At Play in the Fields of the Lord (8 page)

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
–”

Then Wolfie shuffled in, swollen and sobered, one hand scratching his chin bristles, the other still fumbling with his trousers.
Behind him marched Mercedes, looking put upon; haughtily, arms still straight at her sides, she went on out the door into the street, like a huge toy.
Wolfie glared sheepishly at Moon.
“Lousy,” he said, and coughed and spat.
“I mean, that was
really
a nowhere hump.
Nowhere at all.”
To Quarrier he said, “You got a wife upstairs here, right?
You people
screw
at least, I hope.
So keep your eyes to yourself.”

Quarrier rose without expression and went out toward the latrine.

“Well, I’m glad you
got
one, anyway,” Wolfie called.
When Quarrier was gone, he said to Moon, “You dig that guy, huh?”

“He’s all right,” Moon said.
“He’s better than most of them; at least he’s not stupid.”

“He’s not, huh?
You mean he just
looks
stupid.
He just
acts
stupid.”
Wolfie, scratching, sounded like a pig on a dry fence.
“So where’s the treacherous greaser?”
But even as he spoke the door opened and the Comandante appeared.
He too looked angry, and he yelled violently at his son Fausto, “Son of a cow!
Close the doors, close the shutters, before the Gran Hotel Dolores is stolen out from under you!”
And the boy, jolted from his sleep, dropped down behind the bar in case something was hurled at him, then darted out at the far end and scurried to close the doors.

The Comandante pitched over to the table, where he drank down a half-bottle of beer at a single draught.
When he came up for air he was breathing hoarsely.
His color was bad and his fly was open.
“We arr es-spik Ingliss,” he gasped finally at Moon, then nodded craftily toward the room in the rear.
“
Piloto
, you wan focks woo-man, no?
La chica
Suzie—drunk!
Ferry drunk!”
He raised both hands to the side of his head to indicate that the girl was unconscious.
“Ahora”
—he pointed at the door—“you focks Indio gurl,
vamos
, no pay
nada
.”
He raised two fingers, grinning triumphantly at Moon, his gold tooth gleaming.
“Indio boy,” he said, “fock Indio gurl, no pay
nada
.”

Moon grinned back at him.
In a flat voice he said, “The Comandante is a dirty pig.
Un maricón sin vergüenza
.”

A moment later, he lay flat upon the floor.
Guzmán had taken a large beer bottle by the neck and whipped him a backhand blow along the skull; he stood over Moon, holding the bottle by the neck.
Quick as a snake, Moon thought, quick as a snake.
The bottle was not broken, so at least he was not cut.
A
fractured skull, maybe.
He gazed peacefully at Sheriff Guzmán from the floor.
If you don’t kill me now while you have the chance, he thought, you’re going to regret it.

An arm appeared around the Sheriff’s neck, and a wild hairy face over his shoulder; both disappeared from view.
A woeful crash, a roar of animals, and the light on the ceiling spun; the end of the world has come at last, he thought, we have collided with the moon.
And he sank away into oblivion.
When he came to again, there was a kind of silence, the only sound a breathing and a scrape of feet; he sat up, hauling at the table leg, and stared at the scene before him.
Wolfie and Guzmán were each using one hand to hold their pants up.
They were circling in the center of the room, and in the free hand of each of them was a knife.
Behind Wolfie, also circling, was the wretched Fausto, clutching a bottle.

Moon said, “Hey, Wolf—”

“I see him,” Wolfie said, his eyes fastened on Guzmán.
“I see the little lad.
And the little lad gets one step closer, he’s gonna get his throat cut.”
Wolfie had now secured his pants, and his free hand was extended out behind him toward the boy.
He did not stop moving, but kept circling, circling, knees bent, in a kind of squat; as he passed the table he seized a bottle by the neck and broke it in half—
crack
—on the table edge, and kept moving.
Now he had a weapon in each hand.
Passing, he said to Moon, “How you doin, kid?”

“Give me your knife.”

“No, no,” Wolfie called back over his shoulder, “no, no.
This one is mine.
He pulled the knife on me, not you.”
The next time around he said, “And anyway, you ain’t no knife fighter, baby—he’d take you.”
Moon struggled to his feet, hanging on to the table, then crashed back clumsily off the bench against the wall.
“No, no,” Wolfie murmured next time around.
“This one is mine, baby, this one would take you.”

Though Moon’s eyes had cleared, his body was still paralyzed.
He watched Wolfie with a vague dispassionate admiration for something done professionally, with grace: the flowing movements of the man, the sure feet flat to the floor for balance
and silent as on tiptoe, the swift strong gliding legs, the big delicate hairy hands loose at the wrists, the long knife held out like an offering, blade flat, to pass more easily between ribs …

Guzmán bellowed at his son, “Fausto, Fausto!
El otro!
Mátalo!
” Moon sat with his feet straight out and his palms on the bench and watched the frightened boy coming to kill him.
In his daze he was struck by the wide dark eyes, the wide agonized mouth like a hole—
crash
—a spot on the wall and falling glass and the boy broke away with a little screech, dropping his upraised weapon, for Wolfie had whirled and whipped his jagged bottle at the boy’s head.
Guzmán broke to lunge and slash at Wolfie, who turned under and out and away so easily that Guzmán stopped short and dropped his arm in surprise and—yes, Moon thought, yes, there it is, the good old fear.

He had seen Wolfie’s knife come out before and he was sorry he had missed the moment this time, for it was one of the prettiest things that he had ever seen.
It was like the first electric movement of a dance: the draw from inside the shirt was too fast for the eye, so that the forward and outward motion of the blade as the hand unfolded seemed slow-motion by comparison, and lethal because it was so graceful and unhurried, like a ritual performed many times over.
Guzmán could not have watched this movement closely or he would have quit right then and there.

The boy whimpered, coming up again with his bottle, but he was no longer in the fight.

Wolfie sensed all of this and grinned, moving in closer, for Guzmán’s step had straightened.
The big man, until now as quick as Wolfie, was moving slowly, his legs stiffening; in a moment he would lose his nerve and freeze—and then, Moon thought, your only chance is to make your move or run before you freeze.
Moon watched the pale unshaven face with distaste for what now must happen, but without pity.