A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  People are stunned at first, minds taking a moment to grasp the phenomenon. Then the whole 25th falls out laughing, whacking each other on the back and miming the batter’s dumbfounded reaction. Even a few of the white folks join in, the white ladies clapping their little gloved hands with delight. The second lieutenant, though, is not smiling as he steps to the mound.

  “Let’s cut out the nigger show and play ball.”

  “Nigger show is at the plate, sir,” Scott tells him, nodding toward the batter, who is looking sheepish and still picking flecks of orange off his front.

  “You gonna get serious,” says the officer, “or do I call a forfeit?”

  “Yes, sir.” Corporal Ponder tosses Scott the real ball. “I will seriously strike this coon out.”

  And proceeds to put the side down with only nine pitches—in-shoots and drop-offs, fast balls that seem to hop at the last moment and a big roundhouse curve that starts out heading halfway between home and third before hooking back over the heart of the plate, the regiment whooping louder after every strike. The last man to whiff slams his bat down in frustration and Jacks hurries to join Scott as they leave the field.

  “Don’t smile, don’t wave your hat,” he says. “Just walk off.”

  Of course Scott is the first batter up to begin the ninth. The pitcher gives him a long look and then throws a steaming fastball into his ribs. There is a sound like the orange exploding and Scott drops to his knees and then it is very quiet again.

  If this was two white teams or two colored teams it would just be base ball, part of the game, and if there was a fight with nobody sent to the hospital they’d all meet after at the canteen to compare bruises over beer and pretzels. But instead Jacks and Mingo Sanders have to grab Cooper to keep him from running across the field and the officers are out of the bleachers waving their arms to keep the regiments apart and the crackers are asking Scott if he thinks he’s so damn smart now and when the whistles start blowing Jacks thinks it’s the provost guard come to make some arrests. But there is Colonel Daggett with a quartet of majors around him, marching up onto the mound, and in a flash the junior officers and noncoms have their people in formation, base-ball uniforms scattered among the blue, the 25th formed on the third-base side of the field and the 12th on the first, and Daggett waits till even the civilians are on their feet and silent before he speaks.

  “I’ve just received a wire from Washington,” he says, “and it applies to both regiments present. We have orders to break camp, pending transport to Tampa. The Congress has voted and it is on, gentlemen.”

  A cheer erupts on both sides of the field. Hats fill the air. The ladies in the bleachers spin their parasols in excitement.

  The game has begun.

  THE YELLOW KID

  WAR! is the one word the Yellow Kid can read. The rags have been hustling the WAR! for months, and now here is Specs passing it out in the day’s first special edition behind the Journal building. Specs has got an ink smudge on one of the lenses of his cheaters, ink all over his hands.

  “By the time you little bastids unload this batch,” he says, “we’ll be ready with another extra.”

  The Yellow Kid elbows in, slaps down a quarter’s worth of pennies and Specs slams a bundle of fifty against his chest, nearly knocking him over.

  “Watch it, four-eyes!”

  “Yer lucky I let you have em, you little Chiney piece a shit.”

  Just because there is WAR! doesn’t mean their daily battle with the circulation gink is off.

  “He aint Chiney yella,” explains Ikey for the hundredth time as he grabs his bundle, “he’s sick yella.”

  “Yer both a friggin disease. Get outta here and sell those papers.”

  They run around the building, shouting “WAR! Congress declares WAR!” and selling a few on their way.

  “The Chief gotta be shittin himself,” says Ikey, pausing on the corner of William Street to adjust his load. They’ve seen him arriving late at night a couple times, Boy Willie himself pulling up in his hack with the white horse and his two sweet babies who look like the Riccadonna Sisters in the Hogan’s Alley comic he stole from the World, one on either side, fresh from some uptown theater or lobster palace. Big smooth-faced character in his glad rags. As far as they can figure he runs the dogwatch shift at his Journal dressed just like that, still in his silk top hat and swallow-tail coat. He always calls hello but never throws any mazuma their way.

  “Willie been peddlin this yarn hard all year,” says Ikey. “Gonna be bigger than Corbett and Jeffries!”

