by John Sayles
They call at him from their shops and stalls, “You buy! You buy! Yankee soja you buy!” but none are selling anything he is hankering for. There is even one Chinese, wearing smoked glasses, who follows him grinning down the street riffling a paw full of playing cards and hissing his come-on and Coop has to laugh out loud, the idea you would play a man at his own game with his own deck in his own lingo and expect to leave with your pants on. There must be some greenhorns that fall for it, drunk or stupid or both, but Coop isn’t one of them.
“Yankee soja no tonto,” he says finally to be rid of the little sharper, turning and waving a finger at him. “You go way yankee soja.”
But the hands that were played—
—Big Horace used to recite from his cell after lights-out in Greenville—
By that heathen Chinee
And the points that he made
Were quite frightful to see—
Where a geechie no-count like Horace ever run into Chinese was a question, but all he ever answer was with another verse from one of his stories.
The cowboy slept on the barroom floor—
—went everybody’s favorite—
—having drunk so much he could drink no more
The gambler fades and then there is a pair lugging a pig on a pole, tied by its trotters hanging upside-down squirming and squealing just like Coop’s guts and he has to bend over for a moment, head held low and hands on knees, while his stomach does some tricks. Like a tug of war going on down there. He’s had the quickstep for a couple weeks now like a lot of the boys, but now there is blood in it and there is only one cure he knows for that.
A half-dozen pigtails hustle past, each loaded down with something Coop doesn’t want to think about lifting. Just what they want back home, he thinks, niggers who don’t know how to stretch a job out. Way they hop around and jabber so fast it’s no wonder they got to burn some poppy at the end of the day, just to catch a breath.
He is able to straighten and take a few steps and right ahead there is a pair of provost guards in their white uniforms staring at him, so he flashes a big melon-eater and steps up to where they can hear and salutes, though they are both only privates.
“You gentlemens know where Division Hospital at?”
They give him directions, very polite and proper, and he heads away in that direction till he can cut out of their sight. Always somebody to throw a shadow on you, no matter where you are, and he wishes he had took his chance and run off when he got the notion in San Francisco. Not like they got his proper name or got time to go chase one darky trooper while they got so many dog-eaters to kill and such a big passel of islands to take over. Morning roll-call before they climb up that gangplank—“Where’s Coop?”
“Aint seen him, Sarge.”
“We better off without that trash. Let’s march.”
Only he let the chance slip by and here he is surrounded by amigos that want to slit his throat open and pigtails after his pay and a stomach knotted up like a mule-hitch and hot, Lord, even Shreveport in the dead dog of summer got nothing on this mess.
There is a pair of pigtails shuffling after him and waving, one of them lugging a stool, and hell, poorly as he feel right now he might as well sit down. He settles on the stool and the younger one outs with a pair of scissors.
“Takee hat off.”
Coop laughs and loses his topper. “Brother, you aint never cut this kind of wool.”
The pigtail frowns and grunts and walks in a circle around him, studying the problem, while the other squats on the dirt street and lays out a little wooden case full of all kinds of truck that looks like a doctor’s tools only made from bamboo.
“What’s all that?”
The barber grabs an earlobe and wiggles it.
“Takee out dirt.”
“From my ears?”
“You hear everything better, ha?”
Mostly what there is is people giving him orders and blowing the damn bugle and he hears that just fine, but there was that boy from Company L had a bug crawl up in his ear and get stuck there and he near went crazy with it.
“Guess it can’t hurt,” says Coop, giving the ear-cleaner a hard look. “But you better be damn careful about it.”
The crowd on the street keeps flowing past them up and down, paying no mind, while the barber snips away at the edge of his hair with the very tip of the scissors, cautious, and the other one slips a long, bendy strip of bamboo into Coop’s left ear and begins to slowly dig and wiggle. Coop tries not to laugh thinking of what the boys would say if they seen him here. His mama always told him to clean his ears but he never did and then she’d catch him and scour them so hard with a lye-soaked rag they’d burn for days.
