A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “On the Ark,” Niles sighs, his heart racing, all his senses open, alive to epiphany. “With his father’s wife. Can you imagine such evil, such bestiality? On the Ark.”

  “Stark, raving mad,” mutters the Correspondent.

  They have men waiting down the pathway to shoot if the Americans decide to climb up after them, but nobody above and nobody on the other side of the mountain. Everybody left in camp is asleep but Roy and the man who was shot in the jaw, who has his eyes closed and is crying. Even the other American prisoners sleep now, heads nodded forward and to the side, the rope binding them to the tree digging into their necks. Nilda takes a small sack of the corn and an American canteen that is almost full of water. Her knife is dull from splitting bamboo and it takes a long time to saw through the hemp around his wrists and ankles. They soaked it before tying so the knots can’t be untied. Roy says nothing and watches her face, which makes her cheeks burn. They have left him at the edge of the camp, far away from the fire, and his hands are cold to the touch. He shouldn’t have to die. None of them should have to die, but they are set on their war and haven’t decided to stop fighting yet.

  When he is free, they stay low and walk as silently as possible. There are fireflies dancing all around them, and it feels like magic, like the other men will not wake up as long as the spell continues. In the village there would be dogs but the dogs here in the monte have been eaten. She leads when they start to climb, careful not to pull any rocks loose. She can hear his breath behind her. When they are over the crest and starting down the other side she is less worried. The men won’t bother to come after once they’re out of sight.

  Once, on the far side when it is very steep, he holds her arm to help her down and it is a strange feeling. She has been inside herself, alone, since Fecundo left her for the last time, saying she was his problem, that you couldn’t bring a village girl to Manila and expect to become wealthy.

  Nilda doesn’t know if her parents are still living or not. If they are, seeing her with the dark American will not make them think any worse of her. If she is truly dead to them they will give her what she needs to move on. Nobody wants to live with ghosts.

  VARIETY ARTS

  The way it works is you got to fill in between one picture and the next. The Yellow Kid is feeling about as bum as a newsie can without he’s croaked on the pavement but the yarn on the screen takes him away for as long as it lasts. A girl in a green dress stands in a spotlight next to it, singing along with a violin, one of those weepers about she misses her Dear One who’s across the sea. Not much of a canary but she’s easy on the glimmers.

  It starts out how they always do when it’s a war story, with the soldier boy in his outfit kissing off the old folks and his girl, who is another looker. His old lady don’t stop honking into her snotrag the whole time and his old man who is one of those Mr. Whiskers like they trot out for parades all the time is pounding the soldier on the back and probly saying Go over there, boy, an give em hell. It’s like when you look in through the window displays at one of the swell shops on Broadway and there’s people inside jawing and waving their paws around and you try to suss out what they’re saying. The first picture in the story ends when the soldier marches out the door and the looker throws herself down on the ottoman and hides her head under her arms. These people got such a big room, fit a whole floor of apartments from East 5th Street in it, so you wonder how she’s got anything to kick about.

  The canary gives her pipes a rest and the screen goes dark for a second the way it does and then they’re in the jungle, big tall palm trees all around and the soldier boy with a bunch of his pals blasting away with their rifles at something you can’t see. There is lots of smoke from the rifles and they shoot off some firecrackers in the Hall so the pair of old babes sitting right by the Kid with their big hats on blocking the view cover their ears and make with the Oh my oh dearie me and then the soldier boy tells the others to scarper, that he’ll stay back and cover their keisters. So they run off the screen and drums start pounding at the back of the Hall and on the screen this bunch of darkies run in wearing skirts made of palm leafs and nothing else only a couple got a bone in their nose, waving their spears and swords and the soldier boy uses his last shot to plug one of them dead and then they’re all over the guy, grabbing his rifle and one stabs him with a sword and they got him down on his back and start to do the googoo dance while the biggest darky stands over him with a spear ready to finish him off. The Yellow Kid is sweating and his head feels hot, maybe cause it’s the jungle or he’s worried about the geezer gonna get croaked or cause there’s so many people crowded in the seats here even on a Tuesday or maybe he’s just down with the crud. It don’t even help when this doll wearing not much more than the darkies runs in and throws herself on top of the soldier. She isn’t so dark as the other characters, but you can tell she aint white. Still she’s a doll and for some reason she’s telling the one with the spear to hold his water. The Kid wonders if he missed something or if the other paying customers have read about this deal in one of the rags he peddles. Even if she seen him fighting in the jungle at some point a doll, even a Filipino doll if that’s what she’s sposed to be, wouldn’t tumble for a guy that quick. Dolls take some heating up is what Specs and everybody behind the Journal building says, you got to blow them to a good feed or do the candy-and-flowers routine before you can lay the first digit on em.

