by John Sayles
Shoot him in the belly, thinks Hod, wiping sweat from his eyes, and leave him in a ditch.
The suspect makes more strangling noises and tries to jerk himself out from under them and the barrage continues to the south, whump! whump! whump! and when the can is empty Sergeant LaDuke drops with both knees on the googoo’s belly and what comes up smells like bile. There is a series of words between Vásquez and the Macabebe and the half-dead suspect, with Manigault pacing back and forth, back and forth.
“Let’s hear it.”
Vásquez turns to him. “He will admit to anything you wish.”
“Very prudent of him.”
“But you must first say what it is. He confesses that he can no longer reason.”
“I don’t understand.”
The Spaniard speaks slowly, softly, as if to a small and not very clever child. “If you wish there to be an ambuscade waiting at the Zapote Bridge, he will confess to it and we may return with this information.”
“So they are waiting—”
“And if you accuse him of being a general of the insurrectos, he will not deny it.”
Again it takes a long moment for the meaning to penetrate the Lieu-tenant’s overheated skull.
“You’re saying the man is lying.”
“I am saying nothing,” Vásquez replies. “I am merely translating his words, as passed on by this indio, to the best of my ability.”
And I am merely sitting on some unlucky fuck’s arm, thinks Hod, while my comrades in arms, the kind of people who tried to smash my head in with clubs back in Montana, torture him to death for no fucking purpose.
“We’re wasting time on this amigo,” says the Lieutenant, kicking the suspect hard in the ribs and eliciting another heave of blood-tinted water from him. “Everybody up!”
The moaning is general as the rest of the platoon drag themselves to their feet, faces stupid with the heat, the suspect’s torture being the only rest they’ve had all day. Big Ten crawls to his Krag and climbs up it to his knees, then stands, wobbly and soaked through with his own sweat. He wears the straw hat shaped like a pith helmet that many of the volunteers have adopted, their campaign hats worn out, and has lost a good deal of his bulk to the shits.
“We get to this bridge,” he says, “there damn well better be a river underneath it.”
As Hod reaches for his own weapon the Lieutenant appears in his face. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says, loud enough for the others to hear. “If I catch you skulking behind me, I’ll have you shot.”
The lead dog can never relax. He can never, once they’re all out of the traces, let the others slink behind him. Niles has seen it more than once here in the Yukon, the other curs waiting, watching, hatred building with every shock of leather cracking on their hides, with every deep, freezing snow they have to struggle through or die, with every scrap of fish jerky the lead dog chases them off of, till the moment the scales tip—the lead dog coming up lame or finally too old or too weakened from the trek or just not savage enough to dominate the three or four who jump him and get him on his back and eviscerate him before fighting among themselves to be the new leader. Men with guns are ever more devious, the courage to pull a trigger available to the weakest if you pour a half bottle of whiskey down his craw or place a subversive thought in his hate-crazed mind. It is such men, drunkards, cowards, who cut Soapy down in Skaguay, Don’t go, don’t go I said and Doc and Rev Bowers and Old Man Triplett all said Don’t go but him hot-eyed with pride saying that nobody, nobody tells Jeff Smith where he may go and what he may do in this or any other town, marching to the pier with his Winchester in hand, ready to discipline the pack as he’s done so many times before, keep them in line, all of us from the Parlor following to the base of the pier saying Wait, Jeff, at least wait till sunup when they have to look you in the eye but Jeff striding, striding tall and proud as he’d been on his mount in the 4th parade till out steps Frank Reid who thinks because you’ve drawn a map of a town you ought to own it and knowing he has Si Tanner and a dozen other guns ready behind him grabs the barrel of the Winchester and tugs it down and draws his Colt on Jeff. “For God’s sake don’t shoot!” cries Jeff, knowing a standoff when he sees one and they fire into each other so close each can smell the whiskey on the other’s breath and then the rest of the dogs pile on and Jeff Smith, who’d be Emperor of Manila by now, Army command or no, is on his back and the rest of us are running out of Skaguay like greenhorns before an avalanche.
