John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The Assassin has his handkerchief wrapped around his right hand, as if it has been injured, the pistol wet and hot in his palm beneath it. There is a very large colored man behind him. He realizes he should have eaten, but the stabbing he witnessed the night before has driven all thoughts of food from his mind. “Keep moving,” says a policeman, though it is clear everybody in the line is eager to get to the President.

He is a bland pudge of a man, thinks the Assassin on seeing him so closely, a willing tool of the Monopolists and money-riggers, a smug prattler of Christian bromides. The President smiles and shakes hands in the line ahead. “A pleasure to meet you,” the Assassin hears him say. A bland pudge of a man with a massive, self-satisfied belly who scratches a pen on paper and men lose their farms or are thrown out of work or sent to foreign jungles to kill and die. I will do this thing, thinks the Assassin — there is no turning back. Easy as standing in front of a train. Two more people.

“I spent a long, sleepless night,” he hears the President explain to the man who lingers in front of him, “but in the morning I found that the Lord had spoken. We could not abandon the Philippines to paganism and anarchy.”

The Assassin is the pebble under the iron heel of the Rulers. He is the Voice drowned out by their machinery. He is invisible. He sees the eyes of the bodyguard shift from him, uninterested, to the negro giant next in line. The Assassin is No Man. In ’93 when they cut wages at the rolling mill he went out with the others, walked the picket line, was fired and put on their blacklist. Nieman, he said after the strike had failed and they were rehiring and the new foreman asked his name, Fred Nieman. No Man. The foreman did not speak German, did not see the smirks of the other workers as banished Leon Czolgosz strolled back onto the factory floor. He had been cool-headed on that day, had waited in line for his interview, had done what was necessary. He steps past the Exposition man. The President holds his hand out. The Assassin pushes it away.

The soloist pauses then, or perhaps the piece is over, the last great organ note echoing in the Temple.

The Assassin stares into the great, self-satisfied belly of the man and squeezes the trigger.

Harry is helping to set up for the Parade when the shots and the shouting begin. The Temple is behind them. He helps Paley reposition the apparatus, helps him up onto the apple boxes they have nailed together to make a shooting platform. They asked to be inside but the Exposition organizers said no, even the still photographer would have to step out before the greeting process began. The word of the deed crackles around them like static electricity, the line of well-wishers dissolving into an ever-growing mob. The President has been shot, that much is for certain, and the assailant has been made captive. Exposition police have rushed out of the Temple and from other parts of the fair to guard the four entrances, enraged citizens pushing at them, men who have come to stroll the grounds with their loved ones now red-faced and hysterical.

“Lynch him! Lynch him!” they shout.

“Bring the son of a bitch out here and burn him!”

Harry takes his hat off and mops his brow with his handkerchief.

“That’s just talk, kid,” Daddy Paley calls down to him. “We don’t usually go for the rope up here.”

“What should we do?”

“Shoot,” says the cameraman, trying to crank steadily despite his excitement. “Shoot till we run out of film.”

“It’s just a crowd. The backs of people’s heads.”

“The backs of people’s heads trying to get into the building where their President has just been shot. And we’re the only camera outfit on the grounds.” With that he begins to slowly pan the apparatus left to right on the swivel-joint Harry has been trying to perfect.

Harry turns as an electric ambulance pushes its way through the mass of people, siren wailing. Beyond it he sees the denizens of the Midway approaching, cautious, looking stunned and awkward outside of their native habitats. Arabs, Turks, and Armenians, Egyptian dancing girls, Mexican vaqueros, Filipinos of various shades and sizes, Esquimaux, Hawaiians, feathered Indians from the Congress, Japanese in their colorful robes, the Baker’s Chocolate Dutch girl in her wooden shoes, tiny Selenite Moon-Men, tribal chieftans from Darkest Africa and cotton pickers from the Old Plantation. They hang back a ways from the throng of Americans angrily surrounding the Temple of Music, not sure of their place here but knowing something important has occurred.

If there was a way, thinks Harry, to begin with the whole motley gathering of them, wide enough to hold the camel’s head in the frame, then slowly lose all the others so only one face fills the shot, the buckskinned beauty from the Five Nations gift shop perhaps, twisting her braids and crying. And then, turning back as the police raise their clubs to quell a murderous rush on the main entrance, he prays that the assassin is at the least a white man.

They all want to be put wise and expect Shoe to come up with the dope. The rumpus out front has barely settled down when the six o’clock from Syracuse pulls through, factory whistles screaming and the bell gonging at the tractor works. Shoe rolls off his rack, feeling the cold concrete through his socks, steps to the basin and splashes his face with the tiny bit of water left standing, no light yet but everything in the cell within the arm’s reach of an amputee. He wrestles into his pants, shirt, vest and jacket, then jams his feet into the prison-issue gunboats and laces them up. By the time the lights are switched on in the tier, his own bare bulb flickering overhead, he is dressed and combed, ready to peel another day off his sentence. Shoe hooks the rack up flush to the wall, rolls the thin mattress, folds the blanket and lays the sorry excuse for a pillow on top. He does his morning set-up routine, facing the door and pressing hard against the concrete on either side with his arms, straining as if to push the walls apart, then reaching up to touch the ceiling, followed by a dozen squats, knees popping each time he bends them.

“Give him to us!” they shouted. “Hand the filthy bastard over!” That size crowd in the dead of night, police whistles shrilling and every one of the night bulls clomping out to the front gate, it must be some holy terror they’ve brought in, some spitting, unrepentant menace to society hustled past the warden’s desk and flung directly into a punishment cell. Wife-killer maybe, local enough to draw a mob, or maybe a chickenhawk caught with his beak where it shouldn’t be. Whatever the beef, it’s the first flash of novelty at Warden Mead’s hotel for months, and the boys will want to know the particulars.

Time for bolts and bars now, as Grogan, with his heavy tread, clangs up the stairs with Pete Driscoll gimping behind him. The long bar is sprung and Shoe stands with his hands on the grated iron, the levers clunking as the Captain and the trustee approach from the right— chunk! chank! and when his door is free Shoe pushes hard to swing it open, then grabs his shitbucket by the handle and steps out onto the wooden gallery walk. He stands at attention, face forward, shooting his eyes to Pete. But the trustee only raises his eyebrows, in the know but unable to pass it on, and follows Grogan unlatching the cells. The faintest light sneaks through the barred windows of the outside wall across from him now as the company forms up con by con, each with bucket in left hand and wearing their joint faces, indifferent to the day, waiting for permission to breathe. Grogan reaches the end of the tier, every man accounted for, and raps his metal-tipped stick once on the floor. The men half-turn left. Grogan raps twice and they begin to still-march in rhythm with each other, till he raps a third time and they short-step forward, single file along the gallery walk, right hand laid flat on the guardrail where it can be seen, and down the narrow iron stairs to the bottom, crossing the stone floor till the lead man reaches the wing door where they stop and wait in silence till all the tiers are in formation and then Grogan double-raps again and they head out past Captain Flynn counting at the door and into the damp, cold shock of the yard.