by John Sayles
“Brackenridge,” Hod calls out.
“A name that is neither here nor there,” says Masterson. “Something Irish—”
“I’m not Irish.”
“And Fireman Jim Flynn is a Dago, what of it?”
“He fought before under Young McGinty,” Niles blurts.
Niles promised Hod before that it wouldn’t be McGinty, just in case the warrant has traveled from Alaska, but now only puts a finger to his lips to warn him off.
“Young McGinty versus Chief—?”
“Strong Bear,” says the fat man.
“It’s a match. We advertise a prize of five hundred dollars, and out of that the fighters share—”
“Excuse me,” says Niles, holding up a hand. “If we’re talking business—”
He holds a fiver out to Hod. Masterson and Otto Floto and Niles and even the artist all stare at him as if he shouldn’t be there. Hod takes the five and steps to the back of the room.
“That’s to feed yourself,” calls Niles jovially. “Not for an excursion to Holliday Street.”
He gives the sleeping man a nudge as he passes on the way out the back door. “Lunchtime, buddy.”
They are out on 18th before Hod realizes that the man is Big Ten.
“If you don’t mind,” says the Indian, eyeing the five, “I haven’t eaten in days.”
They find a place two blocks up serving steak and eggs and settle in.
“The fat gink,” says Big Ten, “is some kind of newspaper writer who also promotes shows. I pulled his coat for a handout over by the Opera House and he pitched this boxing idea.”
“Jail in Leadville?”
“One week, they got tired of feeding me. Took me to the freight yard, told me to catch the first thing smoking.”
The Indian doesn’t look any thinner. Fighting him will be like punching a tree stump.
“You know what you’re doing in the ring?”
“Hell no.”
“What they paying you?”
Big Ten shrugs. “The fat man got me a flop for the night,” he says. “Then it’s twenty for showing up and then the sky’s the limit, he says, depending on how I handle myself. What about yours?”
“I think he owes Masterson a lot of money, so this is mostly on the cuff,” says Hod. “But if I catch him before he can reach a faro table I might see a few dollars.”
Big Ten sighs as the food arrives and they dig in.
“There was a sign over that bar,” says Big Ten. “Said it was against the law to serve an Indian—less he’s been cooked first.”
“The whole deal sounds like lots of lumps for short money.” Hod stares out the window at the characters circulating on 18th. “I’d recommend taking a powder, only these people always got an in with the law. If they catch us—”
“If you promise not to hit too hard,” says the Indian, “I promise not to fall down too quick.”
They linger over their coffee, just thinking, and are on their way back to the Windsor in a light drizzle when a tramp steps up on the sidewalk to block their way.
“You fellas spare some change?”
The man is swaying a little as he stands, skin and bones, hair wet and wild, looking slightly through rather than at them like fellas will do when they put the touch on you. Big Ten gives him a nickel and a penny.
“That’s it, buddy,” says the Indian. “Now we’re as busted as you.”
“That’s white of you,” says the tramp, who Hod recognizes from Butte, a mucker on the day gang with a Polish name longer than an ore train. The man staggers around them, almost falling off the curb.
“Always does the heart good,” says Big Ten, “to see somebody worse off than you are.”
On the next block they see the recruits.
There are three of them, two normal sized and one half-pint kid, standing at stiff attention in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the Elite Saloon.
“Our sergeant said he needs to kill his thirst,” says the kid, who the others call the Runt. “Or maybe he just gone in to wound it. One way or the other, we got to stand here at attention till he comes out.”
“We’re volunteers,” says one of the normal-sized ones.
“Sure you are,” says Big Ten. “I can’t see how anybody’d pay you to stand out in the rain.”
“In the Army,” says the Runt. “Off to battle the Spaniards.”
“You don’t say.”
The Runt closes his eyes, then opens them and begins to spout.
Oh it’s Tommy this, and it’s Tommy that
and it’s “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Savior of his Country”
when the guns begin to shoot!
The biggest one looks embarrassed. “He does that. Right out of the blue.”
