John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Diosdado nods. “Stay and eat something before you go back.”

“ Gracias, jefe .”

He leaves Sargento Bayani in charge and heads down the road to the west, refugees from Marilao eyeing him uneasily as they pass on their way to Bulacan. Hererra, who is head of intelligence under General del Pilar, stands with a squad of bored-looking fusileros guarding an American prisoner under a huge kupang tree. The soldier is very young and very blond and very sunburned, looking scared and defiant at the same time as he sits with his hands bound behind his back. He doesn’t seem to be wounded.

“Bring him out here.”

Hererra’s men pull the boy to his feet and drag him out into the midday sun to face Diosdado.

“You know what we want?” asks Hererra.

Diosdado nods and walks around the soldier, who tries to keep a steady gaze but has to blink as the sweat rolls into his eyes.

“Your name?”

“Winston Wall.”

“What regiment are you in, Winston Wall?”

The boy squints, frowns. “I don’t have to tell you nothin.”

Diosdado examines Wall’s uniform. They have good boots, all of them, and go into battle with belts spiked full of ammunition.

“You are a private in the Kansas Volunteers,” he says, “under Colonel Funston.”

Wall tries to hawk on the ground but can’t make enough spit.

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.”

Diosdado speaks to Hererra in Tagalog. Some of the yanquis understand Spanish. “How was he captured?”

Hererra smiles. “This yanqui cannot swim. We pulled him out downstream from the fight at Marilao.”

Diosdado turns back to the private. The Kansas soldiers have already made a reputation. “It seems your cupadres have abandoned you.”

“I just got separated, is all.” The boy, taller by a head than Diosdado, lifts his chin and tries to look indifferent. “So you people gone shoot me?”

Diosdado shakes his head but doesn’t smile. “Not now. Not here.”

Before they would send this boy on to Malolos for questioning, would hold him for a prisoner exchange, but headquarters is preparing to leave Malolos and haven’t told anyone where they will set up next.

“You gone feed me, then? I haven’t et for two days.”

Diosdado nods at the fusileros , tiny-looking near the American, who follow their words with rapt incomprehension. Most have never seen a yanqui who wasn’t charging them with a Springfield in hand.

“When these men get to eat,” he says to the private, “I’m sure they’ll give you something. Did you fight at Caloocan?”

The boy can’t help but grin. “That was one hell of a scrap. You boys give it to us pretty hot for a spell till they brung the artillery down on you, tore the hell outta that town. Then it was pretty much butt-and-bayonet drill.”

“You executed prisoners.” A few men who submerged themselves in the water of the ditches saw and crawled back after dark to report the slaughter. The boy seems perplexed, frowning again.

“I don’t know as how we held on to anybody long enough for them to be a prisoner,” he says finally. “Int there some kinda rule about that?”

“If a man is unarmed and surrenders, he is a prisoner. Such actions have their consequence.”

“So you are gonna shoot me.”

Diosdado looks up into the boy’s sunburned face. His nose has begun to peel. “That depends on what you can tell us.”

The boy looks as if he will cry. “But I don’t know nothin. I don’t even know where this is.”

“We are on a road between Marilao and Bulacan.”

“I mean where this whole island is, like on a map. I never been out of Kansas till they shipped us out west, and I was sick on the boat the whole damn trip over. We come to that Hongkong they wouldn’t even let me ashore.”

There isn’t much to know. The Americans are driving north and east from Manila and they have better rifles and better training and officers who speak the same language as their men and aren’t threatening to murder each other. There is no great mystery to their tactics, MacArthur’s division moving parallel to the one commanded by Lawton, fighting up the Dagupan line till they can move their troops by rail. The boy knows less than Diosdado’s own ignorant soldados .

“You had better think of something,” he says to Private Wall. “The people where they are taking you are very angry.”

“I can tell you one thing.” The boy is shifting from one foot to the other and sweating heavily now. The yanquis have been in the country long enough to have the sprue and if they stay through the humid months many will die. The Spanish cemetery in Manila is full of boys who wasted away with disease and weren’t worth the trouble to ship their bodies home.

“I can tell you one damn thing,” he continues, “and that’s that you googoos don’t hold a prayer in this deal. Once Uncle sets his cap for something you can’t chase him off from it. We got an Army full of Indin fighters and wildass country boys and there aint a thing we like better than a old-fashioned rabbit hunt.” He jerks his head at Diosdado. “You’re as near to a white man as they got here — you ought to tell em they don’t have a show.”

Hererra, curious at the boy’s outburst, steps closer. “What is he saying?”

Diosdado wonders how he would act if captured by the Americans, what posture of resolute defiance befits an officer of the Philippine Republic. “He tells me that we’re losing the war.”

The capitán smiles grimly. “I’ll pass that on to my superiors.”

Diosdado gives Private Wall a last appraising look, then starts back to Bulacan. “Your prisoner is going to shit his pants,” he calls, “and then you are going to have to smell him all the way to headquarters.”

“ Cabrón! ” Hererra shouts, grabbing the private and shoving him toward the stream that parallels the road, yelling at his men to pull the boy’s pants down.

The first line of trenches is dug at the south end of the village, women and boys running with water held in joints of bamboo for their own men and for the soldiers who toil beside them. The Pampangano brothers have something resembling a tinola cooking and many of the men are chewing on unripe mangos they have knocked down. It is the time of day when Diosdado feels like he would resign his commission and surrender to the enemy in exchange for a café con leche and a buñuelo at La Campana on the corner of the Escolta and San Jacinto. He did not appreciate the sweetness of his student days, the dreamlike quality of life in the Walled City, and now it is gone forever.

“What was he like?” asks Sargento Bayani, helping the men reinforce the trench walls with lengths of bamboo and palm trunks. “The prisoner?”

“Big,” says Diosdado. “Like all of them. Giants.” He sits on top of the piled earth. His uniform pants can’t get any filthier. “Above all else, the americanos are not the Spanish.”

“You still believe that?”

“The peninsulares are capable of wickedness. And they’re weary — three hundred years of fighting us here.”

“And the americanos —?”

“The americanos are — innocent. The way a crocodile is innocent.”

He has seen them shoot unarmed men, men begging to live, has seen them set fire to a palm-thatch hut to drive whoever is inside out onto their bayonets. But still they seem guileless, childlike in their murder.

“Innocent and hungry,” he says.

Bayani spits. “I grew up hungry.”

It seems that he is from Zambales like Diosdado, though they have avoided speaking of it.