by John Sayles
Diosdado takes the glasses and adjusts them until the field becomes clear, turning to the northwest, searching till it comes into view. There are American soldiers sitting on the ground in the Luneta, American soldiers marching on the drawbridge that crosses the overgrown moat that faces the thick walls of the Intramuros, American soldiers already posing for photographs on top of the Revellín de Real like a group of tourists, and above them, rippling in the late afternooon breeze that comes off the Bay, their gaudy banner.
There is no breeze on the Paco Road. It must be low tide, the little esteros that run inland from the bay beginning to smell.
“I am still waiting for orders,” he tells the captain.
“Well, you just move back on out of sight and wait for them there. It wasn’t for you little monkeys riling up the Spanish we could have marched in there hours ago without a single casualty.” The captain turns as his men cheer. Very faintly, from the direction of the Walled City, come the wobbling strains of the yanquis’ strange anthem.
“We should have been first into the city,” Diosdado says bitterly, and turns to stride back to his own lines.
More yanquis, the reserve units of the day’s campaign, step around Dios-dado’s men as if they are fence posts, crossing the road to join their countrymen. Bayani and Ramos follow Diosdado back.
“You fucking people,” says Bayani, in Tagalog for the sake of Ramos, “you fucking people have given them our country.”
He means all of the ilustrados, of course, the educated, the wealthy, the ones who make treaties and wear tailored uniforms and get to float safely to Hongkong in between massacres, but under Bayani’s unwavering glare Diosdado feels personally responsible.
This wasn’t a battle, he realizes—it was a show staged by white men. Not a liberation but a changing of the guard. And still not a word from Aguinaldo.
Ramos is red-faced, chest heaving as if it is hard for him to breathe. “What do we do now, mi teniente?”
“Now?” The platoon has gathered around them, confused, suspicious, angry. They stare into his eyes. He is the only one of them who has ever been out of the country, the only one, excepting maybe Bayani, who can read. He feels exhausted, though they have not traveled so very far today.
“If the Americans have the city,” he tells them, feeling his own fury rush to his head, “we will have to take it back.”
ANGLER
The fishhook pokes up through the northern tip of Luzon, snagging it securely.
The Cartoonist has arranged the other islands, eliminating many of the smaller ones, to suggest the body of something long and twisted, a fighting pickerel perhaps, with Luzon the head and Mindanao representing the tail flukes. Sitting forlornly upon the northern isle, under a drooping, sickly-looking palm, is a Filipino man, hatless, elbows on knees and head in hands, his tattered shirt open to reveal the slat-ribbed torso of the undernourished. A poor brown little bugger despondently facing away from the hook and its line, which extends tautly across the Pacific to the tip of the slightly bent cane pole held in Uncle’s firm, knobby-knuckled hands. Uncle has rolled his striped trousers up and cools his bared legs to the shins in the rolling sea.
SHALL I REEL HER IN?
—asks the caption, Uncle turning his head to query the reader with bushy eyebrows raised. An extremely unseaworthy-looking dinghy is being rowed away to the northeast of the hooked fish by a white-moustachioed Spanish admiral, with a greasy merchant balancing a bag of loot at the prow, and a fat, tonsured friar in the rear, turning his head back for a last sad glimpse of his Paradise Lost.
The Cartoonist has modeled the friar after Hastings in editorial, and hopes no one will notice till after the paper hits the street.
SOLDIERS OF MISFORTUNE
Hod watches the cards pile up in front of him, still a little dizzy from the wine Neely smuggled in. Company G is back from the defensive line that’s been set up north of the Pasig, scattered now in the nipa huts serving as their cantonment by the reservoir at the edge of a neighborhood called Sampalac or Salampoc or something just as hard to get your mouth around. They’ve named it Camp Alva after the governor, just like back in Denver.
“The women won’t show in public without their chaperones,” explains Corporal Grissom, who has declared himself the squad’s expert on local customs and has a nasty-faced little monkey named Aggy perched on his shoulder. “Daylight catches a señorita on the street, you can bet she’s got one or two old bulldog aunts clearing a path for her.”
