A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  Diosdado nods. “Not a single rifle.”

  Malvar, who sent him on the mission, scowls, but the General’s expression does not alter.

  “No matter,” he says. “The Americans have promised to sell us as many as we need.”

  “When?” asks Riego de Dios.

  “We are to wait here for their summons,” says the General.

  “Our people are already fighting in the Ilocos.”

  “There is little else to entertain oneself with in the Ilocos,” says Alejan-drino, and the men laugh again.

  The General turns back to Diosdado. “We will be waiting here for the summons,” he says, “but you, young man, are to go immediately to Manila.”

  Diosdado takes a deep breath, trying to appear unfazed by the order. Manila. He has been condemned there as a traitor, drawings of him, poorly rendered, circulated by the guardia. He thought he might never see the city again.

  “And what is my mission?”

  The General smiles. “To wait for our American brothers,” he says, “and embrace them when they step ashore.”

  THE CLOUD CITY

  Leadville is a wound festering between the Mosquito Range and the Wasatch Mountains, a high-plains sprawl of new-built structures surrounded by treeless hills pocked with diggings, hills that at closer look are only piles of tailings excreted from the holes men have torn into the earth. Blasted rock spews from tipple chutes into ore cars that rattle and slam down tramways behind coal-devouring engines, wooden headhouse towers marking the mine portals where hoist cables screech lowering men crammed in steel cages down tomb-dark vertical shafts, tongues of candles flickering on their hats, oil lanterns in hand, dropping with stomach-shifting speed past the played-out silver, the abandoned tunnels, past Level Three, Level Four, Level Five, down four hundred feet more sucking air hammered into the ground by a compressor, Level Eight, Level Nine, then thunk to bedrock and the door clanging open and the men spilling out into the main chamber to face a half-dozen galleries. The newest of these, the rawest, leads back a thousand feet, only half that distance with track on the floor. At the end of it, in the nervous light of three candles, Hod braces himself in a narrow fissure and rams a seventy-five-pound stoper drill straight up into the stony roof above him, rock dust filling the crevice, filling his nose his mouth his lungs, ear-shattering trip-hammer roar as he drives the cutting bit into hardrock a thousand strokes per minute, vibration coursing through his chest down his backbone and out through his legs into the rock he is wedged in, muscles of his arms taut cables pushing the drill steel up, up, every part of him straining and concentrated on the shoot-hole above till Cap Stover reaches up to swat his leg. Time to change bits.

  Sudden quiet.

  Hanging rock dust.

  Hod hands the drill down to the chuck tender, who twists the bar stock and pulls out the old steel, still hot to the touch. The edges of the star-shaped cutting bit have been hammered smooth. Cap jiggers in a new rod of drill steel, twists it to lock.

  Grimes, the foreman, calls up through the winze from the level below. “You all right up there?”

  “Changing steel, boss,” Cap calls down into the little opening.

  “How’s it coming?”

  Cap looks up to Hod, who shows him fingers. If he tries to talk it will start the coughing again.

  “Three more to go, then you can shoot,” calls Cap.

  “Keep on it,” calls the foreman, and then nothing.

  Hod starts the tip of the steel into the shoot-hole, then guides the rod as Cap hoists the body of the hammer drill back up to him, unkinking the wire-belted cable that leads back to the compressor at the head of the gallery.

  “Need a minute?”

  Hod shakes his head, then braces himself again and muscles the heavy drill upward till the bit jams against the unyielding top of the hole. The air is almost clear now and he takes a big gulp of it and squeezes the trigger—shriek of metal cutting rock, vibration filling his body once again.

  Maybe he’ll find her tonight.

  One of the girls on the Row who recognized him from Skaguay said Addie Lee is in town, staying at the Crysopolis, but the desk jockey said there were no redheads upstairs and nobody going by any of the names Hod recalled her using. Hod drills and thinks how it would be to be with her, to hold her. He searched the town last night and the night before, she’d been there and gone, sure, happy to pass it on, what was his name again? Hod drills and concentrates on a single image, her cheek resting in sleep against his bare breast, the smell of her hair, her breath warm and steady against his skin. He’ll find her tonight, or she will find him.

