A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  Nicanor from Cavite squats behind the pegged gamecock. “My Butcher will cut him up,” he states calmly. “Anybody who doesn’t think so can show me their money, ba?”

  Locsin, the chino from Botolan, is serving as the sentensyador, mentally recording bets shouted out by the soldiers crammed down in the pit or kneeling just above it. Kalaw’s bird, hackles up, whips its snakelike neck forward, beak snapping just short of Nicanor’s stocky half-breed. Nicanor pulls the cock back into his lap and his second, Corporal Pelaez, straps the razor-edged gaffs, still in their leather sheaths, onto its feet. Joselito is waving a cookpot from the mess at them.

  “This is where your kawawa Butcher is going,” he taunts, “after we tenderize him a little!”

  Diosdado pulls himself away from the fight and walks along the outposts, fully exposed to the other side. Providing an easy target and pretending not to care is part of being an officer. They had started a full hundred yards back from the river, like the Americans on the other side, but after San Miguel took over Third Zone both parties began to creep up, and now each is dug in at the foot of the bridge itself, more convenient for shouting drunken insults at each other. Diosdado has been pulled in to translate, standing with San Miguel at the center of the bridge to parley with the American officers, a volunteer general from the mountains of Colorado and a Colonel Stotsenberg.

  “Encroachments,” the volunteer general stated in the direct, seemingly affectless American way, “will not be tolerated.”

  Diosdado pauses to kick one of the boys who has fallen asleep face-down on his rifle.

  “Wa—?”

  “This isn’t a dream, soldier. What if the Americans decide to attack right now?”

  The soldier looks over the lazy San Juan, the bridge paralleled by the water pipeline from El Depósito, as if the possibility has never occurred to him. Diosdado can smell that the soldier has already celebrated the Constitution.

  “Then they will be very stupid.”

  It is probably good, this confidence, this cockiness. Spirited. When Luna suggested digging trenches, one of the Caviteño generals retorted, in Spanish, that “true men fight with open breast.” Only Sargento Bayani seems to doubt that the Americans, most of them volunteers and soft from inactivity, will be no match if it comes to open hostilities.

  “And what if General Luna were to appear and find you sleeping at your post?”

  The private sobers visibly. “You speak the truth, Teniente. I will try to stay awake.”

  Luna is the boogeyman, the aswang who all the officers use to frighten the troops when they don’t want to risk their own popularity. Luna has already sentenced two poor Manila boys to be executed for sneaking home while on sentry duty, has screamed at and slapped men of every rank below colonel. He is regarded as an Ilocano phantom, likely to materialize in three different places at once, implacable in his mania for discipline, fingers eagerly caressing his pearl-handled pistol. He is known as El Furioso, El Martillo de Dios, El Loco—

  “Did you know,” the men whisper to each other as Luna struts past them, eyes searching for the next junior officer to be humiliated, “that his brother, the painter, murdered his own wife and mother-in-law? And got away with it?” The whole family are locos, go the stories, locos Ilocanos, and all you can do is hope that when he explodes you are somewhere else.

  But Luna is the one who knew they should have taken Manila before the yanquis strolled in, no matter what the cost in lives.

  Sargento Bayani sits on the slope of the riverbank at the end of the outposts, smoking, smiling his private smile. Diosdado stops by him to gaze across the water.

  “You’re not interested in the sabong?”

  Bayani shrugs. “I’ll have some stew tomorrow.” He jerks his head toward the American lines. “They had a busy day.”

  Diosdado watched it all through his binoculars, reporting constantly on their progress till Capitán Grey y Formentos told him to leave him alone and put it in writing. Artillery positions dug and leveled and sandbagged, the pieces rolled into place, painstakingly sighted on the San Juan del Monte hill. If it starts in earnest it will be there—the Americans will try to capture the old Spanish blockhouses and push on to take El Depósito where Bonifacio’s uprising floundered not so many years ago. The powder magazine and the waterworks will be their objectives, and to take them they must pass straight over Diosdado’s celebrating patriots. It has been a week of incidents, escalating each day, insults called back and forth, rumors of American sentries taking liberties with Filipino women passing through their lines, stories of the Spanish garrison back in the Walled City acting more like conquerors on leave than prisoners, stray bullets winging in one direction or the other with greater frequency each night. But orders, from Aguinaldo himself, are to avoid engagement, to accommodate their “allies” wherever possible. To wait.

