Gods Go Begging Read online

  “There’s your answer, sergeant,” said Jesse. “The wind.”

  Jesse lifted his sweating face to catch the full effect of the breeze, then he loosened his belt and zipped down his fly to allow the cool air to circulate inside his pants. He sighed gratefully as the eternal burn of crotch rot subsided for a few precious moments.

  “Suppose the wind had been blowing just right back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The world would have been a very different place today.”

  In anticipation of Jesse’s story, new, extra-large joints had been hand-rolled and fired up. ‘They looked like Cuban cigars. Taut shoulders, tight with savvy, were allowed to slump a bit. There was beaucoup contact going on thirty kilometers to the east. That could mean a quiet night here. For a moment, young men were no longer soldiers. For a moment they were all gathered like enthusiastic students around a noisy table in a coffee shop in Berkeley.

  “Just imagine what would have happened if Hernán Cortez and his men had been blown far off course and landed at Plymouth Rock instead of Veracruz. On the other hand, imagine that the pilgrims had been blown south by a terrific gale and the Mayflower had run aground in the Yucatán peninsula.”

  “What would be different?” asked the chaplain, suddenly intrigued by the unusual scenario.

  “Think about it, padre. What is the primary difference between Mexico and the United States today?” countered Jesse. He waited a moment before answering his own question. No one spoke.

  “Mexico is a mestizo culture, a racially mixed cultura and the United States is not. Both the Roman Catholics and the Puritans had their stupid debates about whether or not the indigenous people were human, but in the meantime the Catholic soldiers went ahead and got it on with the native girls anyway.

  “Those conquistadors were damned sex fiends, and they went nuts over all those bare-breasted women! Hell, it was Magellan’s dick that got his ass killed. He got caught messing around with Lapu-Lapu’s wife. To a man, the Spanish soldiers asked themselves, ‘Why should the pope have all the fun?’ ”

  There was a general consensus among the grunts that the horny Spaniards had posed a supremely logical and valid question. After all, there were so many beautiful women here in the Nam. Everywhere in this country there seemed to be slender, dark-eyed women lifting their blouses for passing GIs while begging for C-rations.

  “The Puritans, on the other hand, were revolted by the carefree spirit and nakedness of the Indians.” Jesse smiled in the direction of the Indian troops. “So much so that they made it a capital crime to have sex with them. Since they believed that everything earthly was necessarily evil, they believed that people close to the earth must be evil, too. So it must be all right with God to take land away from evil people, to let evil heathens suffer disease and starve to death.

  “Just after the Puritans massacred the entire Pequot tribe, they held a prayer meeting! They could’ve been killing vermin or termites instead of women and children. Those people saw everything in terms of their stern, joyless beliefs. They interpreted cultural difference as religious difference. So the prayers of an Indian priest became heresy.”

  In the dark the Indian soldiers were moving in closer to hear. Wary of snipers, they cupped their enormous joints in their hands or beneath their helmets as they passed them back and forth.

  “You mean to say we ain’t a melting pot?” sneered Jim-Earl sarcastically.

  “There was melting, all right,” said the Creole sergeant with a laugh. “All them European folks melted into white.”

  “This simple idea of cultural difference as blasphemy is the very foundation of American racism. It wasn’t much of a leap from the Puritans to the Aryan Nation. It wasn’t much of a leap from their laws against consorting with the Indians to the Jim Crow laws in the South and the antimiscegenation laws in the West. You see, back in the world, racism is a sacred thing.”

  “You know,” said the Creole sergeant thoughtfully, “a large percentage of the membership of the Ku Klux Klan in the forties and fifties was made up of preachers and pastors. I think I read that each chapter has its own chaplain. I think they call him a Kludd. I imagine the name comes from the sound that shit makes when it hits the floor.”

  There was laughter from everywhere on the hill. Other groups of men had ceased their talking to listen.

