Gods Go Begging (32 page)

Minutes later he stepped into a deep crater, suddenly falling waist-deep into soft, collapsing soil. Around his rooted legs was a large, circular depression that was all that remained of an extensive underground hospital complex. There were muted groans just yards beneath his feet, painful sighs of hope and surrender that invaded his consciousness as if in a dream. His ears heard muffled, suffocating cries for help, but his mind did not. The blaring sounds within his own skull were much too deafening.

If he had gazed downward, he would have seen traces of a ruined enemy medical installation—unsterilized needles and ragged bandages, the splinters of handmade surgical tools. A once enormous complex of rooms cut deep into the soil had been instantly transformed into an endless maze of catacombs. A bomb had found its target.

He walked until the sun set once more, stopping only because the night was as profoundly black as total blindness. Though the sky was ablaze with stars, he could see nothing at all below the horizon. Considering neither safety nor comfort, he found a small depression in a grassy hillside and dropped down to wait for morning. He may have slept. He may have dreamed. How could he know? Even in the deep quiet of midnight, the eclipse of reason behind his eyes raised a sheen of sweat on his brow and tightened the muscles of his jaw into an eternal grimace.

Sometime during the night a herd of tiny, spotted deer wandered in, heading for the river. They had stopped to graze on a knoll just below the padre’s depression. One of the deer, a fawn just two hands high, had spotted the padre’s salt-laden boots and was happily chewing on their green canvas. At that very moment the man began to believe he was one with the wild weeds and grasses beneath him, his life gone fallow. Memories and conceits sprouted and died within his mind in random but natural order, flowering in a single instant, and gone to seed in the next. He did not feel it when the canvas gave way and his foot began to bleed.

Days and nights passed this way until the limping lieutenant reached the river at Nong Khai. It was here that the chaplain lost landfall and tumbled headfirst into the mighty Mekong. The mad lieutenant never sensed the water or the pain of the fall. Without knowing it, he coughed and vomited, clearing his lungs of algae and murky water. Blind to the world, he flailed his arms wildly until they caught on a passing log. Immobile and blanched white, he joined the torpid parade of floating dead, the fetid regatta of bobbing soldiers and murdered civilians that has always enjoyed free run of the river.

That hill was far behind him now, that desperate, defaced elevation. Far behind him was Jesse Pasadoble bending in that eerie Martian landscape to touch a smoking corpse and scream a question that would forever be unheard. Were the padre in his right mind, he could have recalled his own impression that the young sergeant had seemed little more than a puppet, a living effigy of himself. He had looked as though he were actually hanging from the clouds of thick smoke that hugged the hillside, the shoulders of his fatigues pinned to the curling air and his legs dangling beneath his waist.

In a single night all life’s comfort had been stripped from the young sergeant, leaving only endless longing and aimless passion. His world back home in America was a land obsessed with comfort; with the avoidance of pain … at any cost. America was the chaplain’s adopted country. There, everyone who can afford it dashes headlong into comfort, into barricades and behind walls for a life without disease and agony—hiding from both risk and passion alike.

In Vietnam, there was no comfort, nor would there ever be. The Creole sergeant had been right. Those boys, like the slaves from Africa, like the hopeless Indians, like true artists and the poor, had been chosen to bear the discomfort of their country, to bear the loss. If nothing else, the lieutenant understood loss. He was intimate with it. After all, the Unitarian had been born in Mexico, a land whose primary sensibility is that of profound loss. Everyone in Mexico felt it. The sense of loss had its roots in the time of the conquest: the loss of a hundred native religions, the loss of an entire race of peoples.

In the United States, there were many peoples who felt this same loss: the Apache and Papago felt it, as well as the great-grandchildren of slaves. Yet white America sensed only gain: the taming of the West meant gain; the defeat of the Mexican Army meant gain. The subjugation of the redwoods and the spotted owl meant progress. Is it any wonder that when those who feel loss utter the word “justice,” it cannot possibly mean the same thing as when that word is spoken by those who know only gain? Hadn’t the Creole sergeant back on that hill said something about justice? Hadn’t the Chicano sergeant said something?