The cleaner goes in with a set of pinchers and plucks something out—a dirty chunk of wax near as big as a shelled peanut—and Coop wonders if it really come from him or if the pigtail just palmed it from his kit to have something to show for his pay, some heathen Chinee trick the two of them will laugh about when he’s gone.
At least it’s not a bug.
The cleaner goes in again with a long stick with a little scoop on the end then, scraping out the smaller bits, while the barber gives up his snipping away a hair at a time and lathers the back of Coop’s neck to shave beneath his kitchen. Coop gives a listen to see if he can hear any clearer. Somebody is playing a guitar not too far away, got to be a colored man from the sound of it, only when the ear-cleaner pulls the scraper out and he can turn his head to look there is only a little amigo, barefoot and in rags, with a guitar nearly half his size hung over him. Coop watches the boy’s fingers, one with a piece of curved sea-shell around it that he uses to slide up and down the strings on the neck while he picks with the other hand. The music is too familiar to be Filipino.
Coop’s stomach suddenly tries to climb out of his body through his asshole. He grabs his sides and holds himself together till it passes and then takes the barber by the wrist.
“I needs smokee,” he says and mimes a long draw, sucking air in and closing his eyes.
The barber looks to the ear-cleaner, who holds out his hand and wiggles the fingers like a bug crawling and says something in Chinese.
“Plenty smokee, Olmigo Street,” says the barber.
“Olmigo—”
“Hormiga, Señor,” says the little amigo, who has come over with his hand out. He makes the bug wiggle too. “Es muy cercano.”
Coop digs out a handful of centavos and the pigtails take some and he flips a couple to the boy and says Take me to Hormiga Street.
The boy smiles from ear to ear and takes off up Analoague where the carpenters are out working on chairs and tables with the little dogeater calling proudly to the other boys selling candy or shining shoes or hawking the lotería which is supposed to have been shut down, showing off the americano he’s hooked, the guitar making a little hollow sound as it bumps against his body and damn if that ear business didn’t work, the whole racket of the streets like it’s right inside his skull now, like it or not.
Hormiga Street cuts off to the right, short and narrow and leading to the bustle of Rosario, with its street hawkers and tailor shops and painted portraits of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Admiral Dewey. Coop flips the little amigo another coin and does his viper again.
“Fumar,” he says. “Dónde?”
The boy giggles and points out a shop with scrawny plucked ducks hanging by their necks on either side of the door. “Al bajo,” he says and runs off with the big guitar slapping against his backside. Coop steps in between the ducks.
A pigtail with pox scars and a moustache nods to him from behind a counter where he is chopping apart a small pig, then waves a bloody hand toward a beaded curtain that leads to the back. Coop can smell the bitter smoke already.
The place behind the laundry in San Francisco was tiny compared to this, just a few bunks in a storeroom. This joint could hold a dozen fiends, with narrow shelves built into the wall, woven mats and pillows in red silk c
overs on them, every nook with a spirit lamp and pipe layout ready to go. A silver-haired man in the loose blue suit they wear seems to be in charge, while the chef sits carefully scraping ashes from the bowl of a pipe into a small lacquered box. There are four or five already here on the hip, glassy-eyed, mostly Chinese with one well-dressed white-looking man who might be Spanish.
“You lie down,” smiles the silver-haired man, “you feel better chop-chop.”
“How much for a pipe?”
“Fittee centavo.”
Coop has a couple American, a couple Mexican in his pocket but knows you have to jawbone them a bit.
“Twenty centavos a pipe.”
The man smiles. “Twenty centavo, fuck you.”
Coop laughs. “All right, six pipes for an eagle.”
