At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

  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. “Hyperthyroid?” 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—”

  “Oh, man.” Wolfie stood up. “You know? Like, cool it. According to what this Guzmán says these Neo-rooneys been massacrin for thirty years. That makes them bloodthirsty savages, don’t it? And anyway, this Guzmán, he’s got us by the balls.” He stared appraisingly at Quarrier. “You ain’t a bad guy, Reverend. You come to Frisco, Reverend, you look me up. In Sausalito or any of them North Beach expressos, they all know me. If they let me back in the good old U.S. and A., that is. You just ask for Wolfie.” He stuck out his hand.

  “All right,” Quarrier said. “My name is Martin Quarrier.”

  “Pleased to meetcha,” Wolfie said, “I’m sure.”

  QUARRIER was at the airstrip the next morning when Wolfie & Moon, Inc., went to work. The airplane had already been gassed up, although as a precaution the Comandante still held their passports. Moon’s whole face was swollen from Guzmán’s blow, and his grin was painful. He nodded to Quarrier, but Wolfie, who looked terrible, had apparently forgotten their new friendship, and responded to Quarrier’s “Good morning” by spitting noisily on the ground.

  “You’re going ahead with it then?” Quarrier said.

  Moon said, “The bombardier here couldn’t hit Bolivia today, much less a village.”

  “So how come you dragged me out here?” Wolfie said. “The way you fly even when you ain’t got no hangover, I’m lucky to get back alive.”

  “The fresh air will do you good.”

  “Fresh air, my ass!” Wolfie was sweating violently in the dank heat. “There ain’t a breath of fresh air in this whole miserable continent.”

  “Please don’t do this,” Quarrier said.

  Without answering him they climbed into the plane. Moon waved enigmatically at Quarrier as the engine noise exploded. The plane jounced and wobbled to the end of the runway, where it roared a moment, shaking like a leaf; then it spun around and came back down the strip, bounding the ruts and depressions like some huge ancient bird seeking to get aloft. The wheels had scarcely left the ground when it curved away; by the time it cleared the trees, it was already headed eastward.

  When the silence had settled down again and the loiterers had begun to drift away, one man remained.

  “Ah,” the priest said. “Good morning, Mr. Quarrier.”

  They did not attempt to cross the strip of ground between them.

  “Good morning, Padre,” Quarrier said, starting away.

  “Have you thought over my question?”

  “What? I mean, what question?”

  “It’s quite simple. I asked you, do you think he cares?”

  “Do you mean Yoyo?”

  “Why, but who else—Oh yes, oh yes, I see!” The padre actually clapped his hands. “Very good, Mr. Quarrier! Excellent! Bravo!”

  Quarrier had started back toward the town and Xantes kept pace with him, remaining on the far side of the road. They went along slowly in the heat. Quarrier was amazed; this man was laughing at him! “I don’t want to discuss this with you,” he told him finally. “I don’t understand why you talk to me at all.”

  “We have a common problem: the Niaruna.”

  “The Niaruna are no longer your concern.”

  The priest raised his eyebrows. “On the contrary,” he said. And he stepped firmly in front of Quarrier, blocking his path. He told Quarrier how his colleague, Padre Fuentes, had been killed by the Niaruna on the very site on the Río Espíritu where Leslie Huben had since established his own outpost. “The Indians,” Xantes remarked, “think it demeaning to harvest crops from a chacra cleared by other people, but apparently Señor Huben does not share this view.” Before Quarrier could defend Huben, the priest had passed on to an account of the martyrdom.

  There were two nuns with Fuentes, and all three were taken alive; the sisters were later returned in a barter deal arranged by Yoyo, in which two women of Huben’s tame Niaruna band were delivered to the savages. By this time the sisters had been martyred so decisively and so often that both preferred to give up Indian work and return to their convent in Spain. “This convent is built,” Padre Xantes said, with a sad smile, “in the manner of a citadel—impregnable.”

  According to Yoyo, the martyrdom of the Dominicans had commenced on the trail leading eastward from the mission. Had the Indians understood the true nature of poor Fuentes, his death might have been more prompt and even, perhaps, more merciful. But they imagined from his cassock that he was female. “They had not got far into the jungle when it came into their heads to rape my poor compadre. Imagine their chagrin! Pues, to make this historia a brief one, they became angry at the deception and beheaded him. We found the body eight days later.”

  The priest stared coldly at Quarrier, who stared as coldly back. It seemed to him that this curious man had actually taken relish in the telling.

  “You will now see,” Xantes remarked after a moment, “why I am presently at a disadvantage in regard to the Niaruna. I have written for a replacement for the good Fuentes, but the record of the Niaruna does not inspire many volunteers. You will also see why I consider the Niaruna my concern. Why, all the jungle peoples, and the mestizos too, and the patrones and even Guzmán, our magnificent Comandante—and yes, even yourself, even yourself, Señor Quarrier—are my concern. Good day!”

  And the little Dominican, bowing, hurried on ahead of Quarrier on the bare path beneath the bare brown sky, his frail body struggling in his heavy cloth, his thin head bobbing.

