John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

There are a half-dozen Filipino boys, the littlest only in a dirty shirt that comes down to his knees, trying to play base ball out in front of the laundry. The batter has a wooden bed slat that he holds cross-handed, and the pitcher windmills forward then backward before underhanding a scabby-looking rubber ball toward the paint-can lid that serves as home plate. The end of the bed slat splits as the batter makes contact, the ball thunking off the side of a passing carabao drawing a cart and bouncing unevenly down the street, small boys dodging through hooves and wheels till one catches up with it, runs back and thunks the advancing runner between the shoulder blades with a vicious throw. There have been inter-regiment games on the Luneta, well attended by both Americans and locals, and the boys seem to have picked up the basics.

“You’re out!” calls Hod, jerking his thumb up, and steps into Lavandería Hung.

The front counter of the laundry has no wall behind to block it off from the works, though on one side the finished orders, wrapped in brown paper with black Chinese characters scrawled on them, are piled several feet high. Three Chinese men, stripped to the waist, stand over huge steaming vats, stirring a heavy porridge of clothing with thick paddles, their queues dripping water, their skin flushed red with the heat, while another younger one hustles about with sticks in hand tending the fire under each vat. One of the stirrers hoists a steaming mass of clothing with his paddle, swinging it dripping behind him to slap down into a cooling trough. Yet another Chinese lifts one garment at a time from the long trough and cranks it through an iron mangle to squeeze out most of the water. Behind him are two more men lifting heavy irons from the top of a woodstove to smooth out the wrinkled clothing on a plank, while another wrestles a huge skillet-like affair with glowing coals on top of it, using it to press pants flat. Darting between them, a pair of Chinese women run the clothes out through the back door to hang-dry. It is hard to see how anyone can keep the orders separate. An older man, maybe Hung himself, appears out of the steam to stand behind the counter.

“You got tickee?”

Hod shakes his head. “Just come in to look your operation over.”

“No tickee,” says the older man, “you go scram.”

The boys are still playing ball when he steps back onto the street and heads for the Walled City. He feels the grouch bag stuffed with his winnings from the show with Big Ten snug against his belly. Just a little set-up at first, he thinks. Hire a couple coolies, maybe right off the road crew or bring them over on contracts, pay them a little better so they want to keep the job. What he’s won and his muster pay and a couple months’ work on the railroad should cover the equipment, and then you just need to be near a good supply of water.

If she’ll have him.

Working the Dagupan line he’ll be able to scout the right location, wherever the Americans plan to dig in and send out east — west rails. Mei would only be up front, with a wall behind her to keep the steam off, running the whole deal with her good English and her head for numbers. Never seen a woman could juggle sums like her — the once he took her to buy some clothes she jawboned the fella down way below what Hod was willing to pay and told him all their business sliding beads around the rack was just for show, that she had the figure in her head way before they got to clicking and clacking.

If he can only lay the deal out right, be sure not to spook her.

He turns down Azcarraga Street. There are more and more shop signs in English, mostly the ones run by Spaniards and Chinese. Only the Filipinos don’t seem to have got the message yet, and they’ll be the ones left in the dust. Like back home where the only Indians selling anything are carved out of wood and got a handful of cigars.

Big Ten is sitting on his favorite chair by the trolley terminal in Plaza Santa Cruz, having his boots polished.

“How’d it go?”

Hod shrugs his shoulders. “I’ll find something. If they gonna bring this country up to snuff, they be needin some experienced hands. And then when I get my own operation runnin—”

“Hell, you’ll make out fine.”

“If you was interested — I mean, you go back and it aint any better than it was, I could use a partner—” Hod has no idea if the British will take an Indian for a citizen or not.

Big Ten smiles. “Naw — I can’t take the heat.”

Hod sighs. “Well then.”

“I got no worries,” says Big Ten. “I’m a Ward of the State.”

The soldier is sitting on the wall outside the hospital, waiting for her. There are a lot of karayuki-san selling themselves in Manila now, and she watches as three of these stop to offer themselves to him and then walk on. He has come to tell her he is leaving.

All the sick and wounded ones of the Colorado, and of the Oregon and of the Minnesota and of the Dakota are being prepared to leave on a hospital ship, their time of bondage to the Army over, and they say the healthy ones are going as well. They make jokes about taking her with them.

“If I could fit you in my rucksack,” they say, “we’d go do San Francisco together.”

He is the nicest one, Hod, a soldier who takes his hat off when he talks with her and bought her shoes and a silk dress she has only worn once so he could see her in it and brings her food sometimes, American food in metal cans that she has kept hidden in her room because she has no way to open them and is afraid the Americans who run the hospital now will find them and think she is stealing. He has even brought presents for Bo, toys that he bought on the street. Radiant Star in Hongkong was taken once and kept for a year by a very rich trader who fed her and dressed her like a rich woman till he was tired of her and found a younger girl. When she came back she told Mei and the others what it was like, how easy, such a crystal life, and they all tried to imagine this. She didn’t talk about what words he used when he told her he had a new girl.

Mei steps out to the soldier, to Hod, and breathes hard through her nose so she won’t cry. Her only worry now, really, is that with all the soldiers going home they may change the hospital or close it and to take care of Bo she will have to be Ling-Ling again out walking with the Japanese girls.

He stands and takes his hat off when he sees her, smiles. His cheek on one side is swollen, as if he’s been in a fight. She thought he was funny-looking at first, like they all are, but now she likes to see his face. The one time he touched her with her clothes off, in a rented room after she wore the dress for him, his hands were very rough from working and he said he was sorry about that. But her own hands are rough too, a farmer’s hands, boiled now in the water every day, and if she has to walk with the Japanese girls maybe she will wear gloves and keep them on till the deal is struck.

He kisses her on the cheek like he does, as if she is a little girl.

“Let’s walk.”

It is the part that is the strangest for her, this walking in front of everybody’s eyes. In the Walled City the other soldiers smile and wink at him and the Spanish and Filipino ladies who walk in twos and carry parasols make faces and turn their heads away and in Binondo the Chinese merchants hiss terrible words at her, acting like she is still Ling-Ling and not just a woman who works in the American hospital, almost a Daughter of Charity.

They walk down Legaspi together, a couple feet apart from each other.

“There are some things I got to say to you,” he says, still holding his hat in his hands. She breathes in hard through her nose. She will not cry now, she will wait till she is back in her room at the hospital, till she takes her new shoes off and puts them under the bed with the metal cans of American food.