A Moment in the Sun (103 page)

Sargento Bayani, running, finds him halfway back to the men.

“What is it?”

“They killed Luna.”

“
Carajo
.”

“They killed Luna and Paco Román is dead and Rusca I don’t know—”

“General Aguinaldo—”

“Was not there.”

Dogs are scampering past them toward the plaza. Diosdado has never seen so many dogs in one town before.

“Luna lost his temper, as he always does, but this—”

Diosdado knows he is an officer in the Filipino Army and should not be shaking. He should be calm and clear-headed and decisive. The side of his jaw is wet and there is blood on his fingers after he touches it. He feels dizzy.

“I don’t know what to do.”

Bayani puts a hand on his shoulder.
“Tranquílate, hermano
. The men are all ready to march.”

“But where are we marching?”

“Home to Zambales,” says the son of Amor Pandoc, as if this has been their plan all along.

WATER CURE

Hod is happy to sit, even if it is on the suspect’s arm. Neely arranges himself on the other arm and Big Ten across the man’s skinny legs, holding the ankles and facing himself away from the whole business. Hod is just back on the line and wants to puke from the heat and the recon march and the battle to take the high ground this morning when they hacked Major Moses’s arm near off his body. The suspect isn’t even trying to move now, just lying there with the
whump
of the shells they’re dropping onto Las Piñas from offshore coursing up through his pinioned body and if Hod could manage to spit he knows it would sizzle in the air and burn off before it hit the dust. The platoon is down to twenty with the injured carried back to Manila by coolies this morning, and others falling out on the side of the road and Lieutenant Manly Goat saying if we pass this way again and they’re still alive maybe we’ll pick them up. He is waving his damn cane around and acting like every fucking shitheel boss Hod has ever hated, the Lieutenant, every company gun thug with a mean streak, like a dog gone bad that somebody ought to put down and Hod would gladly volunteer only he is too jaded with the heat to raise his hand.

“Pry it open,” says Niles, pacing and pulling out his fancy new British pistol. “Let’s put this show on the road.”

Sergeant LaDuke, who even without the heat is no great thinker, tries to ram the sun-heated barrel of his Krag down the suspect’s throat, busting a couple of teeth in, which the man proceeds to swallow and then choke on.

“Jesus Hiram Christ,” sighs Manigault. “Flip him over.”

Hod and the others roll off and Sergeant LaDuke and Corporal Grissom yank the man onto his belly and dig their heels into his back till he coughs out the teeth in a gout of blood. It is the
Monadnock
doing the shelling, Hod able to recognize the pitch of its ordnance whistling in from the sea, and they struggle to get the suspect pinned again, just some poor googoo in a field who waved and called out “
Amigo
” and Lieutenant Manigault said The hell with this
amigo
business, grab the yellow son of a bitch. Vásquez, who interprets from Spanish for the Macabebe scout, just stares down the road, and the Macabebe, looking disgusted with them all, kneels beside the man’s head and works the tip of the buffalo horn he carries into his blood-smeared mouth.

“Let it pour,” says Manigault, and Corporal Grissom carefully tips the kerosene can, filled with muddy water at the creek they just crossed, into the wide end of the horn. The suspect’s arm begins to jerk underneath Hod, the man making strangling noises and arching his back, and Hod looks away trying to concentrate either on his plans for Mei when they get back to Manila or how to shoot Manigault the first chance he gets, anything but thinking about the heat that cooks off all the air before you can breathe it, that is like a hot poker down your nose and into your throat, that the Spanish and the natives are smart enough to hide out from and only volunteer lieutenants and the half-wits above them would expect you to march or fight in. They said in the clap shack how if you have the pox and let it go you might look almost normal as you get older but your head will never be right, which goes a long way to explain the folks running this army.

A good deal of the five gallons gurgle out before Sergeant LaDuke says stop and has the Macabebe pull out the horn so he can stomp hard on the googoo’s distended belly. Hod lets the arm go so the suspect can half roll and puke up water, pink with blood, mostly onto Neely.

“What the hell you doing?” asks Neely, offended.

“He’s got to get it out or he’ll drown.”

“Well he don’t have to get it out all over
me
.”