The man holds out his pudgy hand and Coop lays a gold dollar in it. If he was a white boy he could say he was military police and threaten the price down some, but even the pigtails know there’s not any colored provost. Coop pulls his boots off and climbs onto one of the shelves, lying on his side and resting his head on the pillow. The chef sits on a stool by him, working an iron wire into a little pot of the sticky stuff till there is a gob big as a blackberry on the end of it, which he holds over the open flame of the lamp by Coop’s side, turning it this way and that till it starts to blister and crack with the heat. He used to watch his mama make johnnycakes with the same attention, his mouth watering and hoping his other brothers wouldn’t smell and come in to eat them all. The chef takes the bubbling ball of dope and pokes it into the center of the clay bowl on top of the end of his pipe, then moves away to deal with one of the other guests.
Coop takes a long draw, pulling it in through the pipe and into his lungs and then slowly letting the bluish smoke escape through his nose. Got to give it time to soak in.
He has to reheat the ball after every draw, tilting the bowl toward the open flame and then sucking the bitter heat into himself, but the knots in his belly begin to unravel and at the end of four long pulls the ball of dope is nothing but ash and he can’t feel any of it.
The chef cooks another up for him. The first time he got the quickstep was in the Memphis lock-up, from the food, and when he and Tillis got out they broke into a pharmacy but could only find some bottles of paregoric which they drank down even with the awful camphor smell and then some of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup which made Tillis, who didn’t even have the dysentery, chuck the whole mess up.
You are supposed to have these crazy dreams but really for Coop it’s just peaceful, nobody blowing bugles at you and now with his ears unstopped all the little sounds, the crackling of the dope ball in the flame and the in and out of the others as they breathe their smoke down and the scratch, scratch as the chef scrapes the ash from the bowls to save in his lacquer box and Coop’s own heart, beating long and easy now like waves on a broad beach and more pipes come, hard to keep count, and the thought floats through his head that the heathen Chinee are maybe shorting him but then the thought goes curling up to the yellow-stained ceiling and who cares when you are so high above them all? Floating, with them all below, white and black and Spanish and Cuban and amigo and pigtail looking up as he floats over like the observation balloon that morning at El Caney, above it all, but no, no, they shot that down and all of them are shooting at him now, pointing and shooting but he is too fast for the bullets that rise up slow like bubbles from the muck in Silas Tugwell’s bog where they used to swim, why are they even bothering to shoot when he is so high, a hawk soaring, Cooperhawk that he took his name from, Cooperhawk that catch all the other birds in its claw and take them away, that fly so fast even through the thick woods and somehow don’t ever hit a branch and how can bullets hope to reach him? But then the ants start coming out, out of his ears, going in the right direction at least but so many of them, tickling his neck where it was just shaved but there’s a reason they are leaving, it’s to make room for the music, the notes from the little amigo sliding back to him, so familiar, so like the music he heard the Mississippi boys playing on the rail gang down south, a new kind of music but familiar, simple on top but bubbling and twisted underneath, who knows what be hiding in that muck at the bottom, can’t see the end of it from the surface and it wants words, the music, words to make it a story—
Ashes from the smokestack
—he thinks, and can hear someone, maybe himself, singing along—
Cloudin up my brain
Can’t believe my woman
Leavin on that train
Blow your whistle, captain
All my dreams in vain
—and then he dives, Cooperhawk, into the black water.
When he wakes his mouth is full of ashes and he is looking into the bottomless black holes in the eyes of the old man on the shelf across from him. The old man is the color of what they pulled out of Coop’s ears, with long twigs for arms and legs, body withered like a persimmon been left on the ground so long even the bugs don’t want it and with a look on his face that is no more solid, no more really here, than smoke.
“You and me, brother,” Coop says softly to the old Chinese man. “We been there, aint we?”
The old man stares toward him but not really at him, his eyes all black pupil, his mouth only inches from the pipe gripped feebly in his bony hand. Coop smiles at him. Coop loves him.
“Only difference is,” he says, “you aint comin back.”