The boys back on the hill had repelled an NVA battalion time and time again but felt no joy in it, no gain from it. The entire U.S. Army had a sense of loss wriggling in its arteries, lurking in its veins like a malarial parasite hiding within its mechanistic passion for destruction. Back home, hamburgers were still being fried and vodka martinis were still being shaken and poured. There was no gas rationing in Trenton; there were no victory gardens in Boise.

America had fully expected to win without suffering, without loss. The boys on the hill knew differently. The American Dream—the two-bedroom house with a white picket fence—had always been built on a graveyard. It had always been built at the expense of the Huron Nation, at the expense of the bison, and at the expense of the Vietnamese. It had always been built on a hill.

One hundred kilometers behind the floating padre were the deep brown eyes of Corporal Tiburcio Mendez scanning the heavens above for some absurd object—for some insane reason. The Salon des Refuses was there, bloated and bent beyond recognition. Poor Cornelius was there, impossibly still, lying and drying in his chrysalis next to the stiffening body bags of a Midwestern boy and Jim-Earl, the Shoshone.

Both boys had been cracked open, their scrambled innards draped, painting the dirt a deep aubergine and red. Both had suffered terribly before finding the ultimate comfort. All the colored boys, the Okies, and the spics were far behind, still fighting Vietnam and America at the same time. Tall, white-haired officers and officials on two continents were busily barking orders into their ears—Lester Maddox, George Wallace, and Generals Ky and Westmoreland. Back on the hill there were charred bullocks sprawled everywhere.

The padre’s legs danced involuntarily as a final image of the Creole sergeant and his troops flashed into his mind. From his submerged eye, a single tear welled up and rushed down to join the river. Now he numbly realized that he loved those volatile children on the hill. The unexploded gunpowder in their groins should have gone off on mattresses. Those missing hands were meant to stroke the hair of a lover. Those traumatically avulsed feet should have stepped onto a dance floor. Their senseless eyes should have been allowed to seek out and choose a single face among a million faces, then in three score years and ten, in failing sight, watch that beloved face age and die.

Were these new thoughts? wondered the living flotsam. Were these thoughts new or had he heard them back at seminary? Had there been brandy and late-night coffee, and early morning interlude of alcohol, caffeine, and philosophy? What was the ancient lesson? He seemed to recall that there was an ancient lesson. The opposite of comfort is wilderness. Oh, yes, the New Testament. The opposite of comfort is wilderness. Was this another way of saying that everything turns on jazz?

The padre was free of it all now, his flimsy legs and knees striking an occasional rock or tree stump. His wild, confused, and careening mind—even more turbulent than the water—was far, far away from the Mekong River and that unspeakable war. As hour after hour passed he became as sentient flotsam, dreaming in crests and troughs, hearing in undulations and eddies. Among the myriad sounds that both haunt and attend a river, the padre heard something else. It was the faintest strain—the thread of a sound. It was a prayer, sequestered among psalms that were split at the heart, spoken in one language but always answered in another. It was a whispered, breath-driven tide of supplication that carried with it the scent of candle wax, the crisp, wet smell of apple orchards, and an image of acre upon acre of the waving green grasses of the state of Chihuahua. Slowly, the trembling and tenuous mind of the floating man was wholly transformed from the high grasses that lined the banks of the Mekong River into the grasses of his youth in Mexico.

“What is more placid than tall grass; untended, unmatted; a shivering edge of life to match, gust for gust, the precocious wind—to give it shape?”

The living flotsam spoke its words upward toward the trees that shaded the river. A family of spider monkeys listened closely. He gazed upward at them and saw fauns, dryads, satyrs, all charmed by Orfeo’s spoken aria.

“The truth of grass is in its power to stand out of sight regardless of eyes; to be unmeasured, uncounted; to be among so many and so remain unchosen … undistinguished. No matter who is moving through the earth’s hair, nothing new ever happens here. Yes, it is true that the jaguar and the fawn hide here. In Chiapas and Guatemala, soldiers hide here, set man traps, and bury their fallen here.”

The drowned man, soaked to his soul but for a few dozen raging and rhapsodizing neurons, passed through a forest that had been defoliated. He wondered as he stared at a sky of Kirlian leaves whether the living trunks, in spring, still felt the weight of phantom fruit. He wondered if, someday, someone would come to revive these stumps—hetp them live on. As he spoke aloud to no one, he imagined a glade of prosthetic limbs.

