At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen Read Free Book Online Page A

the Indian leaped back toward the stairwell. In the cheap red shirt that the missionaries had given him, Uyuyu’s neck looked thin, and his face twitched in his attempts to smile. This Indian happened to have a bright red shirt with bright blue rockets on it, but otherwise he was identical to his counterpart in every frontier river town from Puerto Maldonado in Peru to Pôrto Velho in Brazil, from Riberalta in Bolivia to Bahía Negra down in Paraguay: the native with the bright smile and the Christian humility, the sharp eye and the crucifix. Moon demanded, “Did you bring it?” He did not know which gave him most shame—the stupor of the Indian defeated by the white man, or the hunger of the convert like Uyuyu, with his base imitations of the white man’s way.
    Another door opened down the corridor, and a girl appeared in a shaft of light. She closed her door and came toward them. Uyuyu tried to slip past Moon into the room. Perversely, Moon deterred him. Uyuyu was still pushing gently as the girl approached the stairs. She greeted him—“Uyuyu,
buenos días
”—and smiled inquiringly at his discomfiture. Glancing at Moon, she nodded politely, then looked carefully again. She was a small girl with straight brown hair to her shoulders and a clear open face, sunburned, in hide sandals and a dress of pale blue faded linen. Moon had noted her nice legs while waiting to see her face, but it was the face that struck him. The skin was warm and clear and the mouth full—the line of the upper lip was a soft arch and white teeth touched her lower lip in a wistful way. So certain was he that she smelled good that his belly glowed and tingled, and at the same time he was overwhelmed by nostalgia for something lost. Frantic, he cleared his throat. She was turning toward the stairs. “I don’t guess we’ve met before,” he said.
    She gazed directly into his face. “No,” she said, “no, we haven’t.” She went on downstairs.
    “Misionera,”
Uyuyu said, grinning tentatively. The Indian was prepared to speak of her with reverence or obscenity, according to the whim of his new master, but Moon only scowled at him and sent him off; Uyuyu was to seek out his friend, the
ayahuascero
, and bring Moon a fresh bottle of the drug by the next evening.
    Moon went back into the room. Wolfie lay flat out on his bed, his beret propped on his huge dark glasses, his gold earring on the pillow, snoring. At the rust-flecked mirror on the fly-specked sink Moon curled his lip at what she must have seen. Once, at a police hearing, he had heard a tape of his own voice, and the sound had seemed just as foreign to him as the face which now confronted him: a lean face, yellow-bronzed with sunburn and malaria, carved close around high cheekbones and an Indian’s broad mouth, a weathered face, so set in its expression that the dark eyes seemed to burn through a leather mask. The face was capped by a hood of blue-black hair as thick and solid as a helmet—a bad head, he thought, a
dirty
head, as the French say. It looked too big for the body, though the body was strong and quick enough—or had been before he had worn it out with lush and tail and junk, and now malaria. Well, he was scarcely a parfit gentil knight; as Wolfie said, he looked like some Hollywood Geronimo trying to kick a ninety-dollar habit.
    Moon toppled backward over the end of his own bed and blew a long sigh at the ceiling. Wolfie was sighing, too.
    “I’ve had a hard-on for three days now,” Wolfie said. “You think I ought to consult my physician?”
    And they lay there laughing for a long time, Wolfie hiccuping for joy, while the vultures circled in the dull gray sky beyond the window, crisscrossing the black crest of jungle, and the enormous moth on the ceiling gazed down upon them with the white eyes on its wings. And then Lewis Moon sat up again and brought both feet down hard on the floor between the beds.

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    O N THEIR WAY DOWNSTAIRS THEY WERE INTERCEPTED BY