  The shooters are on their way into the drift by the time Hod and Cap come out on the tracks.

  “Got some holes need packin,” says Cap to Greek Steve as he passes with a box of blasting powder and a spool of fuse cord. “And you might ought to shore the roof up some before you set anything off.”

  “Fockeen guys,” says Greek Steve, his usual greeting and the only English he’s ever been heard to utter. They step out into the gallery to join the others coming off shift, Hod’s arms floating slightly without the bulky widowmaker in them. Flem Hurley is honking into his crumpled bandanna, trying to muffle the echo in the stone chamber. The other men look away. Miners’ con is carried as a dirty secret, something shameful. A weakness in a tough business.

  Me in six months, thinks Hod. He only smiles and nods as the others swap reports from their different drives, each ore face a more grievous affront to the human body, darker, narrower, dustier, the timbers bent with stress, the sides unstable and the top threatening to come down.

  “Damn roof make more noise than a Chinaman in a fish market,” says old Arlie Bogle through cheeks bulging with tobacco. “The more you wedge it the more it complains.”

  “The sides where I’m at is all crumbling,” mutters Dog Dietrich. “Got so many hay bales piled up you got to walk sideways to get through, but it aint but sand holdin the whole deal up.”

  “Leastways it’s dry, down this level.”

  “Hell, you don’t ever know,” says Cap. “She be dry as a bone and one day some mucker pokes his shovel into the wrong crack—”

  “Seen a couple fellas blowed straight out of a hole down Idaho Springs once, long with a half-ton ore car and a quarter-mile of track. Busted through to a whole underground lake—”

  “All that pressure built up, waitin there centuries for some dumb hunkie—”

  Fell down shaft

  Hod was on the Grievance Committee in Butte, had memorized the litany of Cause of Fatality they had stolen from the coroner’s office—

  Fall of ore

  Crushed in machinery

  It was all in the same handwriting, and he imagined the functionary, poker-faced as he listened to the shift boss’s explanation, trying to compress each man’s grisly end into a one-line epitaph—

  Rock fall

  Suffocated by carbonic-acid gas

  Shot of dynamite

  Struck by cage

  Explosion of powder

  Bucket fell down shaft

  Hod has been on rescue crews, has helped dig the flattened remains of a half-dozen miners out from a collapse, bodies spread and pressed to the thickness of a floor plank—

  Car tipped on man

  Returned to blast area too soon

  Caught between loaded ore cars

  Rope broke on cage

  Pinned against post

  Cave of dirt while timbering

  Fell into ore bin

  Caught between trippers, bled to death

  Refiring missed hole

  Killed by gas in bag house

  There were quick deaths and slow deaths, deaths that blew out the lights in the drive and deaths not discovered till the next shift stumbled on the scene—

  Picking out missed shot

  Caught between timbers and cage

  Pinned under a motor

  There were deaths caused by stupidity—

 
; Thawing powder in open fire

  —greenhorns fed to the mines, men from desperate countries who nodded with incomprehension when instructions were given and marched into the drives armed with every tool they needed to murder themselves and the man next to them. There were deaths caused by the inescapable nature of the job—

  Bad air

  There were mines that rumbled and growled and warned you not to challenge them, and sneaking mines, mines that invited you deeper and killed you with gases invisible and odorless. The truth was that the air was always bad and the roof always unstable and the laws of gravity without pity. Hod has them all in his head, the jacks and the shooters, the muckers and timbermen, the chute-loaders and motormen and cagers and jigger bosses and whistlepunks, the seasoned miners and the hapless immigrants, and knows they are a scant fraction of those dead or dying from what he already carries in his lungs.

  “A mine has got more ways to kill a man than Carter got liver pills,” says Cap as they step into the elevator. “You can’t take it personal.”

  Grimes comes then to count heads and the men grow silent. He fired a boy the other day, a little nervous Dago kid, accusing him of high-grading. The boy had turned his pockets inside out, dropped his pants and opened the flap of his long johns and not so much as a lead pebble fell out, but Grimes chased him anyway.