  QUARRIER spent the morning in the dining room, at work on Huben’s Niaruna dictionary. While he knew that it was important that he do this, he was extremely restless, and was constantly distracted from his work by the random complaints of fat Mercedes and by the thin fatalistic townspeople, pigs, children, vultures and indentured Indians who paused before the window. He was plagued by worry about Billy, about what might befall them in the months ahead, about the stranger who passed her days on the other bed—the stranger for whom, he kept reminding himself, he was responsible
. But more often he thought about Andy Huben and the fact that at a time of terrible peril he was sinfully attracted to her. At these times he would groan aloud, causing Mercedes to glare and snigger.

  Twice that day Guzmán himself came by to check the hotel accounts. Each time, seeing Quarrier at the table in his salon, he winced and snarled and cleared his throat with violence as if, had it not been his own hotel, he would have liked nothing better than to spit copiously upon the floor.

  Quarrier had placed his chair so that he could see the hallway and be sure to intercept Wolfie and Moon when they returned to the hotel. However, he soon fell asleep, doped by the sun and the drone of flies; he awoke sometime later at the roar of a plane and the sound of running feet.

  In the street, people were standing in the mud, staring upriver. From out of the haze came the growl of a small airplane, invisible, and then the growl rose to a shriek as the plane plunged toward the earth. For a moment, over the edge of town, a bruise formed in the haze, and then the plane burst through at a dreadful angle, seeming to plunge into the trees upriver. But its roar continued, reverberating wildly in the forest; a few seconds later it rose once more, too steeply, into the overcast, its motor dying to a point no longer audible. Then, incredibly, it dove again. After this dive—the third, according to those in the street—it leveled off and headed for the airport; the people, wringing their small hands, ran out to meet it.

  When the fliers appeared at the hotel, Quarrier set himself to question them. But Wolfie looked sick and exhausted, and though Moon’s face was composed, his shirt front and throat were heavily caked with blood. Moon scarcely nodded at him. “Nice country,” he remarked, and went upstairs.

  Toward evening Quarrier cornered Wolfie, who was in evil humor. They had not yet attacked the Niaruna villages, Wolfie said, but he refused to say anything else. Moon was already under the effects of ayahuasca. “If you got any idea you want to talk to Moon, forget it. Like, don’t bother. He drunk enough to turn on a rhinoceros. I seen him flip on this Indian soup before, down in the Beni. It’s like I told him after: Lewis—he don’t like being called Lew, see, only Lewis, which this is some goddamn family name or other, so I call him Lewis, for Christ sake—Lewis, I told him after, like make it with pot, Lewis, or hash, man, or peyote, you can even shoot it if you wanna, jam the needle right inta your miserable brain, Lewis, only just lay off this jungle junk, this Hiawatha. I mean, who needs some kind of a loo-natic around, who needs it? And you know what he says to me? Lewis, I mean, this crazy Lewis says, I need it; it allows me to see. You’re outa your fuckin mind, I told him.”

  To Quarrier, Wolfie’s idiom was so outlandish that he might as well have listened to a savage; the waving hands, the cries and grunts made the problem very similar. Although he got the gist of the speech before it ended, he was wincing and frowning so violently in his concentration that Wolfie himself recoiled in alarm.

  “Look out! Back up!” he cried. “What’s the matter, you gonna puke or what?” He started away, then turned back, furious. “Jesus, here I’m tryna tell you somethin which this is for your own good, and what do you do—you gawk at me like it was me that was the lunatic, not you guys.” He stomped into the bar, still shouting. “You’re livin in Nutsville, Pancho, take it from me,” he told the bar man, who crouched back in terror against the bottles; Wolfie, who claimed to be incapable of telling foreigners apart, had forgotten that he had tried to kill this boy the night before. “Another nut!” He smote his brow. “Another one!”

  Quarrier looked up to see Hazel, drawn from her room by Wolfie’s uproar, staring at him in horror from the stairwell. She looked like an old woman.

  “You’re laughing,” she cried. “How can you laugh? Are you insane?”

  7

  THEY PICKED UP THE RÍO ESPÍRITU AT REMATE, AND FOLLOWED IT north and east. By airplane the distance was not great, for Moon did not follow the serpentine river but swung across the bends. They crossed several Tiro villages; some of the Indians scattered into the forest while others ran out into the yard between the huts to stare at the terrible bird. Then for a long time there were no signs of life, only the dark green of the canopy and the glisten of black water in the swamps and wormy creeks. Soon the Espíritu itself was no more than a creek, and now an unmapped river came into view, unwinding eastward; the headwaters of the rivers were no more than three miles apart, though they flowed in opposite directions. On the bank of the unnamed river, back a little distance from the bank, there appeared a deserted village.

  Moon swung over it in a low glide. The village had not been abandoned but evacuated: a wisp of smoke and the Indian dog that scurried across the open yard confirmed this. One small incendiary, he thought, will take care of this whole outfit.

