At Play in the Fields of the Lord (9 page)

Wolfie had not yet made a pass, though he had feinted once in play and laughed when his foe leaped back; the intense happy grin on Wolfie’s face parted his beard.
That was the terrifying thing.
Moon knew now what Wolfie had known from the beginning: that the outcome had never been in question, not even
when there had been two against him.
It was the big man’s sudden awareness, not of Wolfie’s awesome skill but of his still more awesome and implacable assurance, that had shaken his nerve beyond repair.

“Villains!”

Well, Moon thought, did
I
say that?
He turned his head.
Quarrier stood there in the door leading to the latrine, the near-naked body of the small Indian girl in his arms and on his face the ultimate outrage of Jehovah.
Quarrier, mouth open, glared at the shambles of the room in disbelief: the knife fighters and broken bottles, the cringing boy, the torpid Moon.

Wolfie had halted in mid-stride to stare at Quarrier.
Moon yelled a warning and struggled to his feet.
In the same second Wolfie ducked so low that his fingertips grazed the floor, and came out and up again, knife erect.
Guzmán tried too late to stop his lunge; as he fell, he rolled sideways with a grunt, casting away his knife, and when he struck the floor, yanked his knees up to his stomach and his arms up to his face:
“Misericordia!”

Wolfie stared at him, his own knife shivering; then he whirled and rushed at Quarrier, shoving the knife point at his face.
“You stinkin bitch!
Didn’t I tell you keep your nose out?
Did I or didn’t I?
You spoiled it, you gone and spoiled it.”
He actually stamped his foot.
“Jesus!”
he shouted.
And he drove his knife so hard into the table that the wood split.

Sensing that Wolfie had lost interest in him, Guzmán scrambled for his weapon, then leaped to his feet in fighting posture, bounding and circling and bellowing with rage.
In terror of his father’s ferocity Fausto screeched, “Papá, Papá!”
But Guzmán had the wit not to catch Wolfie’s eye, addressing himself instead to Quarrier.

“Hah,
evangélico!
Hah,
estúpido!
” And he pointed his knife at the girl.
Quarrier tried clumsily to pull her skirt down—she was naked underneath—but since the cloth was bunched against his waist, he failed.
He lowered her feet to the ground and the skirt fell.
“Hah,” Guzmán cried again, smiting his palm to his forehead, “
evangélico!
Evangélico
fock Indio gurl!”

“Yeah, how about that?”
Wolfie murmured.
“How about that?”

“No,” Moon said, “he didn’t do that.”
He remembered how the missionary had stared down the girl’s dress.
“Don’t be stupid, Wolf.”

“Stupid!”
Wolfie grunted, nodding his head.
“And this to the guy that only just saved his life.”
He slumped angrily into a chair.

The Indian girl had come around.
She sat alone against the wall under a yellow bulb, as if in wait for someone to come and tell her where she must go.
Hands pressed like fig leaves to her crotch, she stared dully at the men, uncomprehending.
With her lipstick and earrings gone, she was no more than a child.

Quarrier stood at the table.
The girl had been sick on his sleeve and he smelled bad.
He said to Moon, “Do you realize what these evil brutes have done?
Do you care?
I don’t know what to say to you—”

“Don’t say nothin then,” Wolfie told him.
He shouted suddenly at Guzmán, “You want us to fly tomorrow, prick?
Because if you do, you better get our papers set.”

Guzmán, once he had understood, roared angrily in acquiescence.
He drove the Indian girl out the door into the dawn and his son after her, fetching the latter a slap across the head.
“Son of a cow,” he bawled, “go home to your poor mother, Doña Dolores, and tell her that her husband, El Comandante Don Rufino Guzmán, has set out on his journey to the
casa!
”

Quarrier spread his arms in a gesture toward the room which, with the shutters closed, had become dense with smoke, and stank of sweat and spilled cheap beer and breathing.
“How did I get myself in such a place …” He shook his head.

Moon took his bottle of
ayahuasca
and moved toward the stairs.
“I told you, friend,” he said, “you’re a born loser.”

“Ain’t we all,” snarled Wolfie, “ain’t we all.”