OUR MAN IN PAMPANGA
It is not, at this juncture, the sort of conflict the Correspondent cares to report on. The indigenous forces remain maddeningly elusive, assembling in number as if to make a counterattack, then melting away so rapidly that the engagement is barely worth giving a name to. Diligent as his fellows in the ink trade have been to inflate the skirmishes at San this or Santa that into something newsworthy, the countryside north and south of the capital remains infested with communities never to be immortalized in military history. And then the deuced luck of his diminutive, hastily purchased mare perishing beneath him on the way to the Zapote Bridge. Even Creelman of the Journal, recovered from his blooding at El Caney and screwed to Colonel Funston’s hip all these months, was there for the festivities, the signalmen obliging him by steadily unrolling their spools of wire behind the heat-addled column so he might telegraph his despatch immediately upon the taking of Bacoor. And Creelman is not the most insufferable of the lot. The Correspondent had hopes that with Crane hors de combat and Dick Davis chasing the Boers there would be a clearer field in this pestilent backwater in which to distinguish oneself, but his competitors, toiling for periodicals of greater circulation than his own, are free to spend money like fresh air to corrupt the cablemen and thus beat him onto the wire even when his report is on their desks hours earlier.
Not that they refuse what little gratuity he offers them.
Manila, though the climate is beastly in the dry season and unspeakable in the wet, is all right in a Spanish-gone-tropical sort of way, offering livelier diversions than the worthy Davis can be enjoying in Ladysmith or Pretoria. The local seegars are cheap, plentiful, and surprisingly smokable, while the chief industry seems to be making a racket and selling rides in their unstable two-wheeled outfits (the Spaniards having taxed vehicles per axle) from one side of the pitiful excuse for a river to the other. The horse races are colorful and pleasant, the wealthier caste of Filipinos no less sporting than their Celestial cousins, and there is no end to religious pageantry despite their purported disaffection with the Roman Church and its representatives. But the inequality of the two protagonists has left this conflict nearly devoid of heroic feats and consequently uninspiring, if not undeserving of heroic prose.
Not that an adept such as the Correspondent cannot cobble something together.
Serving as he is for a northern publication hungry for “American color,” the Tarheel Lieutenant has been a find. Gifted with the charming accent and fecund locutions of his section, Manigault also boasts an ancestry steeped in military tradi
tion and dedicated to the Great Lost Cause, having no compunctions, as the rare Southerner displaced in Colorado’s volunteer contribution to the effort, to find fault with superiors both immediate and of greater stripe.
“General Otis would be better employed anchoring a deck chair on the verandah of an establishment catering to the elderly,” remarks the Lieutenant as they clickety-clack north past the earthquake-baroque church and much celebrated ruins of Caloocan, “than put in charge of a body of fighting men. My old Granny, rest her soul, was of a more decisive nature than he. When one encounters an inferior and hysteria-prone foe such as our present antagonist, one does not retreat, one does not pause, one does not rest until he is vanquished. They are the hare and we the hound, but we have been kept on a damnably short leash.”
“You believe that if MacArthur—”
“If either General MacArthur or General Lawton were given free reign, Mr. Nig would have received his much-deserved thrashing, contritely cast away his arms, and we’d all be home by now, amazing our loved ones with the ease of it all.”
“There would no doubt be holdouts—”
“Driven to the farthest and most forsaken outposts of these isles to live as mere banditti, as was done to the worthy Geronimo and his cutthroat band. But in lieu of that, we, and I use the term in the national sense of course, shall remain here, exposed to the diseases rampant in these latitudes, for at least another year. Not to mention the followers of Mohamet—”
“In the southern islands—”
“They have a custom in which their men who are hopelessly mired in debt appear before a wily imam, shaving their eyebrows and swearing an oath to the Mighty One that they will proceed to murder as many Christians as possible until they are themselves destroyed. These juramentados, these pledged assassins, then go about their bloody work assured that not only will all that they owe be forgotten but that upon their ending they will sit at the right hand of the Prophet, with a gaggle of black-eyed houris to attend them. How do you fight people for whom death is an improvement on their condition?”