John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“My people see this, they gone get a start,” says Zeke, still excited by his acting debut. “Aint noner them ever been in no photograph, movin or not.”

The movement, of course, is an illusion. Inside the Beast there are cylinders that move in concert with other cylinders, celluloid coated with chemicals cranked on a spool and held in its groove by a claw mechanism, and passed, hopefully at a consistent rate, in front of an aperture that allows a finite flash of light to hit it before being wound back into darkness. The image borne by that light and captured in the chemicals is only a photograph, as still as any other. But rolled in succession with the other photographs caught on the strip of film, the human eye is fooled—

“They gone think this real? I mean the other people who don’t know me that sees it?”

Harry helps guide the body of the Beast as they slide it forward on the wagon bed.

“That depends on who displays it,” he says. “We’ll send this out as a facsimile, but as to how it is presented in the halls—” he spreads his arms. “It looked very real.”

“That’s what I was thinkin,” says Zeke, securing a rope around the camera body. “They was just a second there, before the man yell ‘Fire!’ where I got to feelin they might be real bullets in them rifles.” He touches his chest. “Made my heart skip a beat.”

“You were very convincing.”

Zeke nudges the other boy with his elbow, winks. “Skeeter here done wet his nappies when they shoot.”

It is not so different in principal from the Gatling gun, Harry thinks, though one device makes itself repeatedly vulnerable while the other deals out lead with precision. At the moment of the execution volley he had been struck by the notion that if Heise’s arm were quicker, four cranks per second perhaps, or the instrument driven by a dynamo with sufficient speed, one could capture motion faster than the capacity of the human eye. One could slow down time itself. The bullets could be seen in their deadly trajectory, the instant of their penetration into the skulls of the insurgents — but of course that would give away the illusion. There were no bullets, only the wadding from blank cartridges, and there was no smashing of bones, no spilling of brains.

When the equipment is secured Harry joins Mr. Heise and Mr. White in the coach to take them back to the shop. The old stone house, windows missing, overgrown with creepers, is quickly left behind them.

“The Spanish-atrocity theme is wearing a bit thin,” says Mr. White. “Given the turn of events.”

Before this the only view they’ve let Harry take part in was Did Somebody Say Watermelon? , and that had been done in the Black Maria with Skeeter and another of the boys from today.

“One of them moved,” says Mr. Heise. “One of our insurrectos . After he was shot.”

“The throes of death.”

“He looked at the camera before he did it.”

“We’ll cut it short. The view is over when they hit the ground. No use in being morbid about it.”

They ride silently through the Jersey woodlands. There might be some great use, thinks Harry, in being morbid. If they’d been able to mount the Beast on some sort of runner or sled apparatus and push it forward to see the bodies of the executed men more closely at the end, or if the camera were not such a behemoth and could be thrown over the shoulder and transported, like a Kodak on a tripod, as easily as a rifle, think of what Paley, or perhaps an operator less portly, might have captured at Las Guasimas or Kettle Hill or in this new Philippine nightmare that Niles has gotten himself embroiled in. Harry thinks again of the image of a bullet leaving a rifle and followed directly to the spot between the eyes of its victim, a handsome Southerner with a constant smirk of self-love on his countenance—

The ladies could not bear to view such a thing, of course, but ladies are not the advocates or perpetrators of war, and cannot be expected to be its aficionados .

The coach passes the wagon bearing the Beast, and Harry leans out to look. To any other eye it is only a bulky and seemingly purposeless piece of furniture.

“I thought our Dago capitán was awfully good,” says Mr. Heise. “Haughty and officious.”

“And without a moustache to twirl,” smiles Mr. White. “Quite an accomplishment.”

Harry’s mind is racing. If you staged it, he thinks, interrupting the wide view with a closer one of the condemned men’s faces, then sighting down the line of pointing rifles, perhaps a little stage blood to increase the impact of the sledding shot of the insurgents’ bodies — or if you could be there, be there on the actual battlefield to capture forever that horrible moment, one man murdering another in the name of the flag — how could they go on with it?

If they want war, he thinks, first make them watch it up close.

Mariquina has to go. Captain Stewart and Phillippi from Cripple Creek and Pynchon, the bicycle racer from Company K, and Maccoe and Danny Donovan killed in four different fights here and enough is enough. Hod trots with a torch made from a length of bamboo and a googoo’s abandoned shirt soaked in kerosene, touching it to the dry thatch roofs of the nipa huts that catch fire with a hiss like that’s what they’re made for. The church is already pouring smoke. This is how it goes, he figures, maybe not so many of the people in this town want to fight them but there’s ones who do who keep coming back and pretty soon the details don’t matter — if it shoots at you, you kill it and tear down whatever it was hiding behind.

The people are all gone, run off into the hills around them, and tonight they will come back and dig for whatever they’ve hidden in the ground and maybe just the church steeple will be left standing and maybe not even that. Lots of the other boys are whooping, eyes bright with the blaze, throwing the wood stumps the locals use to husk their rice into the burning huts and smashing their water jugs with the butts of their rifles and Tutweiler running in and out adding to his collection of statues and pictures of the Virgin and Grissom’s monkey tormenting a fighting cock that has been left pegged to the ground, its feathers starting to singe, but Hod is just trying to get the job done. The quickstep has eased off finally, but now he has the other problem, needing to piss all the time and when he does it’s like acid coming out. This Philippines is trying to kill him.

It is the most beautiful place he’s ever seen, Mariquina, looking at it from the heights by the waterworks, set in between the dark green patches of trees and the lighter green of canefields and corn and rice and bananas and sweet potatoes and watermelons that the fellas would swipe and eat on the road after cleaning the insurrectos out of town yet again and now it is burning, burning — nothing to see from the heights if you were up there but black smoke.

He comes upon Big Ten with nothing in his hand to set fire with, the Indian just standing in the middle of it all, watching moodily. The huts crackle and pop around them, black smoke blowing to the west.

“Some party, huh?” he says to Hod, a strange little smile on his face. “All we need is the regimental band.”

Later, back up on the hill, there is distant shelling, a hotter engagement just to the north, and the captain lets them stand and watch for a moment before they march off to help. Hod feels it coming and turns his back to the far-off battle and opens his fly and out comes a too-yellow stream of it.

Burning.

Nilda squats with the others in the cogon grass, mosquitoes feeding on them all. Her cousin’s little bahay kubo in Mariquina is in flames and there is another battle ahead of them, gunfire and explosions, so they hide and wait. The yanquis usually leave before it is dark, but this time there will be nothing left.