John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Ashes from the smokestack

— he thinks, and can hear someone, maybe himself, singing along—

Cloudin up my brain

Can’t believe my woman

Leavin on that train

Blow your whistle, captain

All my dreams in vain

— and then he dives, Cooperhawk, into the black water.

When he wakes his mouth is full of ashes and he is looking into the bottomless black holes in the eyes of the old man on the shelf across from him. The old man is the color of what they pulled out of Coop’s ears, with long twigs for arms and legs, body withered like a persimmon been left on the ground so long even the bugs don’t want it and with a look on his face that is no more solid, no more really here, than smoke.

“You and me, brother,” Coop says softly to the old Chinese man. “We been there, aint we?”

The old man stares toward him but not really at him, his eyes all black pupil, his mouth only inches from the pipe gripped feebly in his bony hand. Coop smiles at him. Coop loves him.

“Only difference is,” he says, “you aint comin back.”

It is not, at this juncture, the sort of conflict the Correspondent cares to report on. The indigenous forces remain maddeningly elusive, assembling in number as if to make a counterattack, then melting away so rapidly that the engagement is barely worth giving a name to. Diligent as his fellows in the ink trade have been to inflate the skirmishes at San this or Santa that into something newsworthy, the countryside north and south of the capital remains infested with communities never to be immortalized in military history. And then the deuced luck of his diminutive, hastily purchased mare perishing beneath him on the way to the Zapote Bridge. Even Creelman of the Journal , recovered from his blooding at El Caney and screwed to Colonel Funston’s hip all these months, was there for the festivities, the signalmen obliging him by steadily unrolling their spools of wire behind the heat-addled column so he might telegraph his despatch immediately upon the taking of Bacoor. And Creelman is not the most insufferable of the lot. The Correspondent had hopes that with Crane hors de combat and Dick Davis chasing the Boers there would be a clearer field in this pestilent backwater in which to distinguish oneself, but his competitors, toiling for periodicals of greater circulation than his own, are free to spend money like fresh air to corrupt the cablemen and thus beat him onto the wire even when his report is on their desks hours earlier.

Not that they refuse what little gratuity he offers them.

Manila, though the climate is beastly in the dry season and unspeakable in the wet, is all right in a Spanish-gone-tropical sort of way, offering livelier diversions than the worthy Davis can be enjoying in Ladysmith or Pretoria. The local seegars are cheap, plentiful, and surprisingly smokable, while the chief industry seems to be making a racket and selling rides in their unstable two-wheeled outfits (the Spaniards having taxed vehicles per axle) from one side of the pitiful excuse for a river to the other. The horse races are colorful and pleasant, the wealthier caste of Filipinos no less sporting than their Celestial cousins, and there is no end to religious pageantry despite their purported disaffection with the Roman Church and its representatives. But the inequality of the two protagonists has left this conflict nearly devoid of heroic feats and consequently uninspiring, if not undeserving of heroic prose.

Not that an adept such as the Correspondent cannot cobble something together.

Serving as he is for a northern publication hungry for “American color,” the Tarheel Lieutenant has been a find. Gifted with the charming accent and fecund locutions of his section, Manigault also boasts an ancestry steeped in military tradition and dedicated to the Great Lost Cause, having no compunctions, as the rare Southerner displaced in Colorado’s volunteer contribution to the effort, to find fault with superiors both immediate and of greater stripe.

“General Otis would be better employed anchoring a deck chair on the verandah of an establishment catering to the elderly,” remarks the Lieutenant as they clickety-clack north past the earthquake-baroque church and much celebrated ruins of Caloocan, “than put in charge of a body of fighting men. My old Granny, rest her soul, was of a more decisive nature than he. When one encounters an inferior and hysteria-prone foe such as our present antagonist, one does not retreat, one does not pause, one does not rest until he is vanquished. They are the hare and we the hound, but we have been kept on a damnably short leash.”

“You believe that if MacArthur—”

“If either General MacArthur or General Lawton were given free reign, Mr. Nig would have received his much-deserved thrashing, contritely cast away his arms, and we’d all be home by now, amazing our loved ones with the ease of it all.”

“There would no doubt be holdouts—”

“Driven to the farthest and most forsaken outposts of these isles to live as mere banditti , as was done to the worthy Geronimo and his cutthroat band. But in lieu of that, we, and I use the term in the national sense of course, shall remain here, exposed to the diseases rampant in these latitudes, for at least another year. Not to mention the followers of Mohamet—”

“In the southern islands—”

“They have a custom in which their men who are hopelessly mired in debt appear before a wily imam , shaving their eyebrows and swearing an oath to the Mighty One that they will proceed to murder as many Christians as possible until they are themselves destroyed. These juramentados , these pledged assassins, then go about their bloody work assured that not only will all that they owe be forgotten but that upon their ending they will sit at the right hand of the Prophet, with a gaggle of black-eyed houris to attend them. How do you fight people for whom death is an improvement on their condition?”

“But your volunteers have finished their service.”

“So the General Staff informs us. The Regular Army is more than welcome to the travesty of a war we leave behind.”

They met in the hospital ward in Manila, both recovering from an overexposure to the sun on the day of the Zapote affair, the Lieutenant spouting his theories, many quite fantastic, and the Correspondent overcoming a vicious migraine to get it all down on paper.

“And your mission—”

“Has been fulfilled with honor and alacrity,” chuffs the Tarheel Lieu-tenant. “The Colorados, despite a handful of incorrigibles I have had to deal with sharply, have the blood of frontiersmen in their veins — it is their nature to contest the savage on his own ground, and to conquer him.”

The train slows, passing through an orchard that has been cleared back only far enough to give the troops on board the flatcars a clear field of fire at any snipers. The rains have stopped but the vegetation is still very green. He has tried hellish green and bilious green , only to settle on interminable green , although at this time of year it is often interrupted by splashes of death’s bed yellow . He tried jaundiced countryside during the first dry season but Cheltingham in New York has let him know his double entendre was blue-inked every time he wired it. Crane has a patent on red , of course, any journalist employing it suggestively ( the bloodshot eye of the Tropics ) mocked brutally by his cohorts. The Correspondent’s own strength is not in description, literal or baroquely impressionistic, but in his snippets of “overheard” dialogue, some of it actually transposed from interviews with the warriors themselves. That and a knack for the comical pidgin-speak of the natives, developed in his days as a cub enduring the exotic odors and sullen yellow glares of Pell Street.