John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“You care to sit in, Claude?” says Jeff Smith, who knew the man when he’d stick his hand in a cuspidor full of swoose if you tossed a silver dollar in it. “We promise to take it easy on you.”

“Sorry, me and the girls are headed over to the Music Hall. I bought the house out. They’re puttin on East Lynne just for the three of us.” He winks. “The girls get shy in big crowds. They’re sisters, you know.”

“Recently plucked from the orphanage, no doubt,” says Mizner, and the girls giggle.

“Just thought I’d pay my respects, let you boys know I’m back in town. Let’s go, ladies, we got money to spend!”

“Aint no justice in this world,” says the man with the burned face when they are gone.

Arizona Charlie laughs. “He’ll hit every saloon in town on the way to that theater, showing his roll and telling his story.”

“You see that flasher on his ring finger?” says Niles.

“Diamond big as a gull egg.”

“Paste,” says Niles, laying his cards face up. “I was there when Jeff sold it to him.”

“It once belonged to the Duchess of Mesopotamia,” says Jeff Smith, revealing his hand and sweeping the pot. “One acquires the pedigree along with the stone itself.”

The men laugh then and Ox Knudsen stumbles out of Addie Lee’s room with a red tongue of flannel shirt wagging through his open fly, laughing along though he didn’t hear the joke.

“Feel like I just went forty rounds,” he says loudly, shouldering in between Hod and the burned sourdough. “Gimme a beer, Suds.”

“You couldn’t hold your left hand up for forty rounds, much less your pecker,” says Tex Rickard, and Ox laughs heartily, carefully spilling beer on Hod as he turns to face the card table.

“If a man got balls between his legs,” he says after draining the schooner, “he gets his business over quick. Wouldn’t take me no six rounds,” raising his voice theatrically, “to put away some nigger’s assistant.”

Hod can feel Jeff Smith watching him, and the others, but doesn’t take the bait.

“Seems to me, he lasted that long with Choynski, there must have been some money bet on the round.” Ox insinuating, wiping beer foam from his moustache. Smith’s eyes go cold the way they do when the wrong person calls him Soapy or he is crossed or just wants to put you off balance.

“If you could count, Ox,” he says, “you could make some money too.”

The Swede laughs loud with his mouth, then bumps Hod hard putting his schooner back on the counter, raising his voice enough to be heard beyond the hanging flag as he stomps out of the bar. “I’ll take your Yellow-Stain Kid or any other man you can find, got-dammit! You know where to find me.”

Rickard waits till Knudsen stomps out, clapping his hands slightly off time to the music from the dance hall, before he asks. “So how bout it, Jeff? Middle of the winter, people getting restless—”

Smith shuffles the cards lightly, eyes meeting Hod’s as he turns around on the stool. “It’s not when the roosters are ready to fight, Tex. It’s when the suckers are ready to bet .”

They go back to playing then, and Hod drinks a soda water Suds hands him. A man like Flapjack drives his stakes in over the right pile of rocks and he is transformed — ugly, stunted, cross-eyed — into a figure of envy, of legend. He throws money at beautiful young women and they throw themselves back. Ox Knudsen struts around the camp accepting free drinks and the nearest seat to the woodstove because he can pound most everybody he meets into blood paste and lets them know it. And Hod Brackenridge, assistant nigger, waits on a stool for his girl’s quim to dry up so he can stand to look at her.

He waits till they are deep in a high-stakes hand, too intent to be watching, and slips behind the American flag.

She is sitting on the cot with a cardboard fan from Peoples the undertaker, wafting the air around her toward the door. “I swear that Ox don’t eat nothin but beans.”

“You see him a lot?”

“Whenever he’s got the mazuma,” she shrugs, moving her legs so he can sit down. “You ready?”

Hod nods toward the noise from the bar. “Everybody still out there.”

“The Nugget don’t ever close.”

“Yeah. I already heard all the songs twice.”

She smiles. “Listen, we could go back to my room where I sleep. Them drunks in the balconies been throwin gold dust at us tonight — I got to wash my hair and see how much come out.”

“You can leave?”

“You come out from here in a few minutes and then I’ll come out like I’m going back to dance some more. Won’t anybody be wise to it.”

They listen to Niles Manigault, only a few feet away on the other side of the curtain, bemoan his luck. “It’s as if the cards are punishing me,” he says. “I am Fortune’s orphan.”

Hod sits by her on the cot, touching shoulders, and they are quiet for a while. “So when you’ve made your pile,” he asks finally, “what you going to do with the money?”

She looks away from him then, frowning. “I swear I don’t know where it all goes. This and that, you know? But I’m gonna start saving.”

“That would be good.”

“If I had enough right now, right here, what I’d do is stop this box-rustlin and buy some chickens, have a house built for em with a stove set in the middle of it to keep the chicks warm. You know what an egg sells for right now? And if you can get them over the Pass—”

“You’d make more money.”

“Most of the girls think they’re gonna hook on to one of these bonanza kings. Only that type don’t stay in Skaguay very long.”

He counts the forty-five stars in the hanging flag a couple times, pulls his shirt out of his belt, kisses her on the cheek and steps out. The men at the poker table are all smirking.

“Our Apollo has unburdened himself,” says Niles.

“He who loves last, loves best,” adds Billy Mizner. “Though it can get a little slippery.”

Hod waits for her outside in the cold, lamplight spilling from every resort on Broadway, noise from within swirling in the wind off the channel, the camp always loudest at this hour as if they can fiddle or sing or laugh away the endless, howling Yukon nights. Addie Lee steps out and Hod drapes his parka with the hood over her and they walk to the Princess Hotel together, her dancing shoes no match for the snowdrifts.

Her room is small, but there is a rug on the floor and a window to the street and it is warm, twice as warm as the drafty bathhouse with bunks Hod has been staying in, his only decoration the advertisement Smokey gave him to paste on the wall, Jake Kilrane in a fighting stance.

LOSE WEIGHT

it says—

AND ENHANCE YOUR MANHOOD

Smokey doesn’t read, and Hod can only think it can be a reminder of proper boxing posture.

Addie Lee washes her hair out into a metal pan and saves the water to pick through later. She takes her dancing shoes off and lies back on the bed and before Hod can get his pants off has fallen asleep. He takes his wool socks off and puts them in the farthest part of the room and lies next to her. Later, when she wakes, she sits up and stares at him for a long moment as if trying to remember who he is. Then she smiles.

“You,” she says, and they start in, with the lamp on the little table by the bed still on and smelling strong of coal oil and she doesn’t look away once while he is on her.

“How many times you think it will be,” he asks when he is finished and they are lying next to each other again, “to make up a hundred dollars?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Light comes in the window and the wild dogs start to snarl on the street, and then there are loud voices as the next room starts to fill up.