John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Some of my fellas hauling timber in seen him,” says the mine foreman, trying not to stare at Guadalupe on the grulla mare beside him. “They stopped and walked all the way over from the wagon road but he said he’d just stay where he was.”

Lupe is half Mex and half Indian, which Jacks didn’t know till they were hitched and nobody come to congratulate her. Relatives on both sides will nod hello if they pass by but that is about all. And then up in Missoula with her it was a whole nother kind of people, white ladies who couldn’t be bothered and the Flathead gals who don’t speak Spanish or Apache. So it is mostly just the two of them, which has been just fine so far. Marriage is a tricky enough deal without the in-laws thrown into the pot.

“ Es un loco? ” she asks about the soldier when they are riding away.

“ No sé cual soldado es ,” he shrugs. “ Quizás es solamente un borrachón .”

There are men in the company, good men in a pinch, who can’t handle peacetime duty and fall into the bottle. And it is worse out here in the Great Nowhere, easy for a soldier to think the Army has just forgotten about you, that you’ll shrivel up in the sun like a dead rattler. Which is some of why he chased after Lupe so hard on his first tour here, knowing only that she wasn’t white and she wasn’t for sale and that she was one tough trader. They still had a sutler at the Fort then and whenever he would try to swap canned provisions for her wild game or Navaho blankets or other souvenir goods she would pick a can out at random and make him eat the contents, all of it, before she’d close the deal. Wouldn’t talk any English, either, though even back then Jacks could tell she understood it fine.

She points to the sky.

There are nearly a dozen buzzards wheeling lazily in the air, enough to know that what’s below them is bigger than a javelina and high enough to guess that it isn’t dead yet. Lupe leads the mule on a rope. It is maybe a three-year-old, bred in the Mex style on a mustang mare, and is way too curious to have been used in the traces. Its big ears start twitching every which way when they cut off the road and into the chaparral.

From a distance he does look dead, though he is sitting up, cross-legged in the middle of a big patch of ocotillo and cholla cactus. There were maybe twenty each from A and H got the two-day pass, let them blow off some steam and keep the barracks scraps to a minimum. Men are not mules, which would be happy to eat mash and switch flies all day, they get mean and skittish if there’s too little to do, if there’s nobody else to fight but each other. Huachuca isn’t bad duty, laid out just like Fort Missoula only the mountains are scrub instead of evergreen, but riding herd on the cursing, whining, sweat-stinking lot of troopers will wear a man down, so whenever there is a chance to spend a night at the cabin he grabs it. If there was ever a person don’t need taking care of it is Guadalupe. She won’t come on the Fort any more, not even to sell, and he figures it is on his account. The old hands know better than to call him Squaw Man or tamale-eater but still it is nice to keep the two things separate. Army owns enough of you.

It is Royal Scott.

It is Royal Scott and he’s lost his hat and the skin on his face has started to blister. He sits cross-legged, hands resting on his knees with his palms up, eyes closed. Lupe hands Jacks her reins and gets down, stepping carefully over the horse-crippler and around the cholla till she can bend down and look at him close. He opens his eyes to see her.

“Here she is,” he smiles. “Come to kill the wounded.”

“You got lost in the desert,” calls Sergeant Jacks, giving the boy an out. Scott looks over and doesn’t seem too surprised that he is there.

“No, Sergeant, this is just where I come to a stop.”

“You were due back in camp sometime yesterday, I expect.”

The boy shakes his head. “I need to go home.”

“You are home, son. Till they tell us different.”

He keeps smiling, one of those don’t-give-a-damn-no-more smiles Jacks has learned to be wary of. Guadalupe is still bent over the boy, studying his face.

“Just leave me here, Sarge. I aint worth shit for a soldier.”

He is mostly right. “Army will be the judge of that, son. Get up and we ride in together.”

Private Scott holds his hands out. At some point, probably in the dark, he fell and tried to catch himself and got both hands full of cholla spines.

“I can’t hold no reins.”

“You just get up. Lupe can pull you along.”

Lupe helps him stand. He teeters some when he walks, but there is no bottle left on the ground so it is just thirst and hunger and being out in that crazy hail that made such a racket on the cabin roof.

“Thank you, M’am, I think I got it now.” He looks up to Jacks. He isn’t the worst in the company, but he is no warrior, not like some of the old boys or that wild-ass Cooper. “This is her, isn’t it? Mrs. Sergeant.”

“That’s her.”

“I thought it was just a rumor.”

Jacks gets down from his buckskin quarter horse to help her hoist him up onto the mare.

The boy’s hands are useless so it is not easy. The circle of buzzards loosens, disappointed, and one by one they peel off to search for a less active prospect.

The private is still watching Lupe. “She write you letters when you’re away?”

“She don’t write.”

“Good. Don’t teach her.”

When the boy is settled in the saddle Guadalupe rides bareback on the new mule, who is surprised but doesn’t kick, pulling the mare along by the reins.

“ Es que se le parte el corazón ,” she says to Jacks when they are on their way to Huachuca. “ Nada más .”

The Army will occasionally grant leave on the death of a soldier’s mother, but makes no provision for broken hearts. Every time the damn mail comes there is somebody left in a funk, and he wishes the people at home would have the decency to lie if they don’t have good news to report.

“We’ll stop on the way, deal with them hands of yours. Lupe got something to put on it.”

“She a medicine woman?”

“Horse doctor. If she can fix saddle galls and glanders and poll-evil, I figure she can’t do too much damage to a colored infantryman.”

It is only a glue that she makes that you paint on after the big spines are pulled out and wait for it to dry. When you peel it off all the little cactus hooks and hairs in the wounds come out too. They ride for some time, Scott still smiling his smile though he is facing at least a week in the brig and won’t see another leave for months, though it must be some effort to keep seated being weak and dizzy and riding with his hands crossed in front of his chest.

“You were out there a good five miles from Bisbee,” Jacks says finally. “Mind telling me where you were headed?”

“Not headed anywhere. Just waitin.”

“Waiting for what?”

The private stops smiling and looks off to the right to the Dragoons, where old Cochise holed up with his people. “You sit there long enough,” he says, “and the Dark One is spose to come and offer you the world.”

It will take a day or two for the word to drift back from Magnolia, and with the election tomorrow it won’t likely compete as big news. The Reverend and Mrs. Cox seem like they’ve hosted plenty of these — wedding party of four, no announcement in the papers. The Record has shut down, of course, Manly supposed to be halfway to Philadelphia, and the Messenger doesn’t bother with colored society. Dorsey doesn’t mind a bit, not any of it. Only too bad Mama passed before she could see him married to Miss Jessie Lunceford.