A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  A long line has formed in front of the tent, getting longer every moment.

  “I suppose I ought to.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Jeff Smith’s eyes are glowing. He hasn’t changed from last night’s poker game, cigar ash on his pants, whiskey on his breath, the butt of his Navy Colt jutting out from the open front of his otterskin coat. “But first you two must bring me an eagle,” he says, and steps back inside the hotel.

  “Eagles been gone for months,” says Hod.

  Smokey is already on the move. “I know who find us some.”

  They take the wagon out to Alaska Street. Voyageur lives in the last cabin at the end of the Line, the only one without cold-stiffened undergarments hung outside to advertise a woman within. Voyageur is a fisherman and meat hunter who sells his game to the grub tents at White Pass City.

  “You lookin for a three-dollar whore you come too far!” he calls when Hod bangs on the door. He is a white-stubbled, sharp-smelling old man who dresses like a Tlingit and is scraping the flesh off a marmot hide as they step in to state their business.

  “Birds mostly follow the salmon up into Canada when the spawning peters out,” he tells them. “But now that you got this run of fools going over the Pass year-round, why bother?”

  He lets them borrow a square of weir netting and tells them the best place to look. “Anywhere there’s dead things, you find you some birds.”

  They leave the wagon at Feero’s and travel the Brackett Road, able to skirt past the pack trains and the hapless stampeders trying to haul their own goods. The ice won’t break for months but still the greenhorns are in a rush, desperate to add their tents to the cluster at the edge of Lake Lindeman and start eating through their supplies.

  “Skaguay got no use for you less you got cash money to spend, and it gone take some of that every day,” says Smokey as they pass a party that includes two women dragging a woodstove loaded on a sled over the corduroy road. “Stay here too long, they be nothin left of you.”

  Hod talks them through the toll, explaining their mission, and they reach the base of the White Pass by noon. Even in the freezing cold it stinks.

  “That’s some that aint gone yet,” says Smokey.

  The Gulch is full of carcasses, mostly horses. Some are just bones, or frozen and dried to leather, while a few must have fallen or faltered and been pushed off the trail in the last few days. They lie twisted and broken on the rock, bones ripped through their hides, clusters of eagles picking at their exposed innards while ravens waddle anxiously a few feet away, waiting their turn.

  The eagles barely flap out of the path as Hod and Smokey walk through the carnage.

  “Let’s us turn our backs on this bunch here,” says Smokey. “Then when I say three, turn and toss it over em.”

  The ravens all manage to squawk away before the net lands on two feasting eagles. The men sit on the trunk of a deadfall tree on the side of the slope, covering their noses with their mittens, and wait till the scavengers tire themselves out under the mesh. “Mr. Jeff gone want that big one,” says Smokey. “We let the other fly.” The bird he points at has blood speckling its white neck feathers and smells of dead horse.

  Hod can hear a pack train climbing on the trail above them, can hear a man cursing a mule and a child crying, just crying.

  “So how you end up here?” Smokey is the only negro he has seen in Skaguay, the only one he’s seen since the deckhands on the steamer to Dyea.

  Smokey pokes a stick into the tangle of net and the larger eagle strikes at it. “Too many of them ring battles, twenty, thirty, forty rounds. Livin high on the hog in between—it wear you down. Then there was the bottle.” Smokey is quiet for a long moment, drawing patterns in the snow at his feet. Hod has never seen him take a drink. “What it come to, they was a little carnival I hooked on with, takin dives. Pay you a nickel and you hits the bullseye with a baseball, it throw open a trap door and I go in the tank.”

  “I seen that once.”

  “And it keeps me in the liquor and they lets me sleep in one of the wagons but that’s about all. Livin day to day. Only once we gets up to this north country, figure the people is starved for entertainment, the water in the tank won’t stay water, it’s always froze. So they just cut a hole in a curtain, I sticks my head through it. Hit the nigger on the noggin an you wins a prize.” He frowns and gives the eagles another poke. “Then Mr. Jeff see me and offer me a real job workin for him. That very day I took the vow and aint took a drop since.” He stands to stretch his legs. “Near about everybody stays in town owe Mr. Jeff something.”

