John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The eyes grow sharp. “Yer foolin with me.”

“I assure you I’m not.” He lifts his skimmer off. “My name is Harry Manigault. I’m very new in this city—”

“Brigid,” she says, still suspicious. “It’s another name in Irish but here they call me Brigid.”

“May I call for you?”

“Fer that ye’d need to know where I’m situated. Number and street.”

Harry flushes, in deep now and not sure how to get out of it. “I suppose I would.”

“And what would ye think of a girl who told that to a man who’d just stumbled upon her workin?”

He hadn’t thought of that, with her on her knees in bucket water, an immigrant. A scrubwoman. He wonders if he could ever capture those eyes, not the color of course, but the brightness, the life of them, in a photograph.

“Quite right.”

What would Niles say? Even if he didn’t mean it, he would have something.

“Perhaps I could return at closing time and escort you—”

“My work is just beginnin then. It’s only me and the wax heroes, havin a grand time together.”

“Ah.”

She watches him for a moment with her green eyes. “Sunday afternoons,” she says finally, “I’ve been known to pop into the Hippodrome on Houston Street. A persistent gentleman might find me there. By accident, ye might say.”

“A most happy accident.” He puts his lid back on, then tips it to her. “A pleasure making your acquaintance, Miss Brigid.”

“And where do ye come from, Mr. Mannygalt?”

“North Carolina.”

“Right,” she nods sagely. “I had ye spotted fer a foreigner. Twas a pleasure makin yer acquaintance as well,” she says, raising her scrub brush, “considerin the circumstances.”

Harry tries to walk as steadily as he can around the wet spot, not using the cane till he reaches the stairs outside. The cold hits him like a fist, still a surprise. It is night now, the streetlights glowing. He stands on the walk in front of the Eden Musee, the folded paper forgotten in his pocket, slightly dizzy. His heart is racing again, and he hasn’t even started across 23rd Street.

The armbands are supposed to make it all right, but you never know in El Paso. Royal is holding the reins, Junior never much with a wagon team, as they roll along Second, white folks’ brick houses to the left and Mexican baked adobe to the right. They are both wearing the armbands and strapped with pistols, usually forbidden, but this is a provost detail. Royal keeps his eyes straight ahead, glad it’s noon and most everybody is inside.

“We’ll be back in the thick of it in no time,” says Junior beside him, rubbernecking around like a tourist. “The Philippines, China—”

“You don’t know that.”

Junior has been on him all week to reenlist, their hitch officially over tomorrow and lots of the boys who come in with them at Missoula saying they’re going to hang it up.

“It stands to reason.” Junior holds tight to the seat as Royal turns the team left on Campbell. “We’re experienced, disciplined—”

“Don’t want to shoot them people any more than I wanted to shoot a Spanish.”

“We don’t get to choose our enemies, Royal.”

“If you’re not in the damn Army you do.”

“It will be more like police work by the time we get there. Maintaining order—”

“Don’t care for that neither.”

Junior scowls. “Suppose you were to accept discharge. What would you do?”

Royal has been trying not to think of this. He shrugs. “Go back to Wilmington.”

It is a sore point between them, Junior bragging after every letter he gets about how good his people are making it up in New York, like they never lost a step, while Royal, who gets no mail at all, doesn’t call out the lie. If he even says the name Wilmington, Junior gets all tight and says that’s over, that the colored man’s future all up North now.

Or in the regulars.

“What I’ve heard,” says Junior, turning his head away, “is they even told Mr. Sprunt he can’t hire colored anymore.”

All Royal knows, from the other Wilmington men in the unit, is that his mother wasn’t hurt and Jubal took off and hasn’t been back. It was Junior who told him Dorsey Love is dead and Jessie gone up to a better life in New York.

“Set me there with one dozen of these wildass colored regulars,” said Coop when he heard, Coop who used to be Clarence Rice at home and didn’t come back from leave last night, “and they be a mess of redneck crackers floating in that Cape Fear River.”

Royal pulls the wagon off the street, hitching the pair in the shade of the alleyway next to the jail. He and Junior straighten their uniforms out, set their hats, and step inside.

The deputy leans back in a swivel chair behind a scarred-up desk, chewing tobacco and spitting the juice into a coffee cup in his hand while an electric fan blows air on his face. Another man, an Easterner by his dress, sits across from him writing in a notebook.

“We don’t use it so much as the old days,” the deputy is saying, “but we keep the hinges oiled. I’ll show it to you in a minute, up on the third tier of the tank.”

“And is it usual to have multiple executions?” asks the dude, who must be a reporter.

“Hell, there probly been a double-header before this,” chuckles the deputy. “But not since I been here in El Paso.”

“Excuse me, Deputy—” Junior starts, and the white man just holds his hand out and keeps talking.

“The thing is, we had Flores set to go, and we been trying to get old Geronimo Parra back here to stretch ever since he kilt Charlie Fusselman in a shootout up in the Franklins near ten years ago.”

Junior steps forward and places the folded order in the deputy’s hand. The white man does not look up, and Junior takes two military steps back to stand by Royal again, not quite at attention.

“But Parra slipped under the border, then got caught rustling over in the Territory and ended up coolin his heels in the Santa Fe lockup.”

The deputy glances at the paper.

“Cristy!” he shouts, then spits a big gob of black liquid into the coffee mug.

The newsman never stops scribbling. “You tried to extradite?”

“They wouldn’t stand for it. Only our Captain Hughes, who’s from the same Marfa outfit of Rangers that Charlie Fusselman come from, has been on Parra’s trail all these years and that old boy don’t quit . He runs into Pat Garrett in a saloon—”

“Garrett who killed William Bonney?”

“The very same, still a Territory lawman. Garrett says how they’d do anything to get holt of this bad character name of Agnew, spose to be hiding out in Texas, and proposes a swap.”

“An exchange of prisoners.”

“Agnew wasn’t a prisoner yet ,” grins the deputy, teeth flecked black with tobacco. “But with a chance to bring Geronimo Parra home to justice, Captain Hughes jumped on his pony and went looking. Caught Agnew working as a ranch hand on the Big Bend, and we had our deal with the Territory.”

A jailer in a blue uniform appears, the deputy waving the colonel’s paper at him.

“Bring that nigger trooper out.”

Sergeant Jacks, who grew up in this town, has warned them all about dealing with Texans, the white ones, told them scare stories about John Wesley Hardin and lynch law and the Rangers, especially the Rangers, who are death on Mexicans and not much fonder of colored. The colored and Chinese here live in the Mex section, Chihuahua, and there’s even supposed to be a couple of the old black Seminole scouts left over in Juarez. Royal has come in on leave with the others a dozen times, tequila making quick work of him.