A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “You got four, five, maybe a half-dozen fires going,” says one, thick-bearded and bitter, “got to burn off that frost layer before you can dig. And every day it’s a longer walk to find wood. There isn’t but a couple hours of light so half your digging is by fire or lantern and them wolves get to howling—”

  “Indins say it’s dead men’s souls crying out,” says another. “But that’s only to make us cheechakos flighty. What it is is just wolves, which is the Satan of the animal kingdom. Waiting to gang up and pull you down while you still got some meat on your bones.”

  “The nights,” says the third, a man Hod has seen down by the wharf trying to sell his claim and his cabin and what gear he’s brought back to the greenhorns coming off the steamers, “the nights last forever. Out there in a log coffin with an oil lamp and a partner who’s like to go off his nut and murder you if you fall to sleep before he does. You done heard all his life’s business three times over and he’s heard yours and you’re sick of it. Enough to make a man pick up the Bible.”

  Each of them is missing at least one finger and the one next to Hod still has black scurvy gums and a burn scar that covers half his face.

  “The good ground’s all been picked over,” he grumbles, “or jumped by gun thugs. So you pan and you dig and you freeze your damn toes off for that little speck of yellow, more grit in your teeth of a day than you put in your poke, and God help you if you run out of lard or coffee or beans or if your cabin burns while you’re out digging or a bear gets into your stores or you take fever or snap an ankle in the rocks. Out there in them open snowfields, a man don’t count for nothin. It’s too big.”

  There is a commotion then and Flapjack Fredericks makes his entrance, a runty, beet-nosed character in a top hat and an oversized Prince Albert coat and a constant cigar in his face, trailed by two girls dressed in identical red outfits, the older not more than fourteen.

  “I brought my matched set,” he winks, “in case one wears out.”

  The girls wear no makeup, pink-cheeked and curly haired, eyes vacant as sheep, and stand chewing their lips in the corner where Flapjack plants them while he gladhands around the room.

  “Look what the wind blew in,” mutters the man with the burned face.

  Fredericks claps him on the back. “This round is on me, boys. Compli-ments of Flapjack Fredericks, Gold King of the Yukon.”

  “Sluice-robbin son of a bitch that got lucky, is what,” says another of the busted sourdoughs. “Probly fell over drunk right on top of it.”

  “And it could happen to you, boys,” he winks. “Just don’t never give up the hunt. I was down to boiling tree moss for soup when I chopped into a big, fat vein of the yellow stuff—peed my trousers it was so rich—and now I got a palace on Nob Hill and a boat to sail me round the harbor and I spread caviar on my flapjacks every morning.”

  “Fish eggs,” grunts the third prospector, accepting his free drink from Suds.

  “At five dollars an ounce,” twinkles the Gold King of the Yukon. “Go through the stuff like it’s toilet paper.”

  “Figured out what that’s for, have you?”

  “I got the world by the dingus,” Flapjack calls to anyone within earshot, “and I don’t care who knows it.”

  “You care to sit in, Claude?” says Jeff Smith, who knew the man when he’d stick his hand in a cuspidor full of swoose if you tossed a silver dollar in it. “We promise to take it easy on you.”

  “Sorry, me and the girls are headed over to the Music Hall. I bought the house out. They’re puttin on East Lynne just for the three of us.” He winks. “The girls get shy in big crowds. They’re sisters, you know.”

  “Recently plucked from the orphanage, no doubt,” says Mizner, and the girls giggle.

  “Just thought I’d pay my respects, let you boys know I’m back in town. Let’s go, ladies, we got money to spend!”

  “Aint no justice in this world,” says the man with the burned face when they are gone.

  Arizona Charlie laughs. “He’ll hit every saloon in town on the way to that theater, showing his roll and telling his story.”

  “You see that flasher on his ring finger?” says Niles.

  “Diamond big as a gull egg.”

  “Paste,” says Niles, laying his cards face up. “I was there when Jeff sold it to him.”

  “It once belonged to the Duchess of Mesopotamia,” says Jeff Smith, revealing his hand and sweeping the pot. “One acquires the pedigree along with the stone itself.”

