Boronai went to the maloca, his people trailing behind him, and stopped before he entered. He turned politely to face Kisu-Mu and recited a singsong speech of welcome, then turned back again and preceded him inside.
The interior of the maloca was fully used, with hammocks strung in tiers from all the posts, and gourds and packets, palm-leaf baskets, arrow bundles, flutes, feather crowns, monkey-skin drums, drying vines, tobacco leaves and other articles suspended from the rafters. Earthen pots, mortars and pestles, manioc sieves of wickerwork and thorn-board graters lined the walls. There was an ancient rhythm to the chaos of the place, a genial ungeometric order, and even the dirt floor was smooth and clean; as they stood there, an old woman with a feather broom swept the ground beneath a set of hammocks at the center. Moon supposed that these hammocks were occupied by Boronai, but he did not protest; he accepted the hammock as he had accepted Pindi, to avoid the discourtesy of refusal.
He approached the lowest hammock, but stopped when the Indians laughed; jabbering, they pointed at the blackened hearth beside the tier, then at the girl Pindi, then at the hammock. It was Pindi who slept there so that she might tend the fire in the night. The girl placed her hand on the middle hammock, and he managed to slide into it without dumping himself in un-godly fashion onto the ground.
He arranged himself on the hard cords of mesh, stained red from painted bodies, and inhaled the Indian smell, the strange sour grassy smell; it was not unpleasant but it startled him, and feeling trapped, he lurched wildly in the hammock before easing down again. He was dimly aware that the Indians were still standing there, contemplating the spectacle that he presented, not out of bad manners but because privacy and quiet were not conditions of their sleep. Giggling, they pushed at Pindi, anxious that she get into the hammock with him. The girl was frightened, and refused.
When he awoke some hours later, he was given to eat what must have been, to judge from the Indians’ delight on his behalf, the finest cut of the dead orange dog.
IN the daytime he went naked; at night he wore his shirt and pants against the humid cold. The savages did not consider this a weakness, but a proof of his superiority. He was already used to the night cold, the biting insects, the mild chronic malaria; though the food—mostly half-cooked fish and manioc—had given him dysentery, Boronai had cured him quickly with some seeds from the greenheart tree. The insects were no problem except at twilight and at night, when they were checked by the smudge fires under the hammocks; the smoke, in fact, brought him more discomfort than the mosquitoes, for he soon learned to slap the insects as automatically and unthinkingly as the Indians. Meanwhile, his body had hardened, even his feet, which still fettered him to the ways of his past life. His fears for them—ants and infections, bone bruises, scorpions, tarantulas and snakes—obsessed him, and yet his most pernicious foe was the common chigger flea. Every few days Pindi dug at his poor feet with a bone needle, popping into her mouth each small fat mite that she extracted.
It seemed a good sign that a wife of Boronai had been lent to him, though he was not sure how the Indians reconciled his need for women with his spiritual estate. Observing Pindi, Moon thought out carefully his whole situation, returning over and over to the same question that the Niaruna must have asked themselves: who was he?
As Kisu-Mu, he had been identified with Kisu, the Great Spirit of the Rain; when his sneakers wore out, as they soon would, the Great Spirit would be an invalid. He struggled to toughen his feet, running barefoot in the village yard and stamping up and down on logs along the river; he hoped the Niaruna would regard his behavior as strange and godlike rather than pathetic. As soon as he could make himself understood, he asked Boronai for bits of the tough tapir skin so that he could make moccasins. Since he knew no better than they how to cure and sew hides—and for this he cursed Alvin Moon “Joe Redcloud” and the whole degraded Indian nation—the moccasins emerged as twists of wood. By now his feet had toughened, but they still got cut too easily; in the jungle climate, without disinfectant, any cut might be his last. And in the forest he did not know where to step; not only did he not recognize the shapes and colors that the Indians avoided, but his feet were not as sure as theirs, nor his eyes as sharp. He spent his whole time staring at the ground.