  “The Americans are going to vote,” Diosdado tells the sargento. “Back in their own congress. About what to do with us.”

  “What to do with us,” Bayani repeats. He addresses Diosdado in Zambal, as always now, as if it is their private language. Diosdado has not garnered the nerve to order the sargento to speak Tagalog like the others.

  “The bird that loses, the talunan,” says Bayani, “goes to the owner of the one that wins.”

  “We’re not the losers—the Spanish are.”

  “Is that right?” Bayani stares across the bridge, shakes his head. It is too dark to see any movement but there is a harmonica playing, laughter every now and then, shouted challenges and passwords from the river’s edge.

  “The generals know more than we do.”

  Diosdado hopes it is true as he says it. There has already been too much dissent above him, the Caviteños resenting Luna, the veterans of ’96 discounting the newcomers, each general a warlord threatening to pick up with his regional clan and march home if he isn’t deferred to, flattered, given his proper share of glory. And this only in Luzon. Hard to imagine controlling what develops in Negros, Cebu, Samar, controlling the crazy moros on the southern islands.

  “Of course,” says Bayani. “The ilustrados always know what is best for us.”

  He says the word in Spanish, with the slightest touch of contempt.

  “It’s what I heard up in Malolos,” shrugs Diosdado, angry to be made to feel guilty about his education. “The American congress is meeting. Important men are said to support our cause.”

  Bayani cocks his head and studies Diosdado’s face, making him feel as if he is being judged for something long past repair. “If you were a yanqui,” asks the sargento finally, “and you wanted your government to vote to take our country away from us—what would you want to happen here?”

  Diosdado looks down along the outposts, looks to the men lit by the glow from the torches in the cockpit behind them. Most of the sentries have their backs to the river, talking softly with each other or calling to see how the cockfights are progressing.

  “The Americans are not the Spanish,” he answers, hedging. “They don’t have the priests whispering in their ears—”

  “I’d want a fight. I’d want some dead American boys to throw at the feet of these voters, these ones who will decide what to do with us.”

  He is a simple tao, a peasant, Bayani, in manner of speech and appearance, but there is an understanding, a cunning—

  “Yesterday the Americans fired every Filipino working behind the lines for them,” says the sargento, spitting into the darkness. “Today they point their cannons at us.”

  There is a burst of laughter from the cockpit, then shouting and the squawking of birds. “If they attack tonight,” says Diosdado, indicating the sargento’s lit cigarette, “the first one they’ll shoot is the tanga sitting in front of his breastworks smoking.”

  Bayani leans back on his elbows, relaxed. “Unless they hit the teniente standing up next to him in a white uniform.”

  The uniform is impossible, a chore to keep clean at the front. Once a week he gives i
t to a girl who smuggles it past the yanquis into the Intramuros and brings it back the next morning, clean, starched, and smelling of woodsmoke.

  “Maybe the vote will go our way.” Diosdado starts back down the line. The men should at least be facing in the right direction.

  “You know, in the sabong, if you hold the birds back from each other too long,” Sargento Bayani calls after him, “they will burst and die.”

  In the daytime it seems very little like there will be a war. The land on this side belongs to the Tuason family, the rice mostly harvested, a handful of their kasamas wandering over from Santol to compete with the flocks of maya birds, gleaning what has been dropped in the fields. The Englishman McLeod has a house on the hill above them, as do a couple of the Tuasons, and the carabao, untethered, pass their days dozing in the shade of the cane thickets and lumbering down to wallow at the edge of the San Juan.

  “An orderly transition,” Diosdado says in his lectures to the men about not drinking on duty and taking more care with their firearms. “We can only hope these people will be as civil as the Spaniard when they decide to leave.”