I
T HAD BEEN THE CONFRONTATION WITH THE PADRE
,
HE DECIDED
, that had set in motion that series of grotesque events.
And though the episodes had been the fault of Guzmán and Wolfie, the man who had upset him most was Lewis Moon.
She’s got nice tits, wouldn’t you say
: Aow, how that phrase still twisted him!
Moon had faced him with his own perfidy, his longing for another man’s wife, and even worse, a sinful lust for women in general, including the poor little Indian believer.
He could not excuse this on the grounds that Hazel had been cold to him, for to his astonishment her growing terror of this place, her disapproval of his every action, had been accompanied by wild, sobbing desire which had shocked him mightily, not only because it was so unlike her, but because of its greedy and insatiable nature.
Perhaps he should send her home from this jungle that deranged her so.
But she had no memory of her night fevers and refused to discuss what she considered his false concern for her.
Except to accuse him of consorting with killers and harlots, she had
scarcely said a word to him since they came to Madre de Dios.
She had become so dogmatic since leaving home, so frightened!
Yet even back in North Dakota, it had been difficult to persuade her to learn a little Spanish, for wasn’t Spanish a Catholic language?
Had Hazel been reared far away from the Protestant heartland of the Great Plains, she would have made a redoubtable Catholic or even Communist; it was the dogma that attracted her, the security of righteousness, for she felt no need to understand her faith.

Yours is the big girl, with black hair
.
How careless that had been, and yet how mortally insulting, not only to himself and to Hazel but to all women.
What sort of man was this?

He had almost given up on Moon as a cold sinful killer, a man who thought and spoke, when he spoke at all, in short quiet starts of violence.
And it was just after he had asked if attacking the Indians was going to pacify them, and Moon had said,
No, but killing them is
—and to think that, startled by such dreadful cynicism, he had almost laughed!
He had to get hold of himself!—that Moon, blaspheming, seeking to corrupt, had nonetheless spoken to him with passion, and in warning.
Why did moral judgment of this man seem beside the point; could it be that Moon was fatally damned, beyond redemption?
He had never heard of such a thing.

You’re a devil—a true devil!
To try to corrupt
—

If I can corrupt your faith, it smells already to high heaven, right?
Moon had leaned forward, feeling drunkenly for his words.
You look frightened, Mr.
Quarrier.
But you warned us a while ago that we would go to hell, so I am warning you
—he laughed—
that you are there already.
You’re in the jungle now, up to your fat God-fearing ass, and in the jungle the game gets a little rougher
.

You’re very drunk.
Why, you’re not even making sense!

Perhaps I’m not.
But I see that you understand me
.

When Moon had gone off to bed, he and Wolfie were left staring at each other across the wreckage of the evening.

“Moon?
So how do I know about Moon—I mean, he’s only my
friend
and I
still
don’t know’m!”
Wolfie waved Quarrier
away.
“Like, don’t bug me, Reverend.
You don’t get to
know
guys like Moon, for Christ sake, they don’t stand still long enough.
You either swing with’m or you don’t, that’s all.”

But in a little while, more quietly, Wolfie began to talk again.
“I don’t know why I even
tolerate
this madman, you know it?”
He shook his head.
“There’s this kind of very way-out cat—like you run inta him all over the world, and each time he looks different and each time he disappears, but always I know I’m goin to run inta him again, because the guy is on the road, he’s always on the road, and he’s got nine lives and nine names and nine faces.
Only this one, this Moon, he’s different.
I run inta him in Israel, and since then we been to Cuba and all over.
Like in some way which I am too stupid to figure it out, he’s beautiful, see, and also he’s mean as catshit.
They don’t come no meaner than Lewis Moon, and you never know when he’s goin to be mean or when he’s goin to be beautiful.
He always cons you; sometimes I think—in
his
mind, understand?—there ain’t no difference.”

Wolfie glanced up.
“I mean, you seen how quiet he is?
Well, that quiet sonofabitch is also the angriest sonofabitch I ever knew.
He’d give you his last dime one second and break your neck the next, and you’d never know why he done either one.”

According to Wolfie, they had lost their American citizenship for fighting in the armies of foreign countries; their plane they had stolen in Cuba, and they had come with it to South America via Hispaniola, Barbados, the Windwards and Venezuela.
Lacking visas, they stayed away from the big towns on the coast and worked the back country.
In Cuba, Wolfie had taught Moon to fly; Wolfie was also a mechanic.
They had banged down the continent to Tierra del Fuego, where they had made big money bombing out a rash of oil-well fires.

It was on the strength of this feat that Wolfie had painted on the fuselage
Wolfie & Moon, Inc.—Small Wars & Demolition
.
In Paraguay they had operated two new bulldozers that no Paraguayan could run, and had torn up the landscape near Asunción more or less at will until the day when Wolfie was slapped in the face by a low branch of a huge tree; he had battered the giant to the ground, demolishing the new bulldozer
in the process.
He was freed from an ancient jail by Moon, who destroyed it with the remaining bulldozer—“I wake up and there he is, right next to me, yankin on the controls!”—but they were caught immediately.
They were on the point of being shot, Wolfie was certain, when Moon handed over to the guards some river diamonds he had once picked up in Venezuela; they took off in their plane that night and crossed the border into Bolivia.

