John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

CONJECTURE THAT WARSHIP

MAINE BLOWN TO PIECES BY

ENEMY’S SECRET

INFERNAL MACHINE

The Chief will want to post one of his rewards for this one, no doubt, the engraver already preparing a plate to replicate the check. $10,000 is as high as he has gone in the past, but this wondrous catastrophe would seem to merit a greater offering. The Chief will decide when he arrives from the theater. Information, mostly from the sizable lunatic population of the city, will pour in, and the reward will never be paid. But even symbolic gestures demand proportion—

SPANISH AMBASSADOR

DE LÔME

FLEES COUNTRY

AFTER TENDERING RESIGNATION

The Editor’s ultimate test of a split head is to imagine it shouted by one of the pack of newsboys who peddle their wares by the hackney stand where he hires his ride home, particularly the jaundiced little street Arab who bellows every word over 20 points high as if the fate of the world were in balance—

AMERICAN GENERALS WANT

INCREASE IN TROOPS IF WE ARE

TO FIGHT SPAIN

The correspondents will file their copy, succinct narratives peppered (never, they argue, laden) with whatever facts they might stumble upon. Facts, however, are complex, facts are often inconclusive or contradictory. The reader who buys on the street is not looking for information about a crisis, he wants guidance as to how he should feel about it—

WAR? SURE!

The facts will take care of themselves.

A crowd of men have gathered in front of the Mondamin, listening to Jeff Smith up on a barrel of nails. Hod sees Smokey standing a few feet back from the throng, nervous.

“Our boys asleep,” says Smith. “Defenseless. Then the furtive approach, the infernal device installed at water level, the fuse ignited—”

“What happened?” Hod whispers.

“Seattle papers come in,” says Smokey. “This is bad.”

“Then the dormant city shaken by a terrible explosion!” Jeff Smith has his hat over his heart now, a tear in his voice. “Our brave lads blown to smithereens. Dismembered. Horribly burned. Drowned in the unforgiving waters.”

“They gone blame this on me,” mutters Smokey, shaking his head.

“Bodies float to the surface.” Smith is using his soap-selling voice, dark eyes burning with indignation. “The malefactors feign innocence.”

Hod is confused. “What do you have to do with it?”

Smokey looks around at the red-faced men, steam rising from their mouths and noses, jaws clenched in anger. “Cause I’m the closest thing they got to a Spaniard in this camp.”

“But will Americans countenance this treachery?” Jeff Smith raising a fist in the air. “Will we quail and run? Will we falter before the swarthy Dago assassin?” The men shout No! to each tremulous query. Smith spreads his arms wide and smiles. “I knew it in my heart. Our country needs us, gentlemen. I have wired the Territory requesting commission. Any red-blooded American among you—” and here he points with his hat toward a tent that has been set up in the middle of the street at Broadway and Seventh, “—may strike a blow for liberty by signing on with the Skaguay Guards! God bless America!”

There is cheering and fist-waving and then the band from the Garden of Joy steps out to play The Stars and Stripes and most of the crowd, townsmen and busted stampeders alike, hurries to enlist, loudly describing the beating the wicked Spaniards are about to suffer. Jeff Smith hops down and crosses to Hod and Smokey.

“Most of them are hoping Uncle Sam will provide free passage back to the Outside,” he winks. “Let’s see how bold that reform outfit been nippin at my heels is when I’ve got my own army.”

“We gone to war?” Hod hasn’t looked at a newspaper since he’s been in the Yukon. It all seems very far away.

“We will, son, soon enough.” He claps Hod on the shoulder. “I’ll expect you to join the roll, of course. Sergeant McGinty.”

A long line has formed in front of the tent, getting longer every moment.

“I suppose I ought to.”

“That’s the spirit!” Jeff Smith’s eyes are glowing. He hasn’t changed from last night’s poker game, cigar ash on his pants, whiskey on his breath, the butt of his Navy Colt jutting out from the open front of his otterskin coat. “But first you two must bring me an eagle,” he says, and steps back inside the hotel.

“Eagles been gone for months,” says Hod.

Smokey is already on the move. “I know who find us some.”

They take the wagon out to Alaska Street. Voyageur lives in the last cabin at the end of the Line, the only one without cold-stiffened undergarments hung outside to advertise a woman within. Voyageur is a fisherman and meat hunter who sells his game to the grub tents at White Pass City.

“You lookin for a three-dollar whore you come too far!” he calls when Hod bangs on the door. He is a white-stubbled, sharp-smelling old man who dresses like a Tlingit and is scraping the flesh off a marmot hide as they step in to state their business.

“Birds mostly follow the salmon up into Canada when the spawning peters out,” he tells them. “But now that you got this run of fools going over the Pass year-round, why bother?”

He lets them borrow a square of weir netting and tells them the best place to look. “Anywhere there’s dead things, you find you some birds.”

They leave the wagon at Feero’s and travel the Brackett Road, able to skirt past the pack trains and the hapless stampeders trying to haul their own goods. The ice won’t break for months but still the greenhorns are in a rush, desperate to add their tents to the cluster at the edge of Lake Lindeman and start eating through their supplies.

“Skaguay got no use for you less you got cash money to spend, and it gone take some of that every day,” says Smokey as they pass a party that includes two women dragging a woodstove loaded on a sled over the corduroy road. “Stay here too long, they be nothin left of you.”

Hod talks them through the toll, explaining their mission, and they reach the base of the White Pass by noon. Even in the freezing cold it stinks.

“That’s some that aint gone yet,” says Smokey.

The Gulch is full of carcasses, mostly horses. Some are just bones, or frozen and dried to leather, while a few must have fallen or faltered and been pushed off the trail in the last few days. They lie twisted and broken on the rock, bones ripped through their hides, clusters of eagles picking at their exposed innards while ravens waddle anxiously a few feet away, waiting their turn.

The eagles barely flap out of the path as Hod and Smokey walk through the carnage.

“Let’s us turn our backs on this bunch here,” says Smokey. “Then when I say three, turn and toss it over em.”

The ravens all manage to squawk away before the net lands on two feasting eagles. The men sit on the trunk of a deadfall tree on the side of the slope, covering their noses with their mittens, and wait till the scavengers tire themselves out under the mesh. “Mr. Jeff gone want that big one,” says Smokey. “We let the other fly.” The bird he points at has blood speckling its white neck feathers and smells of dead horse.

Hod can hear a pack train climbing on the trail above them, can hear a man cursing a mule and a child crying, just crying.

“So how you end up here?” Smokey is the only negro he has seen in Skaguay, the only one he’s seen since the deckhands on the steamer to Dyea.