  In the pit, Kalaw and Nicanor hold their cocks head to head, the birds pecking furiously at each other, neck plumage bristling—

  “A ra sartada!” cries the chino and the men let the cocks go and step back quickly, the birds smacking together in a flurry and shooting upward, squawking and clawing, feathers flying, the razor spurs unsheathed.

  “Vaya, Destino!” call the men who have bet on Kalaw’s bird. “Cut him to pieces!”

  “Get on him, Butcher!” call the others. “Don’t let him go!”

  They are both well-bred, Diosdado notes, standing with his back to the pit but looking over his shoulder. Small heads, long thighs, necks like steel cable, one rusty and barrel-chested, the other sleek, gray with black stippling and now flecks of his own and the other bird’s blood.

  “Take his eyes out!” cries Kalaw, crouching with his hands balled into fists, doing a little dance as he shadows the movements of the fight. “What’s wrong with you?”

  The fowl leap and flap and peck and claw, chests heaving, blood spattering, their tiny eyes red and implacable in the torchlight, till both stagger back, exhausted.

  “Break!” calls Locsin, and the men gather up their champions, Kalaw spitting water into his wounded bird’s face and cooing endearments, Nicanor taking Butcher’s comb into his mouth and sucking the fighting blood back into it as Private Ontoy hovers over both with his needle and thread in hand, ready to sew off a torn artery if needed.

  “Ristos!” calls Locsin, who receives a good deal of teasing because he can’t pronounce his l’s, and the men again push their gamecocks’ faces together.

  “Rucha!”

  The renewed struggle is easier to follow than the opening brawl, both birds clamping on with their beaks and trying to pull the other down, Destino dragging a broken wing, Butcher blinded on one side, yanking at each other desperately and then resting as if by agreement, their tiny hearts visibly hammering in their bodies, feathers slick with blood and gaffed claws digging for purchase in the trench dirt. Diosdado hears fireworks coming from the east, his first thought that at least his men are not the ones out of control with their celebrating, and then a private whose name he has never learned falls into the pit, shot through the eye.

  “They’re coming!” shouts Bayani from the river. “The americanos are coming!”

  The fireworks are on top of them now, the air filled with angry wasps and the men scatter, most leaping down into the pit, some going for their weapons and the rest just going.

  “To the front!” calls Diosdado, standing tall and feeling sick about it. “Everybody to the front! Cover the bridge!”

  The birds, excited by the noise and the movement, break apart and begin to swipe at each other again and two more that were pegged waiting for the next fight are kicked loose in the scramble and go for each other and Diosdado finds himself stepping forward to the nearest outpost and pointing at the foot of the bridge as if his men don’t know by the muzzle flashes where the attack is coming from.

  “There!” he shouts, over the whine of bullets and the hysterical squawking of gamecocks. “Concentrate your fire over there!”

  There is no cover, he thinks, a tiny redoubt next to the bridge on the American side but then the exposed, low-railed bridge itself and the open water—they must be insane. They will be slaughtered, even at night. He turns to shout an order to Sargento Ramos, but for some reason Ramos is down on his hands and knees, crawling—

  Most of the officers have gone to what is advertised as “Warren’s Combined Shows,” but Niles has never cared for the circus. He sits in his white drill playing bid whist, no jokers, with two Nebraska lieutenants and a major from the Signal Corps. There is money on the table, gold and silver coins and paper bills, and he and his partner, the wire-stringer, are only a trick away from taking the pot. He’s pulled all the trumps from the Nebraskas, and his partner, eyebrows wig-wagging a code they set beforehand, has made clear what he’s still holding.

  “I had my doubts about this game,” says Niles, pretending to consider his cards only to prolong the losers’ agony a few delicious moments more, “but I’m beginning to see its merits.”

  Niles can recite the order of every card played in last week’s poker game, has memorized the nicks and flyspecks on the backside of the worn deck they are using, has caught two reneges already this evening, Lieutenant Coombs too distracted by the lizards on the rectory walls to follow suit.

