John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“You are leaving.”

He looks at her. She feels stronger, saying it before he does.

“Well, that kind of depends. What I was thinking, see—” and he sighs like it is hard for him to tell her. Perhaps it is.

“They got a boat for the regiment now, yeah—”

Some soldiers at the corner look at them as they pass and laugh, not a kind laugh, and it makes her angry. She moves closer as they walk, shoulders almost touching.

“So when everybody goes — see, boiling clothes aint so different than boiling anything else. And you got your Chinese and the local lingo and half the time your English sounds better than mine, so it’s a shoo-in we could open a shop somewheres up the railroad line.”

Sometimes her English is not so good. “Shop?”

“Not a big one at first, just get our feet wet, see how it goes. Or hell, you hate the laundry idea, it could be a lunch counter. Chop suey or whatever. You wouldn’t have to cook, just run the business.”

He has stopped walking now, looking at her, worried.

“Of course first we got to find one of these Jesus-peddlers showing up here every day who can say the words without choking on em. Or whatever you folks do for it, some Chinese deal, that’s fine with me. Anybody don’t like it, that’s just their lookout.”

Mei feels dizzy, her vision blurring, like she is being tossed in a storm at sea and cannot tell which is sky and which is water.

“Bo,” she says.

The soldier lifts his shoulders. “Too bad he got to learn his English from someone like me.”

Mei thinks of the card with her photograph on it, the one she tore up and burned and the one the Comisaria de Vigilencia still has, with all the things about her written on it.

“I am only a no-good China girl,” she says.

“I aint much of a bargain either.”

He holds his arm out then, bent at the elbow for her to walk with him the way the Spanish men walk with their ladies on the Luneta at sunset.

“So what do you think?”

The breathing hard through her nose doesn’t work. Lan Mei takes the soldier’s arm and holds on to it with both hands. Holds on to it for her life.

The women cross themselves when they see Diosdado sitting on the dike. They adjust the bundles on their heads and fix their eyes on the road ahead as they hurry past, muttering incantations in Pampangano. Diosdado and his band have become phantoms, haunting the balete forests between Guimba and Malolos, creatures whose existence is understood but whose presence is feared. They are the shadow government, collecting taxes for the fugitive Republic. They are the unwritten law, whispering decrees and punishing collaborators. They are, he hopes, the fabric of American nightmares, the thing the yanquis fear most when daylight drains from the sky. It is an intermittent, skulking war that they wage, waiting in ambush for forces they never outnumber, shooting and running with no time to assess the damage inflicted, firing at night-lights and noises in the occupied baryos , stealing sleep from the enemy.

And every day the cutting of the wire.

Half the men still believe it is magic, a metal string that goes on for miles and miles and sings its secrets to the yanqui invaders. Pressing their ears against the wooden lances to listen the high-pitched keening of the wire, or holding a cut length in their hands, turning it this way and that, trying to divine its power, keeping a few silenced yards to hang their wet clothes from in camp.

“The wire is their mark, their claim on our land,” Diosdado tells his men. “Wherever we let it stand belongs to them.”

If there is time they pull the lances out of the ground, one every fifty-five paces, then chop the insulators off, cut the wire in several places, and scatter it all in the woods. Closer to the garrisons or in an area with regular American patrols they only stand a nervous guard while little Fulanito shinnies up and uses the cutters Orestes Pulao stole from the signalmen’s shed before he ran from San Fernando. The taut wire zings in protest as it whips apart, the flow of coded orders and reports broken off, telegraph bugs up and down the line gone mute. Fulanito backs down quickly, bare toes gripping the wood, and they all fade back into rumor.

Diosdado and his band are phantoms in the minds of the kasamas , haunting the orchards and fields between San Idelfonso and Mabalacat, materializing when it is least convenient to demand part of their meager harvests, any contact forbidden by the martial law of the occupiers. And phantoms can never rest — west from Cabanatuan after the murder of Luna but never quite reaching Zambales, ordered to slip below enemy lines in Tarlac, sniping, stealing, scurrying from one jungle hideout to the next, counting their bullets and losing track of their days. They joined General Tinio’s Ilocanos for a spell in late November, helping to cover Aguinaldo’s flight to the north, then were sent back to Bamban after the Tirad Pass fight, harrying the mule trains hauling supplies to the American outposts. In January it was up to Pangasinan, responsible for the villages along the Agno River, encouraging informants, threatening fraternizers. In March they were part of the larger campaign to tie up the American troops protecting Concepción, Sargento Bayani’s monkey-chanting night raids so effective that all the Chinese coolies working for the yanquis deserted in terror. In August it was the foothills of Mount Arayat, coming down to ambush the parties of fevered bluecoat soldiers unlucky enough to be patrolling in the heavy rains. And now working their way west again, skirting above Macabebe to Guagua, cutting wire as they go.

The villages were open to them at first, Americans passing through so fast in their chase that food could be hidden, the invaders’ dust barely settled before Diosdado’s men were there to collect the rice-tithe. Then the yanquis began to garrison — ten soldiers for a medium-sized baryo , a company or more for the stone-church towns. And now the barbed wire, the concentration camps, the railroad-tie corrals for men caught without safe-passage documents between villages. In many areas the Americans have shot all the carabao, have torched the rice fields and forced people to eat the same tinned meat and crackers their troopers live on.

Diosdado has eaten lizard, gratefully, and made a belt of hemp to hold his uniform pants up when his leather one rotted to pieces in the damp jungle camps. His men are a hollow-cheeked, spindly-limbed band, as phantoms must be, and the droning camp conversation always reverts to meals once eaten. Kalaw is the master of this, his descriptions of his mother’s saint’s day feasts so detailed they make hard men weep with longing.

And every day they cut the wire.

“The wire is the voice of the oppressor,” Diosdado tells his men. “The wire is his eyes and his ears. If we let the wire stand he will never be gone from us.”

The best tactic is to cut the line halfway between one garrison and the next, to wait in ambush for the Signal Corpsmen and their escorts, far enough away that the sound of gunfire won’t summon reinforcement. The yanquis have implemented mounted patrols, though, on the roads that permit it, whooping troopers too big for their skinny Filipino ponies, dashing along with pistols drawn to shoot anything that moves. They’ve begun to set their own ambushes as well, Diosdado losing a fighter from La Union and three good rifles when they were surprised on the footpath to the Candaba — Santa Ana road.

At the beginning of October a messenger came all the way from wherever General Aguinaldo was hiding out that week, telling them to hold fast and not despair, telling them that the Americans were about to hold elections and that the challenger for president, a great orator named Bryan, pledged to pull their army from the Philippines if he won. The messenger waited while Diosdado explained this to the men, explained just what an election was and that Bryan was a great anti-Imperialist who refused to be nailed to a cross of gold and that no, he wasn’t a Catholic, but a fervent believer in the Almighty nonetheless.