“We come up from Pueblo and he latched on to us,” says the middle one. “But they took us anyway.”
The sergeant comes out from the saloon then, a long man with a long moustache drooping off his face. He glares at his volunteers. “Have you been talking to these civilians?”
“They were asking about enlistment, sir,” says the Runt, eyes forward, chin tucked in, his scrawny body held rigid. “And I was explaining the opportunity.”
The sergeant turns to look Hod and Big Ten over. “I’ve got one deserted already and one lost to the clap shack,” he says. “You boys ready to take the trip?”
The Polish miner wasn’t a drinker, Hod remembers, just a steady, hard-working fella trying to keep grits on his table. He looked like hell, a ghost of a man out there alone in the rain. This is not Hod’s war, the plight of the oppressed Cuban a subject he has barely considered. But it had felt right, that one moment, marching with the Skaguay Guards, and there will be three squares a day and a chance to see the palm trees and it won’t be Soapy Smith or anyone like him running the deal. Hod, light in the pocket and blackballed from the mines, exchanges a look with the big Indian, who he can tell is also considering the offer.
“Where to?” asks Big Ten.
“Five blocks over to the Armory,” says the sergeant, “and then on to Glory.”
ARMADA
The Americans are there before the sun comes up. Just there, out in the bay, somehow passing the Corregidor batteries without a shell being fired.
“Como Pedro por su casa,” says the Spaniard next to Diosdado at the sea wall, a long-nosed ayuntamiento clerk wearing the yellow armband of his volunteer unit. It is first light and already there are hundreds lined up along the Malecón to watch, men only, though there are a few women among those fleeing behind them on the Paseo, the poorest with their rolled tampipis over their shoulders, the wealthiest trailed by barefoot coolies staggering under bulky pieces of furniture. This day has been known, has been inevitable, for weeks—what can they have been waiting for?
“Do you think they’ll bombard the city?” asks Diosdado. His orders are to gauge the mood of the people, both Spaniard and Filipino, and it has required a sociability he never thought himself capable of.
“That is the present subject of discussion,” the clerk tells him. “Do you see their light?”
At the bow of one of the still distant American warships a beam flicks rhythmically on and off. The clerk points across the road behind them, where a corporal and his capitán stand on top of the Baluarte de Santa Isabel, the capitán watching the signaling ship through binoculars and the corporal wig-wagging a pair of flags, one red, one white, in a complicated sequence.
“If General Augustín promises not to fire from the shore batteries,” the Spaniard explains, “their Admiral Dewey may agree not to level the Intramuros.”
“So you think no shells will fall on our heads?”
The clerk gives Diosdado a weary smile. “Leaving more available to murder our boys in the fleet.”
The fleet, if the less-than-a-dozen Spanish ships fanned out uncertainly in front of Las Piñas, escape route blocked by Sangley Point, may be conceded that name, has nowhere to go.
<
br /> “What are they doing?”
The clerk watches the closer ships for a moment.
“One would hope,” he says finally, “they are making their peace with the Creator.”
This same bitter humor, this mix of exasperation and stoicism, has infused every conversation Diosdado has engaged in or overheard since the news arrived that the Americans were steaming away from Hongkong. Haunting the Escolta in his moustache and country planter’s outfit, in for a quick drink at the Tabaquería Nacional or La Alhambra or the San Miguel beerhouse, rubbing shoulders with the peninsulares, infantry, cavalry, volunteers—for every Spaniard between sixteen and sixty has been called to service—it has been the same shameful story.
“We have been abandoned,” said the teniente, said the merchant, said the cargo inspector. “The people in Madrid make speeches and wave their fists, but they send us no ships, no arms, no men.”
“They have the insurrection in Cuba to deal with.”
“An insurrection fueled by yanqui gold.”
“Nonetheless—”
“They have abandoned us. They have hooked a monster this time, have roused the interest of these overgrown Americans, and have decided to cut bait rather than endure the fight.”
“But we will fight,” they all add. “If only for our sense of honor. If only to stand as men, under our flag and God’s eyes, till the very end.”
