At Play in the Fields of the Lord (30 page)

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.”

“A
H
!”
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 in 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.

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?”