John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“The women won’t show in public without their chaperones,” explains Corporal Grissom, who has declared himself the squad’s expert on local customs and has a nasty-faced little monkey named Aggy perched on his shoulder. “Daylight catches a señorita on the street, you can bet she’s got one or two old bulldog aunts clearing a path for her.”

“You mean the Spanish girls,” says Big Ten.

The Spanish haven’t all gone, merchants and friars and even a few soldiers awaiting transport still hanging on in the Walled City, depending on their new amigos yanquis to protect them from the locals. There are days Hod feels like a militia guarding a mine boss.

“I mean the Spanish girls.” Grissom finishes the deal, takes a gander at his hand. He has managed to teach the monkey to throw cocoanuts and other fruit down from the trees and to shit anywhere but on his own shoulder. “And the half-breed ones with money. The dark ones, the whatever — Indian ones, that sell stuff on the street and slick their hair with cocoanut oil, they’ll stare you straight in the eye.”

“Which leaves the field open for you, Chief.”

Big Ten shrugs. “Don’t talk the lingo.”

The locals, the ones who aren’t in Aguinaldo’s so-called army, just stare at you. There are rich folks’ houses here with Filipinos living in them, even the bigger bamboo huts in this neighborhood look comfortable enough, but it is hard to get a peep into their lives with them scowling at you. Worse than being a Gentile in Utah.

“Ye just rattle some of them Mexican cartwheels in front of their noses,” says Donovan, who has already been busted down to private for wandering into a posted district. “They’ll get the idea, all right.”

“I wouldn’t fuck a googoo on a bet,” says Grissom.

“Ye’d fuck a rockpile if ye thought there was a squirrel in it. A dead squirrel.”

Hod has had the trots for a week now and the Dhobie itch real bad and it feels raw where he sits. Some of the guys wear red flannel bands around their middles, even to sleep, but they’ve been getting sick just like anybody else. The wine was a bad idea. Hod is tired of their talk, always the same, tired and bored and worried about his insides turning to mush. He hasn’t been right since a day out of Honolulu, stuffed in the three-tier bunks, only two hours on deck a day, trying to eat the slump they shoved in front of you with puke sloshing around your feet. Here inside the hut there are mosquitoes that come out at dusk and dawn, lurking at the edges of the light from the single kerosene lamp they’ve hung over the ammo box they play on, a half-dozen men sitting around it on a woven-mat floor. They don’t buzz, these mosquitoes, and the only strategy seems to be to let them land and fill up with some of your blood before you crush them.

“The young ones don’t look so bad.”

“Monkey faces,” scoffs Grissom.

“Just close your eyes,” says Winston Wall, a private from the Kansas Vols who it seems is a third cousin of Hod’s, demonstrating with his hips. “And then imagine the woman of your dreams—”

Neely reddens, slaps his cards down on the crate. “She wouldn’t do nothin like that.”

The men laugh.

“You in this game or not, Atkins?”

It takes Hod a moment to react to his Army name.

“Let’s go, buddy, shit or get off the pot.”

Hod doesn’t want to think about shitting. He spreads his cards out. Garbage. “Sure. Gimme two.”

A boy in a white provost uniform ducks into the hut, squints at them through his glasses.

“Hey fellas,” he says cheerfully, “long time no see. What we playing for?”

The men take a moment, in the weak light, to recognize the boy.

“It’s Runt!” grins Big Ten.

“How the hell you get over here, son? Thought they threw you back for being too puny.”

Runyon squeezes onto the floor next to Hod. “Stupid bastards. I snuck on the train to Frisco, hung around the camps—” He shrugs. “There was a Minnesota company that come up a few men short one morning, I talked to the sergeant—”

“They must be desperate.”

“It’s a good outfit—”

“That uniform appears a might roomy on you—” says Winston Wall.

“It fits just fine. They got us policing the city now.”

“Well,” says Sergeant LaDuke, scowling at his hand, “least there’s one of you short enough to look the googoos in the eye.”

The boy scrutinizes the backs of the men’s cards as if he could see through them, cards decorated with a lanky Gibson Girl holding a bicycle. “They’re not a happy group of people, our comrades in arms,” he says. “Had their hearts set on chopping up the Spanish, and then along we come—”

“What I want to know is where they keep the sportin gals.”

Runyon grins. “Just down the street here in Sampaloc. What’re you, blind?”

Grissom deals Runt in, the boy throwing a ten-centavo piece into the ante.

“So you Minnesotas are pullin the provost.”

“For the moment, yeah,” he says, studying his hand. “But we were in the thick of it the day the city fell.”

“ We were in the thick, what there was of it,” corrects Sergeant LaDuke. “I don’t remember seeing you.”

“Me neither,” says Wall. “Less it was way back in our dust.”

“We hooked up with the Astor Battery, hauling their pieces with those water buffalo,” says Runt, standing pat, “and all day long whatever we run into, Spanish in a blockhouse, Spanish holed up in a church, whatever, we get the Astor boys set up and they blast the hell out of it.”

“Imagine having so much money you can field your own artillery,” muses Big Ten.

“I wish old John Jacob would come over here, build us one of his swanky hotels,” says Donovan. “I can’t sleep in these feckin rat-holes no more.”

“And the rats aint too happy about you snoring like a freight train—”

“I don’t snore.”

“And shit don’t smell. Tell him, Neely.”

“I was a googoo sneaking up and heard that racket coming out of your tent,” says Neely, “I’d turn and run for my life.”

“General Otis has ordered all the saloons closed down on Sundays,” says Runt. “But the boys have discovered this beeno home-brew stuff—”

“General Otis,” complains the Kansas private, “has parked his fat ass on a supply of Krag rifles and won’t give em out to us vols.”

“What we need with new rifles if we’re going home?”

“Hate to break it to you, pal, but we aint going anywhere.”

“I signed up to slaughter Dagoes,” says Donovan. “And at that I’ve been sorely disappointed.”

“You’ll get home when they squeezed the last drop of blood outta you.”

“So they got you playing nursemaid to the drunks and goldbricks,” Sergeant LaDuke says to Runt, “while we keep the googoos in line.”

LaDuke was a militia back in Colorado, and when Private Thorogood called him out as a scab and a strikebreaker the sergeant put him on report for a week.

“For a while they had me guarding this herd of buffalo calves,” says Runt. “When they’re little they’re kind of pink-colored—”

“And when they grow up they wallow in the mud and taste like shoe leather.”

“These aint for eatin. They grow the pox on em, for vaccine.”

“Evry time ye turn around this place there’s a feckin doctor with a needle in his hand—”

“Now we’re inside the walls, keeping order. Most nights it’s about what you’d see in Pueblo on a Saturday after dark. One of our fellas got cut by a pimp and his patrol partner shot the little bastard, almost had a riot on our hands.” Runt and Grissom’s monkey trade a look. “What’s the stakes here?”