  “What are you saying, Jesse,” asked the chaplain, “that the sixteenth-century Catholics were benevolent degenerates·”

  “Hell, no, padre!” answered Jesse. “I think they were more civilized than the Puritans, but only a little more. The difference was that the Spaniards believed that all the sins of the flesh could be forgiven in the end. During your life you could lust and get laid all you wanted. All you needed to get into heaven was an act of repentance before you died. It was a perfect system. Check out all those celibate popes with their Vatican concubines and scores of illegitimate kids. Think about it, padre, you’re out here giving the Last Rites to men who have probably just killed another man.

  “The Puritans, on the other hand, abstained from just about everything that was any fun at all: tobacco, cigarettes, coffee, dancing, singing. They believed that forgiveness and redemption lay in the next life, not this one.”

  “They should have abstained from long ocean voyages,” said Jim-Earl, while exhaling a thick curtain of smoke. The other Indians grunted.

  “They believed that if you tortured the body into submission,” continued Jesse, “the soul would certainly follow. It was the complete reverse of the Catholics. The same naked Indian girls that drove the Spaniards wild with longing were branded as satanic by the Puritans. One group was oversexed; the other was totally repressed. We drew the short straw on that one. We got the repressed group. That’s why America is filled with an equal number of censors and sex fiends. It is both compelled and repelled by breasts.”

  “Fucking—A,” said a voice in the dark. “I love breasts.”

  “The confessions of a serial masturbator!” said the voice of a buddha-head, a kid from Hawaii that the troopers called Spam Boy.

  “Last night, Jesse, when things were bad, when you were scared, did you say a prayer?”

  It was t he chaplain. After the last two days on this hill, his own religious education had begun to seem naive and insulated. Even here, in hell, he needed some reassurance. Jesse said nothing. Silence was his answer.

  “Isn’t it lonely?” added the chaplain.

  “If I get out of here alive,” said Jesse quietly, “then someone else doesn’t.” He nodded toward the small, burned harness and rucksack of a North Vietnamese soldier. “I’m no better than him. The God that built that sky up there, padre, does not choose between people down here. If I survive, it’s because of these guys right here.” There was a gesture in the dark that no one needed to see in order to understand. “If we get out of here, it will be because we lucked out.”

  Jesse’s face lit up as he pulled on the burning mota. Fuck the snipers. He smiled as he acknowledged its beneficent effect on his brain and his speech.

  “So anyway,” he began again, dispelling the lull that the padre’s question had caused, “the Mayflower washes up onto the beach at Veracruz and those cold-blooded pilgrims suddenly find themselves in a genuine tropical paradise. This sure as hell ain’t England, and it ain’t the Netherlands. There are no snowdrifts here, no frozen toes, no begging from the Indians… and no Thanksgiving. Now they’re really pissed off because there’s nothing there that they can use to mortify the flesh. After months at sea they find themselves in the garden of Eden and the damn place is filled with brown people.”

  “There goes the neighborhood.” Cornelius laughed.

  “Now they’re completely at a loss for what to do. They came here to live the New Testament, and they find themselves in the first pages of Genesis. How could they possibly bemoan their lot in life in this land of milk and honey? Ah, but the Puritans were resourceful folks. They considered their options. They could import tons of s
now or set sail for the frigid shores of Iceland or they could reach out and pick some of the fruit that’s hanging everywhere around them.

  “They might have heard the same rumors that Cortez had heard about a city of gold, but they lacked the military power and experience to strike inland for Tenochtitlán and the land of the Aztecs. So they would have convened a prayer meeting, killed a few of the locals who had come to visit, and finally decided to stay where they were. Maybe they would even move out to Isla Mujeres to escape all those sex-crazed Mayans. Only now the natives would call it Isla de los Lerdos.”

  Mendez, Lopez, and the other Latinos broke out laughing at the name. Island of the dullards.

  “Isla de los pendejos,” one of them said spitefully.

  “Do you remember the story of La Malinche?” Only the two Mexicans nodded their heads.

  “She was the Indian woman who became Cortez’s sugar mama. She cooked for him, gave him kids, and incidentally, helped him to betray and annihilate her own people.”

  “Then he left her for another woman,” said Tiburcio Mendez with a smirk.

