A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  He stands sideways to the first wave and is almost torn off his feet by it, then runs three long steps forward to dive into the base of the next breaker the way he’s seen the boldest of the local boys do, swimming hard to push out the other side of it, and feels right away that he’s never been in anything this powerful, stronger than the water that swept him away from the company, fighting hard just to keep himself pointed out to sea. Three strides and dive, two strides and dive, not making any ground but surviving each wave and not at all sure how he’s going to help but he can’t just watch a man drown. He digs in, chest-deep and able only to duck under the next rumbling wall of water. He pops up to see Bung still coming, looking sideways and back over his shoulder as he paddles, as if trying to outrace the swell he is on. They meet eyes before it happens, Bung indicating with a flick of his oar that Royal needs to get out of the way, and then the next wave is bigger than all the others and Royal is wrenched off his feet as it breaks early and he is tumbled, the bottom smacking him in the shoulder, back, head, knee, head again, a rag doll in the churning white, saltwater driven up his nose and then lying sideways in outrushing foam being pulled back toward the next breaker till Bung, it must be Bung, grabs him by an ankle and pulls him out of the surf.

  Royal snorts out water and sand. The banca flips and tumbles down the breaker line, both outriggers snapped off, and Bung is frantically running, bowlegged, to toss flopping fish higher onto the sand before the sea can take them back.

  Royal stands. One knee has been twisted, his shoulder scraped, his jaw sore. There is sand in between his teeth. Bung is pointing at Royal, giggling now but with his arms and legs trembling from the struggle and fish, dead and dying, scattered all around him. He sees something beyond and the smile dies on his face. Royal turns to look.

  They are coming up from the south, moving fast like something is behind them, with the Teniente in front. He hasn’t shaved or cut his hair for a long time and looks skinnier than ever. Kalaw is still with him, and Locsin and Pelaez and Ontoy and the little boy Fulanito. The segundo, Bayani, is missing. All of them have rifles.

  The Teniente speaks to Bung first, but the man is frozen, too terrified to answer. Royal steps in front of him.

  “Yall people still running?”

  The Teniente does not smile at him. “We need the road to Candelaria.”

  “I take you there.”

  The men all stare at Bung as they step past him, eyeballing a warning, and Kalaw quickly gathers some fish to stuff in his mochila. Though nobody is pointing a rifle at him Royal feels like a hostage again.

  “The war gone come up here?”

  The Teniente looks back as they wade across the mouth of the stream where it hits the beach. “It has already arrived. Your men are behind us.”

  They squeeze through the stand of nipa palm that lines the far bank, then step carefully over the gnarled, guano-spattered roots of the mangroves, branches laden with sleeping fruit bats hung upside-down, the only thing Nilda ever cooked for him that he wouldn’t eat. Royal leads the band through a maze of boulders then, turning inland when the dunes begin, sandy, palm-studded mounds that lead to the Candelaria road without taking you past any of the fishermen’s huts. The Teniente pauses at the top of the first one, giving Fulanito an order, then waves for the others to keep going.

  The boy lays on his belly at the top of the dune, facing the beach, rifle by his side.

  “Fulanito will fire when they come into view.” The Teniente’s face is grim. He looks as if he hasn’t slept for a long time. “If they believe they are attacked they will delay their pursuit.”

  “They aint gonna care he’s so little,” says Royal as they hurry away. “They kill him anyways.”

  There are a few shacks up by the tree line and a broken dugout boat tumbling in the surf and Coop finds a fish lying in the dry sand, gills still pumping.

  “This got to be a googoofish,” he shouts before flinging it over the breakers and into the sea. “Don’t know where it suppose to be.”

  “We could of ate that.”

  “I aint eatin no more fish in this lifetime.” Coop has been the one most eager to believe the rumor that they will all be replaced by Texas Vols and sent back home. “Rice neither. I get back it’s gone be steak and potatoes or nothin.”

