John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Pete Driscoll had left the apple in the fold of Shoe’s mattress. Shoe took most of the evening to finish it.

Second Work he is running for Dudley in clerical, who likes to keep you hopping. Get me some water, get me some chewing gum, pull down the shade, pull it back up, run this note here, run that note there, run down to the kitchen and get me some java.

“More when I know it,” Shoe whispers as he doles the kites out in the shops, cons hissing questions at him when their supervisor isn’t looking.

“Shoal-gosh,” says Stan Zabriski in the ironworks. “That’s how you say it.”

“The Hunkie.”

“He’s Polish. You say the c-z like a s-h .”

“You people expect to get ahead in this country,” Shoe tells him, “you better straighten that out.”

He is less than surprised, proud even, that the scrap of newspaper he left at the broom shop has beat him to the ironworks.

“Telling jokes, he is,” says Sergeant Kelso when he stops by clerical to check on his pay slip. “Sitting up with his hand firm on the tiller of the ship of state. That’s our Mac.”

“You’ve heard more?”

“The wop who drives the breadwagon got it straight from the special edition. They’ve dug out all but one of the bullets and he’s as right as rain.”

“Thank God,” says Dudley, scribbling in his ledger. “If that damn cowboy gets in we’re all cooked.”

Kelso sits on the edge of the desk. “Oh, Teddy’s all right. A bit impetuous is all. The boys on Capitol Hill will cure him of that soon enough.”

Shoe stands by the blackboard memorizing the shift assignments for the next month. Never know what you might earn with that sort of dope to pass out. “So they left a slug in him?”

“Let sleeping dogs lie, says I. If Mac’s not squawking it’s best to leave it sit there.”

“Sit where?”

“If they knew,” says the keeper, giving Shoe an exasperated look, “d’ye think they wouldn’t have yanked it out of him by now?”

As you come in from Second Work there is a bin full of bread and Shoe grabs two slices to take up to his cell, thinking of Shoal-gosh down there sitting on the rivets, pondering his future with an empty stomach. His future that sits only three steps away, on the other side of the barred oaken door. Shoe pulls his rack down and lays out the mattress and blankets and sits on the edge of it, slowly eating the bread and draining the tin cup of warm coffee left on his shelf. They come through twice a night down in the punishment cells, shining the bullseye lantern in on your face and calling your name and if you don’t repeat it right away they come in and kick you where it hurts. What surprised him was how there could be bedbugs when there was no bed, by the third day a lively nest of crotch crickets in his pants. Scratching their bites and finding and killing them became his only entertainment. The Yiddish singer fell apart a week after they fried Kemmler, screaming how his brains were leaking out through his ears and pressing his shit through the narrow slit in his door till the bulls got arm-weary from slugging him and wrote him a ticket to Matteawan.

“What have you got to say for yourself?” Grogan asked Shoe when he finally wobbled back out into the yard, pale and squinting, his teeth loose with scurvy.

“You win.”

“We always do,” smiled the keeper.

There are worse things, he muses, than doing a three-spot in Auburn. It could be your home, like old Wiley, in the slammer so long that everybody outside forgets you. Or you could be stuck on the Row like this Shoal-gosh, listening to the dynamo grind.

A little before lights-out Pete Driscoll gimps down the gallery, pausing by Shoe’s door.

“Garvin says he’ll give you three-to-two the President lives.”

They’ve planted Al in the south wing, but he and Shoe manage to keep a few wagers running — Al lost a bundle to him on Bryan in the last election, everything he’d won on the Gans — McGovern scrap. It helps to pass the time.

“He’s betting on Mac?”

“Says he’ll serve his full jolt in the White House and waltz on back to Canton.”

According to the papers every two-bit croaker in Buffalo stuck their fingers in the guy, searching for the missing slug. Shoe’s own father walked out of the hospital with a clean bill of health from the docs, only to be kayoed by an infection a week later.

“Tell him I’ll take it for fifty.”

Pete limps away, going down the iron steps one at a time. The bulb hanging overhead flickers, then goes out with the light in the rest of the wing as the seven o’clock from Syracuse rattles past outside. Shoe lies on his back in his prison-issue union suit and listens to the prison telegraph. Tapping from above, tapping from below, tapping from all sides, the bars singing with questions. They all want to know, but Shoe has no answer.

He dreams of crows.

The men don’t want to leave the caves. It is cool inside during the day and there is water running, cold water, in one of them. The American is fevered, mumbling, and sleeps through the first day inside. Fulanito is strutting, proud of his capture, for even if the American is a negro he might be worth somebody in a trade. There was trading in the early days of the campaign, when they were still an army, a half-dozen insurgentes descalzos equal to one American captain. Orestes comes back to report the American column has in fact marched on over the mountains toward Subig and there seem to be no more behind them. The woman from Las Ciegas brings the American water twice without being told to.

The fever of the negro breaks on the afternoon of the second day. Diosdado goes to sit by him.

“Do you understand your situation?” he asks, speaking slowly.

“I got to carry or you gone shoot me.”

Diosdado smiles. “We do not wish to do this. We should be fighting on the same side, you and I.”

“We’re not.”

The man is not stupid. Diosdado asks the woman from Las Ciegas, who speaks Zambal and Tagalog, to bring some of the broiled kamote left from the morning meal, then watches him eat.

“Do you like these?”

“Like eatin em more than carryin em,” says the American. “You a general?”

“Teniente. A lieutenant — in name only. As we have disbanded the army, rank is no longer so formal.”

“Where you learn to talk?”

“In Hongkong. From the British.”

He resembles the mountain negritos in the nap of his hair and the shade of his skin, but his features are what Diosdado guesses is a combination of the African and the European. The man cocks his head as he looks back, calculating.

“How you mix?”

“In Zambales many of us are partly Chinese. And I have a Spanish grandfather on my mother’s side of the family,” he explains. “You, on the other hand, are a Royal Scot.”

The man almost smiles. “They call me Roy in the company.”

“And why do you fight for them?”

It is what he has been wanting to ask, what truly puzzles him, but suddenly out loud it sounds rude.

Royal Scott considers, shrugs slightly. “S’what I signed up to do.”

“But why?”

“Best job they offerin.”

“A job killing people you know nothing about.”

“All I got to know is they shoot at me and I shoot back.” The man softens his voice. “I’m a p’fessional soldier, Regular Army,” he says, face growing blank with belief. “You fight who they say to fight.”

“A mercenary.”

“Pay aint bad, when it comes.”

“Did you ever think,” asks Diosdado, trying to make it sound offhand, “of doing what we have done? Defying your oppressors?”