A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “Form by platoon—march!”

  They separate into their two platoons. The lieutenant hasn’t come along. Drill is shorter when he comes—he gets hot or bored and pulls out his pocket watch which Sergeant Jacks somehow senses without looking and wraps things up. Without the lieutenant it could be a long morning.

  “First platoon, deploy as skirmishers, on the flank—march!”

  Royal pivots around Corporal Pickney and the rest follow, stepping off their two paces from the next man, each squad spread out fifteen paces from the other. It seems a waste, now that they’ve gotten the hang of it, of the manual of arms, of close and extended-order marching and maneuver, now that they’ve learned to stack and take arms, to clean, repair, and fire their weapons, to adjust sights and judge distances, to respond correctly and with dispatch to vocal, whistle, or bugle commands, to make and break camp and dig entrenchments and all of the thousand daily duties of the Regular Army soldier, a waste for their Company L to be the one left behind in Tampa to look after equipment and maintain a base of operations. But that is the order, straight from the Colonel.

  “Second platoon, in support, as skirmishers—march.”

  The rest of the company spreads out behind them. They have their backs to the bay, facing a series of dunes.

  “Observe Sergeant Cade.”

  Cade appears at the top of a dune over a hundred yards away, waves his hat.

  “That is the enemy position. You will advance by rushes, maintaining your lines, on my command. Company, port arms!”

  The shadows of a phalanx of pelicans ripple over the sand in front of them. Royal feels the first little bit of heat on his cheek.

  “First platoon, double time, forward—march!” shouts Sergeant Jacks and they are off, Royal aware only of the other seven men in his squad strung out beside him, boots sinking into the soft sand as the dune slides away beneath their feet, stubbornly surrendering as they lift their knees and pound it under, climbing till Cade is just visible over the crest and—

  “Down!”

  Royal flops forward, easier on the uphill slope than on flat ground, raising the Krag to aim—

  “Three rounds—fire!”

  A metallic clicking all down the line as the men sight their weapons and pull the trigger. Sergeant Jacks always has them check the magazine and set the cutoff before they leave camp, and Royal has only had two brief sessions with live rounds back at Chickamauga. Jacks calls behind them.

  “Second platoon, double time—march!”

  Royal has put three imaginary shots through Sergeant Cade’s forehead by the time the second platoon comes huffing past—

  “First platoon cease fire!”

  The second line kicks sand back, Royal catching a noseful, as they double-time over and past the men lying on their bellies. They are down the far side and halfway up the next dune before Jacks calls out.

  “Down! Hold fire! First platoon up, double time, march!”

  His heart is hammering against his ribs by the time he reaches the upslope of the second dune, his grime-stiffened wool starting to loosen with his sweat, sand down his collar and in his pants and in his eyes and gritty in his teeth and Down! and firing, at will this time, Royal not aiming so much as pointing the barrel in the general direction of Cade and the second line slogging past and down and up to the crest of the next one and then Up! they are charging forward again, shirt soaked and stuck to his body, sand stuck to the wet on his face, the day suddenly very bright, legs leaden on the last slope and then Down! flopping at Sergeant Cade’s feet and heaving for breath, a flock of gulls mocking noisily overhead now, till the second platoon thumps down next to them.

  “On your feet, gennemen!” calls Sergeant Cade. Cade has dull black skin that is creased with age and exposure, is missing several teeth and rumored to have fought the Confederates at Fort Wagner. “Form your skirmish lines! You all bunched up, dammit!”

  Shuffling and side-stepping to get their intervals back. Little Earl is throwing up beside him, a thin yellow liquid that smells like coffee.

  “About face! Rifles, port arms! First platoon—”

  Sergeant Jacks stands back at the shore, waving his hat over his head.

  “—observe the enemy position. Advancing by rushes, first platoon, double time—”

  If you drop they let you lie there a bit but then there is kicking and shouting and even the ones who are carried from the field have to make it up later, in spades, and the veterans spit their tobacco and look at you like you’re nothing. “You can rest when you’re dead,” Sergeant Jacks will say, the toe of his boot digging into your ribs. “And there will be no dying without my permission.” There have been times, since the regiment has been here in Tampa, when Royal has been amazed to survive the day, amazed at what his body can endure, and thought this must be the last test, the worst they will ever put us through—

  “—forward march!”

