John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“I pride myself now on not being tragic,” says Miss Loretta out loud as the final chord sustains, then fades. “Disappointed, perhaps — but never tragic.”

Jessie is looking at her now, unsettled. Miss Loretta gives her a rueful smile.

“That was excellent, dear, very powerful. Let us proceed to Mr. Liszt.”

“Here’s Soapy’s other nigger,” says Tommy Kearns as Hod walks into the Palace of Delight.

He is used to it by now. “You got some tables?”

“In the back.”

A few customers are sleeping off the night’s celebration beneath the elaborate painting on the rear wall, Seven Muses in transparent wisps of gauze dancing in a sylvan glade with a thick-muscled man. Smokey has been shy of stepping in here since the night he was accused of staring at it by a cabin-crazy sourdough and nearly lynched.

“What Jeff need tables for?”

“He doesn’t,” says Hod, crossing toward the back room. “Ham-Grease Jimmie needs tables and he’s got a side of beef going over to the Old Vienna who are sending some empty liquor bottles to the Pantheon where they put whatever it is they mix up there into them.”

Tommy Kearns laughs. “And somewhere along the line it ends up in Jeff’s pocket.”

“Right now we just need the tables.”

Smokey is waiting with the wagon in the alleyway. They are halfway loaded when they hear the whistle echoing on the sides of the channel.

“ City of Portland ,” says Smokey, who is never wrong. “Made good time.”

They quickly empty the wagon and pull it around front and join the rush down to the water. The steamer is pulled up to the Juneau Wharf, just throwing the gangplank down when they arrive. Steering is Hod’s least favorite part of the job, but Niles says he was born for it.

A steam whistle blows and the greenhorns come down the chute and immediately men are shouting offers to them, pulling their coats and promoting their resorts, handing out cards and handbills, promising to grease the wheels on the way to paydirt and warning to watch out for their fellow touts. Hod picks out the likeliest mark, a man who pulls an expensive watch out on a gold chain to check the time every few seconds and skitters over to eyeball each bit of his truck when it hits the planks.

“This is mine ,” he says to no one in particular, then hurries over to claim the next sack of meal.

Hod waits till he has his back turned, arguing with a deck ape about being in a hurry, and begins to load the man’s goods.

“Whoah! Whoah! Whoah! That’s mine!”

Hod and Smokey have a heavy crate in hand. “This here?”

“Yes!”

“You sure?”

“Yes!”

They lay the crate on the ground. “Where you going with it?”

“Over the Pass to the goldfields, goddam it, what do you think?”

Hod rests a foot on the crate and stares at it, scratching his head.

“How you gone get it there?”

The mark gets a shrewd look in his eye. “You men packers?”

“No, but we work for the Merchant Exchange. That’s who will set you up with packers.”

“That’s where we goin,” says Smokey, “once we load up some goods offen this boat.”

The mark narrows his eyes even more. “How much to haul my lot over there?”

Hod shrugs, grins. “ Our horny-handed sons of toil ,” Niles Manigault is fond of saying, “ possess more guile than is apparent .”

“We goin there anyhow,” he says. “Don’t spose it’s no bother.”

They pile the wagon with the mark’s whole outfit and four crates of fresh oysters Jeff Smith has promised somebody for a favor and roll up Runnalls Street to Jeff’s Merchant Exchange building which also holds the Dominion Telegraph Service where greenhorns send their messages home, five dollars for ten words, on wires that end three yards from the back door. Syd Dixon is working the store.

“You get them oysters to the Golden North?” he says, face buried in a ledger book.

“This fella here going over the Pass.”

Dixon jumps to his feet, looking pale but not as shaky as some mornings.

“You’re a lucky man, sir, to be spared the riffraff at the wharf. We are a young city, growing every day, and it is much too easy for an honest fortune-seeker like yourself to be — well — taken ad van tage of. You’ve already purchased the necessary equipment, I trust?”

“I—”

“We left it on the boardwalk out front.”

“Capital.” Dixon makes a shooing gesture with his hand. “Now get those oysters to the hotel before they spoil.”

The mark gives Hod a dollar coin for a tip.

“You done all the talkin,” says Smokey when Hod offers it to him, riding back to the Palace of Delight for the tables.

“Mr. Smith pays me to pick things up and put em down,” says Hod, laying the coin in Smokey’s lap. “I don’t want any profit from the other.”

At least once a week he has to be the Eager Prospector, making a show at the Assay Office in front of some mark who will be inveigled to buy out from under him the worthless claim that he lacks the proper paperwork to file on. Or the Desperate Husband, forced to relinquish promising digs to join his dying wife in Kansas. Or the Assayer, approached to verify that the bar of coated lead Doc is peddling, at a severe financial loss, mind you, is indeed solid gold.

“Men so greedy,” Jeff Smith likes to say when he has an audience gathered, “men so ignorant, such men cannot withstand the rigors of the frozen wilderness. We do them a service, skinning them down to their birthday suits before they can put their lives in peril.”

They drop off the oysters and haul a crated player piano from the wharf to the Garden of Joy just as the winter sun drops behind the mountain and the dance halls begin to fill up. Smokey leaves Hod outside the Nugget.

“You watch out for them womens,” he grins, and turns the nag toward the livery barn.

The floor is shaking under the weight of heavy-footed men and brightly dressed women dancing to band music, Hod fading into a corner to watch Addie Lee work. She twirls with one clomping sourdough or another as the fiddler saws out shortened versions of Mountain Canary or Turkey in the Straw or The Irish Washerwoman at a dollar a go till the girls are breathless and suggest their partners sit out the ballad, sung by Dingle Rafferty, who during the daylight hours removes horseflops from in front of those establishments willing to pay, and there is Addie Lee drinking teawater and the sourdough a two-dollar whiskey, sitting in one of the little boxes partitioned against the north wall—

As I trip across the Dead Horse Trail

With an independent air

— sings little Rafferty from atop a liquor crate next to the piano, chin lifted to the ceiling, eyes closed—

You can hear the girls declare

“He must be a millionaire!”

— Hod watching from his corner as half the men crowd back to the bar for a quick one, Suds dealing out the house mixture and sloppily weighing dust on the scales and the percentage girls who are left with no partner clustering together to steady themselves on each other’s shoulders as they adjust shoes and straighten stockings and the ones in the boxes allowing just enough to keep their escorts’ pokes open—

You can see them sigh and wish to die

You can see them wink the other eye

At the man who found the mother lode in Dawson!

— Rafferty adding verses till he gets the high sign from somebody in the bar and finishing with a high, sweet, wavering note, men stomping and clapping as he hops off his box with the fiddle skreeking a lead-up to a schottische, the banjo man and tubthumper waiting till negotiations on the floor are settled before joining in and Addie Lee out being hurled around in yet another man’s paws.