by Peter Bowen
“We even worried that you and Teddy had had a falling out and he wouldn’t let you come to his war.”
“Nothing’s changed since I was here three years ago?” I says.
“Just like it was, only more so,” said McGarrigle.
We got good and drunk that night and then we went fishing for a few days, landing marlin—it tastes like veal, not fish.
I did not go tramping around in the sweltering jungle making notes and drawing maps. For one thing, that sort of scouting is called spying by most folks, who take ill to it. In the case of the Spanish, they got so vexed that they removed your fingernails and other whatnots and slow-skinned you, all the while trying to save your soul. A priest was always at hand to administer baptism and the last rites.
McGarrigle and Deleage had a small and efficient corps of spies and we would get ample warning of the American troopships sailing and we could take our steps then. We hung around the saloon and played dominoes and backgammon and liar’s poker.
From little snippets of information dropped careless out of the lips of one or the other of them I learnt that they owned the saloon where we ate, drank, and cheated each other. They owned the warehouse which was a legitimate bonded warehouse; they owned all of the other buildings and most of the fishing boats; and they were going to put up a hotel as soon as the war was over.
“I don’t think the Dons own a ship can sail this far,” said McGarrigle, “but we are cautious businessmen.”
“Is the Spanish fleet really that bad off?” I said.
“ ’Tis, ’tis,” said Deleage, “and if they bombard any American port it will be this one—it’s closest to ’em and they can run in all four directions if need be.”
“I take it that you boys is going to make a stab at being honest businessmen?” I says.
“I know it makes you disappointed in us,” said McGarrigle, “but we’re along in years and running guns isn’t any fun anymore.”
“When I was younger I thought nothing of being hung or shot or drowned,” said Deleage, “but now I think about it all the time and it scares me peeless.”
“ ’Struth,” said McGarrigle, “we’re old and lost our nerve.”
“For old-times sakes you will of course drop me in the right place, near on to Teethadore’s ship?” I says, waiting on the answer, for if they wouldn’t I was going to get lost.
“For our friendship with Luther Kelly, the Legend His Own Sorry Self, yes!” they chorused.
One moonlit night we went out to a beach on a tiny cay no more than ten miles from Key West, and we watched sea turtles come up on the sand to lay their eggs. The turtles was clumsy on land, and huge tears dripped from the corners of their eyes while they waddled away from the surf. We killed one and dressed it out there on the beach, and took the meat back to Key West and ate turtle steaks for the next few days, and delicious it was.
Word come that Teethadore’s flotilla had upped anchor and gone to sea, sort of. Well, they was having more trouble than the observers deemed possible. It took five days to get all the ships out of Tampa Bay, what with running into each other and finding out that they had plumb forgot to fill the coal bunkers or something.
So McGarrigle and Deleage and a few ladies from their whorehouse on Key West took Mrs. Kelly’s young son Luther south and we enjoyed each other’s company and scrawled together some maps and shook our heads over the fact that the Dons had been ordering shells for four years and they still didn’t have any for the guns of the forts.
I guess they was supposed to throw rocks.
I tucked all the maps and evaluations and additions and such in the oilskin pouch and Deleage dragged my clothes in—they’d been dragging behind the boat for days with a chain tied up the rope so it whacked them and they was nice and tattered like they would have been if I had been hotfooting it through the jungle for weeks like I was supposed to. We waited for nightfall and run close to the entrance to Santiago harbor and waited for TR. The running lights of the fleet appeared and we tacked back and forth and when they got close on in I tossed an India-rubber raft over the side and scrambled in it with a flare gun and some flares and my oilskin packet of reasonably accurate lies.
The last thing I did was eat a small piece of guncotton. It makes you look sick and hungry and tired and wears off in a day or so.
The guncotton tasted terrible, and it was tough, and I was chawing away on it when something bumped the bottom of the boat. It lifted me a good foot in the air.
I knew it wasn’t a rock, because whatever I felt had pushed.
I was puzzled as to what it might be. I had the flare pistol loaded and I was just waiting on the flotilla to get a little closer.