  They charge back and forth between the sergeants in rushes, first by platoons and then by squads, till the sun is straight up in the sky. The only break is for the few men detailed, one at the shoulders and one at the feet, to lug the five troopers who collapse and lie motionless to the edge of the water and leave them there in the rising tide. All but one is able to stand by the time Sergeant Jacks has the company clean the sand out of their rifles and start the march back to camp.

  The insects are out in force for the return, sand fleas and biting flies, and Royal’s rifle weighs twice what it did in the morning, digging into his shoulder. His eyes sting with sweat and they take a longer route, swinging well clear of the sunburned Georgia Volunteers learning the rudiments of their old trapdoor Springfields at the base of the Heights. When they trudge into camp the other companies are already sitting around confronting the midday meal.

  “Yo, Junior,” calls Coop, fish-eying an open tin of stringy beef trimmings packed for the Japs four years ago, “hold your rifle on me so’s I got a reason to eat this shit.”

  Tampa is a fever dream of commerce.

  Tampa is a fever dream of war.

  Jacks leads the detail of recruits along the trolley tracks that lead down Seventh to the railhead, old Patch following with the supply wagon. He likes Ybor, likes the noise and the pace and the mix of people. The white folks lord it over you in Tampa City, even now that they are outnumbered by soldiers, and the colored who live in the Scrub are a sorry-looking bunch, just scrabbling along, but here there is color and music and industry, more fun than anything he’s seen outside of Mexico.

  The signs are in Spanish, of course, though there are hasty translations painted below them on the establishments catering to soldiers. Two little brown boys, barefoot, fall into step with the detail, thrusting forward an old shoebox filled with live baby alligators.

  “Caimanes aquí, muy chicos, muy baratos!” they sing. “Caimanes vivas!”

  “Para comer?” says Jacks, poker-faced, and the boys peal with laughter, both at the phenomenon of this yanqui speaking Spanish and at the idea of eating the lizards.

  “Como quieres, hombre.”

  The lingo here has a different music than border Mex, the Cubanos dropping their esses and never sounding like burros. Jacks puts his hand over his stomach to indicate he is full. “Acabo de almorzar,” he tells them. “Gracias, no.”

  “You understand everything they’re saying?” asks Lunceford. Lunceford is a schoolboy, full of big words and big ideas.

  “Picked some up in Arizona Territory, some in Texas. Know a little Apache too, not that it do any good here.”

  A good half of the buildings are spanking new, unpainted board shacks tacked together to sell something to the soldiers while they last here, saloons and gambling dens and whore cribs and stands selling fresh fruit and candy and everything not provided for in Army rations, which is just about everything. The new structures are wedged in between the larger brick buildings—the cigar factories, the huge Centro Español, the Dago bakery where he likes to get bread and eave
sdrop on the little gamecock Cubano patriots bragging on how they’ll fix the country up once it is liberated. Not the ones drilling, or their pitiful approximation of drilling, in the streets with their white linen uniforms and drawn machetes, but the vest-and-watch brigade who wave their arms and pound their fists, faces reddening, voices rising into what in any other language would be poetry about the plight of their isla desconsolada. Oaths are sworn, tears are shed, hours of entertainment for a three-cent loaf of bread. More little boys, even darker skinned, cluster at the corner of 14th selling deviled crab.

  “Cangrejo, cangrejo, muy rico, muy fresco!” they shout, holding the platters over their heads. Jacks has tried it once, nice and spicy with a mug of beer, but a lot of work for the harvest. He waves the boys off and presses forward. The shavetails are dragging, the morning’s drill in the dunes knocking the go out of them. If there was time he’d have them all with their feet in pickling salts, he’d have started with shorter marches and built them up, he’d have really taught them how to shoot and not just fumble with their sights and blast away. But the regiment is under strength and there isn’t time. They’ve been split up all over the West for decades now, usually no more than three companies at any one post, and it is no great surprise the unit isn’t in step with itself.

  “So Sergeant, give it to us straight—” Lunceford again, who they call Junior, a real barracks lawyer, with the same damn question they all been pestering him about. “How can they leave behind a company of highly trained regular soldiers to make way for some volunteer outfit with inferior weapons?”