  When they carefully disentangle the smaller bird it doesn’t fly, just backs away from them stiff-legged, skreeking its raspy cry and holding its wings out, trembling, before flapping over to chase a trio of ravens out of a horse’s ravaged belly.

  There is already bunting hung, red, white, and blue, from the façade of Jeff Smith’s Parlor when they get back.

  “The noblest of the scavengers,” Jeff says, holding his head eagle-like and staring back down at the bird in the bundle of netting. “And a fitting symbol for our proud nation.”

  “It looks awful, Jeff,” says Syd Dixon.

  “Throw a couple buckets of water over him, hang him out in the sun, he’ll be good as new. If not, I’ll have him stuffed.”

  They manage to slip a deerskin gold-poke over the eagle’s head, pulling the drawstrings to shut off any light, and the bird calms enough that they can cut the net away and put him in a cage that held a bandicoot Jeff Smith bought from Smokey’s carnival, displaying it in the corner of the Parlor till a sourdough shot it because he didn’t like the way it looked at him.

  “Anybody who desecrates the national symbol in my saloon,” says Jeff Smith when they have hoisted the cage and its hooded occupant onto the bar counter, “shall be dealt with summarily.”

  “What you gonna name him, Jeff?” asks Old Man Triplett.

  “Liberty,” suggests the Sheeny Kid.

  “Columbia,” counters Niles Manigault. “Proud beacon of freedom, torch-bearer to the peoples of the world—”

  “I had a buddy in Seattle, used to rock side-to-side on his legs just like he’s doing,” says Red Gibbs. “We called him Wobbles.”

  “I christen him Fitzhugh Lee,” says Jeff Smith, trying to reach in and snatch the gold-poke off the bird’s head. “General of the Confederacy and present American consul to the besieged island of Cuba.” He looks sharply to Hod. “If you don’t hustle down to that recruiting station, McGinty, you’re likely to lose your place.”

  Despite the dropping temperature there are still dozens of men outside the tent waiting to be processed.

  “I seen a drawing of that Havana once,” says a busted stampeder, shivering, gloveless, in a tattered mackinaw. “They got palm trees.”

  “You think they’ll send us there?” asks the man in front of him, Gott-shalk, who sells sawdust he steals from Captain Billy’s mill to the saloons and peddles useless goldfield maps to the greenhorns coming off the steamers.

  “Hell, maybe if it really gets cooking we’ll go all the way to Spain,” says the stampeder. “Tangle with them conquistadors.”

  “Wherever we fight em,” says Gottshalk, “it got to be better than livin in Hell’s frozen asshole.”

  When he gets inside the recruiting tent Hod finds Reverend Bowers sitting behind the table, taking names, with Ox Knudsen standing over his shoulder, picking his teeth with a splinter.

  “We only take men with balls between their legs,” he says as Hod reaches in to sign the roster.

  “You on this list?” asks Hod without looking up.

  “Right at the top.”

  “Since when do squareheads count as Americans?”

  And then he is on the ground with the Swede on top trying to throttle him, men shouting and yanking as they roll around, finally pulled away from each other and out of the tent by the legs and somehow Jeff Smith and the boys from the Parlor and Tex Rickard and Billy M
izner and half of Skaguay is there gathered around as Ox shouts threats and nearly lifts the three men holding him clear off their feet.

  “Dissension in the ranks will not be tolerated!” Smith steps between them, raising his voice so all can hear. “Not while there is a desperate foe to be defeated, not while the defense of our great Northwest is in the care of the Skaguay Guards!” He turns a full circle, waving his hat, and even Ox Knudsen shuts up to listen to his pitch. “These two gentlemen,” he cries, “have agreed to settle their differences in the roped arena, this Friday night.”

  There is a cheer from the crowd and the men holding Hod in a headlock thump him on the back in encouragement.

  “Details of the event may be read in tomorrow’s News. Volunteers for the Skaguay Guard shall receive a one-dollar discount at the gate.”

  And with that Hod is released and Ox pulled away by Rickard and Mizner and a couple other men and the recruiting tent closed till morning. The crowd disperses, returning to the beckoning saloons, and Hod hurries to catch up with Smith and the others.