The Macabebe catches up with Niles, walking silent and fast, not even a footcrunch on the snow, not even nodding as he passes to join the platoon ahead, and one assumes he has dealt with the suspect in the appropriate manner. The lead dog should barely have to growl. They are skirting wide around Las Piñas, no reason to give the boys on the Monadnock a chance to misfire and tear them apart, smoke rising from where he expects the native village to be, and he half hopes there will be an ambush ahead to dispose of the worst of this band of assassins he has been placed in charge of.
It is cold, killer cold, a cold that makes the thoughts freeze and snap off before you can form them in your mind, and the only remedy is to keep moving, keep pacing, keep the blood flowing in your extremities while the dullards all around you flop in the snow and let the cold creep into their bodies.
They have stopped ahead, crouching in a drift. Niles draws the Webley from its holster, cold metal stinging his hand. Bare the teeth and raise the hackles, he thinks as he steps forward, and don’t let them out of your sight.
Hod is on a knee next to Vásquez as the Lieutenant comes up, crouched low, the pistol out and ready. Please let there be shooting, he thinks, shooting and running and confusion like this morning on the heights and bullets winging this way and that and anybody likely to get plugged in the heat of it. The best would be to pick up a Mauser from the googoos once they’re overrun and do it with that, a tidy hole between the peepers that nobody will question, only they leave their dead and wounded sooner than they leave their weapons, two bolomen behind each soldier with a firearm, ready to scoop the rifle up and continue the fight. I want him to be looking at me when I do it, too, so a stray round from behind is out, though there’d be a dozen men in the platoon they’d have to consider as its author. Manigault kneels by the Spaniard.
“Why have we stopped?”
Vásquez points. “The bridge is down there.”
The Lieutenant rises to gaze over the top of the razor-edged grass and sees what they all have seen, googoos in number on both sides of the river at the base of the stone-span bridge, working in spite of the brutal heat to reinforce their breastworks, digging in for a serious smoker.
Manigault kneels again, turns to stare at Hod. “You,” he says. He hasn’t called Hod anything else since his return from the clap shack. “Get up there and take a look.”
They have been spotted by now, the lack of gunfire meaning only that the googoos know they’re just out of range, and this demented cracker wants to waste time just to get him killed.
“I can see well enough from here,” says Hod, not moving.
Niles brings the pistol up into his face. Ever since he got the Webley he has been overly free with it, as if the pistol alone bumped him up a few bars in the pissing order. “Are you refusing an order, Private?”
Big Ten is off to the left and Hod hears the bolt on his Krag first, followed by several others. No telling who will take which side in the disagreement if it comes to blood, but if he goes forward now the googoos will shoot at him and miss high like they always do and then start running and waving their bolos and it is too fucking hot to run, even to save your own hide. So he might as well just settle it here.
“If that’s the way you want to hear it, Lieutenant,” Hod answers him, “sure.”
He can’t tell from Manigault’s eyes if he is too sun-baked to know he will be the second one to die, and damn quick too. They are still pounding the hell out of Las Piñas, the whump! whump! north of them now, and the shell
bursts punctuate the long silence between the men.
“When we return,” says the Lieutenant finally, “you shall be court-martialed.”
“Fair enough.”
Manigault turns to eyeball each man in the platoon. “You all witnessed what has just transpired. Sergeant LaDuke, relieve this man of his weapon.”
LaDuke takes Hod’s old Springfield, then gives it to Corporal Grissom to carry, who lays it off on Neely as they come out from the tall grass and back onto the road, Hod walking ahead with the Macabebe scout, who seems unperturbed as usual.
“Son of a bitch,” gripes Neely behind them. “You done that just so’s you wouldn’t have to lug your damn rifle comin back.”
They have not gone too far when Lieutenant Manigault starts to weave on the road, drifting from this side to the other and muttering to himself.
“I can’t feel my limbs anymore,” he says. “They must be frozen.”