  “You greenhorns got a long road to tramp before I’d call you soldiers,” says Jacks without turning. “But even if you were, somebody got to be left behind. There aint enough war to go around, and every damn body, regular or not, wants a piece of it.”

  The Rough Riders pulled in just a few days back, college sports and ranch hands and little Roosevelt who belongs at the Ferlita bakery singing his own praises with the Cubano peacocks, four-eyes Roosevelt strutting all over the camps and the Port trailing a remuda of so-called war correspondents and Kodak fiends. Jacks is a professional soldier and his pride, the one thing he has to show for his years of service, is wounded.

  “Volunteers nothing but a bunch of ward heelers and merchant princes leading a bigger bunch of saloon trash who couldn’t find their way out of a half-acre woodlot. But they got pull, see, and there’s only fifty-some buckets out in that harbor ready to steam away, and even packed like sardines that won’t do for the whole force we got mustered here. So the regulars leave without their full compliment and the cavalry leave without their mounts and the volunteer outfits with friends up high leave without a clue among the lot of em as to what they be facing when they get there.” They are passing out of town now, and the sergeant can hear a hurdy-gurdy playing, a Dago selling shaved ice and colored syrup by the stables where the American teamsters congregate. Once he starts the boys jacking crates from the boxcar he’ll come back and get one. He likes the green syrup, the mint, best in the heat of the day.

  “And then at some point they expect there will be slaughter,” he says with no bitterness, “or there’d only be white boys going over.”

  “And somebody’s got to clear the roads and bury the dead.” Scott is a smart one, not book-educated but quick to pick up on what’s needed.

  “Oh, we’ll do our share of that, too. If there’s a shit end to the stick we get to hold it. But there’s times in battle,” he says, a little uncomfortable to be sharing this with rookies, “when your job is to go soak up bullets.”

  “Cannon fodder.”

  “Mexicans call it carne de cañón. Cannon meat. You stuff that first wave of troopers down their mouth so’s they can’t bite no more, and then send in the boys that are gonna survive and pose for the statue.”

  “There’s companies greener than ours set to go on them boats,” says the one they call Little Earl. “How come ours got to stay?”

  “Your company has to stay because your company has been ordered to stay, Private,” says Jacks, putting a little steel into his voice. “You’re in the Army—don’t be trying to figure out a reason for what you’re told, don’t be trying to guess what comes next or why. Aint a thing you can do about it one way or the other, and the sooner you give yourself up to that, the sooner you’ll make a soldier.”

  Still, he thinks, it would be wondrous duty to be deployed in China.

  They reach the little single-track rail depot and Jacks finds the boxcar and shows the dozey white sentry his orders. Patch gets his fly-addled mules in order and pulls the wagon alongside. There are crates inside the boxcar, unmarked, and the orders don’t specify what is in them either, only that they are to be loaded and delivered to the Wisconsin Volunteers, wherever they might be found. It’s just enough work to keep the four rookies busy and afford him a stroll around Ybor.

  He pulls his dollar watch out and pretends to study it. “When I get back here,” he says to the private soldiers, already wrestling crates onto the wagon bed while Patch hunkers down in the shade of the boxcar, “this wagon best be ready to roll.”

  “No problem, Sergeant.” Poor Lunceford, thinks if he hustles and pleases and keeps his buttons shining he can somehow earn the privilege of accompanying the rest of the outfit to go have their heads blown off. So far this deal is more like the game the Mex kids play at their birthdays, blindfolded and batting wildly at who knows what swinging creature, than it is a war.

  “If it isn’t ready, we might have to revisit those dunes,” says Jacks, turning back toward town, always careful to leave with a threat.

  Maybe the purple one, he thinks, that they say is blackberry flavor. No telling if they’ll have that in Cuba.

  Tampa is a fever dream, a snake swallowing its own tail.

  Coop digs and the sand slides in from the sides. He’s spent more time with a shovel in his hands than a Krag, something about him that makes sergeants’ eyes get big when the shit details are handed out. “You! Cooper!” they say, and he knows it’s something down and dirty they’ve got in mind. The white officers, lieutenant and up, don’t even see him, which is happy news. Coop keeps on digging and the sand keeps filling back in.

