John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

We have no engagement to break off, of course, no, we have nothing but our one night of love to remember—

He has seen Custer’s Last Fight in bars before but never studied the details. The old troopers say you kept the last bullet for yourself because if you weren’t finished they would scalp you alive and then do other things. Coop said that in Caney they found a Spanish officer who’d stabbed his woman, a Cuban girl, and then shot himself in the head. But that is just meanness and honor, Dago stuff, and no model for his present situation.

Father will not be moved and I am not of an age to defy him. If it was not for my condition we could wait—

Junior is sitting over with the boys but quiet. And feeling bad, Royal hopes. He drinks more whiskey from the jug. He read all three letters, the second two just more of how bad she feels but she is not the mistress of her own fate, her hands are tied, she suffers with each breath, each word seeming more of a fake than the next, and only the first one has anything for him, scrawled as an afterthought below her name—

I will always love you.

He will not always love her, not if he can help it. He thinks, in fact, that he has already stopped, but that doesn’t make it any easier to breathe. He wants to paint his face like the Cheyenne and the Sioux in the picture and ride straight over somebody, wants to pound somebody to jelly with a club. Dorsey Love is an old man, almost thirty, and he will be the one lying with Jessie, he will be the one raising up Royal’s baby boy or girl, he will be the one that sits at the Luncefords’ big table and the Doctor will have to smile at him and pass the chicken and pretend he is happy about it. The liquor has no bite now, just a smell, and Hardaway is up on a chair reciting The Charge of the Nigger Ninth for everybody in the saloon, though Hardaway is in the 25th and didn’t come up the hill till the second day.

“What you got there?” he called out, passing by as Royal pondered the letters, sitting on the barracks steps. “Some gal that won’t leave you be?”

“Just news from home,” Royal said and looked across at Junior, who was reading his own letter from his mother and knowing by then. “Junior’s sister is getting married.”

“That right?” Mudfish Brown joined in. “Fore you know it he be a uncle. Uncle Junior.”

They were still calling him that on the ride across the scrublands, Junior shooting Royal a sorry look now and then but not saying anything. There is not much he can say that won’t end with Royal hitting him.

I have never understood why Father is so ill-disposed toward you—

Royal understands. Royal has always understood. Junior is the one who doesn’t fit in here, Junior with his little half smile watching the men thumping Hardaway on the back, not a spot on him from a day of riding, Junior the one who grinds through every stupid detail without complaint, who acts like someone even higher than the white brass is watching his every move, judging his deportment, keeping score, while Royal accepts that he is just another sorry-ass nigger no matter how you dress him up.

The second letter didn’t say she would always love him at the end of it, it said how in the light of the terrible circumstances they should probably not correspond any more. And the third one was to apologize for the second one, but it was only a few lines, like she was in a dungeon somewhere and had to write it quick and smuggle it out.

I shall soon reap the consequences of my own weakness. Do not mourn for me, do not even think of me—

She doesn’t say if she means she was weak to come to him at Jubal’s place or weak not to fight more against the Doctor. It doesn’t matter. She is as gone from his life as if she was dead, worse even. Squaw killing wounded. The boys are having too much fun now and he is afraid they will try to pull him into it and the jug is feeling awfully light. He takes it with him, reeling out through the back to the alley behind where you piss and there are two men already sick there, heaving what is probably not really Old Crow and he decides to get the horse and ride somewhere.

But on Commerce Street there are too many men, the town overstuffed with miners come in desperate to spend their pay and get at least as drunk as Royal is. There are three different fistfights in progress and men peeing right out on the curb and a man who has taken his shirt off standing out in the middle and screaming, just screaming. The Gulch rises up steep to the next block, drunken men stumbling down past as he climbs and thrusts the jug into the arms of an already weaving white miner and then passes through an alley between two buildings and just keeps climbing, up the slope and away from the racket of Bisbee and the glowing lights of the copper smelter just below it. It is steep enough that sometimes he has to put his hands down and climb on all fours but finally he is on the ridge, standing unsteadily, looking back down at the lights and the shouting and the raucous music and now and then a gunshot and he can think of nothing more than Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible story. They had it coming and so did he, it looks like, and he wheels around and walks farther away from the light and the noise.

A different story — forty days and forty nights in the desert, Jesus maybe, or maybe Moses. Mama tried to take them regular to church but for a long time was caring for some white people’s children on Sundays and he and Jubal would go but sit in the back and sneak out sometime before the sermon, so sometimes the stories get mixed up in his head. Forty days and forty nights in the desert and turning away from Temptation and then coming back clean and holy but mostly being away from everybody, away from their ribbing and their eyes able to see the shame of it on your face and them talking about you when they think you can’t hear. Might as well give the damn letters to Hardaway and have him read them out loud. He keeps walking up a dry gulley away from the town, don’t look back, don’t look back, that is another story, and it is getting colder fast now and the wind picking up and he starts to howl back at it. There are coyotes at night, of course, a couple big tribes of them around the Fort that set each other off with their noise that can go on for hours, but you don’t see much of them unless you’re out on maneuvers and cook up a mess of bacon and then they’ll come sniffing, head low and ears back. The stars are gone now, no moon, the sky feeling suddenly low and heavy above him and then there is thunder, rolling at first, and sheet lightning flickering up in the clouds, one section of the sky lighting up for a moment, then another, like the clouds are packs of coyotes calling to each other then CRACK! a bolt sizzling down not so far from him and CRACK! another behind and then it is hail, hard and scouring and there is nowhere to shelter, the land here even more wasted, even less friendly than Montana and the hailstones sting like hell where they slap against his skin, Royal ducking his head in under his arms, left his hat on the bar in the Calumet, and thinking I looked back, dammit, I forgot the story and I looked back and now I will turn into a pillar of shit. And CRACK! it answers, close enough to smell fried air this time, answering him, reminding him how small he is, how it don’t care a thing about his troubles.

Royal sits heavily onto the spiky ground, covering his head and waiting for it to end.

Sergeant Jacks is skirting around Bisbee with Guadalupe and the new mule when a mine foreman riding in the opposite direction tells him there is a soldier sitting in the desert. The mule is the end result of a transaction among Lupe’s hundreds of cousins that started at least two years ago, and he hopes to hell it isn’t stolen. El Chato, who sold it to him at his shack down near Naco a hundred yards from the border, is from the Apache side of her relatives, a son of old Hernán whose sister was one of Geronimo’s wives, and likes to brag about what great stock thieves his people are.