And then crumples to the ground.
There are no oxcarts around to commandeer and for a moment LaDuke stares at the heap of lieutenant like he might just leave it there in the road. Finally he has Tutweiler take Big Ten’s Krag and tells the Indian to help Hod carry. Big Ten hefts Manigault up under the arms and Hod takes his feet and it is awkward and still scorching and no way to wipe the stinging sweat out of their eyes.
When they stagger past the mutilated body of the suspect there are already buzzards, three of them, picking at it without enthusiasm, as if the heat has ruined their appetite.
DEVOLUTION
Cross-hatching won’t do for it. To set off the white of the bone in the nose, the white of the rolling cannibal eyes, the hanging shell beads and stiff fronds of thatch around the waist, you need pure black, midnight black, so much ink that it soaks through the pad to stain the desk beneath. The photos of the little nignogs coming down from the exposition in Buffalo have been useful—who knew they had their own pygmies?—but it has been necessary to blend the googoo with his Ubangi cousins, also well-represented at the Pan, in order to convey the true, primitive horror of what our boys are threatened with on that Godforsaken splatter of Pacific islands.
Amok, they call it, this state of blood-lust, this disregard for your own body’s vulnerability to shot and shell, that hurls the ink-black savage forward with razor-edged bolo in hand to wreak havoc on American boys in their shallow trenches. To run amok. How does one defend against a foe with no care for his own well-being, who sweeps forward though thoroughly drilled with pistol shot, who, like the fanatic Chinese Boxer, believes himself invulnerable in his rush to murder and mutilate? If this be, indeed, the White Man’s burden, to civilize, to Christianize this creature of darkness, we have accepted a task far greater than that of our forefathers who confronted the red-pelted tribes of wood and plain, and face an opponent too base to elevate and too numerous to exterminate.
The bolo is suspended from one sinewy arm, the wooden spear held ready to launch in the other, the kinky locks, a maddened squirrel’s nest of hair, springing in every direction.
Behind this apparition sits the humble Cuban Peasant, brim of his straw hat turned back to reveal an honest if uncomplicated face, building a sand castle with the ripe-breasted, silken-haired Hawaiian Girl, the grass of her skirt fuller, looser than the googoo’s spiky fringe, simple, but elegantly becoming to this daughter of Nature. Uncle sits on a beach chair, sleeves rolled up, arms crossed, balefully staring down at the wretched, threatening Filipino, who comes only to his shins.
AMERICA’S PROBLEM CHILD
—says the caption. Horrible as the Tagalo bandit is, the petulant futility of his resistance must be kept in sight.
And no, cross-hatching will not do for it. The Cartoonist opens the top of his pen, and the ink spills forth.
PEARL OF THE ORIENT
Even the coolies are staring. Sergeant Jacks leads the company along the north side of the Pasig, a hodgepodge flotilla of hemp barges and shallow-draft boats covered with curved, palm-thatched roofs bobbing to the right. Barefoot Chinamen balance on long planks leading from the boats to the cement dock, each pair with a huge basket filled with fish hung from poles over their shoulders, pausing to gape at the smoked yankees of the 25th. Small boys snap their switches against the flanks of water buffalo pulling wood-wheeled carts full of bulging rice sacks, the boys giggling and shouting to each other when they see the soldiers file past the steep-roofed warehouses where Filipino brokers in white suits sit on crates to watch, holding parasols over their heads to block the suddenly brutal sun, even the towering crane arms throwing no shadow at this hour. There are boat horns and steam whistles and tethered goats bleating and the shouting of the boys and the brokers and the coolies, none of it in anything Jacks can recognize as Spanish. The dock is puddled from the downpour just ended, what they call an aguacero in El Paso, and another threatening in the sky behind.
Jacks looks across the wide, placid river to the Walled City and just from what is visible over the parapets he can tell Manila is a bigger deal than Juarez could ever hope to be.