“You mean the Spanish girls,” says Big Ten.
The Spanish haven’t all gone, merchants and friars and even a few soldiers awaiting transport still hanging on in the Walled City, depending on their new amigos yanquis to protect them from the locals. There are days Hod feels like a militia guarding a mine boss.
“I mean the Spanish girls.” Grissom finishes the deal, takes a gander at his hand. He has managed to teach the monkey to throw cocoanuts and other fruit down from the trees and to shit anywhere but on his own shoulder. “And the half-breed ones with money. The dark ones, the whatever—Indian ones, that sell stuff on the street and slick their hair with cocoanut oil, they’ll stare you straight in the eye.”
“Which leaves the field open for you, Chief.”
Big Ten shrugs. “Don’t talk the lingo.”
The locals, the ones who aren’t in Aguinaldo’s so-called army, just stare at you. There are rich folks’ houses here with Filipinos living in them, even the bigger bamboo huts in this neighborhood look comfortable enough, but it is hard to get a peep into their lives with them scowling at you. Worse than being a Gentile in Utah.
“Ye just rattle some of them Mexican cartwheels in front of their noses,” says Donovan, who has already been busted down to private for wandering into a posted district. “They’ll get the idea, all right.”
“I wouldn’t fuck a googoo on a bet,” says Grissom.
“Ye’d fuck a rockpile if ye thought there was a squirrel in it. A dead squirrel.”
Hod has had the trots for a week now and the Dhobie itch real bad and it feels raw where he sits. Some of the guys wear red flannel bands around their middles, even to sleep, but they’ve been getting sick just like anybody else. The wine was a bad idea. Hod is tired of their talk, always the same, tired and bored and worried about his insides turning to mush. He hasn’t been right since a day out of Honolulu, stuffed in the three-tier bunks, only two hours on deck a day, trying to eat the slump they shoved in front of you with puke sloshing around your feet. Here inside the hut there are mosquitoes that come out at dusk and dawn, lurking at the edges of the light from the single kerosene lamp they’ve hung over the ammo box they play on, a half-dozen men sitting around it on a woven-mat floor. They don’t buzz, these mosquitoes, and the only strategy seems to be to let them land and fill up with some of your blood before you crush them.
“The young ones don’t look so bad.”
“Monkey faces,” scoffs Grissom.
“Just close your eyes,” says Winston Wall, a private from the Kansas Vols who it seems is a third cousin of Hod’s, demonstrating with his hips. “And then imagine the woman of your dreams—”
Neely reddens, slaps his cards down on the crate. “She wouldn’t do nothin like that.”
The men laugh.
“You in this game or not, Atkins?”
It takes Hod a moment to react to his Army name.
“Let’s go, buddy, shit or get off the pot.”
Hod doesn’t want to think about shitting. He spreads his cards out. Garbage. “Sure. Gimme two.”
A boy in a white provost uniform ducks into the hut, squints at them through his glasses.
“Hey fellas,” he says cheerfully, “long time no see. What we playing for?”
The men take a moment, in the weak light, to recognize the boy.
“It’s Runt!” grins Big Ten.
“How the hell you get over here, son? Thought they threw you back for being too puny.”
&nbs
p; Runyon squeezes onto the floor next to Hod. “Stupid bastards. I snuck on the train to Frisco, hung around the camps—” He shrugs. “There was a Minnesota company that come up a few men short one morning, I talked to the sergeant—”
“They must be desperate.”
“It’s a good outfit—”
“That uniform appears a might roomy on you—” says Winston Wall.
“It fits just fine. They got us policing the city now.”
“Well,” says Sergeant LaDuke, scowling at his hand, “least there’s one of you short enough to look the googoos in the eye.”
The boy scrutinizes the backs of the men’s cards as if he could see through them, cards decorated with a lanky Gibson Girl holding a bicycle. “They’re not a happy group of people, our comrades in arms,” he says. “Had their hearts set on chopping up the Spanish, and then along we come—”
“What I want to know is where they keep the sportin gals.”