  They step out into Newspaper Row and the Yellow Kid takes the north side. They are at the center of the whole friggin works here. There is the tallest building, the World with its gold dome towering above, the glass boxes of the Electro Monogram out front swiveling to tell the folks that it is WAR! with the Tryon Building behind where the Staats Zeitung used to roll and the Sentinel and the mick Freeman’s Journal still do and then the Tribune Building with its clock tower showing that it’s nearly noon, the Yellow Kid better with the numbers and the hands of time than with letters, then the Times and the Sun behind it on Nassau, all of them flying their own flags along with the Stars and Stripes or even hoisting some kind of Cuban banner like Boy Willie’s paper, and then there’s the construction on the Park Row Building, already got the four giant Amazons with their giant stone melons up front and just across Ann Street the St. Paul Building is racing it story by story, both of them sposed to top the World by a good eighty feet when they’re done say the birds who bring the tours past and “WAR!” cries the Yellow Kid, waving a rag to display the scarehead, “Congress Declares WAR!” stepping over into the park in front of City Hall, geezers snatching papers and flipping him their pennies on the way in and out of the building. The Kid tries the can’t-find-change-for-a-nickel dodge on one old whitehair with a pair of muttonchops halfway out to his shoulders but the geezer is wise to it and waits with his palm out, the cheap bastid.

  The Yellow Kid’s corner, by common understanding, is at Broadway and Warren where the omnibuses stop at the park and you can sell to the top-hat crowd heading for the Astor Hotel, with Graub’s restaurant, where the builders go if they haven’t brought their lunch, on one side of Warren and Donnegan’s, which is the reporters’ favorite gin mill, on the other. A hell of a location. But because today there is WAR! he can make a quick run through City Hall Plaza with the horse trolleys turning around and the noise and the dust and the drays pulling up with stone for the new buildings or the new bridge over to Brooklyn to the east and the Tammany hacks and city clerks coming and going and boys hawking the Journal and the Sun and the World and the Times and the Herald and the Trib and the Telegram and the Telegraph and the Daily News and the Mail and Express and the Star and even one poor clueless little street rat trying to pawn off day-old copies of the Weekly Post, just don’t stop moving and there’s no trespass, before he takes up position on his own spot.

  “WAR!” he hollers. “Special edition, Congress Declares WAR! Only in the Journal!”

  It isn’t only in the Journal, of course, at least he doesn’t think so, but the geezers don’t know that yet, do they?

  Nobody muscles you off your spot, the place that is understood to be yours by the Unwritten Law. The one time somebody tried with him, big stupid spaghetti-bender wearing a different color shoe on each foot, thought just cause the Kid is sick-looking and little and skinny he’ll roll over easy, he sold maybe three papers before the Kid come back with a brick in each hand and half the newsies below Canal Street to teach him how it works. The wop tried to run but they caught him and knocked the stuffing out of him till he just rolled into a ball on the cobblestones and then they all pissed on him.

  The Yellow Kid took the spot over from Dink Healy when Dink got too big and switched over to the Western Union, working as his striker for halvsies the first year, buying the corner a nickel a day. Dink has the glimmer that don’t focus right and was maybe a little scary toward the end whe
n he got tall, so the Yellow Kid would sell most of his bundle.

  “You look like death on a friggin soda cracker,” Dink would always say, tugging the Kid’s cap down over his eyes. “I couldn’t have a better striker if you was crippled.”

  “Read about the WAR!” hollers the Yellow Kid. Some of the builders coming out of Graub’s buy on their way back to work, then he tries Don-negan’s but the joint is empty.

  “Haven’t seen em all day,” calls Sweeny from behind the counter. “They’re all at work, poor miserable bastids, slapping together them extras.”

  The Yellow Kid sells out to a mick priest heading for St. Paul’s and hotfoots it as fast as he can go back to the Journal building.

  “You get the last dozen,” says Specs, jerking his nose at the pallet.

  “When’s the next run?”

  “Sposed to be out at three o’clock. All new headers.”

  The Kid buys the dozen and heads up Centre Street. “WAR!” he cries. “Spanish Invasion Plans, this issue!”

  He does a circuit around the Tombs and the Criminal Courts Building, always good for a few sales to the turnkeys, got nothing to do but sit on their keisters, pick their noses, and read. He unloads two under the Bridge of Sighs on the Franklin Street side, then stops in front of the Bummer’s Hall and looks up from where Maminka brought him to wave up at the windows the first time Janek got pinched. The food was lousy in the Tombs, said Janek, but Alderman Burke from Tammany treated him to steak and spuds the day they sprung him.

