John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Lester walks back past them, muttering, and joins the other Georgians at the coffee boiler.

“They took all our money,” says Junior when he is out of earshot.

Jacks yawns, leads them back toward the bivouac. “Won’t be needing it where you going.”

“But we’re stuck here.”

The sergeant shakes his head.

“Had a bunch of our fellows shot up in town last night,” he says without turning. “Sent em to Atlanta. We short in H Company so you three and Cooper are moving over. With me.”

Junior brightens. “That’s terrific! When do we go?”

“They’ll move us to the Port tomorrow, then I spect we’ll sit some more.” He falls back into step alongside them, looks at Royal’s boots.

“Who that blood is?”

“They kilt a dog.”

Jacks nods his head slowly, as if this explains it all. “Yeah,” he says, “you lucky niggers going to Cuba.”

Hod looks up from the chow line at Camp Alva Adams and can see the flophouse he stayed in the night before he enlisted. The camp is laid out just across from the brickyards above Denver City Park, and it is raining, as it has been for weeks now, the volunteers drilling in the mud and eating under a patchwork canvas awning that sags with collected water and promises to collapse under the weight. Runt has been taking bets as to which unit will be soaked when the inevitable occurs. He and Hod and Big Ten and the other late recruits have been reassigned almost daily, landing just this morning with Company G, whose men are mostly from Cripple Creek.

“Reinforcements,” says a private with a ratlike face as they join the group waiting with mess kits in the drizzle. “And we aint even been shot at yet.”

“We’ve been sent over to shape your outfit up,” says Runt, who is from Pueblo and claims to be a newspaper reporter, “and provide a model soldier for you to study.”

“You’d think they’d have sent a full-size model, then.”

Runt only comes up to Hod’s shoulder, fair game for the wags in every company they’ve been stuck in.

“You figure the bigger the soldier,” says Hod, “the bigger the target he’s gonna make.”

The rain comes harder then and they are soaked by the time their tin plates are weighted with stew and they can duck under the sagging canvas to sit on wet benches.

Big Ten slaps water off his hat, looks to Hod. “To think we could be in a nice dry variety hall, pounding each other’s brains out.”

“It rains every day in Cuba,” the rat-faced soldier tells them.

“You been there?”

“I read all about it in the papers.”

“That’s your tropical climate,” says the Runt. “Hot and wet.”

The soldier looks at him suspiciously. “How old are you, kid?”

“Old enough.”

“The Regular Army got standards,” says the soldier, considering Runt and shaking his head. “But us vols — you ought to see some of the officers.”

“Any more poop on when they ship us out of here?” asks Hod. Today he is feeling especially stupid to have signed on. Marching and saluting and yes sir and no sir and sleeping in tents on the muck and slop for food — at least in a mine you’ve got hours working alone up at the face where the bosses can’t ride you.

“Depends on how much weight Colonel Hale carries with the high mucketymucks. Every outfit in the country is trying to be the first to Havana.”

“What’s the hurry?” says Big Ten, shoveling stew into his mouth.

“No hurry,” grins the long-faced private. “Long as they save a couple Dagoes for me.”

After chow there is Battalion Drill, sloshing with rifle on shoulder through the mud and the cactus, trying to stride and turn as one man, laborers from the brickworks pausing to watch on their way home. Once the whole battalion is moving Hod feels better, losing himself in the mass of it, one little part of four hundred rifle-toting, cadence-shouting men shifting into rectangles of various sizes or swinging in great flanking maneuvers, over and over, the mind numbing with repetition as their boots grow heavy with mud. Since the news of the embarkation at Tampa hit camp there is the real possibility that they will actually get to use the old trapdoor Springfields they’ve been given, to kill and be killed. So far they’ve barely fired a round, the officers more worried about a stray shot hitting the neighbors than the fighting prowess of their troop. If it does come to a real fight, thinks Hod, then hell — the Dons are nothing but bosses, bosses of the cruelest sort, and freeing the poor Cubans from them is a good thing, a noble thing, an A mer ican thing to do. There will be breakfast tomorrow, possibly hot, and the next day and the next, his decisions worried out by other men and his hours regulated by trumpet calls. Men like him, homeless, desperate men, are blown about the world like cinders from a locomotive stack, and the Army is as good a place for them to end up as any.

The overcast day loses the last of its light and there is the six o’clock whistle from the Denver and Rio Grande tracks and finally they can march no more. The men stand in ranks and a major struts in front of them and barks loud noises about discipline and teamwork and then they are dismissed till evening meal. Big round Sibley tents have been put up in rows, and the men, sixteen to each, sit on their bedrolls in the gloomy interiors, pulling their sodden boots off, feet facing the center pole, smoking and talking by candlelight.

“Makes you feel right at home, don’t it Chief?” winks a corporal named Grissom to Big Ten. “Back in the old teepee.”

“I never been in a tent,” says Big Ten looking at the simple rigging above. “Except once at the circus. My people live in cabins.”

“We get to Cuba,” says their squad sergeant, LaDuke, “you’ll get a chance to lift some tonsures. Bet that greaser hair comes off easy.”

“Wasn’t nobody in my family ever a barber, neither,” says Big Ten, in a way that announces he’s done with the topic.

“I figure we either go for broke blasting our way straight into Havana,” says Runt, who is full of strategy he reads in the editorial pages of the Post , “or we slip around to the other end of the island and take them from behind. Santiago de Cuba.”

Grissom snorts a laugh. “Oh, they see you, Half-Pint, they’ll be shaking in their boots.”

“Long as you save a couple Dagoes for me,” says the rat-faced soldier.

There is dinner, canned bacon and undercooked beans, and then a little time for card games and another installment in the running debate over which is the finest passion parlor, accessible on a soldier’s pay, on Denver’s Holliday Street. The trumpet signals lights-out at ten. Hod lies back and listens to the rain on the canvas and, only blocks away, the music and shouting from the saloons on Larimer. Once he and Zeb made a pup tent from a tarpaulin and some fenceposts and slept out behind the barn, pretending they were Army scouts out on the range, pretending to listen for hostile Indians and thrilled to feel the ground tremble when the night train from Salina rushed past. He feels like he is pretending now, their little cluster of tents surrounded by the great city, feels like it might as well be the Salvation Army he has joined and not the 1st Colorado Volunteers.

Big Ten begins to snore and it seems as if the ground is trembling.

In the morning the sun is out, and after breakfast the men in Company G decide to kangaroo the Runt in celebration.

“Think of it as an honor,” suggests Corporal Grissom as they toss the boy up from the blanket again and again, one soldier at each corner and dozens gathered around to cheer. “An initiation into the brotherhood of fighting men.”