  Only this one must be bughouse for the soldier boy, cause even when the big geezer puts the spear to her throat she don’t leave off begging for him to be spared. Then the pit band plays Hot Time in the Old Town and there’s more fireworks and the pals who scrammed come blasting back onto the screen, bagging the big one and chasing the rest away. When their smoke clears somehow there’s the looker from back home kneeling by the wounded soldier boy and the pals have got the drop on the native doll. Only then the wounded guy does a lot of palavering and pointing and finally the girl from home falls wise and gives the doll her necklace as thanks for saving his bacon and the soldiers lay off of her. She seems pretty gaga about the necklace, clutching it to her melons and falling on her knees in front of the white girl. The looker from home and the soldier grab hands then and the two old babes start to blubber and the spotlight comes back on the canary in green only now she’s with a geezer decked out like a soldier only you can glim that he’s not the same one, the pair of them looking lovey-dovey and warbling at each other and the Yellow Kid can’t take no more.

  He stomps over the old babes’ trotters on his way out of the aisle and makes a beeline for the exit. There is more on the bill, Wheezer and Spats and then The Great Bendo and then Professor Poodle which is what he really come to see but right now he needs air.

  14th Street never smelled so good. He feels dizzy but the sun is out and the cabbies are trotting their nags up and down and the moll-buzzers are shuffling by the box office and some old wop with an accordion is wheezing away and the only thing that don’t seem right on the block is maybe the monkey dancing on the sidewalk, and even he is wearing a fedora.

  The Yellow Kid sits on the curb and watches the carriage wheels roll past and waits for his head to clear. The evening edition will hit the bricks pretty soon and he’s got to get hisself down to Park Row. When he holds his head in his mitts it is still cooking, which makes it hard to think and is maybe why he missed how the looker gets herself all the way to Googooland just in time to save her boyfriend.

  And how did she know to wear her pearls?

  It goes by so fast. People shooting and smoke and soldiers with the flag and everybody in the theater cheering and then him flopping round so the horse don’t stomp him. People laughing in the theater when he run off, the white folks like that, and then it is over. He wants to say to Miss Alma that there was more to it, that if they had more cameras looking from different spots they’d of got the whole story. But Miss Alma grabbed his arm when the volunteers charged and he fell down, Jubal sitting with her back where the colored ar
e supposed to, or at least where they always do sit in the theater. They don’t have it marked off up here. It goes by so fast and then they are in Auburn.

  Buzzing from the folks when they see the title. When the train runs across the screen in front of the prison wall Miss Alma gasps. It’s her first time seeing a moving-picture show and Jubal is feeling proud he is the one to take her.

  There is another view of the front of the prison from high up, nothing moving but the camera, the way you’d swing your head from left to right to look for something, and then they are in the hallway.

  “Assassin!” cries somebody sitting up with the white folks. “There’s the assassin!” and sure enough there he is behind the iron bars of the door to the left while the prison guards wait on the right for their orders.

  “Murderer!” hollers somebody else, standing up from his seat and pointing, and for a moment it is so real Jubal thinks maybe they will rush the screen and hang the man themselves.

  But then the guards, four of them, march to the cell and one unlocks it and goes in to bring the killer out. He is not in the striped suit but in dark pants and a gray jacket and there is one guard on each side of him and two behind as they walk off to the right.

  Next the picture kind of goes hazy and then comes clear and they are in the Chamber itself. Jubal leans over to Miss Alma. “I help build that,” he says, and she looks impressed and squeezes his arm.

  There is the Edison man who got a board filled with light bulbs laid across the arms of the Chair and when they turn the juice on to test it in front of the Warden and the doctors all the bulbs flash on. The Edison man takes the board off to the left then and the guards march the Assassin on from the right and put him in the Chair and are all over him tying straps—straps on his wrists and on his ankles rolling up one leg of his pants and straps over his thighs and chest and even one across his forehead. Then the Edison man come out and check that they’re all fixed tight and nods to the Warden that it is ready to go.

  Jubal can feel Miss Alma holding her breath beside him. There are three different times they put the juice through, the Assassin trying to rise up but the straps keep him down—Miss Alma like to crawl in his lap when they make sparks crackle up on both sides of the screen and people cheer.

  “Kill him!” hollers the man who stood up. “Fry the sorry son of a bitch!”

  Jubal looks over and Miss Alma is crying. Got a soft heart, even for a white man shot Mr. McKinley.

  “That’s only the actor,” Jubal says to her, quiet. “I seen him get paid afterwards.”

  One doctor puts the heart button against the Assassin’s chest and listens and then hands the earpieces to another doctor who has been feeling the man’s wrist for life and he listens and they nod to the Warden who is a long drink of water, and he turns to look right at them in their seats like they are the witnesses and if you watch his lips he say “The Assassin is dead.”

  Big cheering then, lots of the white men and even some of the colored standing up to clap their hands. Then the lights come on and the band starts playing and it is the next act, Moke and Smoke.

  Moke and Smoke are two colored men who tell jokes and act funny but they got the cork ash rubbed all on their face to make them even blacker and wear suits that is green and yellow with big square checks and Miss Alma is not laughing. The more folks in the theater laugh, even the colored around them, the less she think it’s funny. They go on rolling their eyes and saying their jokes and end with singing a song about Old Alabamy but she is crying again. Miss Alma always seem like one who could go through the Fire and not drop a tear so Jubal ask does she want to go and she says yes.