  There is a woman, youngish, eyeing them from up the bank of a little stream that empties out into the ocean, standing motionless. There are still a lot of them up here never seen an American, colored or not. A number of the palm trees have bolo slashes on their sides, footholds, and Jacks looks into the tops for snipers. It has become that kind of fight, like a handful of wasps worrying a water buffalo. No way they can bring you down, but now and then you get stung.

  The tracks of the band, six of them now, appear on the far side of the stream past the nipa fronds, cutting away from the roaring surf and into a jumble of boulders. The new one is bigger, barefoot. Jacks holds his arm up and Gamble and Ponder scoot ahead into the rocks, ducking low as they run. The rest of the patrol squats or takes a knee. There is no shade here, and Jacks has his midday headache, the rhythmic pounding from the shore working on him all morning long. Huachuca and Bliss would cook you but it never made you wet like this, like you been steamed through. He wonders how Lupe would make out here. He misses her.

  Gamble and Ponder pop out and wave them up.

  “Single file,” he says, and they head into the boulders.

  The rocks are near shoulder-high, no reason they should be there, just something God didn’t have noplace else to put. The men walk silently, rifles held high and ready. Jacks doesn’t have to do much sergeanting with this bunch, all of them experienced soldiers now, turning quick but holding fire when the rustling off to the left turns out to be only a monitor lizard, one of the big long ones that all start to sing when the sun drops out of sight.

  They come out at the base of a low dune with a few crooked palms sticking out from the top. The rebels have climbed it.

  “These boys never learnt to cover they tracks,” says Coop and then his head makes a snapping sound, a wet clot of it hitting Jacks on the shoulder and they are all down on their bellies firing at the top of the dune at the spot between two palms where there was a flash of metal. Gamble and Ponder split wide from each other, lizard-crawling up the slope while the others continue to pour it on to cover them. They hold fire when the boys wave.

  Coop is gone, laid backward in the sand with a hole between his eyes and his head in a puddle.

  “Cover him up with something,” says Jacks and trudges up the side of the dune, slinging his rifle and dropping onto his hands for the steep part. It is only a boy at the top between the palms, shot four or five times, a Mauser lying next to him. Ponder picks up the rifle to put another in him, but the chamber is empty.

  “Hit the man when he didn’t have but one shot,” says the corporal. “What’s the odds on that?”

  Diosdado has given up trying to read the gunfire. It was Fulanito and then a lot of Krags and then silence.

  “Road just up over the top of this hill,” the American says, pointing. “You head east on it. But that boy, if they didn’t get him, he gone get lost.”

  “You could join us.”

  “And yall could give up. You give them rifles over, I bet they still payin out.”

  There are Americans, white men, living in his father’s hacienda now. Americans hold the railroad all the way up to Bayambang. When he gets the men to Candelaria they will bury the rifles and split up, each going to a baryo where they have friends, and pass as Juan Tamad. See their families, maybe raise a crop until it is time to strike again. The yanquis are impatient people, and if they think this war is a disease they can never shake, persistant and painful, maybe they will go home.

  His men are waiting for an order. There is no firing now and they feel the enemy closing in.

  “Go back and find the boy if you can,” he says to Royal Scott, “and lead him to the road when it is safe. We aren�
��t finished yet.”

  He starts over the hill and the others hurry after.

  Royal backtracks a ways and then sits out in the open just over the crest of a dune. Fulanito should find his way at least this far, and if it is the others they will at least see he is unarmed. He rubs the flea bites on his legs softly with the palm of his hand, soothing not scratching like Mama taught him, and waits. Bung will have told everybody left near the shore by now and they will make themselves scarce. It seems like the end of the earth, but the flag has followed him even here.

  He recognizes them before the faces take detail, the way they move on patrol, their shapes. Sergeant Jacks spreads them out in a defensive position and climbs the dune alone.

  “You not supposed to be here, Private.”

  “That aint a lie.”

  Jacks steps past him to the top, looks down the other side, then comes back to sit beside Royal in the sand.

  “Where they gone to?”