  The men laugh then and Ox Knudsen stumbles out of Addie Lee’s room with a red tongue of flannel shirt wagging through his open fly, laughing along though he didn’t hear the joke.

  “Feel like I just went forty rounds,” he says loudly, shouldering in between Hod and the burned sourdough. “Gimme a beer, Suds.”

  “You couldn’t hold your left hand up for forty rounds, much less your pecker,” says Tex Rickard, and Ox laughs heartily, carefully spilling beer on Hod as he turns to face the card table.

  “If a man got balls between his legs,” he says after draining the schooner, “he gets his business over quick. Wouldn’t take me no six rounds,” raising his voice theatrically, “to put away some nigger’s assistant.”

  Hod can feel Jeff Smith watching him, and the others, but doesn’t take the bait.

  “Seems to me, he lasted that long with Choynski, there must have been some money bet on the round.” Ox insinuating, wiping beer foam from his moustache. Smith’s eyes go cold the way they do when the wrong person calls him Soapy or he is crossed or just wants to put you off balance.

  “If you could count, Ox,” he says, “you could make some money too.”

  The Swede laughs loud with his mouth, then bumps Hod hard putting his schooner back on the counter, raising his voice enough to be heard beyond the hanging flag as he stomps out of the bar. “I’ll take your Yellow-Stain Kid or any other man you can find, got-dammit! You know where to find me.”

  Rickard waits till Knudsen stomps out, clapping his hands slightly off time to the music from the dance hall, before he asks. “So how bout it, Jeff? Middle of the winter, people getting restless—”

  Smith shuffles the cards lightly, eyes meeting Hod’s as he turns around on the stool. “It’s not when the roosters are ready to fight, Tex. It’s when the suckers are ready to bet.”

  They go back to playing then, and Hod drinks a soda water Suds hands him. A man like Flapjack drives his stakes in over the right pile of rocks and he is transformed—ugly, stunted, cross-eyed—into a figure of envy, of legend. He throws money at beautiful young women and they throw themselves back. Ox Knudsen struts around the camp accepting free drinks and the nearest seat to the woodstove because he can pound most everybody he meets into blood paste and lets them know it. And Hod Brackenridge, assistant nigger, waits on a stool for his girl’s quim to dry up so he can stand to look at her.

  He waits till they are deep in a high-stakes hand, too intent to be watching, and slips behind the American flag.

  She is sitting on the cot with a cardboard fan from Peoples the undertaker, wafting the air around her toward the door. “I swear that Ox don’t eat nothin but beans.”

  “You see him a lot?”

  “Whenever he’s got the mazuma,” she shrugs, moving her legs so he can sit down. “You ready?”

  Hod nods toward the noise from the bar. “Everybody still out there.”

  “The Nugget don’t ever close.”

  “Yeah. I already heard all the songs twice.”

  She smiles. “Listen, we could go back to my room where I sleep. Them drunks in the balconies been throwin gold dust at us tonight—I got to wash my hair and see how much come out.”

  “You can leave?”

  “You come out from here in a few minutes and then I’ll come out like I’m going back to dance some more. Won’t anybody be wise to it.”

  They listen to Niles Manigault, only a few feet away on the other side of the curtain, bemoan his luck. “I
t’s as if the cards are punishing me,” he says. “I am Fortune’s orphan.”

  Hod sits by her on the cot, touching shoulders, and they are quiet for a while. “So when you’ve made your pile,” he asks finally, “what you going to do with the money?”

  She looks away from him then, frowning. “I swear I don’t know where it all goes. This and that, you know? But I’m gonna start saving.”

  “That would be good.”

  “If I had enough right now, right here, what I’d do is stop this box-rustlin and buy some chickens, have a house built for em with a stove set in the middle of it to keep the chicks warm. You know what an egg sells for right now? And if you can get them over the Pass—”

  “You’d make more money.”

  “Most of the girls think they’re gonna hook on to one of these bonanza kings. Only that type don’t stay in Skaguay very long.”

  He counts the forty-five stars in the hanging flag a couple times, pulls his shirt out of his belt, kisses her on the cheek and steps out. The men at the poker table are all smirking.