In Bolivia they had settled for a while, flying for the new revolutionary government, and then for the still newer revolutionaries who took over in Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
With the defeat of the latter, their luck ran out; in haste they had flown to Riberalta in the Beni, where their last money had gone for a tank of gas.
That same day they had crossed the border.

“Moon’s been all over this lousy continent, you know, on
foot
, for Christ sake.
Took him three years, and all he’s got to show for it is malaria.”
Wolfie shook his head.
“Like I says to him, Lewis, like what are you, some kind of a
mas
-o-chist or what?
Like, there’re
jag
-you-ars here!
Not to mention all them
serpents
, Lewis, and tarantulas and crocs and vampires and poison arrows.
Whatta you got, I says to him, some kind of a
hang
-up about this place?
I says, Gimme Frisco or the Village any time, that’s the Old Wolf’s kind of jungle!”

Wolfie looked restless; he needed to talk and was prepared to talk too much.
Quarrier noticed how careful the man was to establish his expertise in regard to Moon—a kind of possessiveness, a proprietary interest, as if Moon were some easily recognized and very valuable phenomenon that others might try to steal.

“Oh, I don’t mean I ain’t
heard
things,” Wolfie confided.
“Like, in Cuba, I ran inta some guy who knew a guy that said he done time with Moon, you know, in stir; if you wanna know what for, don’t
ask
me.
And once I seen he had some kind of a union card, and it turns out he worked over in New York with them Mohawks or Mohicans or whatever the hell they are that work on the high girders in them new buildings.
After that, he was in the merchant marine, and one year he jumped ship in
Maracaibo.
He got up in them rivers and got hold of a big haul of them river diamonds some way, and that was all the stake he needed.
He bummed around this continent on foot—like one little knapsack.
Even the handle of his razor is sawed-off; it fits inta a match box, for Christ sake!”
Wolfie laughed.
“He learned long ago to travel light, and he never give up the habit; he don’t own nothin and he don’t want to.
Once I asked him what the hell he thought he was doin down here, and he told me he was huntin for wild Indians.
He said there was horse Indians in Patagonia that fought with the goyims just like on the Plains, but they was all on reservations, and the Indians down there in Tierra del Fuego were all gone.
The mountain Indians, he said, were nothin but tame diggers, and from what he heard about the jungle tribes they were nothins—little rats, like, sneakin around in swamps.
Right about then, he got bad dysentery and malaria, so he grabbed a ship out of Callao, west for Hong Kong.”

Wolfie got up and scratched himself all over with both hands.
He was tottering, and placed one foot slightly ahead, to maintain balance.
“Don’t you go tellin him I told ya nothin, because I don’t really
know
nothin; I only picked up a little here and there, from things he said.”
He blinked.
“Where was I?”
He frowned at Quarrier.
“Oh yeah.
So don’t go gettin nosy.”

Quarrier stood, but Wolfie waved him down again.
“What
are
you?”
he demanded.
“Hyper
thy
roid?”
He shook his head again, astounded at his own patience with the world.
He whistled a little, his head nodding.
Quarrier was listening for his snore when Wolfie said, “For all he says about himself he might as well have come from Mars, only I happen to know it’s out West somewheres—he’s part Indian.
His father was halfbreed Cheyenne Indian and French Canuck, his mother halfbreed Mississippi Choctaw, which prolly this makes him some nutty kind of a Negro.
But it don’t matter where he comes from; like I was sayin, a guy like that is always on the road, like he was condemned to it.
I been around a lot—I mean, I ain’t like him or nothin, I ain’t no drifter—and I run inta other ones just like him.
He don’t belong nowhere, he’s like a house cat somebody runs
out on, you know, like turns out at the edge of some woods: he don’t belong where he comes from and he don’t belong where he is, so he keeps movin, and soon he’s a wild animal that you don’t never tame again.”

“But you,” Quarrier said.
“You’re going home.”

“Yeah,” Wolfie said tiredly.
He slumped back against the wall.
“I mean, I been just about everywhere, I seen enough of life.
Some one of these fine days I’m goin home.
I even got a wife and boy home, see.”

“You do?”

“Well, kind of.
Azusa’s common-law.
Azusa and Dick the Infint.
We named the infint Dick.”

“You mean Richard?”

“No.
Dick.
We named the infint Dick.”
Wolfie shrugged.
“For some goddamn reason when I say that, Lewis always laughs.”

“But tomorrow—today, I mean—you’re going to go out and bomb those innocent—”