And then, enraptured with their own tragic Iberian nobility, intoxicated with sentiment for their beloved archipelago, their Pearl of the Orient, each Spaniard will turn to lay a hand on Diosdado’s shoulder and speak as if to a brother.
“Y tu, amigo—what will you do?”
They do not mean what will Diosdado Concepción do, or Idelfonso Ledesma, the name on the newest cédula the Committee has given him. They worry, they obsess, about what the Filipino people will do.
“So many of our prominent figures,” Diosdado reassures them whenever asked, “have sworn to stand with our mother Spain against these invaders. Look at those already leading volunteer battalions—Pio del Pilar, Buencamino in Pampanga, Paterno, Ricarte, Licerio Gerónimo, the Trias brothers—”
Diosdado has spoken to almost all those that Alejandrino, too well-known by the Spaniards to operate secretly, has not been able to reach. Hurrying about the provinces in his flimsy disguise, General Aguinaldo’s faceless envoy to those he hopes will follow him in a revived insurgency. They are all, perhaps with the exception of Ricarte, practical men, and have deduced that the safest position in the coming upheaval is at the head of a large body of armed men, preferably from one’s home province.
“But will they stand to the end?”
And because he is an imposter, with a radically different notion of what that end should be, Diosdado can look the Spaniards in the eye and say, honestly, “I hope so. With all my heart.”
He raises his binoculars as the American ships form a line, one behind the other, speeding past the Malecón now, the shore batteries silent. The lead vessel is within two hundred yards when the Spaniards begin to fire. One by one the American ships turn hard right and run parallel to the Spanish line, rapid-fire cannons delivering a continuous broadside, balls of smoke and then the booming report over the water. The Regina Cristina and the Don Juan de Austria charge forward and immediately begin to come apart. They are old, badly fitted, wooden-hulled relics facing gray-painted fortresses of steel. It is target practice. The Mindanao is on fire off Las Piñas beach, the Castilla is sinking, only its chimney stack still above water, and the Regina Cristina explodes with a concussion that jolts the solemn watchers all along the sea wall.
The clerk has the side of his hand in his mouth, biting down on it. There are men in the water now, some of them on fire, swimming away from the wrecks or rowing lifeboats, desperate to be out of killing range. The American ships each take a second, then a third and a fourth turn, as evenly spaced as a line of mechanical ducks at a shooting gallery, only they are the sportsmen and the thrashing Spanish marineros the prey.
Most of the Filipino leaders were evasive, or at the best noncommittal, when he spoke to them, noses to the wind.
“Give Miyong my regards,” said Buencamino, who fought for the Span-iards in the ’96 uprising. “Tell him I will do what is best for our people.”
Any of them watching this carnage will have chosen sides by now.
Diosdado has planned for this day, he and his fellow universitarios have longed for it, but at this moment, with the mighty Spanish Navy revealed as a floating scandal, his heart is with the men struggling to keep their heads above the waves. Morning sun flashes off the steel hull of the last American warship in the procession as it turns, then the rolling smoke and the roar of cannons and one of the long lifeboats is blasted into flying splinters, the rowing men simply gone, gone from the world. Somebody beside him is sobbing.
READER
Quiroga sits on his platform, surveying the bowed heads below. They never look up, not even if he pauses for a very long time, not even at the most emotional moments, as when poor little Nell died in Mr. Dickens’s wonderful tale—only a wagging of the bowed heads, maybe a cry of “Ay, Dios!” from one of the women at the back benches, stripping the fibers from the leaves, and the one instance where Fermín Pacheco was so upset that it seemed one of the Musketeers had been killed he slammed his fist down and ruined a Corona. No matter what Quiroga reads or how powerfully he presents it, the work, the chopping and pressing, the rolling and wrapping, the tap-tapping of wooden boxes being assembled, continues unabated, the fingers keep on moving.
