John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Get to O’Brien’s ship!” shouts Niles as he turns to help Red Gibbs slow down the lynch-minded throng. “And keep out of sight!”

Hod runs then, sweat steaming in the freezing air, men chasing him across Runnalls and down Broadway and off onto Holly Street, Hod cutting through the open door of Jeff Smith’s Parlor and past the squawking eagle and through the card room into the backyard where he throws the latch that opens the secret passage through the board fence he has seen them use so many times to frustrate a skinned stampeder. He comes out into Paradise Alley and steps into the first red-lit crib he sees, startling the Belgian girl inside.

“But what is this?!”

Hod is swallowing blood and fighting for breath, realizing, as the hammering of his heart begins to slow, that he is nearly naked.

“I’m freezing.” One of his gloves has been torn off in the melee and he manages to work the other off with his teeth, but his hands are nearly useless in the hardened wrappings. He manages to lower the shade. “I got to get under the covers.”

“I will get Bernard—”

“Unless he wears my size,” says Hod, climbing into the narrow bed, “forget about your maque. Just relax, make me some coffee. Soapy will pay in the morning.”

The woman is wearing a wrapper with a Chinese design on it and mukluks. She pours him coffee from a pot already cooking on the little woodstove in the center of the room.

“You have been in a fight?”

“Something like that.” The coffee tastes like metal.

“The other man, he beats you.”

“Listen, would you mind coming in here with me?”

The woman has blondined hair and huge breasts. She keeps the wrapper on and plants herself on top of him and it is strange, lying with a woman who isn’t Addie Lee, but after twenty minutes he stops shaking. He sends her to the Parlor then, and sits wrapped in blankets on the bed, fire poker in hand in case her Bernard is one of Smith’s many enemies and betrays him to the mob.

It is Smokey who finally comes to the door, Smokey with a fresh gash across his nose, wearing a fur hat with side flaps to hide his face and carrying a bundle of clothes and a pair of sheep shears to cut the handwraps away.

“Thought you didn’t work for Jeff anymore.”

Smokey shrugs. “Guess I been bought back.”

“How’s the Swede?”

Smokey works the blade of the shears under the stiffened cloth and begins to cut.

“Sheriff Taylor got a warrant out for you.”

Hod starts to shiver again. “It was a fight. With a referee—”

“Don’t nobody remember boxing aint legal till somebody get killed.”

Outside the auroras are still shimmering green above and the wagon sitting in Paradise Alley has PEOPLES’ FUNERAL PARLOR painted on the side.

“You gone have to climb in there,” says Smokey, indicating a casket loaded on the back. “They still mens out hopin to tie a rope round your neck.”

When he pulls the lid off he discovers that the box holds the remains of Fritz Stammerjohn who used to work on the Brackett Road with him, murdered yesterday at the Grotto and now frozen quite stiff.

Smokey, nervous, takes the reins in hand. A pack of Skaguay dogs, terriers and shepherds and collies and retrievers deemed too weak or too flighty to pull a sled, have discovered them and take turns propping themselves up against the wagon on their front paws to sniff. “You and him both headin for Seattle,” says Smokey. “Gone have to double up till we gets to the boat.”

Hod lays the Belgian whore’s blanket over Fritz Stammerjohn and climbs in, lying head to feet, Smokey propping the lid over them with a tiny crack for air. It is a bumpy, uncomfortable ride, angry voices calling out here and there, but the wagon never stops till they are on the Alaska wharf alongside the Utopia. Captain O’Brien is out on deck, watching the Northern Lights.

“You start to wonder if there’s a God in Heaven,” he sighs as Hod helps Smokey lug the casket aboard, “and then He sends you a night like this.”

In the drawing there are a half-dozen young men standing aimlessly, many with their hands in their pockets, as if in line for a free lunch. They are placed, however, on a ramp leading into the maw of a huge iron pot atop a roaring fire.

The pot is labeled CUBA.

A leather-aproned Hephaestus-as-blacksmith grins down into the brew, steam curling around his large, boyish face — unmistakably a caricature of the Chief — as he pumps a large hand-bellows to excite the flames. A chute extends from the base of the pot, and marching out on it is a neat row of identical, uniformed soldiers with rifles on their shoulders.

THE CRUCIBLE OF WAR

— reads the caption, and the Cartoonist is hard-pressed to say whether the whole effect is critical or laudatory. The soldiers look manly and forthright, a vast improvement over the loafers they had once been, and the Chief might seem either demonic or merely industrious. Since an equal number of men are seen leaving as are seen entering the crucible, there is no indication that any have been lost within it. The word is that the Chief pinned this one on the wall of his office and called the Herald to compliment them on the likeness.

The other drawing portrays him as an old geezer, bent double with age and supporting himself on a crutch labeled WAR WITH SPAIN. A Latin-looking nurse wields an oversized hypodermic, injecting JINGO JUICEinto his buttocks while Joe Pulitzer, hands on hips, observes disapprovingly.

GOOD FOR THE CIRCULATION

If anything will improve circulation it is the nurse, one of Templeton’s specialties, her dress much more form-fitting than would be allowed on a white woman. Pulitzer’s World has always been merciless to the Chief, of course, accusing him of having manufactured the Evangelina Cisneros affair and of scuttling any hope of diplomatic solution in Cuba. But Old Jewseph has jumped on the war wagon so wholeheartedly himself that this can only be viewed as a purely personal attack.

So once again the Cartoonist is drawing the Eagle.

He has a knack for birds, better than any of the big salary boys, and the Chief knows it. The trick is to make them express themselves with their feathers. The Chief wants not only to rebuke the Spanish and his competitors, but to remind the readers that we need a good scrap, that this won’t be American against American, no — if certain people would just get out of the way we could step out and take our place among the Great Powers.

The Eagle, spear and arrows clutched in its talons, strains its wings as it attempts to soar skyward despite the chain around one leg, with Pulitzer and Senator Hanna and a couple of the other naysayers hauling back on it, heels dragging the ground as the mighty raptor threatens to lift them all away. His Pulitzer needs some work, a decent enough likeness but not sufficiently craven. The Eagle’s feathers, if you had to put it into words, are proud but angry. Uncle is there already, speaking to his companion yet to be drawn, President McKinley.

SHE’LL FLY IF YOU LET HER

— Sam is saying. The Chief wants the President to be uncertain but dignified. He also wants to try a small boy, an onlooker, off to one side and very much upset by the spectacle, labeled OUR FUTURE WARRIOR or something similar. The terrible effect of peace-mongering on tender minds. The Eagle is looking with furious concentration at a trio of distant islands, Cuba, Porto Rico, and Guam, each with a palm tree and a Spanish flag sticking up from them. Adding China, though in tune with the ambition of the picture, might be confusing.