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

never again.
    In the dark corridor leading back into the bar-salon, Guzmán’s son Fausto lay in wait; he swung open a door for Moon’s inspection. Inside was a table and a cot; there was no window. “
S-ss-t, señor, s-ss-t
.” The boy’s eyes flashed; he pointed vigorously at the door to the bar, through whose glass pane the head of fat Mercedes swam in a garish light. Then he pointed at Moon, then at the bed. When Moon only shrugged, Fausto scuttled ahead of him to the next door, jerked his thumb at it and grinned. There were murmurings within. Bending forward a little, the boy made a basket of his arms and then, rolling his eyes, moved his hindquarters in and out spasmodically, in the manner of a dog.
    Moon entered the bar, disregarding the urgent tugging at his sleeve. As he suspected, it was none other than the perfidious Wolfie who was missing. Moon found himself face to face with the fat girl in mission gingham, who stuck her tongue out very slowly.
    “We arr es-spik Ingliss,” said the Comandante. He looked disgruntled, and was scratching his armpit inside his shirt. Across the table Quarrier was still present, his hands clenched on his knees, his face pale and rigid behind the dull thick lenses.
    “Okay,” Moon said. “The pen of my aunt is on the table.”
    “You fren fock woo-mans,” Guzmán retorted. He was glaring at Moon with an artless hatred that grew with every drink. When the fat girl reached over and stroked his arm, he drove her off with a backhand blow across the breasts.
“Vete al diablo!”
commanded El Comandante. “We arr es-spik Ingliss!”
    Quarrier said, “Did he tell you he’d stolen my letter to the government about his methods with the Indians, in which I reported that he makes money in the slave trade? Because I’ve learned just that from our Mintipo believers here in town.”
    Moon put his glass down. “You just got here a few days ago, isn’t that right?”
    “That’s right.” Quarrier nodded up and down, aggrieved. “That boy Fausto showed him the address, and he read my letter and then tore it up, right under my nose.”
    “Send another letter,” Moon advised him. “This time accuse him of tampering with the mails.” He shook his head. “Take it from me, you’re a born loser.”
    After a pause Quarrier said, “Do you really think attacking the Indians is going to pacify them?”
    “No,” Moon said, “but killing them is.” He reached over and seized Wolfie’s abandoned glass and drained off what was left in it. Wolfie came and signaled to his Fat-Girl. “That Suzie of yours, for Christ sake,” he complained to Moon. “She’s too damn drunk to move.” Mercedes got up and wandered toward him, clutching her arms to her hurt breast and glaring over her shoulder at the Comandante, who was drinking even more heavily than before. He glowered evilly at Wolfie and the girl, nodding his head as if to indicate that a moment of dreadful reckoning was at hand. When Wolfie yelled at him, “So what’s with you, you spic sonofabitch!” Guzmán gulped at his beer, protruding his lower lip at Moon and expelling noisy puffs of air, like a blowing horse; after a time he disappeared toward the latrine.
    The place had emptied; Fausto was sleeping behind the bar. An occasional head poked furtively through the door, but the window clientele had vanished. Somewhere a rooster crowed, and a pig snuffled in the mud street; a light of the oncoming jungle dawn soured the bad light in the room.
    Quarrier tried doggedly to interest Moon in the Niaruna, showing him a crude dictionary compiled by Huben and Uyuyu. “They seem to use the same stem for verbs and nouns and adjectives, with just a change of affixes, and they have genders, and their second-person pronoun is
ti
. All this suggests an Arawakan stock, the only one in this region. Perhaps you know that some tribes in our own South may derive from the Arawak as well. And I remember something else: the Sioux word for the