A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  It’s not a village, really, eight of the bamboo and palm-thatch huts scattered along the ocean and another half-dozen, like the one he and Nilda have taken over, on the banks of the little stream that runs into it. A couple of the men are already out in the stream, thigh-deep, checking their fish weirs. They see him but don’t say good morning. A couple of the men are runaways like him, dodging something or other, and except for Bung, folks pretty much ignore him. A low mist comes up off the water as the rain hits it and Royal thinks again how pretty, in its dopey, dreamy, slow-ass way, it is in this country.

  The beach is wide with a gentle slope to it, yellow-brown sand leading back to a thin strip of cocoanut palms before the thick brush begins. The stream cuts a different channel through the sand to the ocean every day, and this morning it is deep and swift-moving, churning at its wide mouth where the waves roll in over the freshwater pushing out. There are stick-legged birds skittering along the surfline and ghost crabs popping in and out of their holes, but it is too cool and rainy for the big lizards, lizards as long as Royal if you count their tails, to be out on the sand. Royal sees the pigs first, snuffling around some fallen, rotting cocoanuts, and then spots Bung way up in one of his palms. Bung waves and shouts a greeting, always cheerful.

  Bung cut the notches for Royal’s first tree, somehow able to get enough mustard on the bolo while he’s clinging halfway up the trunk and not chop his own fingers off, taught him the whole routine. Royal stuffs the bamboo tubes in his belt and starts up. Bung cut the notches to fit his own legs which are shorter, but Royal is glad for so many hand- and footholds as he wrestles his way up the slippery-sided palm. They are so damn high, swaying mightily at the top on windy days, and he tries to never look down. In Cuba the little muchachos had a way of tying a short cord between their ankles and gripping the trunk with that but they were just skin and bone and had been doing it their whole life. It is a long hard climb for Royal, nothing like getting up in the spreading sycamores back home, and he has to rest his arms and legs a bit when he reaches the top. He pulls off a few ripe-looking cocoanuts and drops them to the sand, the time between letting them go and the soft smack reminding him how high he is.

  He’s tapping just three of the flower stems, like Bung showed him, rattan strips tied to bind them over so the sap drips down into the bamboo tubes. The sap will run for half a day before the cut heals up and clogs, and then you have to climb again. Royal unhooks the bamboo tubes he’s left there, all three full with the whitish sap, carefully slipping them into his belt. He cuts a finger-long section off the end of each of the stems with Nilda’s little curved knife, then binds them down with the rattan strips and fixes the new collector tubes underneath. He licks his fingers off, sweet and sticky, clamps the knife between his teeth and begins to feel his way down the trunk.

  The stems give less in this rainy season than before, but with two trees it is enough. Bung works six of them, but Bung does it as a living, selling some as frothy tuba in the village of Nilda’s mother and letting some pass into vinegar which he spices with hot peppers and once a week cooks down in the still he’s built to make lambanog which is even stronger than the beeno locals used to peddle to the boys in the garrison. Lift the top of your skull right off. Royal trades whatever he doesn’t drink himself to Bung for a little pigmeat.

  Bung’s little herd is mostly out on the beach now, rooting for crabs, and Bung is waiting at the base of the palm, grinning, offering Royal a strip of the mangrove tanbark he crumbles into the tuba for color and to give it more punch. Bung talks at him, laughing and dancing around in the sand the way he does, waving his hands. He is bowlegged and keeps his hair short and bristly, rubbing the back of his head whenever he laughs. He is ripe-cocoanut colored, like when the bark first turns from green to tan, and lives with a very short, very round woman whose teeth are so red from the betel nut that when she smiles it looks like she doesn’t have any. At first Royal thought Bung was so happy because of his home brew, but has never seen him take a drop of it. Bung and his wife speak a different lingo than the other folks here, and even Nilda who has been other places doesn’t always understand them.