Runyon grins. “Just down the street here in Sampaloc. What’re you, blind?”
Grissom deals Runt in, the boy throwing a ten-centavo piece into the ante.
“So you Minnesotas are pullin the provost.”
“For the moment, yeah,” he says, studying his hand. “But we were in the thick of it the day the city fell.”
“We were in the thick, what there was of it,” corrects Sergeant LaDuke. “I don’t remember seeing you.”
“Me neither,” says Wall. “Less it was way back in our dust.”
“We hooked up with the Astor Battery, hauling their pieces with those water buffalo,” says Runt, standing pat, “and all day long whatever we run into, Spanish in a blockhouse, Spanish holed up in a church, whatever, we get the Astor boys set up and they blast the hell out of it.”
“Imagine having so much money you can field your own artillery,” muses Big Ten.
“I wish old John Jacob would come over here, build us one of his swanky hotels,” says Donovan. “I can’t sleep in these feckin rat-holes no more.”
“And the rats aint too happy about you snoring like a freight train—”
“I don’t snore.”
“And shit don’t smell. Tell him, Neely.”
“I was a googoo sneaking up and heard that racket coming out of your tent,” says Neely, “I’d turn and run for my life.”
“General Otis has ordered all the saloons closed down on Sundays,” says Runt. “But the boys have discovered this beeno home-brew stuff—”
“General Otis,” complains the Kansas private, “has parked his fat ass on a supply of Krag rifles and won’t give em out to us vols.”
“What we need with new rifles if we’re going home?”
“Hate to break it to you, pal, but we aint going anywhere.”
“I signed up to slaughter Dagoes,” says Donovan. “And at that I’ve been sorely disappointed.”
“You’ll get home when they squeezed the last drop of blood outta you.”
“So they got you playing nursemaid to the drunks and goldbricks,” Sergeant LaDuke says to Runt, “while we keep the googoos in line.”
LaDuke was a militia back in Colorado, and when Private Thorogood called him out as a scab and a strikebreaker the sergeant put him on report for a week.
“For a while they had me guarding this herd of buffalo calves,” says Runt. “When they’re little they’re kind of pink-colored—”
“And when they grow up they wallow in the mud and taste like shoe leather.”
“These aint for eatin. They grow the pox on em, for vaccine.”
“Evry time ye turn around this place there’s a feckin doctor with a needle in his hand—”
“Now we’re inside the walls, keeping order. Most nights it’s about what you’d see in Pueblo on a Saturday after dark. One of our fellas got cut by a pimp and his patrol partner shot the little bastard, almost had a riot on our hands.” Runt and Grissom’s monkey trade a look. “What’s the stakes here?”
They gamble, dice and cards and side-bets about what time it is going to rain or how many insects will they find in a plate of beans or anything that comes to mind, many of the men owing next month’s pay and the one after that, gamble, Hod included, because so far they have only time to kill and nothing to save for.
“Fifty-centavo minimum,” says Grissom, “and if one of our Mariquina googoos picks you off before you settle your debts we don’t pony up to bring the body back.”
Manigault steps in then, and Sergeant LaDuke nudges the wine bottle behind his body.
“As I assumed,” says the officer, looking over the spread of cards and pesos on the ammo crate. “Uncle Sam’s finest issue, ever vigilant, girding their loins for battle.”
“We’re rarin to go, Lieutenant,” says LaDuke. “Only the coons have decided to take the night off.”
He was not popular in training or on the ship, Manigault, the men going through “that cracker peacock” and “Niles Manlygoat” before settling on “Lieutenant Tarheel” when he was out of earshot. Opinion improved on the day of the so-called invasion, Niles striding out in front of the company with a malacca cane in hand, seeming to grow more cheerful with every flurry of sniper fire.
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” he says, tapping the cane twice on the edge of the crate. “I had the opportunity to visit headquarters today, and from what I was able to glean—” he winks to the men, a hint of conspiracy in his voice, “—I wouldn’t wander too far from your weapons.”
