John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“As long as your politicians take the colored man into their embrace on election day and make him think that he is a man and a brother, so long will lynching prevail — for familiarity breeds con tempt .”

She is brilliant, as usual, in her use of the language. “Your” politicians, leaving the unenfranchised women innocent of the outrage, the twist in logic that makes misplaced benevolence the handmaiden of murder. Daddy was president of the Forensic Society in his Princeton days and has drilled Miss Loretta in the uses and abuses of rhetoric. She feels tears beginning to form. The man beside her presses his hands, curled into fists, against his thighs as he rocks and growls, his knuckles white.

“And if it needs lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from these ravening human brutes—” a tiny caesura, the intake of breath before the final chord, “—then I say lynch , a thousand times a week if necessary!”

The little man springs to his feet, smashing his hands together in approval, joined by half the audience, the women applauding as fervently if not as athletically as the men. It is what they have come for, the air in the room with a different charge than she’s ever felt before, a raw and terrible energy. Miss Loretta rises and walks quickly up the aisle toward the rear of the hall, a tight smile on her face, the tears coming now.

She recognizes the man standing at the very back. He is not applauding but writing on a pad, a frown fixed on his handsome face. Their eyes meet for an instant and he nods, though they have never been formally introduced. It is Alex Manly, the editor of the Wilmington Daily Record , who is engaged to her dear little Carrie.

Miss Loretta may be the only person in the hall who knows he is not white.

“The manhood of the South,” she hears the Suffragist continue as the applause dies down, the words echoing, distant and hollow now as she hurries across the lobby, “must put a sheltering arm around innocence and virtue. The black fiend who lays his unholy and lustful hands on white women must surely die!”

An ancient negro waits, leaning against his hackney carriage at the bottom of the steps.

“M’am,” he says, tipping his battered cap, and offers his hand to help her up.

Miss Loretta experiences a twinge of — what? Discomfort? Fear? — as she takes it, and is immediately furious with herself.

“Thank you,” she says when she is settled. “Eighth and Market, please.”

The old man tips his cap again and climbs up into the driver’s seat.

“Listenin to Mrs. Felton,” he says as he urges the horse into motion.

“Yes. She’s — she’s quite an orator.”

“Womens at the ballot box,” he says, shaking his head at the wonder of the idea. “That be a new day.”

In Denver they don’t make him undress.

The meeting is in the bigger bar downstairs at the Windsor, the one with the silver dollars inlaid every few feet in the floor and walls. Masterson perched on a stool pulled away from the bar counter as the pencil artist sits and stands and squats to draw his face from different vantage points, Niles Manigault obligingly skittering out of the eyeline whenever it changes, the fat man blocking most all the daylight from the open doorway.

“He knows the deal?” asks Masterson, flicking his eyes briefly at Hod.

“He fought Choynski,” says Niles. “Held his own.”

“The three great virtues of a prizefighter,” says Masterson, lifting his chin a bit to catch the light angling in from Larimer Street, “are Talent, Heart, and O be dience. In my book the last of these is the greatest.”

“He’s a sharp lad,” says Niles. “Once the deal, whatever it is, has been agreed upon—”

“Twelve rounds,” says the fat man, slowly circling Hod, poking his bicep once with his cane. “Reddy needs time to sell beer, and if the Kid and Mongone are fighting straight—”

“For eight rounds they’re fighting so that both stay on their feet,” interrupts Masterson, “and then they can knock each other’s brains out.”

“You’ve placed some wagers.”

“Move, Otto,” says Masterson, holding his pose and wiggling a finger sideways. “You’re throwing a shadow.”

The fat man snorts in annoyance but moves to the side a few feet. He wears a bright checked suit and a red vest. “If you’d just have a photograph taken like a normal man—”

“It lacks the human dimension,” says Masterson. His face is fleshier than Hod has imagined, his eyes sharper. In their boyhood games he always insisted on being Masterson, his brother Zeb left with a choice of badmen to represent. “It lacks the soul . These likenesses, which will appear in — what’s this one to be called?”

“ Bat Masterson, Plague of the Kansas Outlaw ,” answers the crouching artist, eyes fixed on his sketchpad.

“These likenesses convey the spirit of the man, his sense of vitality. A photograph freezes time, character becomes a mask, motion a blur—”

“What about the moving pictures?”

“Overrated.”

Hod catches the eye of Niles Manigault, who discretely motions for him to sit back at the bar. He wonders what they do to keep men like himself, desperate men, from prying the silver dollars out of the woodwork.

“They could have used one of those cameras in San Francisco when your friend Earp handed the fight to Sharkey—”

“The man fouled—”

“Fitz had him all but knocked out.”

“On a punch delivered when the Tom’s knees were on the canvas.”

“A film wouldn’t have lied—”

“Were you there ?”

The fat man pushes the skimmer back on his head. “No. But if there had been a camera—”

“ I was there. It was the correct decision.”

The artist clears his throat. “Do you think,” he asks softly, “you could assume a gunfighting stance?”

“About to draw or piece in hand?”

“Either one would suit me.”

The Hero of Adobe Walls stands and pulls a short-barreled Colt from inside his jacket. The fat man takes a step backward.

“That isn’t loaded, is it?”

“What fucking use under God’s blue firmament would it do me to carry an unloaded firearm?”

Hod looks down to the end of the bar. A large man has folded his arms on the counter and is dozing upon them. Tabor had the hotel built during the first gush of silver from his holes, had supervised the details in both of the bars. This is a drinking man’s dream of heaven — inlaid panels of ebony and oak, cherrywood on the bartop, enamel spittoons with Chinese designs, gleaming brass and silver metalwork and a dozen cut-glass chandeliers hanging overhead. A bartender in sleeve garters is polishing glasses, feigning indifference to the negotiations.

“They wanted to make a moving picture of the border fight,” says Mas-terson, crouching slightly and pointing the iron held at his hip toward an imaginary foe. “I’m down in El Paso with Tom O’Rourke, sitting on the ten thousand cash prize, when the Rangers run the lot of us — fighters, managers, promoters, fans — out on a rail. So Roy Bean down in Langtry says he can handle it and he builds a little bridge out to a sandbar in the middle of the Pecos. ‘It’s not Texas and it’s not Mexico,’ he says, ‘and is subject only to the laws of Nature.’ The fellow with the camera had paid a bundle to Stuart for the right to photograph, and when Fitzsimmons’s people demand a percentage of his profits, he turns them down cold. As it was, Ruby Robert put Maher away with one of his corkscrew punches in less than a minute of the first round.”

“A disappointing afternoon,” ventures Niles.