The whatever bumped me again. This time it lifted me about two feet and slopped water in the raft.
The leading patrol boat was coming on. A few drops of water hit me from behind and I turned and there was the biggest damned shark’s head I have ever seen. Up close. It swiveled some so it could look at me with the other eye. Then it went under. I thought I’d be very, very quiet.
The shark’s head shot up right in front and the jaws was open from here to there and I shot the flare down the bastard’s gullet and I saw it hang fire a moment before it burst into flame. The green flames licked at its gill rakers and it seemed a damned long time before the shark shut its four-foot-wide mouth and dove.
I quickly shot off another flare and commenced hollering for help. The patrol boat saw my flare and turned on a searchlight. The destroyer behind the patrol boat started firing its four- and five-inch guns at me. Out there in the ocean in my rubber duck. I couldn’t remember when I had been so happy. Great gouts of water shot up on every side of me. The shells was armor-piercing high explosive and when they burst underwater I got spanked but good.
So there I am trying to outshout a naval barrage and all the time wondering when that damned shark was going to come back and eat what had give him such indigestion.
Busy remarking on Theodore’s ancestry it took me a moment to see the shark was coming toward the stern of my boat, mouth open and belching green sparks. So I give him another helping and the mouth shut and it disappeared. The brief light helped the gunners to correct their aim and their shots was damned close and the waterspouts was filling the raft rapidly. I grabbed the oilskin packet and the flare pistol and waited for the shark. It rose up a couple hundred feet away, in a searchlight’s beam, mouth open as far as it would go and one of the gunners put a shell right down the monster. Pieces of my most recent acquaintance rained down for several minutes and one of them, a portion of jaw with several razor-sharp teeth in it, thumped into my raft and tore the tubes open.
I couldn’t remember when I had been so deliriously happy.
I was cussing a blue streak a yard wide and a mile long as I sank ungallantly beneath them black, greasy Caribbean waters, and I come up and I dogpaddled and treaded water cursing that goddamned four-eyes Dutch dwarf and accusing him of perverted lusts and the many horrible things I knew he did to small barnyard animals.
My invective was rewarded by a searchlight beam that blinded me and a faint order “Away boats!” come to my ears and soon I was being hauled over the side of a longboat.
I was near on to running out of things to call Teethadore anyway. Someone flipped open a dark lantern and shone it on my face. The lantern moved. TR’s monstrous choppers gleamed white in the light.
“Kelly,” says my good friend, “I knew I could count on you.”
I was shivering with anger and fear. I must move to Nepal and change my habits. I wasn’t sure where Nepal was, which was encouraging, come to think on it.
I managed to grab the ladder and hoist myself up, the packet in my teeth, and I tumbled to the deck of the destroyer. Good old Teethadore was right behind me. He had them signal with an Aldiss lamp to a big ship a couple miles away, and the destroyer raced toward it.
The seas was heavier out there, and they had to rig a bosun’s chair to get us over from the d
estroyer to the battleship—the Texas—and after woozlebumbling about the decks a while I got my balance back. Blasphemy does that to me when I practice it as religiously as I just had been.
Col. Theodore Roosevelt and his aide, General Wood, pored over my bogus maps and notes and seemed well satisfied.
“Fifteen thousand troops in Santiago but you say no more than three thousand can be mustered against us?” said the general.
“Probably less than two thousand. Ten thousand troops are needed just to hold Santiago from the Cubans, who kill a few Spaniards every night. There are two to three thousand troops too sick to rise from the floors of their filthy hospitals. Many of the ones who can still stand have malaria, yellow fever, and typhoid—all them jungle camp diseases. Them as can move can and will fight bravely, but they are drawn from all over and don’t know their officers. They’ll fight defensively. Anything you take, you keep. They won’t counterattack. Your biggest worry is the snipers. They have the new twenty-five-caliber Mauser needle gun. Good to fifteen hundred yards. The Mausers aren’t sent by Madrid. A local Don paid gold for three hundred of them, and ammunition.”
“Gold to who?” said TR.
“Gunrunners,” I said, and no more.