They’ve been sleeping in their boots for a week, but other than insults tossed across the two hundred yards the forces are ordered to maintain between each other, there has been no action. Hod feels it coming again, stomach churning, but holds to his seat.
“Merely a suggestion to the more prudent among you,” says the lieutenant, raising his eyebrows, then sees Runt.
“Runyon, if I recall.”
“Yes sir.”
“I thought I cashiered you in Denver.”
Runt grins. “But I caught on with the Minnesotas. Some real fighting men.”
“With real officers,” adds Hod, “from what I hear.”
Manigault moves to stand behind Hod. “Insubordination is not looked upon kindly, McGinty. Even in the volunteers.”
“He’s Atkins,” corrects Big Ten. “I’m McGinty.”
Manigault narrows his eyes at the Indian. “I am acutely aware of what you are, Private.” He turns to the others. “None of that wine had better end up in your canteens, gentlemen. I miss nothing.” He gives Hod a smart tap on the shoulder with his cane and steps out into the darkness.
“What’s with the shavetail?” asks Runt when he is gone. “Is that the real goods?”
“They like to start rumors. So’s we don’t become lax and undisciplined.”
“As if the little monkeys would dare start anything.”
“Who says they’ll be the ones to start it?” says Big Ten.
“Give me something to shoot,” declares former corporal Danny Donovan, “or send me the feck home.”
If respect is not forthcoming from the lower ranks, one must settle for fear. Niles strolls toward the entrenchments, the night beginning to cool, startling a private so overcome with the sprue that he has dropped his trousers to do his business at the side of the path.
“Name and company,” Niles barks as he steps around.
“Bollinger,” says the sweating youth. “Company I.”
Niles only nods curtly and continues. He may or may not pursue the matter. Unpredictability is a valuable tool, even the worst dullards forced to attend, to remain vigilant. Jeff Smith was the master of unpredictability, his moods, genuine or feigned, keeping his pack of thugs and grifters on a very short leash, his pistol always prominently displayed and judiciously brandished. Niles reflects that his own sidearm, an Army Colt ransomed from a pawnshop on lower Larimer, is rather plebeian for an officer of his caliber. It is not a gentleman’s weapon.
“Who goes there?” calls a sentry at the Cossac
k post, whirling around.
“Lieutenant Manigault,” he answers. “Had I been a skulking googoo, you’d have been dead three times over.”
Command suits him, thinks Niles—he seems to have been born to be a leader of men. The Colorado Volunteers are a ragtag outfit, true, with a criminal element personified by Hod Brackenridge and his redskin cohort, but such a group demands a finer, firmer class of officer to be effective. When this Philippine fracas has petered out he will look in on the political situation in Wilmington, and, if it is still impossible, offer his services to the Regular Army. Colonel Manigault, at least.
Niles strides past the discomfited sentry and climbs up on the earthwork wall that faces the enemy—no, they are not yet that, officially—the Filipino lines. Conversation, in their atrocious ning-nong dialect, drifts across the no-man’s-land with the sound of a guitar being strummed. If, when, the reckoning comes, they shall not prove an estimable foe.
There is a man standing on the opposite earthworks.
He is wearing boots and a short-peaked cap, sporting a pistol on his hip. He sees Niles and mimes pulling the sidearm, pointing it at him and pulling the trigger. It is too dark, the distance between them too great, to see if he is smiling or not.
Niles lifts his hat and gives the nigger a stiff bow.
Soon enough for you, my friend.
IMPROMPTU
The keys have changed their pattern. Jessie stares at them, trying to remember, trying to let the music in. She feels like her body is sinking, heavy, into the floor as her head floats dizzily above it. The Conservatory is in Virginia, not far from Hampton where Junior went to school, and if she can be the first colored girl accepted there, living away from her parents—
“Jessie?” calls Miss Loretta, the voice, echoing in the near-empty hall, a shock.
“Yes, M’am,” she says. The white man’s eyes challenged her when he said hello, his steady gaze asking Just what do you think you’re doing here?, and at the moment she has no answer for him. Usually she has only to lay her fingers on the keys, all in their proper pattern, and the music is there.