  “I’m not really a fighter,” he says, joining them on the boardwalk. “Just cause Choynski let me stand up for a while—”

  “Nor are any of the hash-slingers in this outpost actually cooks, nor the shylocks who collect quitclaims lawyers, nor the Skaguay sparrows who parade at the Theater Royal dancers or singers,” says Jeff Smith, putting an arm around him. “You, my boy, are not a fighter any more than Doc, who has been known to prescribe laudanum for a hangnail, is a physician. In this benighted corner of the globe, however, you will have to do. Smokey has been training you, has he not?”

  “How many rounds I got to go?”

  Smith raises his eyebrows in something like shock. “Why, as many as you are able, my boy. In an affair such as this there can be no breath of scandal.”

  “The audience will be almost totally local,” Niles Manigault explains before he follows the others into the Parlor. “And it is never wise to defecate where one resides.”

  “Rickard wants it catch-as-catch-can, but Jeff is holding out for the Marquis of Queensbury,” says Frank Clancy in front of the Music Hall. “He says we’re not savages here.”

  “I hear they want a twelve-foot ring,” says Billy Saportas from the Skaguay News. “Might as well hold the scrap in a piano crate.”

  “Soapy says it’s twenty feet or no go,” says Goldberg in his cigar store. “Is this a fight or a bicycle race?”

  “No gloves, that’s what I heard,” says Arizona Charlie, lounging in the Pantheon as Hod and Smokey roll barrels of beer across the floor. “Going back to the true spirit of the game.”

  “Tell Jeff I’m proud of him,” says Tommy Kearns when they lug a new Wurlitzer Orchestrion into the Palace, Smokey trying to keep his back to the naked Muses on the wall. There is as much talk in town of the fight as there is of the developments in Cuba, and somehow the two are connected in people’s minds.

  “Proud for what?”

  “For putting his boy in the scrap right away. This old Granny McKinley, feeding diplomats to the Dagoes—”

  “You mean Ox is like the Spanish?”

  “I mean if there’s bound to be a fight, get on with it! How you feeling, son?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Kearns steps close to look Hod over. “And what do you think, Smokey? I lost a bundle when the Jew let him go past three.”

  “That’s cause you sold him short,” says Smokey, carefully laying his side of the crate on the floor. “That Swede can’t box.”

  “Neither can a grizzly bear, but I wouldn’t step into a ring with one. Show me your muscle, kid.”

  Hod puts his end down and, for the third time that morning, flexes his right bicep to be felt and evaluated.

  “It’s kind of knotty. You don’t like to see that knotty kind of muscle on a fighter. It should be big and smooth, like—like the muscle on an ox. Pure power.”

  “You bet how you gonna bet, Mr. Tommy,” says Smokey. “But this boy know what he’s about.”

  “He says he’s gonna kill you,” says Addie Lee as she sits with Hod on her bed behind the flag.

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “He sent for me to come to a room up at Dutch Lena’s. He thinks Soapy and them are out to do him in, so he had a bunch of his friends waiting downstairs.”

  Hod feels himself flush, thinking of her in a hotel room with him.

  “Look, the Farallon is leaving today. You could get out of here—”

  “So could you,” he says.

  “Wherever I am, I be doing the same thing. Right here is where it pays best.”

  The men out in the bar beyond the flag are trading opinions of how the battle will go. “The thing with Swedes,” says one, “they don’t feel pain the way a normal white man does. Something about how thick their skulls are.”

  “So he talks about me?” asks Hod.

  Addie Lee shrugs. “We’ve had a couple chewing matches on the subject.”

  “He ever hit you?”

  “Threatened to once or twice. But he’s afraid of Soapy and them, like everybody else.”

  “And you work for Soapy.”

  “Half of everything goes to the house, wherever you are,” she says. “Who owns the house, that aint always so clear.”

  He buries his fingers in her hair and kisses her on the mouth and she kisses back.

  “This don’t matter, you know.” She is crying, sort of, tears falling but her face composed and serious. “You’re just sucker bait for the gamblers. And I’m just sucker bait for you.”

  He gently pushes her down on the bed then, and for the first time doesn’t care about the men out at the bar.