In those first days he had gone with Tukanu to Huben’s mission, hoping to find a pair of sneakers. His quest had put him in bad humor—not least of all because he felt grotesque wearing shoes while otherwise naked—and his humor worsened when he did not find the sneakers that he did not wish to wear. He and Tukanu found nothing useful. Boronai had told him that his people had taken nothing, and Moon himself had seen no article of civilization in the Niaruna village. Boronai could only suppose that Huben’s manso Niarunas, the people of Yoyo and Kori, had looted the House of God; that, fearing attack, they must have fled to Remate almost as soon as Huben had gone away. When Boronai had led his people there, planning to kill Kori and his worthless men and to adopt the women and children before some other band took advantage of them, they found the mission ransacked.
On his trip to the mission Moon had asked about the radio set lying in the shallows; Tukanu acknowledged that Boronai’s men had done this. Tukanu himself had been poking at the radio, hoping to find food in it, when suddenly the spirits of the box had snapped and whined at him. As far as Moon could piece the strange story together, poor Tukanu, yanking crazily at the controls, had tried to keep the spirits in their box; instead he turned the volume up to a loud blare, at which the whole war party fled into the jungle. Then Boronai had rallied them, saying that these were demons of the white man, that if the box was destroyed, the demons would have no home in Niaruna land. Boronai led the bravest men toward the shed, and from a distance the warriors shot arrows and hurled clubs and lances through the doors and windows. After a terrific struggle the voices of the demons died, but they kept on snarling and coughing for a long time, until at last Boronai himself rushed in with a club and beat the box to the floor. Then the box was seized and hurled into the river, but not before biting and cutting two of the warriors who grabbed it.
Tukanu had likened the white man’s Demon House to Kaiwena, the piranha fish, which snapped at fingers even after it was speared and dying. After the battle with the demons, the Indians were leery of the mission, imagining that it swarmed with vengeful spirits. They left a feathered club of warning and went away.
Tukanu had fiddled with the radio in the first place because, of all the band, he was the most knowledgeable about the mission; during the period of Huben’s first appearance he had spied on it for some weeks as scout for Boronai. It was Tukanu, in fact, who had proposed the massacre of Kori’s people. During the period of his surveillance he had fallen in love with an old woman named Taweeda, whose husband was Kori’s brother. He had met with her often in the forest, and she encouraged him to come back with her to the mission, saying that if he got down on his knees and spoke to Huben as she instructed him, he would be given food and presents and could wear the same bandages on his sores that had attracted him to her own person. Tukanu was enthusiastic about this idea and took several praying lessons from Taweeda, but his conversion was thwarted when Boronai forbade him to show himself. As an alternative to salvation, Tukanu had hit upon a massacre, from which his friend Taweeda would be spared.
At one time or another Tukanu had wished to marry every woman in his own village, and he had actually contrived to marry Pindi. First, he had gone around for many moons chanting incantations and clutching aphrodisiac charms and talismans of love, all to no avail. Second, he had killed a tapir and dumped the entire animal at Pindi’s feet. Finally he had seized her up and bore her off into the weeds to work his way with her, whereupon, out of indifference, she permitted him to marry her.
In the few months of their marriage Pindi was so unfaithful that Tukanu replaced his talismans of love with fetishes to control her lust. Moreover, she refused to work for him no matter how often he beat her; her failure to do her share in the
communal work caused dissension throughout the village, until the whole band became ill and began to waste away. Finally Boronai invited Pindi into his own household in the role of wife. She came gladly, and henceforth did her share, and Boronai made no objection when she slept sometimes with Aeore. Tukanu let her go without rancor, declaiming loudly that gay and pretty girls made the worst wives, and that a woman of wide back and sour mien would suit his purposes far better. But in the village there was no one of this description who had not already refused him, which accounted for the joy he felt when, one day in the forest by the mission, he surprised the surly, broad-backed old Taweeda and mounted her forthwith, without resistance.
