John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“I can’t feel my limbs anymore,” he says. “They must be frozen.”

And then crumples to the ground.

There are no oxcarts around to commandeer and for a moment LaDuke stares at the heap of lieutenant like he might just leave it there in the road. Finally he has Tutweiler take Big Ten’s Krag and tells the Indian to help Hod carry. Big Ten hefts Manigault up under the arms and Hod takes his feet and it is awkward and still scorching and no way to wipe the stinging sweat out of their eyes.

When they stagger past the mutilated body of the suspect there are already buzzards, three of them, picking at it without enthusiasm, as if the heat has ruined their appetite.

Cross-hatching won’t do for it. To set off the white of the bone in the nose, the white of the rolling cannibal eyes, the hanging shell beads and stiff fronds of thatch around the waist, you need pure black, midnight black, so much ink that it soaks through the pad to stain the desk beneath. The photos of the little nignogs coming down from the exposition in Buffalo have been useful — who knew they had their own pygmies? — but it has been necessary to blend the googoo with his Ubangi cousins, also well-represented at the Pan, in order to convey the true, primitive horror of what our boys are threatened with on that Godforsaken splatter of Pacific islands.

Amok , they call it, this state of blood-lust, this disregard for your own body’s vulnerability to shot and shell, that hurls the ink-black savage forward with razor-edged bolo in hand to wreak havoc on American boys in their shallow trenches. To run amok . How does one defend against a foe with no care for his own well-being, who sweeps forward though thoroughly drilled with pistol shot, who, like the fanatic Chinese Boxer, believes himself invulnerable in his rush to murder and mutilate? If this be, indeed, the White Man’s burden, to civilize, to Christianize this creature of darkness, we have accepted a task far greater than that of our forefathers who confronted the red-pelted tribes of wood and plain, and face an opponent too base to elevate and too numerous to exterminate.

The bolo is suspended from one sinewy arm, the wooden spear held ready to launch in the other, the kinky locks, a maddened squirrel’s nest of hair, springing in every direction.

Behind this apparition sits the humble Cuban Peasant, brim of his straw hat turned back to reveal an honest if uncomplicated face, building a sand castle with the ripe-breasted, silken-haired Hawaiian Girl, the grass of her skirt fuller, looser than the googoo’s spiky fringe, simple, but elegantly becoming to this daughter of Nature. Uncle sits on a beach chair, sleeves rolled up, arms crossed, balefully staring down at the wretched, threatening Filipino, who comes only to his shins.

AMERICA’S PROBLEM CHILD

—says the caption. Horrible as the Tagalo bandit is, the petulant futility of his resistance must be kept in sight.

And no, cross-hatching will not do for it. The Cartoonist opens the top of his pen, and the ink spills forth.

Even the coolies are staring. Sergeant Jacks leads the company along the north side of the Pasig, a hodgepodge flotilla of hemp barges and shallow-draft boats covered with curved, palm-thatched roofs bobbing to the right. Barefoot Chinamen balance on long planks leading from the boats to the cement dock, each pair with a huge basket filled with fish hung from poles over their shoulders, pausing to gape at the smoked yankees of the 25th. Small boys snap their switches against the flanks of water buffalo pulling wood-wheeled carts full of bulging rice sacks, the boys giggling and shouting to each other when they see the soldiers file past the steep-roofed warehouses where Filipino brokers in white suits sit on crates to watch, holding parasols over their heads to block the suddenly brutal sun, even the towering crane arms throwing no shadow at this hour. There are boat horns and steam whistles and tethered goats bleating and the shouting of the boys and the brokers and the coolies, none of it in anything Jacks can recognize as Spanish. The dock is puddled from the downpour just ended, what they call an aguacero in El Paso, and another threatening in the sky behind.

Jacks looks across the wide, placid river to the Walled City and just from what is visible over the parapets he can tell Manila is a bigger deal than Juarez could ever hope to be.

Company E, just ahead of them, cuts left up a street along the side of the customs building. The boys don’t have the usual strut, legs still wobbly from the choppy trip on the launch from the anchorage and their two weeks at sea out of Hawaii on the Valencia , but orders are to march them without pause through what is supposed to be secure territory all the way out to the reservoir at El Depósito.

“Companyyyyy— left !” calls the sergeant and they follow him up the side street. Like most folks, he never heard of the Philippines before Dewey steamed into the Bay. There was some possibility, just before climbing aboard in San Francisco, that it would be China to fight the Boxers, but it looks like they got their share of Celestials here, doing all the nigger work with their long braids hanging down their backs. He wonders if they speak the same brand of Chinee as the ones on St. Louis Street in El Paso.

“Let’s pick us up a couple of these yellow men here, Sarge,” calls Cooper from behind him. “Leave them Army mules behind.”

There seems to be no glass in the windows, just panels with a lattice-work of little pearly squares set in them, oyster shell maybe, ground thin to let the light through. The panels slide back and forth in grooves and are pulled open now for the break in the rain, what he figures must be more Filipinos sticking their heads out to stare at them. So far they seem to come in as many shades as his troopers, only straight-haired and pint-sized. Old women and near-naked children have come out to try to sell something like a tamale wrapped in a leaf, walking alongside and calling to them and Jacks feels like he’s in Mexico again only the heat, thick and liquid still despite the hours of rain dumped this morning, is more like Cuba. Like Santiago just before they left, half the outfit down with fever and feeling like you could drown on dry land. The white folks still call his men all the same things they ever did, good and bad, except for “Immunes.”

They follow E Company to the right now, old women with red teeth setting up shoe-shaped earthen ovens on the ground, feeding sticks to the fires within and arranging kettles filled with anybody’s guess above, and then they pass between a stand of bamboo with leaves like spearheads and a huge, oak-looking tree covered with red blossoms and Sergeant Jacks asks himself for the thousandth time how else a narrow-ass little cane chopper from the Texas border get to see all this?

And maybe when the brushfires here are all stamped out, on to China.

They come to an estuary of the Pasig, more like a canal from how they’ve built along it on both sides, and head toward a little bridge Jacks can see to the north. Good we’re here, he thinks, nothing for the boys to do at Bliss but get into trouble, the Army like a horse that needs to be rode or it gets sullen and ski-footed. He knows they’ve been talking on the ship about Indian-fighting, but this far behind the lines it looks like a fairly peaceable tribe, nothing a steady flow of government beef and some vigilance over the firewater can’t control. There are lizards skittering on the walls of the stone buildings, the little thumb-sized ones Mingo Sanders in B Company always calls “Apache breakfast sausage.” It is puddled up pretty deep here and the boys enjoy splashing through it, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four , but slogging all the way out to these waterworks in wet socks isn’t a good start for troops penned up sitting on a ship for a month. Jacks is sweating from everywhere now, blue shirt stuck to his back, but smiling. Beats Missoula in fucking January any day.