and spitting.
Kisu-Mu’s fear of the bullets had not been lost on him, and from this time forward, he made no attempt to hide his suspicion of the Great Spirit of the Rain.
Moon had wondered first if Aeore’s hostility might have to do with Pindi, but now he was sure this wasn’t so.

T
HE
girl rose and came to his hammock.
She flinched when he put his hand on her shoulder; at the same time she watched him boldly and possessively.
Running his fingertips along her temple and down across her small neat ear, he marveled at the cool rubber quality of her flesh; there was real spring in it.
She giggled and laid her head on his chest, then placed her fingers gently on his lower belly, inspecting the coarse hair.

“Tsindu,”
she muttered fondly, and wrinkled her nose.
The Niaruna were all but innocent of body hair, which they regarded as a sure sign of promiscuity.
Since they associated hairiness with the
guhu’mi
, the forest demons, he had thought at first that this feature might enhance his aura of the supernatural, but their line between the sacred and the profane was an obscure one.
They now took a more familiar tone with Kisu-Mu, and teased him not only about his pubic hair but about his tender feet, his terrible aim and his inability to eat lice.
From the start they had been much more curious about the revolver, the gleam and weight of it, than they had ever been about airplane or parachute, which were beyond all comprehension.

He led Pindi out the side door of the maloca and off among the trees, where he made love to her.
The children came along to view the spectacle; though he drove them off, a few slipped back to cheer the couple on.
There was no solution short of infanticide, since Pindi refused to lie with him after dark.
In daylight Kisu-Mu was harmless and could be dealt with as a man, but in the night, when the jaguar and fer-de-lance, the vampire bat and
guhu’mi
were abroad, it was dangerous to sleep with spirits.
Nightfall and the moon were sacred.
For all Pindi knew, Kisu-Mu might turn himself into Anaconda-Person, and she would give birth to snakes.

They rolled apart and lay there on their backs, enjoying the sun on their bare skin and the languor in their legs.
Then Pindi followed him to the river, called Tuaremi, and the other Niaruna abandoned the dugout they had been working on and followed them.
She came into the water with him, and the children ran in too, and they all splashed one another.
The people on the bank took great delight in everything Kisu-Mu and Pindi did, and clearly wished they would do more; one old woman, cackling maniacally, made sexual pantomimes with her hands, causing one of the younger men to lie down on his back and kick his legs up in the air for joy.

When Moon came out of the water, he found Boronai awaiting him.
The headman held a bamboo tube of the red achote paste; with a thin spatula he drew on the legs of Kisu-Mu the
twin serpents of the Niaruna, to protect him from the bite of snakes.
From his pouch he took some waxy black genipa berries, grinding them on his palms and spitting on the paste, which he then mixed with tapir grease; with his fingertips he drew a short black bar on Kisu-Mu’s cheekbone and a harsh black line under his mouth, while the others laughed and whooped in admiration.

“Kin-wee, kin-wee!”
they called out.
Good, good!

Then Boronai addressed the river Tuaremi, angrily at first, then in placating tones, invoking its spiritual indulgence.
The Tuaremi brought the People food and carried them on their journeys, and when the day came it would carry them eastward in the death canoe, into the Morning Sun.
The People lived on the rivers, in the avenues of light; of the dark forest they were much afraid.
Yet the only sky that most had ever seen was the narrow strip of sky over the torrent.

They led Kisu-Mu back to the clearing.
His feet were sore and he slipped and stumbled, glancing at Aeore as he retrieved himself; the man was forever catching him off guard.
They crossed the clearing to the maloca, where the women remained outside; in the cool shadows, Boronai sat down upon the ground, motioning to Kisu-Mu that he sit opposite.
When the men had gathered, Boronai began speaking in a strange new voice, a kind of singsong, violent and shrill by turns, breaking off now and then to place his hands upon Kisu-Mu’s shoulders and stare fixedly past his head.
He spoke of the great days of his clan, of how they controlled the hunting and the fishing rights far down into the country of the Sloth People, the Tiro, and from there across to the Tuaremi, and far to the east, toward the Sea of Life; all that land was of his clan.
But now the clan had been forced westward by the Yuri Maha, their own kinsmen to the east—here Tukanu pointed at Aeore, for Kisu-Mu’s benefit—and they had been threatened from the west by the Green Indians and the Tiro.
The Ancestors were very angry.
He, Boronai, was very angry, and all of his people were very angry.

