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 mi
nor
ity 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
in
timate. 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 in
trigued
. 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
“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 mi
nor
ity 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
in
timate. 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 in
trigued
. 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
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