  Royal is soaked through from the drizzle by the time he is done tapping his second tree, wearing only his pants which Nilda has cut and hemmed above his knees. He has gotten used to being wet all day. He leaves the tubes of palm sap on the bank of the stream and wades in, picking his way over the ankle-breakers on the bottom to the fish trap he has set up. There are three caught in the hemp, foot-long, bass-looking things, and he bends to snake his arm in and pull them out. He cracks their heads against a hardwood stump on the bank and strings them through the gills to carry. Food, at least enough to keep you going, pretty much just comes to you here. Fruit falls, root crops bump up from the dirt, fish are flushed down the river or swim in close to the beach to be caught. Before the rain started some of the beach men went in to work in the fields for the people in the village of Nilda’s mother, but none of them would hire Royal. They are poor, what people back home call catfish poor, having enough to eat and a roof overhead but not much else.

  Their bahay has a steep-pitched roof for all the rain, hinged thatch shutters propped open and a little rough hemp mat on the platform to wipe your feet on. Nilda dries his hair with a cloth and has fish and rice hot for him when he comes in from the rain, pulling it off the indoor stove that is nothing but a hollowed section of log lined with mortar. It tastes like geechie food, only hotter when it is hot and sweeter from the cocoanut when it is sweet. They eat with their hands from the same bowl, sitting cross-legged on the woven sea-grass banig with their shoulders touching. Everything she fixes tastes fine but it is always the same things mixed in different ways.

  Better than Army food.

  When they are finished Royal sticks his hands out in the rain to wash them and then drinks some of yesterday’s tuba juice, already tangy with alcohol, from a gourd. Nilda will take some with food when it is maybe a half day old and still sweet, calling it lina, but Royal needs the extra kick.

  He sits in the opening and watches the rain come off the thatch, watches the stream roll by, taking another sip now and then. The tuba softens the sound of the water hitting the roof, dulls the sound of the waves pounding the sand, smooths the edges off any thoughts that try to force their way into his mind. After a while he will lie out on the mat, not so much tired as waiting out the long day, and if she wants it Nilda will be lying next to him when he wakes. She is careful never to wake him, explaining in a complicated pantomime that when you sleep your soul wanders away, and that a person startled from sleep might lose it. Royal doesn’t have the words to tell her he left his behind long ago, in a cactus patch outside Bisbee.

  In the early evening, hard to be exact in this season where you never see clear sky, he will climb to tap the palms again. Bung has a store of rice and he will trade some sap for it and then maybe sit and listen to the sea fishermen when they come in with whatever they’ve netted and drink and tell their long stories, eyes and voices growing soft with liquor, talking along with the slow rhythm of the waves. If there is news from the war, or if the war is still going on, nobody is trying to tell him about it. He feels his eyelids growing heavy. He senses Nilda moving around behind him, always with her hands busy, sewing mostly. She can make all kinds of pictures and patterns with the thread, and other women, the ones who don’t ask her to play cards and the ones in her mama’s village who won’t hardly look her in the eye, pay her in goods or sometimes in Mex money to put fancy borders on their clothes. Sometimes she will get up and step over to just touch him, like she needs to check that he is still there, that he is real. He knows she is there, always. This is where she is from, where she belongs, and he is just something that has washed up and doesn’t really fit. It is not so bad, a dreamy sort of life, the waters he has given himself up to warm and gently flowing. Royal drifts on the palm wine, barely able to hear the drops hit anymore, the air just a kind of water that is not so thick as wh
at is in the slow, meandering stream outside, the sky is water and the earth soaked and overflowing with it and he lies on his side right where he is. A little chacón lizard is scuttling across the wall, hunting for insects. He can’t hear the waves but knows they haven’t stopped rolling. It will rain again tomorrow.

  REAPER

  The boy has been following him for two blocks, eyeing the bag, undoubtedly seeking the perfect moment in which to spirit it away. Dr. Lunceford has never been this far south, below Canal Street, and is unfamiliar with the neighborhood. It is his last day in Manhattan, the apartment across the river arranged for, and he has exhausted the appetite for Dr. Bonkers’ elixir in the tenements farther north. There is alleged to be a settlement of colored people down here, but thus far he has not discovered it.

  “Hey Mister!” calls the boy.

  Dr. Lunceford stops and turns to face him. The boy is perhaps eleven or twelve, though it is difficult to be certain with the more undernourished of the street Arabs. The boy glances down to the bag.

