John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The extra belt of ammunition is digging into the side of his neck. They pass through a cornfield, the stalks up to his top button, Gamble and Mills hoisting the stretcher poles on their shoulders to get it over.

Junior was here to impress the white folks. I am here, Royal thinks, to impress Junior’s sister. Or that’s how it started. But Captain Parker, when they bring the body in, will not be impressed. And Jessie Lunceford is lost to him forever.

They hear the conversation of rifle fire, Krags and Mausers trading compliments, about three miles out. The sun is low in the sky, off to their right. Ponder holds the squad up. Royal tries not to look at the pile on the stretcher. He can hear the flies that have been worrying it all afternoon, following them.

“We gone have to leave Junior back,” says Ponder. “No tellin what we got on our hands up there.”

“There’s at least twenty with rifles,” says Coop, listening. “Mausers and Springfields. That usually mean two, three times more with bolos.”

“I’ll keep with him,” offers Royal.

“Can’t spare you, Roy. He be all right.”

They leave the body in a dry gulch parallel to the east-west road, covered with cornstalks, and Coop ties the laces of Junior’s boots together and tosses to snag them, first try, on a cleat high up on a telegraph pole so they have a marker. Not far down the road they find the wire cut, at the same spot they always do it, almost a courtesy by now. The men double-time in two rows, three paces apart. They don’t carry bayonets on patrol. When they can see black powder smoke on the horizon Ponder waves them off the road.

“Swing on around behind,” he says, “and come at em with the sun behind our backs like they done to the boys.”

There is nobody at the western outpost, dead or alive. They hide their canteens and the extra rifle in the rocks and share out Junior’s ammunition, pressing the rounds nose-down into their hatbands, then take the slings off their weapons, spreading out into a firing line. Royal realizes it is Junior’s Krag he has kept, no nick on the forestock.

“You know what to do,” says Ponder and they set off at a trot. When they get to the rice they take the irrigation ditches two at a stride, the Filipinos in sight now, little men, crouching behind the dike at the end of the field, firing into the village. The regulars run twice as close as Royal thinks they should before one of the bolomen sees and points and shouts and then they all flop on their bellies and begin to fire. The rebels can’t see how many they are because of the setting sun in their eyes and panic, the ones not hit in the first volley running along the dike but too high, exposed to the soldiers dug in in the village, and falling, falling, wet mud sounds and water splattering up into Royal’s face from the ditch in front of him, probably fire from the boys in Las Ciegas and then the rebels scatter in every direction like a startled flock of birds and Ponder yells to run them down.

Royal is up running after, the others whooping beside him and the first one he shoots is wounded already, kneeling, the round passing through his throat and spatting against the wet bank beyond and Royal running past, working the bolt as he goes, dropping one and then two from behind and seeing a third go down, just falling in the uneven paddy with his bolo flying away and Royal is over him before he can rise. The man, not young, clutches a cross hanging from a cord on his neck and says words, sides heaving from the run, and Royal waits till they meet eyes to thrust the barrel inches away and put one through his chest. He sits then on the wet ground then and listens to the man’s last wet gasping as the others splash past and the rest of the garrison steps out from the huts on the other side of the irrigation dike, cheering.

The Assassin begins at the Filipino Village. The tops of thatched huts are visible as he skirts along the fence, smoke rising from a breakfast cookfire inside. Roast-pork smell. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday noon. He turns right between the cyclorama dramatizing the Battle of Missionary Ridge, a limping old man in yankee blue shouting the names of dead generals to drum up interest, and the Cineograph exhibit, slowing to mingle with the crowd that flows in and out of the Pabst Pavillion. Nobody is watching him.

Nobody knows.

Across the Midway is an enormous, beautiful woman’s face, chin slightly lifted, her eyes closed in sweet reverie while people stroll through the wide entrance portal at the base of her neck. DREAMLAND say the letters on the rim of the corona set in her luscious, wind-blown hair. Only moments after the gates open there are thousands of spectators at the Exposition, sleep-walking, hazily grazing past amusement and advertisement to ponder which exotic world they will surrender the quarters clutched in their fists to.

Only I am awake, thinks the Assassin, and turns away to walk toward the thick brown Bavarian turrets of Alt Nurnberg.

A German brass band thumps away inside the courtyard, tuba grunting rhythmically, and a man outside in lederhosen and a feathered hat does a hopping, knee-slapping dance. The Assassin turns left at the biergarten, passing the Johnstown Flood exhibit and then the tall wood-pole fence that protects the festgoers from Darkest Africa. He hooks south along the Canal, turning his head away when a motor-gondola passes bearing two men, one cranking the lever of some kind of large camera. He turns again at the Mall, plunging into the crowd between the Electricity building and the Machinery and Transportation complex. If the monster is Capital, as the books and pamphlets have it, then this is its lair. He holds the site map, carefully marked and folded, under his arm. Mines, Railroads, Manufacturing, Agriculture and Government, Standard Oil, Quaker Oats, Aunt Jemima, Horlicks Malted Milk, and Baker’s Chocolate, all glorified in plaster and stone. There is no escaping the message-barkers and street bands hammering the air from every side, young girls in strange costumes passing out samples, concession signs boasting that their prices beat any at the Pan. The Assassin squirms through the press of bodies and emerges to face the sparkling blue-green of the Grand Basin, pausing to stare up for a moment at the massive Electric Tower that dominates the fairgrounds. It is an ivory tower with gold trimming and lustrous blue-green panels, a steadfast white sentinel over the riotous reds, yellows, and oranges of the South American buildings, with the gilded Goddess of Light herself sparkling four hundred feet above them.

I will bring this down.

The Assassin turns and walks past the Cascades, each towering plume of water a different color of the rainbow, then takes a seat on the wall of the Fountain of Abundance to wait.

The Kodak fiends are hiding them in their wicker baskets. Or shoeboxes, if less prepared. Word has gone out about the extra charge at the gate, a squad of sharp-eyed boys collecting fifty cents per camera, but with so many visitors blithely carrying their own food onto the grounds for bench picnics it only makes sense to smuggle your Brownie or Bull’s-Eye past them. Harry sees the devices everywhere, pulled out to snap the family grouping in front of one of the Exposition juggernauts or immortalize a comrade with his arm around some Midway exotic or a sweetheart precariously astride a dromedary’s back, then quickly nestled back into their hiding places. There is no hiding Mr. Edison’s apparatus of course, and immediately upon hauling it from the gondola Daddy Paley is surrounded by shutter bugs and small boys wanting to examine it. Ensconced in Luchow’s Nurnberg restaurant with the machine at his feet, a platter of steaming wursts and a nickel draught before him, he gives Harry leave to explore until the President comes at noon.