General Wood snorted.
Like I had told Theodore, Spain wouldn’t do anything more or less or different in the three years since I had last been to Santiago. (That was a fairly exasperating trip. I was trying to keep a bumptious little scamp named Winston Churchill alive long enough to see his dear mother once again. I was fond of his mother my own self. Jennie was unlike any other woman I ever knew. I can’t tell you why, but she sure was.)
I yelled and threatened and sniveled and whined at Teddy to let me return to the States. I would, I said, forgo all the medals he was planning to give me. I even said I’d vote for him, goddamn me.
He waved aside my pleas like he was brushing away gnats and I stormed off and sat down on something I thought was a locker. It was a vent to belowdecks and I got stuck in it. Just in far enough so that if I got my muscles bunched to pull myself out I was stuck.
The watch pulled me out.
I have had worse days, I thought, but not lately.
4
I SHALL SPARE YOU the revolting details of the off-loading of troops. For one thing, once again they had been issued winter garrison uniforms, heavy wool serge, in which they were expected to work and fight in damp tropical heat. Men keeled over and died of heart failure or convulsions from heatstroke. When the bully beef was opened it stank of formaldehyde and was a livid fishbelly white. The sailors had good food and it did not endear the Navy to the Army.
The Army always gets the shit end of the stick anyway.
Five days later our troops were ready to advance on the entrenchments of the enemy. Some of our troops, that is. We landed fifteen thousand. Six thousand was down with any mad number of ailments and half of them was to die. The Spanish shot a few, the profiteers who had supplied to the Army the poisonous beef and the peas colored with copper sulfate and the hardtack full of mold killed fifteen for every one met a Spanish bullet.
In the wee and small hours of the sixth day, Theodore, mounted on the least sickly horse left, led in a charge up a hill such of his Rough Riders as could stand. They had to march about five miles through a jungly forest to get to the grassy hill, and green-uniformed Spanish snipers potted over a hundred—the Mausers was good to more than half a mile.
Theodore had sent me skulking off to find out if the Spaniards had moved forty thousand troops or a lot of machine guns in overnight. I shinnied up a very tall tree and slapped mosquitoes and biting flies for a few hours and then slithered back down and said no, they hadn’t.
The Rough Riders’ charge was not awful military-looking, what with the insubordinate cutthroats that was private soldiers, the Harvardlings that was junior officers and convinced this was some sort of strange lacrosse game, and Teethadore, who sweated like a hot hog so bad his glasses was dripping and he was blind, and he zigged and zagged until the Sundance Kid, of all people, grabbed the reins and led Teddy’s horse up the hill.
“Follow me, men,” said Teddy, furiously rubbing his glasses with his sopping kerchief.
“SAY PRETTY PLEASE” bellered a couple hundred assorted bank robbers, train robbers, cattle rustlers, horse thieves, regulators, bushwhackers, claim jumpers, tinhorn gamblers, pimps, and other such solid citizens as the West has been so justly famous for.
The boys had got the hang of the Spaniards’ green uniforms, which was just a little bit off—no cowboy or gunfighter ever wore glasses, they all had eyes like hawks—and soon as one would spot a sniper half a mile off and point it out a passel of .45–90s and .45–120s would let fly and the Spaniard would have many holes in his dead ass.
Theodore was beside himself with rage. He’d just about get his glasses clear and slap them back on and another cascade of sweat would slosh down off his forehead and he’d start again. Finally, Theodore made a sweatband of a spare kerchief he found somewhere, clapped his glasses on, and saw maybe five hundred of his Rough Riders standing here and there about him, keeping close guard on a huge kettle of peas and ham hocks the Spaniards had abandoned. There was a little gunfire now and again as one or another of these bandits come upon a Spaniard.
We was in sole possession of the field, the ham hocks, and the peas.
Just then a Mauser cracked and Theodore’s hat had a fresh hole in the brim—and the Sundance Kid had drawed and fired damn near straight up, a sniper had stayed quiet in the tree directly overhead. The sniper fell sort of slowly and landed on his back in front of Teddy. His horse shied and Sundance grabbed the reins again. I went over to the body. The slug from the Kid’s Colt had gone right up through the lower jaw and tongue and out the top of the man’s head. The Kid didn’t aim, he was so fast his hand was empty, then one fraction of a second later the sniper was dead. He was no one to fight with, for sure.