  There is a horse trolley running up Broadway that the Kid manages to catch up to, hauling himself aboard as it rolls and hollering his way up the aisle to the front.

  “WAR!” he cries. “Spanish Fleet Sighted in East River!”

  He sells all but one, hands it to the conductor before the old grouch can lay a collar on him. “Read all about it,” he says, then ducks under the man’s arm and leaps off the moving trolley in front of Blatnik’s.

  The working stiffs have fed their faces and gone back to their stalls so now it is only newsies who have peddled their morning bundle at the counter—Nub Riley and Beans and Ikey and Chezz DiMucci and Yid Slivovitz. The Kid grabs a stool and shouts for his burger and pie and a chocolate fizzer which Yid likes to call an egg cream though they don’t put neither egg nor cream in the thing.

  “About friggin time with this WAR!” says Nub, who is a fiend for red-hots and always has two, one with onions and one with pickle relish, laid on thick. “I mean shit or get off the friggin pot.”

  “This is gonna be big,” says Ikey, pushing the scoop of vanilla under the surface of his root beer with the spoon. “You remember how we sold when they sprang the Señorita?”

  “That was only the Journal.”

  “So? This’ll be good for everybody.”

  The Journal made a big deal out of this beautiful Cuban Señorita the Spanish bastids had violated and tortured and locked up in a dungeon in Havana, got the Women of America to write letters to their king or queen or whatever they got over there, then finally lost patience and sent their own guy, just a scribbler, down to spring her out of the joint with a ladder and some men’s clothes for disguise. Boy Willie hogged the headlines for a week.

  “Well it’s a damn sight better than that Cross of Silver malarkey they were floggin. Jesus, Mary, an Joseph, how’s a guy spose to sell papers, they can’t make up better news than that?”

  “You at least need a society dame floatin in the river. Or a riot where the Army gets to blast away—”

  “Like that Pullman strike.”

  “Okay for a week,” says Chezz DiMucci. “But them labor things burn out quick.”

  “What about that Coxey’s Army circus?” says Beans.

  “Or Dr. Holmes who croaked all the people in Chicago?” says Yid Slivovitz.

  “Most of youse weren’t born yet,” says Slow Moe Hershel who is flipping burgers behind the counter, Moe who used to be a newsie himself when the Sun was the hottest rag in town, “but when they brung Geronimo in off the warpath, that was a story. Couldn’t print em fast enough.”

  “And leave us not forget—” says Nub Riley, spreading his hands to signal he’s got the topper, “Remember the Friggin Maine.”

  They all have to pull their faces out of their feedbags for that one. What a day that was, what a week.

  “I had a guy bought my whole bundle, gimme a buck. Couldn’t of been more than fourteen, fifteen left.”

  “Jeez, the way they played it out—Day One, the ship blows up. Day Two, who blew the ship up? Day Three, we think we know. Day Four, we sent down our experts, here’s the facts—and on and on and on—”

  “The extra where they printed the names of the diseased—”

  “You mean deceased.”

  “You sure?”

  “Diseased is your mama’s bunny hole. Deceased is them unfortunate sailors on the Maine.”

  “But WAR!—”

  “WAR!—”

  “Fellas, I been in the newspaper business a long time,” says Yid, who is thirteen, “but nothing we been through in our lives has prepared us for this.”

  Slow Moe lays a burger down and the Yellow Kid flips the lid and dumps ketchup on it. It comes with potatoes cooked in the same grease and half a kosher dill.

  “Over in Europe, China, Italy, places like that,” Yid continues, “they got a massacre every day of the week. But here in America, what—” he looks to Moe. “When was our last big WAR!?”

  “Week ago Saturday,” says Moe, not looking up from the grill. “The Eastmans took apart a social function the Five Pointers was hosting.”

  “Friggin numbskull. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “Even when I sold em,” says Moe, “I never looked past the headlines.”

  “It must have been the Civil WAR!, that they put up all the statues about,” offers Ikey.

  “Yeah,” says Chezz. “When we took over Mexico.”

  “I bet Boy Willie goes down there to Cuba himself, bags a couple Dagoes for the front page.”