  “There’s no way that La Malinche would have fallen for a sexually repressed, tight-assed pilgrim,” said Jesse. “No way! Pocahontas must’ve been blind or really hard up to fall for a wimp like John Rolfe. Anyway, the Puritans would have done well for themselves out there on the island. More pilgrims would have arrived and today there would be a huge self-mortification theme park on the island and a body of water to keep the dreariness and the Protestant work ethic away from the shores of Quintana Roo. The Mexicans would have established a Border Patrol to keep those stern, pasty-faced people at bay.”

  “Keep those bastards from taking jobs away from the Mexicans!” exclaimed Mendez.

  “Meanwhile, up at Plymouth Rock our boy Cortez has landed and in his push westward runs smack dab into the five tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. Now, these folks are certainly not the Aztecs. They don’t have a king who makes Hamlet look decisive, and they don’t have a mythology that says that white gods with beards will appear from out of the east. The Spaniards would never have lulled the Iroquois Nation into complacency with Bible studies and false pacifism. There would have been beaucoup shit coming down.”

  “Them Iroquois are cold,” said Jim-Earl the Shoshone, his voice filled with deep respect.

  “Damn right,” said Jesse. “The way I figure it, five or six divisions of Iroquois regulars told old Powhatan to get out of the way, then they wiped Cortez out.”

  “But not before sodomizing him,” said a Cherokee voice.

  “Coño! En las nalgas,” said Mendez with a jerk of his hips.

  Jesse laughed. The padre blinked his eyes in confusion. His seminary training and his doctorate in divinity had not prepared him for this sort of discussion.

  “The Indians would have been put on notice as to the true intentions of the Europeans. Jamestown would have never happened. Lung cancer would have to be invented somewhere else.”

  “The Kola would’ve had their war ponies decades earlier,” said an excited Indian voice.

  “With those horses, their cavalry could have repelled the Dutch merchants and the French Jesuits, and the entire Huron Nation would still be alive today. North America would be Russian-Indian and French-Indian today,” concluded Jesse.

  “Why wouldn’t they kill off the Russians and the French?” asked the chaplain, who was surprised by his own question, asked in earnest. For a moment he had forgotten about the war that raged around him. This “supposing” stuff actually worked, he thought to himself.

  “Because they came for the pelts, for the furs,” said Jesse. “They didn’t take away the Indians’ land and their livelihoods. A lot of them took Indian wives. Indians can understand lustiness, it’s self-deprivation that confounds them. Today everything west of the Mississippi and north of Texas would be called Russo-Aztlán; everything east would be called Kola-Quebec. It is my supposition, after the benefit of much marijuana, that Mexico would have the same name as today because it’s derived from the word Mejica, the Aztec name for themselves.”

  Jesse smiled. He loved these speculations. Thoughts like these were always bubbling up in his overactive mind. He often used historical scenarios such as these to help himself fall asleep when marijuana didn’t work. It didn’t matter that no two scenarios ever had the same result.

  “Say, man,” said Cornelius, suddenly caught up in the fantasy, “there wouldn’t be no slavery in Russo-Aztlán and Kola -Quebec, because there wouldn’t be no Spaniards and no Englishmen!”

  “Right on,” said a twelve-string voice from Mississippi.

  “No fucking missionaries in Hawaii,” spat Spam Boy.

  “That’s right,” said Jesse, “and old Moctezoma, down in Mexico, would have learned of the defeat of Cortez and eventually realized that the bearded people were not gods. He would have seen the necessity of preparing for future invasions from Europe. Having first-hand knowledge of the insanity of the English—remember, the Puritans are camped out on the Island of Dullards—he would have sought help from the mortal enemies of both the English and the Spaniards.

  “I think he would have sent his royal emissaries to Dublin and Edinburgh to speak to all of the clan chieftains of the Irish and the Scots. Other Aztec emissaries would have gone off to Paris. All of indigenous America would have been spared Moctezoma’s imperial foolishness and his terrible defeat at the hands of Hernán Cortez.”