  “They still haven’t moved,” he keeps saying. “But if they were dead they’d fall off the wall, wouldn’t they?”

  Niles has suggested that the friars glued them in place for some manner of reptilian penance, but the Nebraskan remains fascinated, much to his partner’s dismay.

  “Coombs here is as much help in a card game as our little brown brethren were in taking the city,” says Lieutenant Spottiswood. “With friends like these—”

  Niles slips the jack from his hand, raises it high—

  It is something like the effect of rain on a metal roof. A few hard drops, scattered and tentative, then thickening, the thin pop of Mausers and louder bang of Springfields and then a hammering onslaught of gunfire, really pouring now, all coming from the defensive positions to the north.

  “That sounds like us,” says Coombs, laying his hand down with a frown and rising from his chair. The lizards skitter out of sight.

  Spottiswood, much relieved, begins to sweep money into separate piles, as if he can recall who wagered what. “Afraid we’ll have to call it a night. That is most definitely us. Trouble with our amigos across the river.”

  Jeff Smith once held a pistol on a steamship captain, forcing him to play out his hand despite the news that his vessel was sinking off the Juneau Pier. Niles can only scowl at the Nebraskans’ abandoned cards. “If you don’t have the queen of spades in there,” he says, “those niggers are going to pay.”

  It is coming out of Hod, hot and liquid and seemingly with no end as he squats alongside the convent and listens to the bullets chip the stone away. All hell has broken loose and there are signal rockets streaking across the sky and I got the trots again, fuck these fucking islands and please let me die with my pants pulled up. The googoos must be shooting high, well over the heads of the boys on the front, for their bullets to be landing this far back and now here’s Lieutenant Tarheel, chuckling, stepping around and over the men who have grabbed their rifles and laid down on their bellies to wait for orders.

  “Word is we’ve got them coming in all through our lines, gentlemen,” he says, pointing to the north with his cane. “It looks like the dance has begun.”

  Hod gets himself buttoned up and joins the others, shaky legged, as they are mustered on Calle Alix, Companies F, G, and E marched quickstep in Indian file out past the dark cemetery to dig in just south of the Balic-Balic road, looking across at the googoos that must be holed up in Blockhouse 6. I
t is all bamboo thickets and just-harvested rice fields around the road, Hod peering into the dark every few yards of the march for a good spot to flop if they run into an ambush. By the time they are in position the firing has thinned out, the blockhouse a black shape against a blacker sky ahead. Hod manages to crawl over an irrigation dike and pull his pants down around his ankles again. He is only just started when Sergeant LaDuke slides down next to him.

  “You too,” he says, unbuckling his belt.

  “It aint nerves, Sergeant,” says Hod, wishing he could be left alone by the Army for one solid minute, if only to relieve himself in peace. “This country’s got my bowels in a twist.”

  “Artillery will start in on that at sunup,” says the sergeant, eyes bright with excitement, jerking his head back toward the enemy blockhouse as he squats to deliver. “And then the shit is gonna fly.”

  The moon is just peeking over the horizon when the Chinese come with coffee, a huge tureen of it suspended on poles they carry across their shoulders, running and squatting, rising and running again with their quick bow-legged shuffle that always makes Corporal Grissom laugh so hard he almost chokes. It is quiet over by the big bridge and only a random potshot from the blockhouse now, but the Chinamen are trembling like gun-shy puppies by the time they arrive.

  “No toast and jam?” says Neely. “That tears it—Sergeant, I want to go home.”

  “Sugar and cream?”

  “Hey, it’s still hot. Attago, Chop Suey.”

  All the Chinamen are Chop Suey or Chow Mein or Foo Young or You Yellow Pigtail Bastard and they give Hod the willies. Windy Bill Bosworth who he double-jacked with in Montana worked with them in California and said they were demons in a hole, do-anything rockbusters who the white miners eventually ran out so they wouldn’t have to compete. These two just stay close to the ground and watch the tureen, wishing for it to be empty so they can hurry it away from the front.