  “Yeah, then what’s Jewseph Pulitzer gonna do? He’s too old to ride a horse.”

  “Any stunt Hearst pulls, Poppa Joe’s gonna try to top him. If we’re sellin this good already and nobody’s fired a shot yet, just wait’ll the lead starts flying. We just gotta pray they can keep it going awhile.”

  The pie is hot and full of apples and cinnamon and his stomach is full, tight even, like the chocolate fizzer is still bubbling inside him when they cross the street to Newsome’s Palace of Pleasures. Music blasts them as they enter, the Coinola Orchestrion that Gruesome Newsome who owns the arcade feeds to attract business pumping out a version of Down Went Mc Ginty, piano tambourine bells xylophone woodblock triangle snare bass and cymbal all-in-one mechanically slamming out the song punched on the paper scroll. Ikey and the Yellow Kid march straight down the center aisle, past the bagatelle games and the Big Six slots that never friggin pay off and the Electro Shock Machine and the Fortune Teller and the Automatic Billiards and the Lung Tester and the Skill-Shooter Pistol Range and the box-ball setups and the Scientific Punching Machine and all the Black Diamond Gum vendors to the last Mutoscope viewer on the left.

  “This is the one,” says Ikey, pointing at the photo card above it that advertises the view. “I seen it the other day, twice.”

  The Kid feeds it a Lincoln and gets on his toes to get his eyes to the slot. They put the ones that are spose to be for adults up on a board to make them taller, but not really so tall you can’t look if you want to. The light comes on and he starts to crank, nice and steady, so the Lady Undressing for Bath moves a little slower than normal.

  “Careful you don’t run it out,” says Ikey. “She don’t ever make it into the tub.”

  The Kid cranks it backward then, which Gruesome Newsome says you can’t do cause it hurts the machine but really cause he doesn’t want anybody getting more than a minute view for their penny, but what fun is it to see the lady put her clothes back on?<
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  He cranks it forward again, real slow, till what must be nearly the last card flips into view and holds it there.

  “Nice melons.”

  “What I tell you?”

  The woman is down to her unders, a white corset cinched tight in the middle and black stockings you can follow all the way up to her—

  Whap! His cap flies off as Gruesome smacks the back of his head.

  “What I tell you little shits?”

  “Hey, I paid!”

  “That don’t mean you can park yourself there with your tongue down the slot.”

  The Kid bends to retrieve his cap. “Don’t cost you nothin extra.”

  “You monopolize the machine, nobody else can see it.” There is ten or eleven of the guys in the joint at the moment, and plenty of machines to go around.

  “Besides, you got the same crappy pitchers every week,” says Ikey. “Even Fine changes his once in a while.”

  Fine runs the Garden of Delights two blocks down, but it’s smaller and dirtier and there’s a character they all call Creepy Drawers who seems to hang there all day long.

  “You don’t like it,” says Newsome, “you can hit the bricks.”

  They stroll around a few more minutes just to show him he can’t boss a paying customer, and then the Kid has to blow.

  “I told my sister I’d come by,” he says.

  The Yellow Kid, running, always running in the daytime cause there is money to make if you are quick on your feet and loud and fearless, cuts across Worth Street, the morning’s pennies rattling in the grouch bag tied around his waist and stuffed into his crotch, four more in his pocket in case the guinea kids catch him when he hurries past Mulberry and Mott and he needs something to surrender, running all the way to Chatham Square where he stops in front of Altgeld’s to look at the crates.

  All the downtown Social Clubs buy from Altgeld when one of their brothers kicks the bucket, the crate from Altgeld and flowers from Kil-murray’s. There are three in the window now, two full-size and one cut short for kids. One of the full-size is the basic model, a wood rectangle with no metal fittings like the old-country hebes have to use, but the other is a real beauty, a polished box that juts out wider at the shoulders, with the shiny brass handles for your pals to hang on to and all kinds of fancy carving on the lid. If he’d had the dough he’d have popped for something like that for Maminka, instead of her riding the damn barge that might as well be a garbage scow up to Hart Island where One-Nugget Feeny says they just dump you in the common trench, shoulder to shoulder packed three deep with the other dead. Or worse, give you to the junior croakers to cut apart and learn their trade. But there was no dough and the Old Man fell apart, stupid Bohunk bastid, so there she was.