  They circled back to the Espíritu and this time found the mission settlement: two large huts and a wooden cross. They must have passed right over it, and it was easy to see why they had missed it, for in the short time since Huben left, the jungle had reclaimed it. The huts were smudged by vines and leaves, their outlines blending with shadows, and the yard itself was a tumult of green strands and infestations. The wooden cross had been seized by a thick liana and was tilted crazily, about to topple. A damp miasmic heat seeped through the plane each time they neared the ground, and the ground steamed softly in the morning light, as if the earth were cooling still in some primordial gray morning.

  The scene was so infernal that even Wolfie, startled from his doze by Moon’s maneuvers, spoke in horror. “Whatta these Indians got?” He coughed, in pain. “Some kind of a emotional involvement with this place?” At a loss as to where to spit, he swallowed, wincing. “Oo,” he said. “Like, I’m dyin, man.” He reached behind him to unstrap the crate that held small incendiary and fragmentation bombs. “This ain’t gonna be no bombin, man. This is what you might call pest control.”

  “Go back to sleep,” Moon said. “There’s nothing to bomb yet.”

  Wolfie settled back, clasping his hands on his gut as he closed his eyes; he blew a loud sigh through his lips. “There ain’t, huh? Well, if I had bombs and time enough, I’d bomb this miserable jungle from end to end. I mean it. It gives me the creeps, I don’t even like to look at it even.” He sat up again and stared at it. “Whee-oo!” he said, and shook like a wet dog. “So why don’t we unload a few of these highly dangerous explosives and cut back to Madre and grab the bread and split?”

  Moon left the mission area and moved back up the river to the empty village and circled it at a distance; in comparison with the mission station, the yard was brown and bare and the thatch clean.

  “All right, Lewis, maybe you don’t wanna bomb no Indians, is that what you’re sayin? Who needs it, you’re askin me. What’d these noble redskins ever do to us, right? They’re only just another minority group, right? So that’s exactly what I’m tellin you—it don’t matter where you drop the bombs, you can drop ’em in the river for all I care, or right on their lousy heads, that’s beautiful too, but anyway, like it don’t matter—let’s just drop somethin in case this Guzmán got his nose inta this crate and counted, and then we waltz back to Madre havin done our duty fait’fully; and by tomorra night, man, we’re outa the jungle, we come up for air …”

  Getting no response, Wolfie sighed with disgust and subsided once again, eyes closed. Moon scarcely noticed him. He was intent on the still, silent clearing, the silent watchful waiting, as tangible as blood—he could feel it right through the noise and vibration of the plane. Unlike the Tiro, the fierce Niaruna were terrified. These inner rivers were narrow and winding, so that the pontoon planes used in the jungle could not land on them beyond Remate; the chances were that the savages hidden in the trees below had never seen a plane in all their lives. The rain forest of the Niaruna lay at the farthest eastern reaches of the country, and part of it was thought to cross the disputed frontier into the jungles of Amazonas. The only scheduled flight within five hundred miles was the plane that came twice each week to Madre de Dios and
returned across the Andes.

  He circled closer, banking low; he could scarcely hope to glimpse the Niaruna, and he was about to climb again when he saw what he had come down to this continent to see. A naked man appeared at the edge of the clearing, and stamping violently on the ground, raised a black bow. Moon did not see the arrow until it hung suspended for an instant at the top of its arc: a gleam of blue-and-yellow feathering, like a small bird, a turn of dull light on the cane shaft …

  “… like, one problem,” Wolfie was saying, “was gettin her to be, you know, like intimate. Man, I tried everythin, even daisies. Finely I grabbed her hand and put it there—it didn’t take. It got to be this kind of a joke: her sayin she would never touch me, I was too funky, man, I was not her type, Azusa said. Well, I was kind of, you know, like intrigued. So I got her to promise just one little thing: If you ever touch it, Zoose, I says, just even once, then we go all the way—right, baby?”

  Until this moment the only Indians that Moon would acknowledge were the old men of his childhood who had survived the long wars with the whites on the Great Plains. Most were reduced to the white man’s denims and were grateful for rolled cigarettes and sweet canned foods, but one of these old warriors, steadfastly scorning the government dole, had lived out his stubborn life in a small cave. This old man spoke often of Charles Bent, the halfbreed Cheyenne son of Trader Bent of Bent’s Old Fort, down on the Arkansas, whose rage had only found relief in violence. Charles Bent, or so the legend said, had escaped the slaughter of Black Kettle’s unsuspecting people at Sand Creek, and after that had tried to kill his own white father. With his young warriors of the Dog Society, Charles Bent had waged revenge so cruel and savage that the Cheyennes themselves, the Race of Sorrows, who had suffered more death and betrayal from the whites than any tribe on the Great Plains, had turned their backs on him. But a few Cheyennes still knew Bent’s name, and Moon, peering into the bright mad old eyes of this ancient cave dweller, caught a brief flicker of that lunatic rage that closed the heart and snapped the teeth shut like a trap, and caused a man’s whole head and frame to shudder.