All this Moon understood later from Boronai and Pindi, but that day, standing in the mission clearing listening to Tukanu, he could not make head or tail of the Indian’s story. When he finally understood, he had the explanation for the Indian genuflection he had glimpsed on the flight with Wolfie and on the day of his arrival. During his praying lessons Tukanu had gathered from Taweeda that the white man’s god was Kisu, the Great Spirit of the Rain. Taweeda said that the white man’s Kisu invited the spirits of good Indians to drink masato with him in his Sky House, and sent the spirits of bad Indians to live down in the mud like frogs. Huben had told Taweeda—who told Tukanu—that Kisu was angry with those Indians who paid no attention to his anger, and although Tukanu found this idea of an almighty power rather foolish, the first appearance of the great bird in the sky had lent support to Taweeda’s silly story. For want of a better course he gave his people praying lessons then and there. The day of Kisu-Mu’s descent, they decided to pray again, but the trouble was that he had not remembered anything about the prayer except the physical position, and so they had remained silent.
“We wished to pray,” Tukanu said piously, “but we did not know what to say.”
ON the third morning after Moon’s arrival, another airplane had appeared out of the heavens. At the distant sound, Aeore ran from the maloca and sprang in a bound to the center of the clearing; body tense, his bow and arrows in his hand, he knelt, pressed his ear to the earth, frowned, leaped up again and whooped shrilly in alarm.
Shouting and jabbering, the Niaruna in the village gathered at the edge of the clearing. At a command from Boronai, a silence fell. The sound of the airplane was unmistakable, and an uproar started; the women seized the smallest children and moved toward the shelter of the forest. But Aeore, and then Boronai and Tukanu, had turned to gaze at Moon, who rose slowly and walked toward them. He wondered if the plane was searching for him or whether it had been sent by Guzmán to attack; he could take no chances.
Pointing and gesturing, he had told Boronai that a great bird was coming to their village, that they must put out all fires and take their dogs and hide from sight. Boronai shouted at his people, who scattered off into the jungle. Moon himself hid at the jungle edge, and Aeore crouched just behind him, like a warder.
The plane was circling off to the west; the pilot was reconnoitering the mission station. Then it came on again, passing to the north of where he stood. In a moment it might spot the point where his own plane had plunged into the sea of leaves. But the drone was steady, changing only as the plane came around in a wide arc; on this course it would pass eastward of the village.
Then the plane had turned. When it came in, high over the trees, Moon recognized the Mustang fighter from the airstrip at Madre de Dios. When the machine went into a sudden sideslip, losing altitude quickly, in a dangerous and peculiar “falling leaf” maneuver, like a wounded goose, Moon grinned; Old Wolf, he thought—I’ll miss that sonofabitch.
The plane flew briefly out of sight beyond the wall of trees. Then it came on again, and he crouched down. Crossing the village, very low, it seemed to fill the entire sky; its passage shook the treetops of the canopy, and nuts and twigs and bits of leaf rained earthward in its wake. It came in with its left wing pointed to the ground, and Moon caught the blur of the pale bearded face. While the Mustang was gaining altitude for its turn, he pointed at Aeore’s bow and arrows, then at himself, and made a shooting motion at the sky. With a rude grunt, Aeore shoved the weapons at him.
Naked and painted, Moon stepped out to face the plane, and shot an arrow at his old friend Wolf. The arrow arched weakly and harmlessly, but it was greeted with machine-gun fire. The bullets tore into the canopy beyond the clearing. Then the plane faded, strained, and circled round again to come in from the same direction; he made for the nearest tree trunk, waving at Aeore to follow him.
Wolfie came in this time on a low power-dive, preceded by a stream of bullets that whiplashed the thatched roof of the hut, danced in puffs of earth across the yard, and chopped to shreds the wooded edge where Moon had been standing. The plane did not return again; it wandered far off to the west, quartering back and forth, then dying out.
Aeore fingered the shattered twigs, yelling and spitting. Kisu-Mu’s fear of the bullets had not been lost on him, and from this time forward, he made no attempt to hide his suspicion of the Great Spirit of the Rain. Moon had wondered first if Aeore’s hostility might have to do with Pindi, but now he was sure this wasn’t so.
THE girl rose and came to his hammock. She flinched when he put his hand on her shoulder; at the same time she watched him boldly and possessively. Running his fingertips along her temple and down across her small neat ear, he marveled at the cool rubber quality of her flesh; there was real spring in it. She giggled and laid her head on his chest, then placed her fingers gently on his lower belly, inspecting the coarse hair.