  Niles Manigault sits nursing a bourbon when Hod steps out.

  “There is a theory,” says the Southerner, “only recently given much credence, that proper training for a fight precludes intimate relations.”

  Hod looks at him blankly.

  “Each visit to the daughters of joy, each frolic with the fairies of the demimonde,” he elaborates, “further saps the warrior’s vitality. Even married men are advised to forfeit their conjugal benefits until the foe is vanquished. Of course, if one lacks hope, there is the phenomenon of the condemned man’s last meal—”

  Hod leaves him contemplating at the bar.

  The Skaguay Guards march on the day of the fight. After two hours of drilling conducted by a defrocked Mountie named Hopgood who Jeff Smith has hired, they form up and strut in a pair of ragged columns down Broadway, to the cheers and jeers of those who haven’t joined. Knudsen has been put at the head of the second company, a long-handled shovel over his shoulder, while Hod leads the first, carrying Jeff Smith’s Winchester. All the percentage girls come out and wave handkerchiefs and the Garden of Joy band is playing as they march behind the volunteers and the sun is showing itself brighter than it has in weeks and for a tiny moment, stepping along smartly to the beat of El Capitán, Hod starts to feel that this is something big, something real, something important in the world and that he is a part of it.

  Jeff Smith stands waiting on a wagon at Second, a flag draped like a Roman’s toga over his shoulders, with Fitzhugh Lee glaring from the cage at his feet.

  “Friends,” he declaims when the band has sputtered to a halt and the columns have deployed around the wagon and the civilians crowded in among them close enough to hear. “Patriots. Americans.” He pulls the banner off his body and holds it out to them in both arms. “I speak to you today concerning the march of the flag, and of the Almighty’s designs for our future.”

  It is freezing cold despite the sun, the breath of the Guards huffing out like musket volleys as they stand at attention in their ranks, the unenlisted allowed to dance in place and bury their hands in their coats. Hod hopes that Smith has not prepared a stem-winder.

  “For it is to Him that we must look for guidance in the approaching millennium,” he continues. “It is a mighty people that He has planted on this soil, a peopl
e sprung from the most masterful blood of history, perpetually revitalized by the virile, man-producing workingfolk of all the earth. A people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their Heaven-directed purposes. The propagandists,” cries Jeff Smith, “not the misers, of liberty!”

  Hod sees the reform contingent, who call themselves the 101 Committee, watching from the boardwalk, arms crossed in disapproval.

  “And it is a glorious history our God has bestowed upon his chosen people, a history divinely logical, in the process of whose tremendous reasoning we find ourselves today.”

  The eagle in the cage at Smith’s feet begins to croak rhythmically, swaying back and forth like an agitated parrot. Hod feels the Winchester heavy and cold on his shoulder. He is ready. Sick of this fool’s-gold Yukon and ready to go off to Cuba or the far islands of the Pacific, to wear a real uniform and fight and maybe die for the flag that droops from Jeff Smith’s outstretched arms.

  “Shall we free the oppressed Cuban from the saffron banner of Spain?”

  “Yes!” cry the Skaguay Guards.

  “Shall we add our blood to that of Christian heroes who blazed their way across a savage continent?”

  “Yes!” cry the sourdoughs and the stampeders, the merchants and the sure-thing men, the citizens of America’s farthest outpost. Hod sees Smokey, standing alone back in the doorway next to the oaken Sioux at Goldberg’s Cigar Store, watching them all with a vacant look on his face.

  “Shall we continue,” asks Jeff Smith, holding the flag over his head now, “our march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall our free institutions broaden their blessed reign as the children of freedom wax in strength, until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind? Will we not do what our fathers have done before—to pitch the tents of liberty ever further from our shores and continue the glorious march of the flag?”

  Uproarious cheers and men throwing their hats in the air and percentage girls waving little flags on sticks that have been passed out and a crackle of patriotic gunfire that prompts Fitzhugh Lee to lift his tailfeathers and unleash a stream of fish-smelling offal onto the cage floor. Then by some common but unspoken agreement all adjourn for drinks of celebration, all but the dozen who linger to watch Hod and Ox Knudsen staring at each other, ten yards separating them.