Company E, just ahead of them, cuts left up a street along the side of the customs building. The boys don’t have the usual strut, legs still wobbly from the choppy trip on the launch from the anchorage and their two weeks at sea out of Hawaii on the Valencia, but orders are to march them without pause through what is supposed to be secure territory all the way out to the reservoir at El Depósito.
“Companyyyyy—left!” calls the sergeant and they follow him up the side street. Like most folks, he never heard of the Philippines before Dewey steamed into the Bay. There was some possibility, just before climbing aboard in San Francisco, that it would be China to fight the Boxers, but it looks like they got their share of Celestials here, doing all the nigger work with their long braids hanging down their backs. He wonders if they speak the same brand of Chinee as the ones on St. Louis Street in El Paso.
“Let’s pick us up a couple of these yellow men here, Sarge,” calls Cooper from behind him. “Leave them Army mules behind.”
There seems to be no glass in the windows, just panels with a lattice-work of little pearly squares set in them, oyster shell maybe, ground thin to let the light through. The panels slide back and forth in grooves and are pulled open now for the break in the rain, what he figures must be more Filipinos sticking their heads out to stare at them. So far they seem to come in as many shades as his troopers, only straight-haired and pint-sized. Old women and near-naked children have come out to try to sell something like a tamale wrapped in a leaf, walking alongside and calling to them and Jacks feels like he’s in Mexico again only the heat, thick and liquid still despite the hours of rain dumped this morning, is more like Cuba. Like Santiago just before they left, half the outfit down with fever and feeling like you could drown on dry land. The white folks still call his men all the same things they ever did, good and bad, except for “Immunes.”
They follow E Company to the right now, old women with red teeth setting up shoe-shaped earthen ovens on the ground, feeding sticks to the fires within and arranging kettles filled with anybody’s guess above, and then they pass between a stand of bamboo with leaves like spearheads and a huge, oak-looking tree covered with red blossoms and Sergeant Jacks asks himself for the thousandth time how else a narrow-ass little cane chopper from the Texas border get to see all this?
And maybe when the brushfires here are all stamped out, on to China.
They come to an estuary of the Pasig, more like a canal from how they’ve built along it on both sides, and head toward a little bridge Jacks can see to the north. Good we’re here, he thinks, nothing for the boys to do at Bliss but get into trouble, the Army like a horse that needs to be rode or it gets sullen and ski-footed. He knows they’ve been talking on the ship about Indian-fighting, but this far behind the lines it looks like a fairly peaceable tribe, nothing a steady flow of government beef and some vigilance over the firewater can’t control. There are lizards skittering on the walls of the stone bu
ildings, the little thumb-sized ones Mingo Sanders in B Company always calls “Apache breakfast sausage.” It is puddled up pretty deep here and the boys enjoy splashing through it, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, but slogging all the way out to these waterworks in wet socks isn’t a good start for troops penned up sitting on a ship for a month. Jacks is sweating from everywhere now, blue shirt stuck to his back, but smiling. Beats Missoula in fucking January any day.
He leads the company over the bridge, a pair of local sports in white linen outfits gawping at them from some sort of high-wheeled pony carriage stopped in the middle—that’s right, fellas, there’s people darker than you in this world—and then they jam up behind Company E and the rest in a little plaza.
“What’s the deal, Sarge?” calls Hardaway. “What we waitin for?”
Hardaway has a burning need to be informed, a hopeless business for anyone pursuing a career in the military.
“We are waiting,” Jacks answers, “because we stopped moving ahead.”
“Oh,” says Hardaway, for the moment accepting this as an explanation.
There are shops and stalls all around the plaza and the proprietors, mostly Chinese, come out to stare.
“Where this is?” asks Cooper.
Sergeant Jacks looks at the map they’ve given him. “Binondo,” he says. “Does it matter?”
“We gone billet here?”
“No.”
“Then it don’t matter.”
When you come into a place like this you never know if you’ll be back. Jacks waits for what feels like ten minutes of being steamed, then breaks rank and saunters forward. Take a look, at least.