  “You a croaker?”

  The license has been promised, but given the vicissitudes of state bureaucracy there is no telling when it will be delivered.

  “Are you in need of a doctor?”

  “It’s me pal,” explains the urchin. “He’s awful sick.”

  The boy leads him to Duane Street, then toward the West River. Dr. Lunceford is wary, not discounting the possibility that the boy has older confederates in waiting. He has been waylaid twice uptown, once losing several bottles of Dr. Bonkers’ to a gang, boys who were not, surprisingly, interested in the more valuable leather bag or the rest of its contents. He assumes they were disappointed upon drinking the nostrum. In the other incident he merely fled, prudently if not with dignity.

  The boy, who offers his name as Ikey Katz, stands at the head of an alleyway a block from the pier and waves him in.

  “He’s down here at the end, Doc,” he says. And noticing the doctor’s suspicious demeanor, adds, “On the level.”

  The spill from the streetlamps does not completely penetrate the narrow passage. A trio of eating establishments of the lower echelon back onto the alley and the smell is not pleasant.

  He notes rat droppings as he walks, and trash bins that have not been emptied in some while. At the end there is a hodge-podge of discarded wooden pallets, and lying on one of these, muttering in a language Dr. Lunceford has no inkling of, is a semi-comatose young boy.

  “We figgered somethin was crook wid him when he don’t show at the Newsies’ Home yesterday night,” says Ikey. “Thursdays they wash your drawers for free, and he don’t ever miss out on that. So we been checking all the spots where he flops at night, an I found him here.”

  The boy is moaning and muttering, his forehead damp and hot, his pulse racing.

  “He’s been like off his nut lately, the Kid, and—you know—getting darker.”

  “What is his name?”

  Ikey shrugs. “We call him the Yella Kid.”

  He is not yellow now, despite his mop of blond hair, but more of an angry bronze. Dr. Lunceford presses lightly on the swollen abdomen and the boy cries out, his eyes popping open to stare at the stranger in fright.

  “Aw Jeez, not yet!” he cries. “I ain ready to go!”

  “Calm yourself, son. I’m here to help you—”

  “Shit you are! You’re here to stick me on the boat!”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “He thinks you’re the Reaper, Doc,” says Ikey. “The character that takes you unnerground.”

  Dr. Lunceford removes his black homberg, forces what he hopes is a reassuring smile.

  “I’m here to help you.”

  The boy’s terrified eyes swing to his friend. “You member the one I showed you, Ikey? Right in the front winda at Altgeld’s. It’s all white—”

  Ikey turns to Dr. Lunceford. “See? He’s been like that all week. Bughouse.”

  “You got the meatwagon here, right?” says the boy. His voice is hoarse, unsteady, his eyes burning feverishly.

  “I am not Death,” says Dr. Lunceford. “I am neither a butcher nor an undertaker. I am a doctor and I’m going to take you somewhere you can be treated.”

  The boy’s eyes grow wider. “I aint goin to no croaker shop! They slip you the black bottle or you end up on one of them Orphan Trains—”

  “Those are just stories—”

  “The Orphan Trains is real,” says Ikey Katz. “They got their paws on Jinx McGonigal and shipped him out to some farm where there’s nothin but squareheads. Made him work like a dog and kneel on a wooden pew every Sunday. Took him most of a year to scarper and bum his way back here.”

  “He won’t be going anywhere for a long time,” says Dr. Lunceford, realizing how little reassurance the phrase offers. “Do you know where the Hudson Street Hospital is?”

  “Sure.”

  “You run there as fast as you can, straight to the ambulance barn, tell them that it is an emergency and bring them back here.”

  “You got it, Doc.”

  Ikey runs off down the alley. The sick boy’s breathing is rapid, shallow. A late-phase cholestatic jaundice, the bile ducts obstructed by a tumor or, less likely in one so young, gallstones, growing steadily. Nothing to be done till he is on an operating table.

  The boy squints his eyes at him, as if his features are hard to make out in the weak half-light from the street. “You gotta tell em about the funeral crate,” he pleads. “It’s right up front in the winda. I got enough saved to cover it.”

