John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The crowd on the street keeps flowing past them up and down, paying no mind, while the barber snips away at the edge of his hair with the very tip of the scissors, cautious, and the other one slips a long, bendy strip of bamboo into Coop’s left ear and begins to slowly dig and wiggle. Coop tries not to laugh thinking of what the boys would say if they seen him here. His mama always told him to clean his ears but he never did and then she’d catch him and scour them so hard with a lye-soaked rag they’d burn for days.

The cleaner goes in with a set of pinchers and plucks something out — a dirty chunk of wax near as big as a shelled peanut — and Coop wonders if it really come from him or if the pigtail just palmed it from his kit to have something to show for his pay, some heathen Chinee trick the two of them will laugh about when he’s gone.

At least it’s not a bug.

The cleaner goes in again with a long stick with a little scoop on the end then, scraping out the smaller bits, while the barber gives up his snipping away a hair at a time and lathers the back of Coop’s neck to shave beneath his kitchen. Coop gives a listen to see if he can hear any clearer. Somebody is playing a guitar not too far away, got to be a colored man from the sound of it, only when the ear-cleaner pulls the scraper out and he can turn his head to look there is only a little amigo , barefoot and in rags, with a guitar nearly half his size hung over him. Coop watches the boy’s fingers, one with a piece of curved sea-shell around it that he uses to slide up and down the strings on the neck while he picks with the other hand. The music is too familiar to be Filipino.

Coop’s stomach suddenly tries to climb out of his body through his asshole. He grabs his sides and holds himself together till it passes and then takes the barber by the wrist.

“I needs smokee,” he says and mimes a long draw, sucking air in and closing his eyes.

The barber looks to the ear-cleaner, who holds out his hand and wiggles the fingers like a bug crawling and says something in Chinese.

“Plenty smokee, Olmigo Street,” says the barber.

“Olmigo—”

“ Hormiga, Señor ,” says the little amigo , who has come over with his hand out. He makes the bug wiggle too. “ Es muy cercano .”

Coop digs out a handful of centavos and the pigtails take some and he flips a couple to the boy and says Take me to Hormiga Street.

The boy smiles from ear to ear and takes off up Analoague where the carpenters are out working on chairs and tables with the little dogeater calling proudly to the other boys selling candy or shining shoes or hawking the lotería which is supposed to have been shut down, showing off the americano he’s hooked, the guitar making a little hollow sound as it bumps against his body and damn if that ear business didn’t work, the whole racket of the streets like it’s right inside his skull now, like it or not.

Hormiga Street cuts off to the right, short and narrow and leading to the bustle of Rosario, with its street hawkers and tailor shops and painted portraits of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Admiral Dewey. Coop flips the little amigo another coin and does his viper again.

“ Fumar ,” he says. “ Dónde? ”

The boy giggles and points out a shop with scrawny plucked ducks hanging by their necks on either side of the door. “ Al bajo ,” he says and runs off with the big guitar slapping against his backside. Coop steps in between the ducks.

A pigtail with pox scars and a moustache nods to him from behind a counter where he is chopping apart a small pig, then waves a bloody hand toward a beaded curtain that leads to the back. Coop can smell the bitter smoke already.

The place behind the laundry in San Francisco was tiny compared to this, just a few bunks in a storeroom. This joint could hold a dozen fiends, with narrow shelves built into the wall, woven mats and pillows in red silk covers on them, every nook with a spirit lamp and pipe layout ready to go. A silver-haired man in the loose blue suit they wear seems to be in charge, while the chef sits carefully scraping ashes from the bowl of a pipe into a small lacquered box. There are four or five already here on the hip, glassy-eyed, mostly Chinese with one well-dressed white-looking man who might be Spanish.

“You lie down,” smiles the silver-haired man, “you feel better chop-chop.”

“How much for a pipe?”

“Fittee centavo.”

Coop has a couple American, a couple Mexican in his pocket but knows you have to jawbone them a bit.

“Twenty centavos a pipe.”

The man smiles. “Twenty centavo, fuck you.”

Coop laughs. “All right, six pipes for an eagle.”

The man holds out his pudgy hand and Coop lays a gold dollar in it. If he was a white boy he could say he was military police and threaten the price down some, but even the pigtails know there’s not any colored provost. Coop pulls his boots off and climbs onto one of the shelves, lying on his side and resting his head on the pillow. The chef sits on a stool by him, working an iron wire into a little pot of the sticky stuff till there is a gob big as a blackberry on the end of it, which he holds over the open flame of the lamp by Coop’s side, turning it this way and that till it starts to blister and crack with the heat. He used to watch his mama make johnnycakes with the same attention, his mouth watering and hoping his other brothers wouldn’t smell and come in to eat them all. The chef takes the bubbling ball of dope and pokes it into the center of the clay bowl on top of the end of his pipe, then moves away to deal with one of the other guests.

Coop takes a long draw, pulling it in through the pipe and into his lungs and then slowly letting the bluish smoke escape through his nose. Got to give it time to soak in.

He has to reheat the ball after every draw, tilting the bowl toward the open flame and then sucking the bitter heat into himself, but the knots in his belly begin to unravel and at the end of four long pulls the ball of dope is nothing but ash and he can’t feel any of it.

The chef cooks another up for him. The first time he got the quickstep was in the Memphis lock-up, from the food, and when he and Tillis got out they broke into a pharmacy but could only find some bottles of paregoric which they drank down even with the awful camphor smell and then some of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup which made Tillis, who didn’t even have the dysentery, chuck the whole mess up.

You are supposed to have these crazy dreams but really for Coop it’s just peaceful, nobody blowing bugles at you and now with his ears unstopped all the little sounds, the crackling of the dope ball in the flame and the in and out of the others as they breathe their smoke down and the scratch, scratch as the chef scrapes the ash from the bowls to save in his lacquer box and Coop’s own heart, beating long and easy now like waves on a broad beach and more pipes come, hard to keep count, and the thought floats through his head that the heathen Chinee are maybe shorting him but then the thought goes curling up to the yellow-stained ceiling and who cares when you are so high above them all? Floating, with them all below, white and black and Spanish and Cuban and amigo and pigtail looking up as he floats over like the observation balloon that morning at El Caney, above it all, but no, no, they shot that down and all of them are shooting at him now, pointing and shooting but he is too fast for the bullets that rise up slow like bubbles from the muck in Silas Tugwell’s bog where they used to swim, why are they even bothering to shoot when he is so high, a hawk soaring, Cooperhawk that he took his name from, Cooperhawk that catch all the other birds in its claw and take them away, that fly so fast even through the thick woods and somehow don’t ever hit a branch and how can bullets hope to reach him? But then the ants start coming out, out of his ears, going in the right direction at least but so many of them, tickling his neck where it was just shaved but there’s a reason they are leaving, it’s to make room for the music, the notes from the little amigo sliding back to him, so familiar, so like the music he heard the Mississippi boys playing on the rail gang down south, a new kind of music but familiar, simple on top but bubbling and twisted underneath, who knows what be hiding in that muck at the bottom, can’t see the end of it from the surface and it wants words, the music, words to make it a story—