  “Up the road. There’s a village.”

  “That boy killed Cooper. We come into any village, somebody’s dyin.”

  “Cooper.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The waves seem very far away, rolling now, and the sky has gone clean of bad weather. Royal is wearing only a wrapped cloth like Bung does and feels naked next to the sergeant. Jacks stands.

  “You better get your story together, son.”

  The other men nod and Too Tall mutters a hello when he comes back down with the sergeant, but they keep their eyes away like he might be a ghost. Corporal Ponder is carrying Fulanito’s Mauser.

  “Those people long gone,” Jacks tells them. “So we just liberate this prisoner and head back to the garrison.”

  They follow their own tracks back over the dunes to the boy’s body. They have rolled him onto his side and except for the blood he could be napping in the sand. Coop’s body is stretched out way down the slope, a palm leaf covering his head. It wasn’t an easy shot.

  Nobody offers to help when Royal squats and puts Coop’s body over his shoulder to carry. He feels the head sticky against the small of his back as they walk, over and through the dunes to the beach, making their way around the boulders, squeezing through the nipa and crossing the stream knee-high where it spreads out. The tide is up now, only a little strip of sand left uncovered. Royal kneels and lays Coop down on it.

  “I get something we can carry him in the rest of the way.”

  “You go with him, Hardaway,” says Jacks, looking into Royal’s eyes. “Might be some of them googoos still about.”

  He leads Hardaway to Bung’s hut, better built than most, and unties the hammock stretched between the deck post and the cocoanut palm growing next to it. He speaks softly, searching hard for the words in Tagalog. Bung won’t be far away.

  “What you say there?” Hardaway asks when they are coming back with the hammock.

  “Told where that boy is. Maybe somebody will do for him before the crabs get busy.”

  The others have stripped most of Coop’s clothes off.

  “I tell the lieutenant you got lost in the river, got caught, run away and spent you some time in the sun out here,” says Sergeant Jacks, tossing Coop’s pants at him. “But you best walk in there looking like a soldier and not some wildass golliwog been shacked up with a native gal.”

  The other men busy themselves wrapping the body in the hammock, satisfied with the story. You sign up to fight for the flag but at the end it’s only each other you risk yourself for. Coop’s clothes fit Royal fine except for the hat, which slips down over his eyes, and the boots. His feet have gone wide from walking barefoot so long and they pinch like a son of a bitch.

  Nilda stands back from the beach, watching from behind the trunk of a big dapdap tree as they file past. Even in the uniform and at this distance she can tell which one is him by the way he moves. And by the way he moves, she knows it is no use following.

  ARRIVISTE

  Uncle has put on some muscle. Sleeves rolled up, the biceps of his powerful arms bulging as he holds the squalling, ragged pickaninny labeled PHILIPPINES over his knee and administers the medicine, a shoe with AMERICAN MILITARY printed on the sole raised in the other hand. Other urchins in their native costumes—a dark-haired little Spaniard, a big-lipped Hawaiian, a Mexican in a sombrero, a yellow Chinaman, an Indian in breechclout and feathers—nurse their throbbing backsides while kindly Lady Liberty deals out schoolbooks to each and indicates the bench on which they are to sit quietly. An unruly gang of onlookers, German, Jap, Colombian, Russian, even a portly John Bull, observe the thrashing with wide eyes, duly impressed. Uncle fixes them with eyebrows raised and chin thrust forward—

  WHO’S NEXT?

  WHISTLE STOP

  They are all colored, the ones who come in, which makes it simple. Hod doesn’t care, it’s all business, but some of the white soldiers and the leftover Spanish do and they are the customer, who is always right. The locals, whatever their color, tend to wait for the time in between trains to come in and he has decided not to put up a sign or make a policy. Let them work it out on their own. He catches the sergeant looking between him and Mei while they handle orders at opposite ends of the counter, the troop with maybe a half hour before their transport is serviced.

