John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“So why you want to be here?”

The Teniente waves a hand at his dozen sorry-looking insurrectos . “Most of my men were born in these mountains. And I lived here, on the other side near the sea, when I was very young.”

“You think you can beat them?”

He isn’t dressed any different but the way they treat him he must really be a lieutenant or maybe just rich before the war or what they have instead of white people. It is hard to tell the differences just by eye, specially with all them looking so raggedy and underfed and no coolies to truck their goods but him. They don’t joke with Teniente like they do with each other and a couple even take their hats off when they talk to him. Bayani, who they call sargento , looks at Royal the way you look at a brood hen that might be ready for the pot. If the time comes for killing the dark-skin American, he will be the one to do it.

“Are they willing to follow us all the way up here?” asks the lieutenant. “To send men to every island, to fight the moros whose god tells them it is beautiful to die in battle and who were never broken by the Spanish army?”

Up here, hungry, cold now, and if the Teniente is telling the truth, surrounded by all these wild people, it seems crazy to think you could ever bring it all under control. But the people who make the decisions, who send the Army to do their business, are not up here and never will be.

“They run the flag up,” he tells the Filipino. “And once they done that they won’t leave off, no matter what. I been to where they chased old Geronimo, there aint enough in that country to keep a snake alive, and still they went and chased him down and thrown the irons on him and drug him back to the reservation. Once they run that flag up, the story is over.”

He can tell it is not what the Teniente wants to hear. He seems to ponder something for a moment. “What do you know of Roosevelt?”

“Teddy? He was in Cuba. Got up the hill without they shot him, so he’s a hero now.”

“He is your new President.”

“That dog sink his teeth in,” Royal tells him, “he aint letting go.”

The Teniente nods, looks over to where the little boy, who the others call Fulanito, sits staring at the pile of rocks and wooden cross.

“Nicanor, the man who has fallen, was not meant to be a soldier,” he says. “He was a breeder of the male birds.”

“For rooster fights.”

“You have this?”

“Sure. I seen a bunch of em.”

“It is very popular among my people. Wagering—”

“Hell, my people bet on whether the sun come up.”

“And music. You are also great musicians.”

“Some of us are. I can’t hardly sing.”

“You won’t try to escape,” says the Teniente, more a statement than a question. “Will you?”

It is so many years since he has prayed. Diosdado was a firm believer as a child, the star pupil of the cura parroco , wearing the subaltern’s vestments for special masses, thrilling his poor, God-intoxicated mother with his ability to parrot the Latin phrases. He sits alone on a knob of limestone looking eastward down at the valley they’ve run from, straining to muster the faith to tell his men what must be done next. If the Father in Heaven who Diosdado was taught to adore — remote, wise, looking very much like a Spanish don — is a fabrication, a mere projection of men’s fears and desires, then what of this mythical Republic? The men who personified it, Bonifacio and Luna murdered, Aguinaldo captured and tamed, San Miguel and la Vibora Ricarte grown less rational with each doomed engagement, have all failed them. Our Father Who art in—

He prayed, pretended to pray, over Nicanor, over the other fallen who they’ve had time to bury. The men expect it, need it, sometimes demanding that hostage friars be dragged from their confinement to mutter phrases in languages the men do not understand, to make their holy signs. A breeze climbs up the side of the mountain, carrying the smell of canefields burning over, sugar rising up into the stalks. The Igorots have an older god, one they never speak of to the curas españoles , a god who makes the spears fly true and the arrows find blood, a god of severed heads and fire. It is a terrible god to have to pray to, thinks Diosdado, dreading whatever decision comes next, but the only one left who will listen to him.

Royal hears banging and sees the little boy, Fulanito, slamming the barrel of his rifle against a rock.

“What you doing that for?”

Royal squats next to the boy. Fulanito snags the fixed sight of the rifle on his shirt front and says something. Royal has seen Mausers abandoned in the field or in the arms of dead rebels with the sight filed off. These are the people who hacked Junior to death, not the very ones maybe, but on the same side. Up close, though, they only seem scared and confused, running and hiding and running again the way a rabbit will if you’ve filled up all its holes. He holds a hand out. “Lemme show you what that’s for.”

The boy has only one 7-mil round, carried in a small pouch hung around his neck. After he brought Royal in he jacked it out of the magazine and stuffed it back in the pouch. He does the same now before letting Royal touch the rifle.

Royal flips the rear sight ladder up, then pushes the elevation button and slides the marker up and down the calibrated numbers.

“You got to guess at how far your target is and set the number here, then you line it up with the tip of your front sight there — which is why you don’t want to go knocking it off . And if they close to you—” he indicates Bayani standing forty yards away, looking back down the mountain, “you slap this down and just use that front one. Otherwise you might’s well just grab it by the barrel and try to club em on the head.”

Fulanito takes the Mauser back and Royal leaves him playing with the sight ladder. The Teniente says the boy, no telling where he came from, walked into their camp carrying the Mauser one day, doing a dumb-show about how he stole it from a Spaniard. Since it is old and crooked-looking and there is only the one round they let him keep it. This bunch seems mostly to want to move as fast and as far from the shooting war as they can, and Fulanito can run with any of them.

Nilda is shelling corn, piling the dry kernels on a banana leaf, when the American sits to talk at her again. The men don’t seem to care. Fecundo talked at her like this when they were still in Las Ciegas and he wanted to leave, only Fecundo was always nervous and waved his hands and talked loud like making a speech. The American, Roy, has a soft voice and is sad and sometimes helps her with whatever work is simple enough for a man to understand. Fecundo hit her once because he thought she wasn’t listening. There was nowhere to go. She had run away from Candelaria at fifteen to be with Fecundo even though her parents said he was a gambler and a bassi drinker, even though they had chosen Ciriaco Kangleón who was the cabeza de barangay and had two boys nearly her age from his wife who died of the coughing. They sent word that she was no longer their daughter. In Las Ciegas she had to live with Fecundo’s mother who had wanted him to marry a different girl and called her a puta , even when Fecundo was in the room. When Padre Praxides finally came to marry them and end the scandal he said she had offended Our Father. But she decided that Our Father had surely gotten a look at el viejo Kangleón and his two lazy sons and would understand.

“Nobody who is intelligent can live like this,” Fecundo would say. “The people here are ignorant and jealous and they cheat at cards.”

She would keep weeding or digging or chopping or cooking or washing or feeding what few chickens the wild dogs hadn’t eaten and usually he didn’t need her to speak. Fecundo was sure that the people in town were all against him, telling lies and spreading rumors, maybe even poisoning the crops though he had given up caring for them already.