  Sooner or later somebody with chevrons will come and see it is impossible, that the company will either have to be let to shit where the white boys do or walk through their territory to firmer ground. Coop has his shirt off, suspender straps cutting hot into his bare shoulders, red bandanna soaked on his forehead. I’m just a latrine-diggin fool here, staying in rhythm, throwing sand and watching it slide back in. And this after they try to kill us on them dunes. That’s one thing with the Army—half of what gets ordered is just doing to be doing. There’s no goods that come out of it, no cotton, no tobacco, no tree gum. Back home they happy to let you lie easy till the harvest, and then a black man better jump quick and get him a job before the sheriff put him on the work gang, same work but you got nothing to show at the end of it but marks where they put the irons on. But nobody let to lie in the Army—

  Dewey comes by and watches for a moment.

  “You wants to help,” says Coop, not breaking his rhythm, “kill up some a these damn flies be pesterin me.”

  “I don’t want to help,” says Dewey. “I just come to see where we going tonight. That’s if they let you out.”

  “Tampa City,” says Coop, making Dewey hop back from a shovelful of sand heaved at his feet.

  “Been having an awful row with the white folks in there.”

  “Yeah, and I aint been in on it yet.” Coop likes Ybor well enough, but the idea that there is something he’s not supposed to do, somewhere he’s not supposed to go, even in the uniform their own damn Army give him—well. “Hear they got some ladies there make your toes curl.”

  “Not for us they don’t.” Dewey has been in for ten years and likes a good time without too much trouble.

  “Well if them others wants to know,” says Coop, “that’s where I be
.”

  Dewey watches him shovel for a moment. “That hole gonna just keep filling up.”

  “You see Sergeant Cade, you tell him about it.”

  “Oh, he knows, Coop. He just don’t want you cooking up mischief. Idle hands is the devil’s instruments.”

  Dewey steps away. Though Coop has made some kind of shallow bowl the back-sliding sand is halfway up to his knees now. Keep this up long enough, he thinks, and I bury my own self.

  They don’t whip you in the Army, or chain you up at night. They give you real folding money, thirteen dollars a month, instead of cardboard scrip you got to use in their own store and they give you a rifle and teach you how to use it. Just show up telling them you’re Henry Cooper, jump over a stick, cough while the Doc puts his fingers on you, and you can wear the blue. He was skinny, bleary-eyed, a week hiding in the piney woods and two more tramping north and west, with nothing in his pockets and clothes that didn’t fit he had to steal on the way. The recruiter in Kansas City barely looked at him. “Cavalry is full up,” he said, “but if you don’t mind walking we got a place for you.”

  Even in war there’s got to be nigger jobs, he figured. Not just the digging and hauling and minding prisoners, but bloody work, something they don’t want to put their white boys in front of. The Indians had been settled in for some time and there wasn’t much talk of this Cuba war yet, they hadn’t blown that ship up, so killing wasn’t even on his mind.

  Beats slaving in a damn turp camp with iron on your legs.

  One of the white outfits, volunteers, double-times past him in formation, a blue rectangle moving against the bleached sand. Coop recognizes the look on their faces, trying hard not to think beyond the moment, not to wonder when is this particular hell going to end. There been nothing regular about their life since they pulled out of Fort Missoula, the brass just guessing their way along, and you got to grab your chances when they come. Get a chance to get drunk, or for a woman, or for a decent bite to eat and you damn well better jump on it. “We not paying you boys to think,” Sergeant Cade likes to tell them, “just pick em up and lay em down.” The sun is lower now and Coop tosses his sweat-heavy campaign hat to the side of the pit. He hasn’t been to stockade once since he joined, they can’t break him and they can’t shake him and he knows it bothers old Cade, on his tail from first bugle to Taps, but Cade don’t rile him none. Just keep smiling and shoveling and tonight they owe him a pass, strap on the pistol and step out with the boys. Coop can’t read, as such, but he knows his letters, knows when there is a big W on a brand-new sign it likely means “Whites Only” and was stuck up there just for him. There was more of that back home when he visited too, making a point of what a man already know on his own, rubbing you raw in a public way. We will see. The Cubans in Ybor just want your money—hell, they all shades themselves, ebony to ivory, and got all manner of Italians and Chinamen running around in the bargain. But Tampa City it’s your standard-issue crackers, sun-baked and nasty, and a nigger won’t get too many chances in this life to run it down their throats, to carry a sidearm and dare them, just dare the sorry sons of bitches to make something out of it.