“Follow me!” Teddy yelled, urging his horse forward. There was some scattered shots off to our left.
“THE HELL WE WILL,” bellered his loyal soldiers.
I went on over to him. “It’s over,” I said. “There’s nothing for the Spanish to do but surrender. We’re on both their flanks and we have the high ground.”
Teddy sagged visibly. He wanted to be known as a brave man. Well, sheer lunacy is as good a substitute as any that I know, and Teddy sure had that in quantity.
His Rough Riders had to a man thrown away the serge blouses, and they was either barechested or wearing light cotton shirtings. Someone brought out a deck of cards and they cut the cards six times and the thirty men who lost out the worst went off without a word to picket duty while the others sampled the peas and ham hocks that was the first real food they’d had since they joined the damn Army.
“I thank that yu’d best get us off this here pesthole ’fore we’re all dead of the rot,” drawled Badger Dick Boskill. He was a six-foot-eight half-Kiowa who did card tricks of the variety you can get shot for. Badger Dick was so damn big no one had tried yet.
“Uh, um,” said Teddy.
“Othersome,” Badger Dick went on, “we might have to all sign this here affidavit about how—what is your name these days, Sundance?”
“Jones.”
“No you ain’t,” said Butch Cassidy, “you are Smith. I am Jones.”
“Smith,” says Sundance.
“How Private Smith here had to lead your horse up the hill on account of you is as blind as a damn mole and woulda rode out to sea and drownded Private Smith here hadn’t come to your aid.”
“Ah, ah, ah, ah,” said Teethadore. He was now getting ready to impress us all with his very best empurpling asthma attack.
I shoved a pint bottle of tequila I’d taken off a sniper’s corpse at Teethadore and roared, “Pour that down yer gullet or you’ll smother.” Teddy drained off about half of it and his eyes sort of lolled around for a moment and he shuddered top to the soles of his feet and ba
ck up. “Hoomph,” he said, swaying in the saddle.
“Oh ma God,” he said, whisper-like.
“Oh fer Chrissakes,” says Butch, “we don’t want to go back on them damn transports. Let’s us just go kick the rest of them greasers out of Santiago and see what they got in the way of grub and liquor and when the goddamned U S of A wants Santiago all they got to do is ask polite and have us a way home and we will give it to them right away.”
The Rough Riders allowed as how that seemed a good solution.
The Harvardlings having observed the fulsome awe with which the soldiers regarded good old Teethadore chose to keep a discreet silence as the Rough Riders fell in and marched on Santiago. They slouched along any old way, blowing snipers out of the treetops at a half-mile and appropriating a couple of fieldpieces had ammunition by the way and about four hours later this slovenly army approached the ancient fortifications of Santiago.
About ten heads showed, barely, over the stone breastworks.
The Sundance Kid and Snakefoot du Plessis flipped for which side and went out front. When Butch fired a shot in the air them two drawed and it sounded like cloth ripping the shots come so fast. The heads went down like some sort of carny game.
In five minutes a white flag waved from the parapet. The gates was flung open and a podgy little Spanish general stalked out and handed his sword to Sundance, who hefted it and walked back and gave it to Theodore.
“You want his balls, too?” said the Kid.
“Who speaks Spanish here?” yelled Teddy.
“It’s not necessary,” said the Spanish general. “I went to Harvard.”
So him and Teethadore had a fine old reunion and compared notes on football games and racing shells while hundreds of men in both armies died of neglect.
The Spanish just put down their arms and went to the business of trying to stay alive in a tropical city which had tainted water and every disease known to man but chilblains, and the Rough Riders joined them.
About a week later the Spanish admiral took his ships out through the harbor’s roads to give battle to the Americans and in fifteen minutes all the Spanish ships was burning or sinking. The U.S. Navy didn’t lose a single man.