John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“So what do you think?” he says to Royal. “They’re making the pay up, and once you’re off the books—”

“Give me one more reason,” says Royal, easing the pair to a stop in front of the stockade. “One good reason.”

Junior leans in and speaks quiet enough that Cooper, brooding in the back of the wagon, can’t hear.

“Because you’re my friend,” says Junior. “And I can’t do it without you.”

Sergeant Jacks is in the little guard shack with Lumbley, the duty officer.

“You didn’t make it to the other side,” says Jacks, looking Coop up and down.

“I was about to the middle of the bridge when I trip over them trolley tracks,” Coop shrugs. “And then it feel so good, layin on them boards, my head in Old Mexico and my feets in the United States, I just decide to take a nap.”

Jacks steps close and looks into Cooper’s eyes, searching. “You wonder what could put an idea like that in a man’s head.”

Junior makes a noise to get his attention. “I’ve come to a decision, Sergeant,” he says, straightening up and locking his eyes forward the way you only need to do with captains and higher. “I’ll be reenlisting.”

“I’ll call the War Department,” says Lumbley. “They been holdin off on their plans.”

Cooper starts to laugh. “Me too, Sarge. I mean after I does my little stay in here, you can sign me up.”

Jacks shakes his head. “ If you survive the next three weeks’ punishment, and if the 25th Regular Infantry, Colored, in its ill-advised generosity, agrees to accept your petition,” he says, “you will have to earn those boots back, Private.” He turns to Royal. “How bout you?”

Fort Bliss is like Huachuca, is like Missoula. Some mountains on one side and then just open land with hardly a soul upon it. Nothing out there. Royal sees himself walking in the great emptiness, on and on, no uniform on his back, a part of nothing with nowhere to go.

Junior won’t look at him but is listening hard.

“Yeah,” says Royal. “Count me in.”

This is not the first time Tondo has burned. Twice while he was at the Ateneo the chapel bells rang and the Manila firemen stumbled over each other and the British sent their shiny wagon into the streets and the sky was alive with floating embers all through the night. Diosdado ducks low and zigzags through the maze of nipa huts, thrusting the torch to anything not already ablaze. Men and women and children scatter before him, barefoot, carrying whatever they value most and searching for a pathway through the flames. The plan is to move from east to west, advance runners warning the people and the next wave firing their homes, driving everyone before them to the sea. But the wind has shifted several times, torch-men have run ahead of the ones crying the alarm and there are screams now, lifting above the crackle and roar of the conflagration, screams of fear and more hysterical screams that Diosdado doesn’t want to think about and bamboo timbers exploding like rifle shots and the pop-pop-pop of real rifles to the east as their snipers engage the first of the Americans to respond. He has to backtrack quickly as a nipa hut ahead erupts into flame, a burning dog squealing as it scampers out, tail on fire, the rush of heat like a blow to the side of his face and there is panic in the firelit eyes of the scattering people, panic in their shouts to each other and the pop-pop-pop closer now with what must be every chapel bell in Manila ringing at once. The local firemen are out there somewhere and the British, no doubt, never miss a chance to show off their new steam pumper, and the Americans with whatever equipment they’ve loaded off their great ships — but when Tondo burns it burns to the ground.

A small boy is staggering under the weight of the plaster statue of Saint Joseph he carries on his shoulder, trying to escape but driven back from a wall of heat in each direction. Diosdado shouts and the boy whirls, sees the torch in his hand and backs away from him, terrified, before turning to disappear into the thick black smoke rolling in from the west.

Diosdado edges away from the smoke and tries to gasp a clean breath, the scorched air searing his lungs, worrying that his clothes and hair, despite their dousing before the raid, will burst into flame. He is trapped. The burning is only a diversion, meant to draw some of the Americans away from Binondo before General Luna’s attack on their northernmost lines. It is the last hope, more desperate even than the defense at Caloocan when the enemy first pushed north from the river, Diosdado’s company among four thousand dug in by the chapel and the Chinese cemetery, lying in the muck of the rice fields with the American artillery raining down from La Loma and the Gatling gun tearing the sod off the ditches and the yanqui infantry advancing like a murderous flood tide as the colonels flapped and postured and squawked at each order from Luna saying Aguinaldo, Aguinaldo was the supremo and they would obey only him while their men fought bravely, desperately, uselessly and the railhead and the five locomotives with all their cars sitting on the tracks were lost.

Diosdado tries to strip his uniform tunic off but the buttons are too hot to touch. Luna insisted the officers keep them on for the raid—“So they know we are not tulisanes ,” he said, “not a rabble of bandits but the Army of the Filipino Republic, saviors of the nation.” Saviors, Diosdado thinks as the shifting curtains of flame drive him one way and then another, of the very people whose homes we have put to the torch. He is afraid, more afraid than he was on the night the fight with the Americans started, buried in the wet earth as the shells burst above him, or at Caloocan trying to keep his face toward the enemy as he stumbled backward over the paddies, firing his pistol methodically till his ammunition was all gone, the huge Americans in their blue uniforms pausing only to chop and hack with rifle butt and bayonet at the wounded men he’d left behind, Diosdado finally turning and running to catch the ones still living and gather them back into some kind of coherent unit.

The Lake of Fire. Every story Padre Inocencio terrified them with in the primario ended with the Lake of Fire and the agonies of the sinners cast into it, their shrieks of anguish unheard in Paradise, their flesh rendered from their bodies, limbs twisted with spasms of pain, bones blackened and cracking in the molten inferno but not dying, no, doomed to endless torment. Once he held Diosdado’s hand over a candle flame till the skin of his palm blistered, reciting the litany of tortures reserved for the damned and holding a scapular with the image of a woman engulfed in flames close to his face. “Imagine this pain a thousand times hotter, all over your body,” he hissed into the little boy’s ear. “Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, without hope, without release. This is Eternal Damnation.”

Burning to death has always been his worst fear, the nightmare that wrenches him awake in a sweat. Diosdado drops his torch. The leather of his holster feels like it is melting, the metal butt of his pistol like a sizzling griddle as he forces his hand closed around it. I will not say a prayer, Diosdado thinks, cocking it. And if there is a Hell, Padre Inocencio will be there to greet me.

He is lifting the pistol toward his head when Sergeant Bayani emerges from the black smoke, a torch in each hand, eyes gleaming with flame, a lunatic smile lighting up his face. There is vino on his breath as he shouts over the crackling of the nipa and the screams and the bells tolling everywhere and the rifle fire on all sides now, Bayani who threw Diosdado unconscious over his shoulder on the first night of the war with the yanquis and carried him halfway to Malolos, who was waiting for Diosdado with the survivors of the rout at Caloocan, dug in and ready to resist again, on the outskirts of Tinajeros, Bayani who the men say is insane and invincible, the anting anting sewn beneath the skin just over his heart protecting him from evil thoughts and enemy bullets.