  “Our Apollo has unburdened himself,” says Niles.

  “He who loves last, loves best,” adds Billy Mizner. “Though it can get a little slippery.”

  Hod waits for her outside in the cold, lamplight spilling from every resort on Broadway, noise from within swirling in the wind off the channel, the camp always loudest at this hour as if they can fiddle or sing or laugh away the endless, howling Yukon nights. Addie Lee steps out and Hod drapes his parka with the hood over her and they walk to the Princess Hotel together, her dancing shoes no match for the snowdrifts.

  Her room is small, but there is a rug on the floor and a window to the street and it is warm, twice as warm as the drafty bathhouse with bunks Hod has been staying in, his only decoration the advertisement Smokey gave him to paste on the wall, Jake Kilrane in a fighting stance.

  LOSE WEIGHT

  it says—

  AND ENHANCE YOUR MANHOOD

  Smokey doesn’t read, and Hod can only think it can be a reminder of proper boxing posture.

  Addie Lee washes her hair out into a metal pan and saves the water to pick through later. She takes her dancing shoes off and lies back on the bed and before Hod can get his pants off has fallen asleep. He takes his wool socks off and puts them in the farthest part of the room and lies next to her. Later, when she wakes, she sits up and stares at him for a long moment as if trying to remember who he is. Then she smiles.

  “You,” she says, and they start in, with the lamp on the little table by the bed still on and smelling strong of coal oil and she doesn’t look away once while he is on her.

  “How many times you think it will be,” he asks when he is finished and they are lying next to each other again, “to make up a hundred dollars?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Light comes in the window and the wild dogs start to snarl on the street, and then there are loud voices as the next room starts to fill up.

  “That’s Babe hosting the spillover,” she says, rising to pull her stockings off. Her legs look even skinnier without them on. “She’s gonna be over to get me if we don’t go out.”

  She puts on two sweaters and oversized men’s pants and her mukluks and Hod scouts the stairway so they can hit the street unnoticed. With Hod’s parka on her and the hood up Addie Lee gets barely a glance from the stunned-looking celebrants emerging from the saloons and dance halls, though a bob-tailed mastiff trails close, sniffing at her till Hod chases him away. They walk north of town, avoiding the wagon road, until Skaguay is only a hundred columns of woodsmoke in the sky behind them.

  She plays at blowing puffs of breath into the air, turning in a circle to look up at the treetops, then stops and stares into his face. “McGinty aint really your name, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Most of the percentage girls, they got a different moniker up here than what they were born with. A lot of the men too, hidin from the law or their wives or whatever. Like there aint no rules cause it’s not really America.”

  “There’s rules,” says Hod. “It’s just different people in charge of them.”

  They start to climb, circling around the boulders and felled trees, the sharp air feeling good in Hod’s chest. Inside there is smoke everywhere, cigars and pipes and woodsmoke and his clothes all smell like smoke but here, where the stampeders have never been, there is only clean wind shaking the tops of the spruce trees.

  There are women in the camp who aren’t for rent, not the way Addie Lee is, who do laundry and cook and wash pots and sell goods or run boarding houses, but they dress against the cold and wear big shoes and none of them, not a one, shows the least bit of interest in Soapy’s other nigger. It was the same in Butte, the same in every mining camp he’s ever worked in. He climbs slightly ahead when it gets steeper and reaches back to pull her up.

  “I suppose you come here for the gold,” she says.

  “Me and fifty thousand other halfwits.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I got to the top,” says Hod, “but I never got over.”

  He motions for her to stop, taps his mitt against his lips.

  There is a bear coming down the slope.

  It is immense, dark brown flecked with gray, swinging its head and grunting now and then as it rubs its flanks hard against the tree trunks.

  Hod feels Addie Lee slip her arm into his and pull tight, so little that is actually her inside the layers of clothing, a thrill shooting through him, and then the bear sees them or smells them, stopping to stand, steadying itself with a massive arm against a spruce tree, its tiny, stupid eyes trying to comprehend.

