John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

He doesn’t see the second signal.

He is cranking steadily and there is a noise from the crowd around him, a thousand gasping at once as smoke billows up from all four shoes, white smoke and burned-flesh odor and then Topsy buckling without a cry, collapsing in a pile like a condemned tenement building.

Shouts and some cheers and somebody crying, but Harry cranks through it, strangely shaken by the end of this breathtaking, murderous creature, the song in his head running to the rhythm of his cranking, as if it is a hurdy-gurdy and not a motion-picture camera—

You absent-minded beggar

Be you city-sport or jay—

The roll runs out and Harry calls to Jubal for another. The veterinarian is there to proclaim that the beast has been executed and a trio of groundskeepers, colored men, wait to dispose of the gargantuan carcass. It is a heroic task, much more difficult than throwing a switch, and he wants to record the process on film. But Porter is already taking the instrument off the tripod.

“People have seen what they came for, Harry,” he says. “Show’s over.”

But it won’t leave his head, the song the young men were singing incessantly on that first boat trip to Coney Island with Brigid McCool—

You absent-minded beggar

Be you city-sport or jay

If you want to see the Elephant

You must pay, pay, pay!

John Sayles’s previous novels include Pride of the Bimbos, Los Gusanos , and the National Book Award — nominated Union Dues . He has directed seventeen feature films, including Matewan, Eight Men Out , and Lone Star , and received a John Cassavetes Award, a John Steinbeck Award, and two Academy Award nominations. His latest film, Amigo , was completed in 2010.