John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

In the early evening, hard to be exact in this season where you never see clear sky, he will climb to tap the palms again. Bung has a store of rice and he will trade some sap for it and then maybe sit and listen to the sea fishermen when they come in with whatever they’ve netted and drink and tell their long stories, eyes and voices growing soft with liquor, talking along with the slow rhythm of the waves. If there is news from the war, or if the war is still going on, nobody is trying to tell him about it. He feels his eyelids growing heavy. He senses Nilda moving around behind him, always with her hands busy, sewing mostly. She can make all kinds of pictures and patterns with the thread, and other women, the ones who don’t ask her to play cards and the ones in her mama’s village who won’t hardly look her in the eye, pay her in goods or sometimes in Mex money to put fancy borders on their clothes. Sometimes she will get up and step over to just touch him, like she needs to check that he is still there, that he is real. He knows she is there, always. This is where she is from, where she belongs, and he is just something that has washed up and doesn’t really fit. It is not so bad, a dreamy sort of life, the waters he has given himself up to warm and gently flowing. Royal drifts on the palm wine, barely able to hear the drops hit anymore, the air just a kind of water that is not so thick as what is in the slow, meandering stream outside, the sky is water and the earth soaked and overflowing with it and he lies on his side right where he is. A little chacón lizard is scuttling across the wall, hunting for insects. He can’t hear the waves but knows they haven’t stopped rolling. It will rain again tomorrow.

The boy has been following him for two blocks, eyeing the bag, undoubtedly seeking the perfect moment in which to spirit it away. Dr. Lunceford has never been this far south, below Canal Street, and is unfamiliar with the neighborhood. It is his last day in Manhattan, the apartment across the river arranged for, and he has exhausted the appetite for Dr. Bonkers’ elixir in the tenements farther north. There is alleged to be a settlement of colored people down here, but thus far he has not discovered it.

“Hey Mister!” calls the boy.

Dr. Lunceford stops and turns to face him. The boy is perhaps eleven or twelve, though it is difficult to be certain with the more undernourished of the street Arabs. The boy glances down to the bag.

“You a croaker?”

The license has been promised, but given the vicissitudes of state bureaucracy there is no telling when it will be delivered.

“Are you in need of a doctor?”

“It’s me pal,” explains the urchin. “He’s awful sick.”

The boy leads him to Duane Street, then toward the West River. Dr. Lunceford is wary, not discounting the possibility that the boy has older confederates in waiting. He has been waylaid twice uptown, once losing several bottles of Dr. Bonkers’ to a gang, boys who were not, surprisingly, interested in the more valuable leather bag or the rest of its contents. He assumes they were disappointed upon drinking the nostrum. In the other incident he merely fled, prudently if not with dignity.

The boy, who offers his name as Ikey Katz, stands at the head of an alleyway a block from the pier and waves him in.

“He’s down here at the end, Doc,” he says. And noticing the doctor’s suspicious demeanor, adds, “On the level.”

The spill from the streetlamps does not completely penetrate the narrow passage. A trio of eating establishments of the lower echelon back onto the alley and the smell is not pleasant.

He notes rat droppings as he walks, and trash bins that have not been emptied in some while. At the end there is a hodge-podge of discarded wooden pallets, and lying on one of these, muttering in a language Dr. Lunceford has no inkling of, is a semi-comatose young boy.

“We figgered somethin was crook wid him when he don’t show at the Newsies’ Home yesterday night,” says Ikey. “Thursdays they wash your drawers for free, and he don’t ever miss out on that. So we been checking all the spots where he flops at night, an I found him here.”

The boy is moaning and muttering, his forehead damp and hot, his pulse racing.

“He’s been like off his nut lately, the Kid, and — you know — getting dark er.”

“What is his name?”

Ikey shrugs. “We call him the Yella Kid.”

He is not yellow now, despite his mop of blond hair, but more of an angry bronze. Dr. Lunceford presses lightly on the swollen abdomen and the boy cries out, his eyes popping open to stare at the stranger in fright.

“Aw Jeez, not yet!” he cries. “I ain ready to go!”

“Calm yourself, son. I’m here to help you—”

“Shit you are! You’re here to stick me on the boat!”

“I don’t understand—”

“He thinks you’re the Reaper, Doc,” says Ikey. “The character that takes you unnerground.”

Dr. Lunceford removes his black homberg, forces what he hopes is a reassuring smile.

“I’m here to help you.”

The boy’s terrified eyes swing to his friend. “You member the one I showed you, Ikey? Right in the front winda at Altgeld’s. It’s all white—”

Ikey turns to Dr. Lunceford. “See? He’s been like that all week. Bughouse.”

“You got the meatwagon here, right?” says the boy. His voice is hoarse, unsteady, his eyes burning feverishly.

“I am not Death,” says Dr. Lunceford. “I am neither a butcher nor an undertaker. I am a doctor and I’m going to take you somewhere you can be treated.”

The boy’s eyes grow wider. “I aint goin to no croaker shop! They slip you the black bottle or you end up on one of them Orphan Trains—”

“Those are just stories—”

“The Orphan Trains is real ,” says Ikey Katz. “They got their paws on Jinx McGonigal and shipped him out to some farm where there’s nothin but squareheads. Made him work like a dog and kneel on a wooden pew every Sunday. Took him most of a year to scarper and bum his way back here.”

“He won’t be going anywhere for a long time,” says Dr. Lunceford, realizing how little reassurance the phrase offers. “Do you know where the Hudson Street Hospital is?”

“Sure.”

“You run there as fast as you can, straight to the ambulance barn, tell them that it is an emergency and bring them back here.”

“You got it, Doc.”

Ikey runs off down the alley. The sick boy’s breathing is rapid, shallow. A late-phase cholestatic jaundice, the bile ducts obstructed by a tumor or, less likely in one so young, gallstones, growing steadily. Nothing to be done till he is on an operating table.

The boy squints his eyes at him, as if his features are hard to make out in the weak half-light from the street. “You gotta tell em about the funeral crate,” he pleads. “It’s right up front in the winda. I got enough saved to cover it.”

With a good surgeon, thinks Dr. Lunceford, and the helping hand of Providence—

“I’ll be sure to let them know,” he tells the boy.

The boy clutches his middle, tears streaming down his cheeks. “It hurts somethin awful,” he says. “It hurts awful.”

“I know,” says Dr. Lunceford. “I know it does.”

The boy begins to convulse then, eyes rolling up into his skull, slender limbs thrashing against the pallet until Dr. Lunceford is able to take hold of him. The doctor hugs the boy’s head against his chest, wrapping his arms around him tightly till the spasms stop, muscles exhausted. His eyes clear slowly.

“I’m scared as hell, Doc,” he says, grimly lucid now, turning his head to look up to Dr. Lunceford. “I never figgered on that.”