“Tsindu,” she muttered fondly, and wrinkled her nose. The Niaruna were all but innocent of body hair, which they regarded as a sure sign of promiscuity. Since they associated hairiness with the guhu’mi, the forest demons, he had thought at first that this feature might enhance his aura of the supernatural, but their line between the sacred and the profane was an obscure one. They now took a more familiar tone with Kisu-Mu, and teased him not only about his pubic hair but about his tender feet, his terrible aim and his inability to eat lice. From the start they had been much more curious about the revolver, the gleam and weight of it, than they had ever been about airplane or parachute, which were beyond all comprehension.
He led Pindi out the side door of the maloca and off among the trees, where he made love to her. The children came along to view the spectacle; though he drove them off, a few slipped back to cheer the couple on. There was no solution short of infanticide, since Pindi refused to lie with him after dark. In daylight Kisu-Mu was harmless and could be dealt with as a man, but in the night, when the jaguar and fer-de-lance, the vampire bat and guhu’mi were abroad, it was dangerous to sleep with spirits. Nightfall and the moon were sacred. For all Pindi knew, Kisu-Mu might turn himself into Anaconda-Person, and she would give birth to snakes.
They rolled apart and lay there on their backs, enjoying the sun on their bare skin and the languor in their legs. Then Pindi followed him to the river, called Tuaremi, and the other Niaruna abandoned the dugout they had been working on and followed them. She came into the water with him, and the children ran in too, and they all splashed one another. The people on the bank took great delight in everything Kisu-Mu and Pindi did, and clearly wished they would do more; one old woman, cackling maniacally, made sexual pantomimes with her hands, causing one of the younger men to lie down on his back and kick his legs up in the air for joy.
When Moon came out of the water, he found Boronai awaiting him. The headman held a bamboo tube of the red achote paste; with a thin spatula he drew on the legs of Kisu-Mu the twin serpents of the Niaruna, to protect him from the bite of snakes. From his pouch he took some waxy black genipa berries, grinding them on his palms and spitting on the paste, which he then mixed with tapir grease; with his fingertips he drew a short black bar on Kisu-Mu’s cheekbone and a harsh black line under his mouth, while the others laughed and whooped in admiration.
“Kin-wee, kin-wee!” they called out. Good, good!
Then Boronai addressed the river Tuaremi, angrily at first, then in placating tones, invoking its spiritual indulgence. The Tuaremi brought the People food and carried them on their journeys, and when the day came it would carry them eastward in the death canoe, into the Morning Sun. The People lived on the rivers, in the avenues of light; of the dark forest they were much afraid. Yet the only sky that most had ever seen was the narrow strip of sky over the torrent.
They led Kisu-Mu back to the clearing. His feet were sore and he slipped and stumbled, glancing at Aeore as he retrieved himself; the man was forever catching him off guard. They crossed the clearing to the maloca, where the women remained outside; in the cool shadows, Boronai sat down upon the ground, motioning to Kisu-Mu that he sit opposite. When the men had gathered, Boronai began speaking in a strange new voice, a kind of singsong, violent and shrill by turns, breaking off now and then to place his hands upon Kisu-Mu’s shoulders and stare fixedly past his head. He spoke of the great days of his clan, of how they controlled the hunting and the fishing rights far down into the country of the Sloth People, the Tiro, and from there across to the Tuaremi, and far to the east, toward the Sea of Life; all that land was of his clan. But now the clan had been forced westward by the Yuri Maha, their own kinsmen to the east—here Tukanu pointed at Aeore, for Kisu-Mu’s benefit—and they had been threatened from the west by the Green Indians and the Tiro. The Ancestors were very angry. He, Boronai, was very angry, and all of his people were very angry.
To prove this, Boronai shouted at Kisu-Mu in terrific anger, and his men shouted angrily at one another, especially Tukanu, who was so angry that he jumped around in a circle, farting like a tapir. But the only one truly angry said nothing and sat quietly, gazing at Kisu-Mu. And now, as Boronai spoke softly once again, Moon realized what was happening—that Boronai and Tukanu were inducting the Great Spirit of the Rain into their clan.
At Play in the Fields of the Lord Page 19