  “This place has gone through some changes since we last come through,” says the sergeant. It’s clear he means San Fernando, not the lunch room, which has been open just two weeks.

  “Earthquakes, Spaniards, American gunboats—” says Hod, “not the first time it all come down.” The sergeant has ordered a hamburger sandwich like most of the others, like most of the Americans who come in off the train. The carabao beef is a might stringy so he has Chow mix a little duck fat into the grind. “But you can’t leave it just sit. Hell—I heard them folks back in Galveston already built their downtown back.”

  “Never understood why people want to stay there,” says the sergeant. “I’m from El Paso—the river don’t flood and the earth don’t shake.”

  “On your way home?”

  There is a looseness to these men, a lightness, that he remembers from when the Colorados got pulled off the line for good. Had your chance to kill me and now it’s gone.

  “They send us to some fort,” says the sergeant, looking down the counter at his laughing, shouting soldiers, “and we’ll sort it out from there. Not like you vols, walk off the boat and that’s the end of it.”

  Mei touches his arm and tells him she’s going back to help Chow fix the orders. He can feel the sergeant watching them.

  “Where you been garrisoned?” he asks. It is no skin off his ass what people think, it really isn’t, but some of them act like if you married a Chinese it’s their business to say something.

  “Zambales.”

  “Sittin on the beach.”

  “Ever walk ten miles over loose sand with your full kit on?”

  Hod grins. “Wasn’t any picnic where we was either. How the people up there?”

  “Not so different than here. Got some different languages, some folks up in the mountains still carryin spears.”

  “I heard about them.”

  The sergeant swivels around in his seat to look out the front window. The window cost more than anything else, that much glass a rare item in earthquake country, but the swivel seats were a steal after Hod told the workmen what he wanted, the head fella having seen the real thing on a visit to Manila and able to copy it.

  “It’s no wonder my boys just give up and called em all googoos,” says the sergeant. “So many kinds to keep track of.”

  “I suppose.”

  “The Mexicans, they got names for every kind of mix. Mestizo, castizo, mulato, morisco. Even got something called a salta-atrás—a jump backwards.”

  “Which is—?”

  “Chinese man and an Indian woman.” The sergeant shrugs. “You figure these folks have their own words for all of it.” He points out the window. “Like what would you call that?”

  He is
pointing at Bo, who stands on the porch holding himself up by the bamboo roof support watching the other boys hustle their peanuts and cigarettes and bananas next to the steaming locomotive. Mei has scared him enough about the tracks that he will stay there for hours, following the action in the station like it is all a show put on for his enjoyment. He doesn’t look like the other boys here, who could all go for twins, and Hod has never thought before about what name to give. He told the major he’d applied to be British so they’d let him stay, but has let it slide and once the ship sailed with the regiment nobody has questioned him. Bo turns to look inside, and, seeing Hod, lights up with the smile he does with his whole body.

  “That,” says Hod, reaching for the water jug to serve the colored infantry, “would be a Filipino.”

  FAVORITE SON

  If it wasn’t so damned blue. The band is playing When Johnny Comes Marching Home as his son requested and Sally is weeping prettily and half the folks who matter in Wilmington are on the platform waiting. But the first thing the Judge’s eye falls on is the blasted yankee outfit Niles is got up in, and it makes his blood boil same as always. Niles pauses in the doorway of the Pullman, showing his brilliant teeth and waving his arm at them and all the ladies crying now and the men clapping their hands, he looks so heroic, and then there is the sleeve pinned up on the other side and what they’ve done to his face and the Judge has to breathe deep to hold himself together. He steps forward and takes his son’s hand, the right, thank you Lord, and they embrace. The band rushes into There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, people clapping and stomping as Sally hugs Niles and the people cheer and then he is led to the little platform they’ve set up where Tom Clawson and Mayor Waddell are waiting, the other instruments dropping out to leave just the boy on the trap drum rattling a quiet tattoo to reclaim the military theme of the proceedings and the redcaps stop and set their burdens down, watching respectfully at the edge of the crowd.