GOD IS PLEASURE! shouts the Reverend to his intelligence officer in this wasteland of Veracruz as long as we carry on His work on earth He rewards us pleasure is only odious when we do not deserve it when we seek pleasure before we seek the Lord but if we first seek the Lord we shall always find Him He is only absent when we do not seek Him out all we have to do is seek Him to find Him and the nothing is a sin NOTHING NOTHING is impossible and everything is possible is permitted in the name of the Lord everything is permitted to him who has found the Lord and the voice of the Lord has said: Go forth and be my soldier exterminate my enemies and then I shall receive you and you will have the pleasure which I am! says the Reverend to Professor Gingerich of Dartmouth College and Will Gingerich realizes that the Reverend is surrounded by a luminous, orange-colored square and the feline purring of a TV camera (a tiger in the jungle): If you turn your back on Jesus, Jesus will turn his back on you, concludes Royall Payne, followed by organ music and a list of thanks to the program’s patrons and an announcement that this program reaches your home via satellite thanks to a subsidy from the Union Carbide Corporation from somewhere in Veracruz: now you know why we’re in Veracruz! Close-up of the Reverend’s fists and slow fade:
Royall Payne jumps off his designer helicopter picks up a towel to wipe off his sweat lathers up his cheeks picks up his razor and reminds Will Gingerich you are here to tell Washington what it wants to hear nothing else don’t work so hard don’t even leave your CAT HUT just write your weekly report saying there are Communists in Veracruz Soviet agents Cuban bases even if it isn’t true: modern intelligence consists in telling your superiors what they want to hear: the rest of the time, well, there’s a case of beer over there and in Cardel there are very pretty girls if you don’t mind dying of some venereal disease but what can stop sex, eh, Professor? Go on tell me what can stop it. I’ll tell you: the fear of God, but you, an agnostic secular humanist, what do you do, Professor? Screw and die!
The helicopters that still work leave the jungle clearing near El Tajín in search of nonexistent targets / they see a nosegay of roof tiles and they drop a bouquet of napalm / they seek out the thickest places in the forest / the mangrove swamps the rotten vines / the wavy fronds of the palm trees and they open the valves of Agent Orange to exterminate all greenery /a chemical, dark-red cloud to defoliate the jungle / an orange-colored juice to defoliate its inhabitants: they come back late from their incursions when the tiger opens his golden eyes and begins his nocturnal prowling / they withdraw to their CAT HUTS and open their refrigerators and drink Iron City beer and tear open their cellophane bags and eat pretzels Doritos and individual-sized pizzas: then they drop a nickel into the beer bottle and try to see while they laugh and make jokes about Thomas Jefferson’s being a shithead, if what they say about Iron City beer is true, that it can dissolve a nickel, but they don’t know that the orange pesticide is dissolving them and they that now are twenty, thirty years old and then go home with medals and beer bellies and hearts swollen with patriotism to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Lansing, Michigan, years later will wonder why is my pancreas my liver my fucking brain my colon my rectum dissolving?
they don’t wonder about this now now they go out on patrol carrying their Backpack Nukes: this is a green knapsack which contains a nuclear device equivalent to 250 tons of TNT and they go down to Villa Cardel spend a jolly Saturday in the cantinas where half of those who enter do not leave alive but they emerge safe and sound: who’s going to mess with a Detroit black six feet tall and carrying 250 tons of nuclear explosives? or with a Puerto Rican from the island of Vieques armed with / who walk in shouting THIS IS RAMBOWAR! and later on they decide to visit one of the bordellos they’ve been in all of them except one: the one that belongs to the old Chinese / he’s put them off / but they have bet each other that before leaving Veracruz they are going to screw every available woman and they’re about to reach 175 days here so they know that in four more days they’ll be transferred so that there will never be any official record of their ever having been in Veracruz they walk out singing happy tunes by Stephen Foster and Irving Berlin America America from sea to shining sea: the Oriental guardian of the Celestial Empire fans himself and rocks smiles at them and invites them Amelica? flum sea to shiny seamen? you go in now see mos’ elotic woman flom sea to shiny seamen smiles the diminutive Deng Chopin inviting the gringo soldiers in with his long mandarin pianist’s fingers and the boys from Detroit or PR look at each other, elbow each other with a joking air of complicity and they enter the Celestial Empire giggling Will Gingerich doesn’t know it but he’s delirious and in every one of the jungle’s shapes he sees a frightened tiger he imagines he’s a big sports hero a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals a fullback for the Los Angeles Rams the oldest winner at Wimbledon he’s delirious but not even that can diminish his fear they’re going to come back they’re going to get him he walks in circles through the jungle they’re everywhere and he nowhere; the navy-blue sky splits open: the moon parts the veil and sticks to the sky like a silver decaclass="underline" Will Gingerich flees and the Reverend Payne argues: why are we in Veracruz? Caressing the metallic body of his Apache attack helicopter, as metallic as his cheeks shaved four times a day, caressing the tenderly applied decals on the Apache each decal a star with a skull in its center and surrounded by statements in which only the geography varies: I WAS IN VIETNAM. I WAS IN GRENADA. I WAS IN NICARAGUA. MEXICO NEXT: Reverend Payne begins to pound desperately on the fuselage of his helicopter scratching the decals saying with a hoarse voice: Why are we in Veracruz? and Gingerich trying to quiet him down telling him we’re here to protect the oil installations in the Gulf of Mexico without which the free world would be strategifucked … and the Reverend interrupts him with an open, hard slap on the body of the helicopter that echoes like a gigantic can of Campbell’s soup allowed to swell monstrously in the boiling humidity of the jungle: the truth! shouts the Reverend the truth! We’ve got to terminate this country that exports greasers who are invading us like the plague of locusts that destroyed Pharaoh’s power! Michigan is not growing South Carolina is not growing Georgia isn’t growing, not even your own home state Texas is growing, Professor, we aren’t having kids but all these greasers grow and grow and cross over and cross over and they’ll end up coupling with our own daughters and mothers and wives who have emerged like Venus from the Caucasian genetic pool Are you listening to me, Professor? haven’t you heard how often they call each other motherfuckers? well I want to send them back to their mommas air-mail with my faithful Minuteman 92 kill them in their father’s seed before they enter their mother’s belly repulsive filthy greasers invaders of other people’s clean white American property / camping out on our green lawns Are you going to allow it, Professor? But you’re opposed to abortion, Reverend, how are you going to halt the demographic explosion of the Hispanics if you are an apostle of the anti-abortion movement in the good old U.S.A., but they are not U.S. of A. nor are they good nor are they old said the Reverend in a horrible explosion of rage, throwing himself on the unarmed figure of Professor Will Gingerich and killing an unborn child is not the same as killing a grownup Mexican with a mustache to keep him from procreating, it isn’t the same, Prof, admit it! Will Gingerich, assaulted by Reverend Payne, lands face-down next to a slow river surrounded by burning tigers