  “We’ll get out of your way,” says Hod in as steady a voice as he can muster, then pulls Addie Lee sideways, neither of them taking their eyes off the beast.

  It makes something between a bark and a grunt and drops back onto all fours, pawprints dwarfing the tracks of their feet as it descends on the path they took up. They watch till it is lost in the trees. Addie Lee has tears running down her face but doesn’t seem scared.

  “To think there’s such a thing in this world,” she says.

  They climb up a ways farther, not talking much, angling sideways so they won’t surprise the bear on the way down. Where there is enough snow she tries to slide down on her back, but it’s too powdery.

  “There’s never a crust on the snow here,” she says. “It’s dry as sawdust.”

  “You don’t get a thaw, you don’t get a crust.”

  She is in a dark mood by the time they come back to town, making their way through the badgering merchants and frantic, ignorant stampeders.

  “It’s just what men turn into when they get up here,” she says, studying them, her face mostly hidden by the parka hood. “Or maybe that’s what they are all along and they just start to look the part more. All hairy and stinky and grunt and snuffle and climb on you and grunt and snuffle and climb off and go digging in the ground.” Smokey waves to Hod in passing from the seat of the wagon, signaling that there is work to be done. Addie Lee doesn’t notice. “And every once in a while they get sore and tear each other apart.”

  Hod walks her up the stairs to her room in the Princess Hotel and leaves her there, panning her washwater for gold dust.

  SOJOURNER

  Father—

  Please forgive the tardiness of my correspondence, but we have been in transitu of late and the regular mail schedule is not in effect. As you may surmise from the postmark on this missive, I am in St. Louis, part of a specially chosen unit testing a novel mode of military transport.

  Our commander Moss, of whose organizational skills I have written before, has long entertained General Miles with the notion of replacing the temperamental, noxious, and oat-burning horse with a vehicle less expensive in its upkeep and more in tune with our age. Thus was born the Infantry Bicycle Corps. Though the cavalry was afforded the first opportunity to participate in this great experiment, they proved much too
fond of their equine cohorts (and, I must say, of the dashing figure they cut mounted upon them) to accept. As the colored troops invariably are saddled (apologies) with whatever duties our paler brethren-in-arms abhor, and as Lt. Moss was the originator of the scheme, the honor of implementation has fallen on the 25th.

  Junior kneels, tablet resting on a stump, writing. He has been left to guard the wheels while the rest of the squad are off tom-catting on the east side of the river. He had taken it for a display of trust, the lieutenant recognizing the most responsible of his troopers, till Moss went off with the mayor’s party and the others started in about all the high times he would be missing. Telling him to polish their wheels while he was at it, Army humor never subtle or kind.

  The Corps has, previous to my enlistment, cycled dispatches about the Bitterroot Valley and taken one longer journey, which I am very sorry to have missed, to the Yellowstone area and its attendant natural wonders. A pair of the lieutenant’s stalwart wheelmen having since mustered out of the service, I volunteered myself and Pvt. Scott (who, by the way, sends you and family his warmest regards) to take their places. My own recreational familiarity with the device gave me a leg up, so to speak, on poor Royal, but in no way prepared me for the rigors of extensive cross-country cycling. We pedal our steel-rimmed Ramblers over the roads, such as they are, in these vast, unpeopled spaces of Montana, whenever they are available and in passable condition. Otherwise it is the bumpy course through scrub and sagebrush, flushing rabbit and antelope in our path and deploying rapidly to “hand-over” our metallic steeds when we encounter the occasional stock fence. On these training jaunts we carry only our bedrolls, on a rack bolted in front of the handlebars, and our rifles slung over our shoulders.

  Junior kneels before the stump, writing, because he cannot sit, may never, in fact, be able to sit again. There is no glory in his wound, the simple mention of being “saddle sore” drawing the wrath of the former cavalrymen in their party, and he has resolved himself to suffer in silence. He talks to Royal, of course, and Royal seems to listen, but there has been a reserve in his friend lately, an edge of What have you gotten us into? Not just the cycling, but the whole idea of joining the 25th in hope of heroic action when there has been little more than monotony and cursing and scutwork of the lowest variety.