To prove this, Boronai shouted at Kisu-Mu in terrific anger, and his men shouted angrily at one another, especially Tukanu,
who was so angry that he jumped around in a circle, farting like a tapir.
But the only one truly angry said nothing and sat quietly, gazing at Kisu-Mu.
And now, as Boronai spoke softly once again, Moon realized what was happening—that Boronai and Tukanu were inducting the Great Spirit of the Rain into their clan.

Moon could never be sure of his own status, especially in the hostile eyes of Aeore, whom he saw as the greatest threat to his security.
In the long fear of the early days he had considered provoking an incident, then bringing forth the revolver like a wand of Kisu and striking Aeore down.
It was only a matter of time before some episode would bring Aeore’s suspicions out into the open.
Yet to kill the man who had shot the arrow—well, why not?
What difference did that arrow make?
His own superstition annoyed him.

Once Aeore asked where he had found his white man’s clothes.
How did such things go from Remate, where all white men lived, to Kisu-Mu up in the sky?
Because this was the first time he ever saw Aeore smile disarmingly, Moon had answered warily, in a manner which pleased neither of them.

Kisu-Mu was also the white man’s god, according to Tukanu, who had learned this from his woman at the mission.
It seemed logical to the Niaruna that Kisu-Mu should be an Indian spirit in the daytime and a spirit of the white man at night; spirits, unlike ghosts, took the form of Man.
Most spirits, said Tukanu, were very hairy or had two heads; at the very least, their legs did not bend at the knees.
Yet Tukanu seemed willing to accept Kisu-Mu’s unspiritual appearance, while Aeore was not.

Aeore seemed to know that Kisu-Mu was not Tukanu’s Kisu, but an agent of Kisu with strong shamanistic powers and therefore a rival of himself.
Unlike Boronai, who was a great headman and who possessed certain skills of curing and divination, Aeore was training to become one of the rare jaguar-shamans.
The year before, the young warrior had killed a jaguar single-handed with a lance, and while he did not wear its teeth upon his chest, out of respect for Boronai, he could now, under the effects of nipi, assume the form of Jaguar and consort with other jaguars in the night forest.
Meanwhile, to enhance his reputation, Aeore became
more and more ferocious, and submitted himself to prolonged tests of abstinence and endurance.
In recent months, Tukanu told Moon, Aeore would have usurped Boronai’s shamanistic role—though not the role of headman, which was related to one’s status in the clan—had it not been for Kisu-Mu’s induction into the clan by Boronai.

“If Kisu-Mu was an ordinary man,” Tukanu said cheerfully, “Aeore would kill you.”

The same evening that Boronai took Kisu-Mu into the clan, Aeore waylaid him at the forest edge.
Silent, he made Moon sit down, and squatted opposite him; with rough strokes of his thumb he wiped away Boronai’s markings.
Then he painted on Moon’s face the black lightning across the cheekbones that he wore himself, and the same narrow band of red beneath.
Then he followed Moon to the maloca.

Tukanu saw by firelight what Aeore had done, and started shouting.
Aeore caught Moon’s gaze and held it.
When Tukanu raised his hand to smear Aeore’s work, Kisu-Mu frowned; the hand paused and then Tukanu spun in a half-circle and stamped his foot down on the earth.
Boronai watched them, silent as stone.
Moon tried to placate Tukanu, but he painted himself thereafter in the manner of Aeore.
Sometimes he went down to the river and gazed with pride at the wild new face reflected there—how near and distant were the morning days when, as a child, he had seen his face in the spring rivers of the northern prairie.