“ MUCH CONJECTURE IN LIBERATORS’ CAMP,” he reads in the tone he reserves for newspaper headlines and chapter headings. La Verdad and most of the other Ybor City papers invariably refer to the American force as “los liberadores” unless they choose to use the more fraternal “nuestros hermanos de la Causa.” Don Vicente allows him to read the Cuban papers if he sticks to the reporting, the editorials invariably too inflammatory and likely to injure the sensibilities of the Spaniards at the fábrica, who are, after all, his key employees.
“General Shafter Cites Progress in Organization.”
Still declamatory, but at reduced volume. Quiroga prides himself on delivering the sensation of reading, even for those few illiterates in the factory, prides himself on finding an equivalent for the effects of font and justification. He has a vocal technique to match everything in the arsenal of author and printer.
The fingers keep moving.
“United States Major General William R. Shafter, in an interview granted today from his headquarters at the Tampa Bay Hotel, displayed a cautious but optimistic viewpoint when asked about the readiness of his force for the impending confrontation on Cuban soil. ‘The logistics of transport and supply for an army that has not been employed on foreign shores in one hundred years are daunting,’ he stated. ‘But I am confident we shall overcome them in time to engage the enemy to our best advantage.’ When pressed to verify that Havana will be the primary focus of the assault, he reiterated that all sensible military options remain open. Major General Shafter reassured this newspaper that contacts with Cuban patriots already in arms on the island are being maintained, and that these groups are considered an invaluable part of the liberation process.”
Though the author of the article, a Cuban zealot of his acquaintance named Flores, employs a very high and impassioned style, Quiroga tries to deliver the story in the matter-of-fact tone befitting a news dispatch. He is paid by the workers themselves like any other lector, but he understands he is here at the sufferance of Don Vicente.
Quiroga notes that Señor Aragon is not at his bench. It has been entrusted to him, Quiroga, to “keep an eye” on Aragon, a Spaniard of openly Royalist sympathies. But Aragon is a crafter of perfectos, an artisan paid by the bundle and not by the hour and thus able to stroll out onto La Séptima whenever he wishes. When a special order was presented to the wonderful writer, humorist, and cigar aficionado Mr. Samuel Clemens, it was Ara
gon who was honored to fashion the puros. Any man who makes nearly three cents per cigar is an aristocrat among workers.
The elite here and at the Sanchez and Haya fábrica down the street are Spaniards. Cubans, thus far, are only the masters of a few storefront operations, full of moody Sicilians churning out inexpensive cheroots for those who can tolerate them.
“ LOCAL MERCHANTS OFFENDED, ” Quiroga announces, switching to the other front-page story. “ Colored Troops Behind Disruptions.”
Aragon has never so much as acknowledged his existence, even when he is reading from the more exhortatory of the Cuban papers. In fact, the only Spaniard he can be sure is listening is wizened old Infante, the blade-sharpener, who puts something especially dull and noisy on his wheel if the writer’s opinions upset him.
“Several Tampa merchants have complained of distasteful and sometimes violent incidents involving bands of negro soldiers set loose on the city streets each night. They complain that military officials have not considered the effect on local sensibilities of encamping such troops in the area without adequate supervision. ‘We are left at the mercy of these insolent brutes,’ a prominent merchant accuses, ‘and ask at least that the authorities disarm them before allowing them to leave their bivouacs.’ The murder of a white man by members of the colored 10th Cavalry, prompted by his refusal to serve them in his establishment, has terrorized the inland community of Lakeland recently, and residents there warn of impending retribution. ‘We have plenty of white boys down here ready to fight, and more coming from our Western states,’ continued the downtown merchant. ‘The colored should either be sent home or immediately dispatched to Cuba, where their loss on the battlefield will be no great misfortune.’ ” Quiroga folds the newspaper carefully. “Reprinted from the Tampa Post and Defender.”
A few of the negros americanos stand in the rear talking softly to each other, the ones who tend the wagons and carry crates to and fro. He wonders if they have any Spanish. Most of the Cuban rollers know only a scant handful of English words, and with the Sicilians it is impossible to tell. English is not necessary here in Ybor City.