  Hod and the shift boss face each other, nose to nose in the press of miners as the man-skip hoists them up through the levels, Grimes chewing tobacco and avoiding Hod’s eyes. Hod is one of the few who passed on shitting in Grimes’s lunchpail this morning when the muckers got hold of it. They had not been short on volunteers.

  The cables shriek, cage shuddering as they jolt to a stop. The bar is drawn and the miners crowd out through the split-log shafthouse and into the late sun filtering through the refinery smoke.

  The mine dick who pinched Hod and Big Ten stands at the side of the tramway with another company gun, a pimple-faced kid with a worried look on his face. The dick points at Hod.

  “You.”

  Hod can feel Grimes shifting behind him as he steps away from the others who cross to pull their tags off the shift board, brassing out, and don’t look back.

  “Say your name was?”

  “Metoxen. Henry.” Hod has recognized two or three other jacks on the job from his Butte days, men also digging under bogus handles. They usually don’t much care who you are if the ore keeps rolling out.

  The mine dick steps up to look him in the eye. He can feel Grimes’s breath on his neck.

  “There’s somebody got you pegged as a fella name Brackenridge. Officer in the Federation.”

  There’d been a riot in Leadville in ’96, and the Federation led a strike just last year, shut most of the works down and had the owners worried some till the Colorado Guard was brought in to keep the workers starving and away from the driftmouths. One hothead had snuck through the sentries and sabotaged the pumps up on Carbonate Hill, flooding some of the mines beyond repair.

  “That aint me,” says Hod.

  “Somebody says it is.”

  “Who would that be?”

  They keep a blacklist, he knows, but he’s never been kodaked by the bulls or sat for a police artist. Not yet.

  “Don’t matter who it is.”

  “Well it’s not true.”

  “That don’t matter neither,” says the mine dick. “You’re done.”

  The nervous kid puts his hand on the butt of his gun. “That means out of company lodgings. Tonight.”

  “He knows what it means.”

  This is where you always have to be careful, Hod thinks, not admit to anything but not give them an excuse to unload on you.

  “I worked three days already this week,” he says.

  Grimes speaks up behind him. “That’s your lookout.” Grimes who a year ago was just another rock donkey like Hod, Grimes who for another fifty cents a day drives them and curses them, hollers cause they’re going through drill bits like green corn through a goose then hollers louder cause the jacking is going too slow, Grimes who missed his lunch because the day shift left their opinion of him steaming in it.

  “We don’t pay off no Reds,” he says.

  Hod smells apricots, acid and thick in the air, the separation plant upwind running their cyanide process, and the ball mill rumbling louder than thunder even a half mile away, and everywhere around them smoke, black smoke hanging over the tailing dumps and the smelters and the ore trains and over the hodgepodge shitpile of a town itself, hanging like a bad mood from Ball Mountain to Pawnee Gulch.

  “Sure will miss it,” says Hod and steps quickly past the mine thugs.

  He wanted to greet her with a job and a bankroll. He has twenty-five dollars hid in his street shoes but that won’t last long here, nothing but a man’s labor cheap in Leadville.

  The boys in the washhouse are careful to avoid him, not sure who might be a spy scrubbing under the steaming water, sympathetic but living from payday to payday themselves. Hod sniffs shower spray into his nose and blows out gray clots, swishes the grit out of his mouth and works the carbolic soap deep into his hide, feeling it burn a little before he lets the cold water blast it off. The smelters pay only two dollars a day, two and a half tops, but they haven’t been struck so often and are less vigilant. In town there are only pimps, faro dealers, and respectable folks, the doctors and lawyers and assayers for the big outfits, and then a lot of former rock donkeys missing arms or legs who are living, more like slowly dying, on the bum. The clothes shed is empty but for Hod by the time he laces his shoes up and is ready to leave, hair wetly combed, shoe tops polished on the backs of his legs. He wishes he’d shaved this morning.

