John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

HIS FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL

—says the caption, condescending but not vindictive, a nod to the elation felt by most citizens at the daring capture of the little supremo .

The other sketch keeps the heat on McKinley and the jingoes. A runty, demented TR in his outsized Rough Rider togs and an equally diminutive Colonel Funston (whose mug has been plastered all over the dailies in the last week) shoulder a pole from which they’ve slung scrawny, bedraggled Aguinaldo like a slaughtered hind.

WE’VE BROUGHT YOU AN APPETIZER

—proclaim the boys as they rush toward the President and Mark Hannah, bibs tucked into their collars, knife and fork poised in hand, greedily surveying the map of the world laid out on their table. A sobering thought that transcends the moment’s euphoria, muses the Cartoonist, but not one likely to satisfy the man on the street.

The Chief, when he stampedes in from whatever theatrical event or soirée he has escorted his young ladies to this evening, will not ask the Cartoonist’s opinion. He will frown at the drawings, the frown turning to a scowl when he spies the hated Roosevelt, eventually grunt, and, hopefully, jab his finger into the center of one of them. “Print it,” he will say, a newsman’s newsman, charging uphill as heedlessly as the toothy Vice President during his “crowded hour” on San Juan Hill.

Or maybe he’ll ask the Cartoonist if plucky Funston couldn’t appear to be just a few inches taller than TR.

There are ten of them, with Junior, a buck sergeant now, in charge. The days have been getting cooler since the end of the year but they have been off the road for most of the patrol, up and over the rice-field dikes, working their way through prickerbush and scrub, chasing another rumor of a rebel build-up. The two collections of huts they’ve walked through, not big enough to be on the lieutenant’s map, were deserted, but that might only be for one of the endless religious marches, people here with more saints to celebrate than days to do it on, or else they’ve heard the rumor too and don’t want to be around for reprisals from the losers. Royal sees one man the whole morning, standing thigh-deep in the muck of a flooded rice field whipping a switch on the butt of a sweat-lathered carabao, itself mired to the chest, trying to get it to drag a wooden harrow through the mess and neither of them going anywhere. He feels more like the water buff than the man, hard to say if it is really trying to pull itself forward or just satisfied to sink deeper and ignore what’s happening to its hind end.

The men march on, walking in a loose rectangle through a banana plantation, Royal and Willie Mills in the van, carrying their rifles port-arms. The trees are strange, nearly twice as tall as Royal, with each trunk supporting a single massive bunch of fat green fingers, like a man in a bulky overcoat hung by his heels. And the rows of banana fingers all pointing up to the sky — it seems wrong, like a lot of the things that grow here, like something a little boy might draw. Royal keeps an eye out for the spiders he has seen crawling on the bunches. He doesn’t like spiders.

They walk, talk for a while, then lapse into silence. There are men among them who would make better sergeants, older men who deserve it, but Junior is the lightest of them and educated and Royal figures that is what the officers were thinking when they had to move somebody up. Junior has been tight since he got the stripe, knowing there is some resentment, and trying to be firm but not lean on his rank too heavy. It is usually Hardaway who starts the talking.

“You member Fagen?”

“Big ole Tampa boy with the 24th.”

“That’s the one. Word is he run out.”

“Run out to where?”

“Loaded up every sidearm he could carry and walked into the boondocks.”

“Where the googoos kilt him.”

“Naw, man — made him a cap tain.”

“Captain of the googoos is like King of the Niggers.”

“General is king in the Army.”

“Then captain is what? Duke? His Royalty, Duke Fagen.”

“Story is he been leadin ambushes, and they caught some of them volunteers from Ohio, left em alone with Fagen—”

Too Tall aims a pretend pistol downward.

“Told em to kneel and say their prayers, then pop! pop! pop! pop! ”

They are quiet for a while, passing from the bananas into a stubbly cane field, considering Fagen.

“Ohio Vols,” says Coop.

“Yeah. White boys.”

“Well — as long as he don’t teach the googoos to aim .”

They laugh then, even Royal who can go a week without cracking a smile. Junior is heard at the rear.

“Treason is treason. When he’s captured they’ll hang him.”

“Not gonna capture that ole boy. He stepped out that far, he cut his own throat before they take him.”

They ponder this, the dead-end nerve of it. Royal can hear the river ahead, see the tops of the trees that line both banks. The patrol is meant to reach the river, work north along it for a few miles, then loop back to the garrison before dark.

“If all he wanted to do was kill crackers,” says Gamble, “he could have stayed in Tampa.”

The river is not so wide here, but swift-moving from the months of rain. They keep it on their right and march till they come to a sandy beach piled with driftwood in the crook of an elbow bend. There is none of the usual comment when Junior orders them to fall out.

The men have taken to carrying fruit or boiled eggs they’ve bargained for in Las Ciegas as well as their rations, and Sims gets a little driftwood fire going to cook coffee.

“How they do it,” says Coop, “is they just keeps mov in. Them little shitholes we run through this morning? Full up with googoos five minutes after we leave, havin them a party.”

“They aint gonna win no war that way.”

“Long as they not where we are, they doin fine. Most alla them U.S. volunteers gone home by now, right? And how many ignant niggers like us you think they can fool into coming here?”

“Speak for yourself,” says Junior.

“I’m doin that. I been vaccinated twice already, bit by every kind of bug that crawls or flies, had googoos shoot at my head and knock a cocoanut off a tree and the sun done cook me to a whole new shade of dark, and yet I aint put nary a one of these little monkeys in the ground. They just playin with us, is all, cause they don’t want to fight no more.”

“They’ve switched to guerilla tactics,” says Junior. “Like the Boers in South Africa.”

“They’ve switched to hidin out and laughin at us poor donkeys runnin around in the heat,” says Coop. “Aint no tac tics to it.”

Royal eats to get it over with, staring dully out at the river and the long wall of jagged mountains beyond it. Junior has been drilling him about the importance of a positive state of mind, and every new day he tries to will himself into one, but it never lasts much past Kid Mabley blowing Assembly. Mingo Sanders from B Company and some of the others from the Indian wars say get used to it, this is what regular soldiering is, living out your routines, working your details, keeping yourself razor-sharp so that when the redskins do attack you’re more than a match for them, ambushed or not. The fights, if they come, are flash floods in a life of drought.

“Two of you will post up and down the river,” says Junior suddenly, standing up from the sand, “while the rest of us bathe.”

“I’m staying out of there,” says Hardaway. “Might be snakes.”

“Man got snakes on the brain.”

“All right, Hardaway and Gamble set up as pickets—”

“Why me?”

Junior gives Gamble a long look.