  Jesse took a deep drag off another joint that had been shoved into his face by an unknown grunt. Now his entire brain was bathed in warmth. This daydream felt good.

  “Alexander Graham Bell and James Watt would have been born in Cuernavaca. Their fathers would have married Mixtec women. The Industrial Revolution would have begun in the wide streets of Tenochtitlán City. And listen to this….” Jesse grinned with glee. “In the seventeenth century, thirty thousand Aztec soldiers would have joined the Irish for an invasion of England. Oliver Cromwell would have been soundly defeated at the great Battle of the Isle of Man. An Aztec soldier would have torn Cromwell’s heart from his body.”

  “Andale pues!” said Lopez excitedly. “Qué madre!Corn, beef fa jitas, and cabbage!”

  “England would finally have some decent food,” said the padre, “and no gold bullion coming in from Mexico would have meant the end of the Inquisition in Spain. Without the Inquisition, Spain might have experienced the Renaissance. Who knows, maybe Gen eralissimo Franco would never have existed.”

  “Now you’ve got it, padre!” said Jesse enthusiastically.

  “And we wouldn’t be standing here in Indian country,” spat Jim-Earl, completely aware of the irony in his words. The Seminoles were out there, huddling and skulking beyond the berm. The long knives, having run out of Indians and elbow room in North America, had crossed the Pacific Ocean.

  “What about me and my family?” It was the Midwestern voice.

  “Your name is Dutch, isn’t it?” asked Jesse. “That would make you a Dutch Kola-Quebequois, unless your family managed to get across the big river.”

  “That’s way better than honky,” said the Mississippi voice.

  “You would have a real culture. White don’t mean any more than black does,” added the Creole sergeant.

  “You could be crossing the Rio Grande at night, trying to get work in Mexico,” said Lopez.

  Abruptly, the sound of inbound choppers in the far distance brought a sudden end to the dreaming and to the discussion. The conversation would begin again, somewhere else in another province, in another ville, in another calm moment after great turbulence.

  The sergeant had already gone to organize the removal of the bodies and the wounded who hadn’t been airlifted earlier. As the trio of helicopters came closer to the small landing zone behind the radio dishes, a stream of red tracers rose up from the forest darkness to meet them. Some North Vietnamese were still out there. A lot of them were still out there.

  The single gunship peeled off to
return fire, while the slick ships kept coming, the saucers of their rotors almost touching. From the high pitch of the blades, it was clear that the Hueys were empty. Even as they set down in a swirling cloud of dust, the tracer rounds followed them down. The young, gum-chewing warrant officers at their controls moved deliberately, almost slowly, and with unearthly courage despite the deadly rain of bullets piercing the skin of their ship. Within their huge headsets was a torrent of words, controlled jargon in a cold monotone, practiced words hovering at the very edge of sheer panic.

  Without saying a thing, the chaplain got up and ran at full speed to the top of the hill, falling three or four times before he reached the landing zone. Behind him, Julio Lopez was calling after him, crying out that death was coming for him and that he needed to make one last confession. The chaplain heard Julio’s voice but kept running. He hurriedly helped someone place the Russian boy’s bag into a chopper. Two wounded boys needed help climbing in.

  One of them, a traumatic amputee, was hit again as he was lifted up. The bullet slammed into his remaining leg. It had flown toward his body at over three thousand feet per second and the dark spray it created filled the air inside the helicopter. Everyone inside was breathing pieces of a friend. A chopper on the pad was an easy target

  The legless boy’s screams went unheard as the chaplain climbed in with him and crouched down near the transmission housing. He covered his own contorted face with his hands as rounds tore into the chopper’s body. As he did so, the door gunner noticed that the padre was not getting out and said something into his radio. The copilot looked back toward the hellhole area of his ship to survey the chaplain hiding there.

  For an instant there was eye contact between the two. Without a word he turned his head toward his console and the chopper lifted from the pad. The air was cooling and thick and so the rotors had bite. Climbing would be easy, even with an extra man aboard. In mere seconds the firing stopped and the chaplain glanced cautiously through the door. The hill was gone.