“You pin this suspect down, Private,” the Lieutenant growls to Hod. “And
keep
him down.”

Manigault has always been shit, a card-cheat and an errand boy and a faker, and he knows that Hod has him pegged, all the way back to Skaguay. But there is a different look in his eye today, wild and fry-brained, and there is that pistol—

The Macabebe says something to Vásquez, who turns to the Lieutenant.

“What do you wish to ask this man?”

“Ask him?”

Vásquez sighs. He seems like an educated man who, for whatever reason, is not so welcome back home. “The suspected one. You wish to ask him something. That is the reason for this—” he indicates the writhing, choking googoo.

Manigault stares at the Spaniard for a long moment, having clearly forgotten what he wanted to know, if in fact he ever had anything in mind.

“Ask him if they got as many pin-head officers in their outfit as we do in ours,” says Big Ten.

Manigault glares at the Indian, then makes sure the suspect is back to his senses before sticking the barrel of his pistol to the man’s forehead.

“Ask him how many troops they have waiting for us in Las Piñas,” he says.

Vásquez says this to the Macabebe in Spanish and the Macabebe repeats it in whatever lingo he thinks the suspect talks and the suspect manages to croak out a few words before the scout slaps him and barks something to Vásquez.

“This man asks who would still be in Las Piñas,” Vásquez reports to Lieutenant Manigault, “when your navy has been shelling it for six hours?”

Blam!
Manigault fires the pistol into the baked dirt just to the side of the suspect’s ear, causing him to urinate in his trousers and startling Neely so bad he rolls onto his side and covers his head.

“Jesus, Lieutenant,” he complains, rolling back onto the man’s arm. “How bout a little warning?”

“Ask him something else,” says the Lieutenant.

“If they are going to make a stand,” the Spaniard explains, “it will be at the Zapote Bridge. We fought them there many times before you arrived.”

“Ask him about that, then.”

“But if we know this already—”

Manigault points the pistol at Vásquez. “Ask him!”

Vásquez does not take his eyes off the shrill-voiced Lieutenant as he speaks to the Macabebe scout. The scout shouts into the ear of the suspect, who sobs something back. Hod doesn’t want to look in the suspect’s face. The Macabebe says something to Vásquez in Spanish.

“He says he has not been across the Zapote Bridge for many days.”

“Well—that is very unfortunate for Mr. Nig.” Manigault nods to the Macabebe scout. “Give him another drink.”

The scout pinches the suspect’s nose shut till he opens his mouth to breathe and then pushes the tip of the buffalo horn back in. The Macabebes don’t look so much like the other natives here, the rumor going that they’re Mexican Indians brought long ago by the Spaniards to work the crops, and of course the fellas expect Big Ten to be able to palaver with them.

“C’mon, Chief,” they say. “You’re holdin out on us.”

“You know how many Indin languages they got back home I can’t say a word of?” he tells them. “I barely remember any Ojibwe after a year with you people.”

Corporal Grissom yanks the suspect’s head to the side so he sees, then pisses loudly into the mouth of the kerosene can while Sergeant LaDuke giggles. After I shoot Manly Goat, Hod thinks, these two will have to be next. And maybe the Macabebe too, though this is his country after all and he is entitled to play his cards the way he wants. Corporal Grissom, who has been on the warpath since his monkey disappeared, convinced that the Chinese porters ate it, rebuttons his fly and begins to dump the liquid into the buffalo horn, splashing far too much of it onto Hod.

Shoot him in the belly, thinks Hod, wiping sweat from his eyes, and leave him in a ditch.

The suspect makes more strangling noises and tries to jerk himself out from under them and the barrage continues to the south,
whump! whump! whump!
and when the can is empty Sergeant LaDuke drops with both knees on the googoo’s belly and what comes up smells like bile. There is a series of words between Vásquez and the Macabebe and the half-dead suspect, with Manigault pacing back and forth, back and forth.

“Let’s hear it.”

Vásquez turns to him. “He will admit to anything you wish.”

“Very prudent of him.”

“But you must first say what it is. He confesses that he can no longer reason.”

“I don’t understand.”

The Spaniard speaks slowly, softly, as if to a small and not very clever child. “If you wish there to be an ambuscade waiting at the Zapote Bridge, he will confess to it and we may return with this information.”