  They take one look and say they aren’t hiring at the Thespian, or the Irene Number Two or the Julia Fiske or the Eclipse or the Forsaken or any of the other diggings and by the time he gets to Harrison Reduction it is dark.

  It takes a while for the floor boss upstairs to understand what Hod is yelling in his ear, bulk ore thundering down the chute onto crushers and the crushers spinning, cannonballs inside tumbling to smash the biggest chunks into smaller ones that rattle walnut-sized to the shaker screens then tip into the grinders, iron ore-cart wheels screeching over the thrum of the conveyor belts and the roaring furnaces below, but finally he points down through the floor and hollers back “See van Pelt!”

  The smelting works is not allowed to cool, men feeding the furnaces day and night, and Hod has to pause halfway down, air searing his lungs, till the heat of the metal steps prods his feet into movement. A bare-chested worker jams his lance into the mouth of the nearest furnace, which erupts with blue-green flame before the glowing red tongue oozes out, bubbling and smoking as it fills the sluice and rolls forward, the heavier matte beneath channeled off to the side as the molten surface waste spills over the front edge to splash, hissing viciously, into the conical slag pot below. Another sweat-drenched worker rushes forward pushing a cart frame, jacking the pot up off its stubby legs and rolling it, still sizzling, out through the low opening to the tip. Cones of just-dumped waste glow on the spoil bank, their light fading as they cool to ash, piles flickering here and there, dying, smoke wisping up toward the moon. Van Pelt is a balding man scribbling on a production log steadied against his assistant’s back. Both men wear flannel jackets and appear not to perspire.

  “Worked in a smelter before?” Van Pelt gives Hod the briefest of glances and continues to write in the log.

  Hod nods at a worker rolling a slag cart past, head turned away from the trailing fumes. “I can do that.”

  “But you just come from a mine, didn’t you?”

  Hod’s hair feels like it’s on fire, each breath scorching, and his high-mountain headache sits right behind his eyeballs, sharp as a fresh drill bit. He is in no shape to invent a plausible lie.

  “Yes sir, I have.”

  “Fired.”

  “They didn’t have no complaint with my work.”

  When the supervisor
turns to look at him again there is the reflection from the angry furnace in his eyes. “Agitator.”

  “No sir,” says Hod, cap held twisted in his hands. “Just a working man needs a job.”

  Van Pelt lifts the production log and the assistant straightens his back. “Won’t find one in Leadville, not in the mines, not in the mills. Word’s gone out on you, son.”

  The man was a colonel in Horace Tabor’s light cavalry, Hod remembers, the vigilante outfit that tried to boot the union out of town before the militia came in. The man is on the list Cap showed him once in the company dormitory before lights out, high up among the ones to be dealt with if the class war ever really boils over into something serious, something final. Hod is wasting his time here.

  When he gets back to the dormitory he finds his lower bunk stripped bare, his few belongings piled on the mattress. Mrs. Mapes sits scowling and rocking and smoking her pipe in the entryway, snorting once when he passes with his roll to go out the back stairs.

  There is a burro standing in the path down the hill, a slat-ribbed jenny with scabs on her rump, staring at nothing and still as a painting. Most of the wild pack wandering around the gulches are too old or too ornery to work anymore, no longer worth a prospector’s handful of feed, but this is a loner with a mad gleam.

  “Look like you had your fill of it,” says Hod softly, making a careful arc around the animal. “Don’t spose I blame you.”

  There is not the slightest movement in the creature’s eye as he passes, only the stare, angry and infinite.

  There are men in tailored suits and ladies not for hire outside of the Delaware and at Tabor’s Grand Hotel on Seventh. Hod fights the notion that he should go inside and search out someone higher up the pyramid than Burt Grimes, maybe surprise old J. J. Brown or John Campion or any of the top-hatted, champagne-swilling bonanza kings who own the town and suggest where they might stick the Little Johnny and the rest of the Ibex works, but they are probably forted up in their Denver mansions and unavailable to entertain his opinions. Instead he drifts down slag-paved Harrison to Chestnut Street, already bustling with miners determined to throw their hard-earned money away, and begins to search the thirst parlors and love shops for Addie Lee.