John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

If the girl, Corazón, who seemed nice enough, had told him he was going to have to stick a needle up his peehole every day for two weeks he might have had second thoughts. Runt passed out on a couch, sick as a dog from the rum, but the Minnesotas said he always does that, can’t handle it, and them and Big Ten went too, each with a different girl, yet he is the only one of them here in the clap shack. He wasn’t even that keen on it, only full-on drunk for the first time since San Francisco and doing what the others wanted, and it is just the odds caught up to him, like how he figures it must be on the battlefield.

“Don’t hardly make sense to duck or hide,” says Corporal Grissom in his platoon, whose daddy chased Cheyenne in the regulars. “Bullet got your name on it, it’s gonna come find you.”

Hod pulls the works out and wants to pee right away, the burning and the pressure just awful, but you got to hold it five minutes.

Spinks is waiting when he pulls the canvas curtain open.

“It fall off yet?”

Hod ignores him and hobbles off toward the shitter. They give you some little woven-straw slippers that got nothing behind the heel, so the whole ward of them are shuffling like the old whiskey-soaked paretics he’s seen on Skid Road, the pox gone to their brains.

He crosses paths with the chaplain, who hangs a glare of disapproval on his mug before he comes into the ward most every day to gloat over the ones so far gone they can’t get out of bed. “Malingerers” is the nicest thing the chaplain has called any one of them, but you suppose it’s part of the treatment, Uncle paying you to shoot at Spanish boys and now the natives and not to get infected by the local queridas . Manigault has been riding him since Denver, like the rest of the company won’t figure out their lieutenant is a poker cheat and a humbug without Hod telling them, so it is something of a relief to be in here, now that he’s sure it’s nothing that will kill or unman him. The doc isn’t so bad as long as you hand over a glass of your pee now and then for him to ogle at under his microscope, and the chuck is passable even with meat crossed off the diet.

The clap patients outnumber the syphilitics three to one and there are a couple fellas who got other problems with their kidneys that they put up right next to the shitter. Hod nods to one of them from his company, Loftus, who is propped up to almost a sitting position.

“How’s it going?”

Yesterday Loftus said “Not so good” but today he is a bad color and just looks at Hod like he’s somehow at fault for it all. There is white folks and black folks, thinks Hod, rich folks and poor folks, Spanish and Filipinos, but there is no greater gulf than the one between the sick and the well.

And he’s not that well.

There are maybe a half-dozen of his fellow sinners, what the wags in the hospital have taken to calling “Rough Riders,” lined up at the trough, a couple of them with their pocket watches swinging in front of their faces. Every few seconds one will let it go and moan in anguish or curse or just gasp a quick deep breath as the Protargol and what it carries splashes down onto the metal. Hod is careful not to stand too close to any of them.

“Back on the firing line,” says Blount, shuffling up beside him.

“I figure another minute.”

“Yeah.”

“You wonder who she got hers from.”

“We are all brothers under the foreskin.”

“What’s that mean?”

“If you follow the chain, somebody gives it to somebody else, they pass it on — hell, it could go back to Moses.”

“Moses had the clap?”

“No, but I bet a couple them old boys dancing around the Golden Calf had it. Only they had to persevere without the wonders of modern medicine. Half the damn population must have been in tears every time they took a leak.”

“I say it’s five.”

“Feels like ten. Ready, aim—”

Blount makes a high whine that comes out through his nose, while Hod grunts an “ ah — ah — ah — ah— ” as he urinates, both men tilting their heads back and squinching their eyes shut. Afterward there is water and soap set out to wash it again and towels for drying and then a fresh-cleaned sock to pull over it and keep the new discharge from staining your hospital togs.

“I’d have worn this sock over it when I rolled that señorita,” Blount observes, “I wouldn’t be in this fix.”

She wore a lot more powder than Addie Lee ever did, this girl who give it to him, but seemed nice and friendly and not in a hurry. She was rounder than Addie, too, round in a nice way, and looked to be some kind of mix of Spanish and Filipino, though the people here look so many different ways it’s hard to get a handle on them. She called him “Yankee Boy.”

When he’s finished Hod goes to look for Lan Mei. The corpsman, not Spinks but the other who doesn’t seem to want to be there, says that she was left behind by a pack of nuns who used to run this ward till they set sail for the motherland. Some of the fellas say she was a whore like all the Chinese girls who come from Hongkong and the sisters brought her to the light and give her a job dumping bedpans, but that is only a rumor. There are no women allowed on the venereal ward at all but they’ve seen her in the hallway and one sergeant from the Nebraskas who has since been shipped home smuggled a pint in and got pickled and started railing about how she sneaks in at night and smothers white men with a pillow.

Hod finds her in the little room just off the kitchen, wearing gloves and using tongs to drop the syringes from the morning irrigation into a large kettle of boiling water.

“Mei.”

“You still here, huh?” She shouts a little when she is teasing him, but otherwise has a nice voice, soft and deep for a woman.

“I could go back to my unit any time,” says Hod, “only I’m stuck on you.”

“Stuck.”

“Enamored.” He is a little embarrassed to use the fancy word and wonders if she understands it. Their eyes don’t show as much as a white girl’s, and maybe that means they can’t pretend so much.

“You don’ think right,” she says, attending to her work. “Too much time inna sun.”

She knows that is not what is wrong with him, knows which ward he comes from, but doesn’t seem to care. The steam from the kettle turns to a thin film of water on her face and her hair is wet where it peeks out of the cloth she has tied it back in. He’s seen the other fellas say things at her or about her but none ever really stops to talk and she seems alone, alone as a person can be, though this is more her country than his.

“So where you come from, Mei?”

“Born in Guangxi.”

“What’s that like?”

Mei looks up at him, wipes the wet from her face with the back of her sleeve. “Work in a field. Leave there when I’m a little girl, go to Hongkong.”

Hod decides not to ask her what she did in Hongkong. She is skinny like Addie Lee but not from the consumption or they wouldn’t let her work in a hospital.

“We stopped by there for coal,” says Hod. “But they wouldn’t even let us off the ship.”

“You pretty sorry bugger, then, huh?”

He has to laugh. “Yeah, that would be me.” Disgrace to his uniform or no, Hod thinks, before I go back to the company I am going to try to kiss this woman.

One of the doc’s adjutants steps in then and asks what he is doing there.

“I found a syringe on the floor,” Hod tells him. “I just brung it in.”

The officer looks at the black mark on Hod’s sleeve and makes a disgusted face. “Get back to your ward.”

“Yes sir.”

He pauses in the kitchen to listen and is relieved when the adjutant has nothing to say to Mei. A sad-eyed private who looks sicker than most of Hod’s bunkies is stirring a huge cauldron full of bubbling oatmeal with a wooden paddle.