  Another time he would worry about people staring at him, leaving down the aisle while the show is still running, but Miss Alma still got hold of his arm and he can’t help but smile.

  Look who I got.

  He takes a look back right before they step out into the lobby room. Teethadore the Great who is a friend of Mr. Harry is coming out, dressed up like Mr. President, which is what he is now, and right away people start up clapping.

  Teethadore does not run onto the stage anymore. The strut is slow, confident. Presidential. There is a full minute of applause and he lets it fill him up, chest out, grin locked in place. He puts one foot slightly in front of the other, squares his shoulders. The diapositive flashes on the screen behind him.

  AMERICA AND THE PHILIPPINES

  —it says in bold letters.

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  —he says, and there is another wave of applause from those familiar with the verse—

  Send forth the best ye breed

  Go bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives’ need

  To wait in heavy harness

  On fluttered folk and wild—

  Your new-caught, sullen peoples

  Half-devil and half-child—

  PRODIGAL

  Nilda hangs the Bleeding Jesus over him in the morning.

  “Para los santones,” she says.

  It is two squares of cloth connected by red shoestrings, one hung down on your chest and the other in back between your shoulders, both with Christ on the cross sewed on them and some words Royal can’t read, Catholic words probably, and He is bloodied up something awful. There is a tiny stitching of blood from the thorns and from the spikes in His hands and feet and the spear in His side and little red dots of blood-tears down His cheeks. It is more of their hoodoo that doesn’t work as far as Royal can tell, meant to protect you from bullets, but he doesn’t fuss when she hangs it on him any more than he did when Mama put herbs and bird bones in a little sack round his neck. She, Nilda, cut him loose and is leading him, he hopes, away from folks who want to shoot him or cut him up, so why kick about it?

  The sun is on their right the whole morning, the two of them heading north, following a foot trail that runs just below the mountain ridge. She knows where she is going, slowing to turn and look at him a few times, stopping once to share the last potato. Royal tries not to think any further ahead than he can see and not to think behind at all. It is not so bad except he’s thirsty. Royal’s undershirt is torn and his leggings stolen and his boots still on his feet only because they didn’t fit none of the rebels who tied him down. He wishes he had his hat and some wet banana leaf under it the way he’s seen them do. The sun isn’t high but already it is cooking his skull.

  There is a man walking toward them on the path. Barefoot, his hair longer and wilder than any of the rebels. When the man steps aside to let them by, his eyes burning, Royal sees that his shirt is hanging open to show off a dozen of the cloth squares, different colors and pictures and words on each. Nilda keeps walking like it’s nothing so Royal follows. They come to a swaying bridge made of bejuco rope and bamboo slats suspended over a little gorge, and halfway across he feels it shudder behind him. The man is following, maybe twenty yards behind, and is muttering something to himself.

  The footpath picks up on the other side and there is a little bamboo shack next to it, and then another a little farther along, the houses here roofed with grass instead of palm, and then as the path widens there are men walking alongside them, men wearing the religious squares and medals and crosses on the outside of their shirts and all of them with eyes red and burning, muttering, like a humming prayer, as they walk. These men have bolos dangling from a thong around their wrist or some gripping tight to the handle. An older man, wild hair touched with gray, stands blocking the way in the center of the little group of huts that make up the town. The old man has dozens of pictures hung on him, Bleeding Jesuses and red crosses and lots of the Holy Mother and he has a flaming cross painted or maybe even tattooed on his forehead.

  Mama wear some things, some homemade and some boughten, but not like these people. There was a crazy man at home, called himself Percy of Domenica, who jingled and clacked with all sorts of hanging charms and grew his hair down long and woolly, but he never had a follower. The man with the cr
oss on his head starts to bark at Nilda and she answers back steady while the mumbling men surround them and other people, women among them, step out from the huts to watch. Sometimes Mama go off at the Pentecostal. The first time it scared the living Jesus out of him and Jubal, Mama hollering in the tongues and her body twitching and the sisters in white not able to get down the aisle before she could knock her head on the floor a couple times. The flaming-cross man pushes past Nilda and fixes his hot eyes onto Royal’s and yanks the Bleeding Jesus out from under his shirt.

  “Your Mama been saved,” the righteous sisters would say over their shoulders. “She give up on her evil ways.”

  At least one of those sisters come to Mama later for a root cure to lose a baby, but that first time it felt better to know the twitches and hollers were about Salvation and not some sickness that come on her.

  The mumbling men are very close, hot breath on his neck from behind and all of them gripping hard on their bolos, make him think of Junior all cut apart, think of the man he shot with the gun barrel almost touching his body and there is a desperate note in Nilda’s voice now and the flaming-cross man is shouting questions Royal can’t answer right into his face.

  “You don’t call Him,” Mama always say. “You just open all the way up an in He come.”