“I am grass, and here in Chihuahua young girls in the first heat of womanhood lie curling and unfurling here, their ardor ankle-deep in my soil. Loving couples roll and thrash here fervidly, upending shoots and tearing at tender roots. Mexican butchers kill their trusting cattle here. Grass like me is full of words, full of secretive spiders and flirting moths. Everything happens in grass like me. But never anything new.

“Let’s suppose.”

Above his head a new family of spider monkeys ceased their grooming to hear his words. The padre saw them turning their heads to see him as he passed below. He lifted an arm and pointed a finger at them.

“Supongamos,
as someone once said. Supposing I say to you that my own story begins on the hallowed hinge of a chrysalis, an exquisite cocoon that dangles between truth and fable. But before I begin my mad weaving, there are certain things that I suppose I must confess to you. I cannot be an omniscient narrator, so don’t expect me to have the answers to everything, and don’t expect me to see every facet as though I had a hundred insect eyes.”

The family of monkeys blinked their mutual confusion, then returned to their search for ticks, hair lice, and fleas.

“I suppose that I must have been chosen to spin my own part of this tale. Chosen not by a conscious mind but by the odds, by chance … by destinies. Why was I chosen? Why me, since I am no one at all? Well, I am something of a sort: a coward who has run away from war and from my own past. That is my single qualification. I am a wayward shepherd who has left all his flock behind. But I certainly don’t mind the question. I must have been chosen because I know it all from beginning to end. I am certainly not the story itself. I am only the grass that tattles on the wind.”

On the shore a sniper followed the padre’s progress, framing the floating man’s head in the rear sight of his rifle. The man’s wild gestures above the waves had caught the sniper’s eye.

“Don’t get me wrong”—the padre continued his sermon to no one. “As I have said, I am far from omniscient and still farther away from perfect. In fact, my only true strength is my ability to see the ends of things. You see, I am obsessed with endings. I am insane with endings. To be sure, they have ruled my life. Endings are the captain of my soul. Why else would I turn my back on my calling, abandon everything, even death on that hill near Laos? Who one earth can abandon death?”

The sniper on the bank lowered his weapon and clicked on the safety. He was a soldier—not a butcher of the insane, of the already dead.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this. Perhaps I should make an end and simply float away on the Mekong and die waterlogged and anonymous. I doubt you’ll listen to me anyway. I’m really not in mint condition, you see. Never was. But don’t you see how adrift we are? We’re down here and God’s way up there.”

The chaplain pointed toward the clouds that were gathering above him. All at once a squall sent sheets of dark water rushing downward. The padre’s first impulse was to seek shelter from the rain, but the absurdity of that soon had him laughing madly.

“The real omniscient narrator is always way up there. I tell you, believing in God is exactly like living downstairs from a boy genius who has been stricken with polio. I had to do that once, you know. I was a kid then, back in Mexico. I could hear that poor, sickly boy scuffling and stumbling around upstairs, that angry, envious little Mennonite boy.

“I remember him, inching his way down the stairs and clinging tightly to the railings. There was always black ink on his tongue and on his fingertips. The boy passed his days turning the pages of a book. He always smelled like bedsheets, like mounds of tossed linen in an airless room. I remember thinking that he was a prisoner of linen—a secret slave to detergents, disinfectants, and bleaches. He always smelled the way a mother should smell, like fawning kisses, like fumes of guilt and medication. He smelled like a mother’s tears on clean laundry.

“My God, he was such an angry boy, fed up with adoration. All he ever wanted was to be able to move around on his own, without someone downstairs always apologizing for his absence, always listening for his halting steps or divining the cause and effect of every cough. I apologize for this manner of speaking. Though now I am little more than a sheaf of grass stems that has been tossed upon the waters; I was once an ardent seminarian.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. Who am I to comment on God. I’m not in mint condition. Maybe you don’t really need to know about the buzzing cruelty and the webs that I have come to understand as life. But please pardon me. Here I am telling you about endings when my poor life’s story must have a starting place.