“So they are waiting—”

“And if you accuse him of being a general of the
insurrectos
, he will not deny it.”

Again it takes a long moment for the meaning to penetrate the Lieu-tenant’s overheated skull.

“You’re saying the man is lying.”

“I am saying nothing,” Vásquez replies. “I am merely translating his words, as passed on by this
indio
, to the best of my ability.”

And I am merely sitting on some unlucky fuck’s arm, thinks Hod, while my comrades in arms, the kind of people who tried to smash my head in with clubs back in Montana, torture him to death for no fucking purpose.

“We’re wasting time on this
amigo
,” says the Lieutenant, kicking the suspect hard in the ribs and eliciting another heave of blood-tinted water from him. “Everybody up!”

The moaning is general as the rest of the platoon drag themselves to their feet, faces stupid with the heat, the suspect’s torture being the only rest they’ve had all day. Big Ten crawls to his Krag and climbs up it to his knees, then stands, wobbly and soaked through with his own sweat. He wears the straw hat shaped like a pith helmet that many of the volunteers have adopted, their campaign hats worn out, and has lost a good deal of his bulk to the shits.

“We get to this bridge,” he says, “there damn well better be a river underneath it.”

As Hod reaches for his own weapon the Lieutenant appears in his face. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says, loud enough for the others to hear. “If I catch you skulking behind me, I’ll have you shot.”

The lead dog can never relax. He can never, once they’re all out of the traces, let the others slink behind him. Niles has seen it more than once here in the Yukon, the other curs waiting, watching, hatred building with every shock of leather cracking on their hides, with every deep, freezing snow they have to struggle through or die, with every scrap of fish jerky the lead dog chases them off of, till the moment the scales tip—the lead dog coming up lame or finally too old or too weakened from the trek or just not savage enough to dominate the three or four who jump him and get him on his back and eviscerate him before fighting among themselves to be the new leader. Men with guns are ever more devious, the courage to pull a trigger available to the weakest if you pour a half bottle of whiskey down his craw or place a subversive thought in his hate-crazed mind. It is such men, drunkards, cowards, who cut Soapy down in Skaguay, Don’t go, don’t go I said and Doc and Rev Bowers and Old Man Triplett all said Don’t go but him hot-eyed with pride saying that nobody,
no
body tells Jeff Smith where he may go and what he may do in this or any other town, marching to the pier with his Winchester in hand, ready to discipline the pack as he’s done so many times before, keep them in line, all of us from the Parlor following to the base of the pier saying Wait, Jeff, at least wait till sunup when they have to look you in the eye but Jeff striding, striding tall and proud as he’d been on his mount in the 4th parade till out steps Frank Reid who thinks because you’ve drawn a map of a town you ought to own it and knowing he has Si Tanner and a dozen other guns ready behind him grabs the barrel of the Winchester and tugs it down and draws his Colt on Jeff. “For God’s sake don’t shoot!” cries Jeff, knowing a standoff when he sees one and they fire into each other so close each can smell the whiskey on the other’s breath and then the rest of the dogs pile on and Jeff Smith, who’d be Emperor of Manila by now, Army command or no, is on his back and the rest of us are running out of Skaguay like greenhorns before an avalanche.

The Macabebe catches up with Niles, walking silent and fast, not even a footcrunch on the snow, not even nodding as he passes to join the platoon ahead, and one assumes he has dealt with the suspect in the appropriate manner. The lead dog should barely have to growl. They are skirting wide around Las Piñas, no reason to give the boys on the
Monadnock
a chance to misfire and tear them apart, smoke rising from where he expects the native village to be, and he half hopes there will be an ambush ahead to dispose of the worst of this band of assassins he has been placed in charge of.

It is cold, killer cold, a cold that makes the thoughts freeze and snap off before you can form them in your mind, and the only remedy is to keep moving, keep pacing, keep the blood flowing in your extremities while the dullards all around you flop in the snow and let the cold creep into their bodies.

They have stopped ahead, crouching in a drift. Niles draws the Webley from its holster, cold metal stinging his hand. Bare the teeth and raise the hackles, he thinks as he steps forward, and don’t let them out of your sight.