  With a good surgeon, thinks Dr. Lunceford, and the helping hand of Providence—

  “I’ll be sure to let them know,” he tells the boy.

  The boy clutches his middle, tears streaming down his cheeks. “It hurts somethin awful,” he says. “It hurts awful.”

  “I know,” says Dr. Lunceford. “I know it does.”

  The boy begins to convulse then, eyes rolling up into his skull, slender limbs thrashing against the pallet until Dr. Lunceford is able to take hold of him. The doctor hugs the boy’s head against his chest, wrapping his arms around him tightly till the spasms stop, muscles exhausted. His eyes clear slowly.

  “I’m scared as hell, Doc,” he says, grimly lucid now, turning his head to look up to Dr. Lunceford. “I never figgered on that.”

  “Don’t you worry,” says Dr. Lunceford. “It won’t be long now.”

  The doctor sits on the pallet holding the Yellow Kid, waiting and thinking. Thinking about his life and what has happened to it, thinking about where he should be now, with Yolanda, instead of down this filthy alley in a city of orphans. Junior was about this size the one time they thought they were going to lose him to scarlet fever, Yolanda furious at him for being a doctor and not being able to do more, only hold him and rock him and talk to him while Yolanda pressed the ice packs to his forehead. He felt it in his fingertips when the fever broke and his son was able to sleep, past all danger.

  The street boy, shaking weakly, manages to lay his hand over the back of Dr. Lunceford’s.

  “Lookit that,” he says in a small voice. “We’re the same color, you an me.”

  RESCUE

  Jacks watches the sand. The rebels are keeping close to the crashing waves but it isn’t high tide yet and they’ll have to leave track on dry sand to get into the trees. The tip was on the level for a change, some amigo earning himself a couple gold eagles or a pass out of the hoosegow, and if they’d gotten there a few minutes earlier they would have had the rebels boxed in. For some of the terrain here it would be good to have horses, ride down fast on the little shack towns before anybody has a chance to holler, run down whoever tries to light out. This humping around on foot won’t get it done.

  “Got to be something wrong with these people,” says Coop. “Don’t know when they been beat.”

  “Or maybe they know it, but got nothin better to do,” calls Hardaway from the rear of the squad. “Vex us with sniper fire and make us haul our n
arrow asses down this damn beach chasin em.”

  “Army’s not paying you to eat beans and sleep, Private.” Jacks turns and walks backward for a few steps, making sure his men aren’t strung out too much. There is a good thirty yards of open sand before the tree line here, perfect for a googoo ambush.

  “I forgot,” says Hardaway. “We all making a fortune here.”

  Coop walks like he’s on a Sunday picnic, rifle held casually in one hand. “We ought to send the ones we caught back home,” he says. “Let them be the niggers for a spell.”

  Even on a flat beach the surf can kill you. The wind is moving one way and the current another today, something like a storm collecting out over the water, and the waves are high as Royal’s shoulder with the out-sucking fierce enough that they seem to hang in the air for a moment before slamming down on the hard, bare sand. Bung maneuvers his little banca out beyond the breaker line, looking for an opening, turning the boat out to face the biggest of the swells, now and then raising his oar to be seen when he slides into the steep troughs. He is riding low, like he has a big haul of fish or has taken on water. The outrigger is about the only thing Bung owns in the world and Royal knows he will risk his life to save it.

  Bung makes no signal when he starts in, just paddling hard, one side and then the other, trying to ride a medium-high swell in without getting too far down its slope, no reason to think this one is any easier than the others so he must be at the end of his strength. Royal stands up on the beach where the spent waves race around his calves and then hurry away, the front line of the ocean booming, churning white, and wishes Nilda was here. But it is too late to run for her and the surf too loud for him to shout and everyone else is in Candelaria for the festival of Saint Somebody. Bung is moving fast in the banca now, flying like a spear, and on some days when the waves aren’t high and undercut Royal has seen him glide ashore, effortlessly disengaging from the boat to grab the painter at the bow and run it up another ten feet without breaking speed. But today the water comes apart before you can get to the sand, the sea violent against itself, and Royal pulls a deep breath into his lungs before rushing in.