A Moment in the Sun (109 page)

“Well, sir, we was operating as a recon patrol by that time, so we never got right up
to
it—”

“Lieutenant Manigault issued an order—”

“He issued a good number of them, all day long—”

“He issued an order to Private Atkins.”

“Atkins was still there, I do remember that. We’d had all kinds of fellas fell out on the way, left a trail of em behind us, but Atkins kept up till the bridge. It was around then that the sun got to the Lieutenant—”

“
Got
to him.”

“Yes sir. He went down like a sack of spuds.”

“But before that, was the Lieutenant acting erratically?”

Big Ten has been staring at a brown lizard twitching in a crack in the stone wall behind the others. He looks down into the captain’s eyes.

“I’m just a private soldier,” he says. “It aint up to me to judge whether an officer is bughouse or not, is it?”

The captain meets his gaze for a long moment.

“Did Private Atkins refuse an order from the Lieutenant?”

Big Ten ponders it. “There was some debate on tactics.”

“Lieutenant Manigault gave an order and the private refused to carry it out.”

The way the captain says it Big Ten realizes it is an offering. One day here is worse than a month in the Leadville box and there is no telling how much time they can throw at him. All he has to do is say yes and his part in the deal will be over. He’ll walk out of Bilibid and leave this shithole island with the rest of the outfit. As for Hod—

“The way I remember it,” he says, carefully, “and none of us was thinking too clear on account of the heat, the Lieutenant said something that didn’t make no sense and then Atkins asked if that’s what he really meant and the Lieutenant he jumped to conclusions. Such as that his own men, starting with me and Atkins, were fixing to do him in.”

“And were you?”

He shakes his head. “Who’d believe a thing like that, Captain?”

The officer considers for a moment and then grabs the paper Corporal Schreiber has been writing on and crumples it.

“You lose two months’ pay,” he says to Big Ten, “and when you go back to your company you keep your lip buttoned.”

Big Ten feels a little dizzy. The chuck in Bilibid is about what you’d expect it to be and his stomach hasn’t been right from the second day inside.

“I don’t know, Sir—what with Lieutenant Manigault thinking I’m out to—”

“Lieutenant Manigault,” interrupts the captain, “is no longer with us.”

Big Ten comes upon Hod out in front of the prison, looking pale and skinny and staring up at the Teatro Zorilla, which is presenting something called
Bodabil
.

“Look who else bust out of the hoosegow today.”

Hod sees him and grins. “What you tell him?”

Big Ten shrugs. “All a big misunderstanding. Plus Manlygoat’s gone and they don’t know if he’s coming back.”

“Yeah. I guess it’s been LaDuke trying to put the screws to us.” They walk toward Calle Iris.

“Lose your pay?”

Hod nods.

“So we’re back to where we started in Denver, aint we?”

“I spose so.”

Hod turns, walking backward to watch some coolies putting up wood and bamboo bleachers for a parade. There has been a parade near every day they’ve been in Bilibid, music drifting over the walls, the goldbricks and thieves and deserters singing along to the ones that have words. Hod turns back to him and grins again.

“As I remember it, back in Denver, we were set to have a fight.”

No woman who wasn’t a whore, any color, has ever asked Hod in before. Mei seems nervous, looking around corners to see if anybody is watching, and then waving him up to join her. He is excited in his stomach, his eyes still smarting from the bright light after the months of prison gloom. They go past the ventilators of the hospital laundry and then there is a little shed that probably once had supplies in it. Waiting outside is a very round Filipina gal holding a little boy who the minute he sees Mei spreads his arms wide and smiles and starts hollering “Ma! Ma! Ma!”

Something she never told him.

The Filipina gal says some things in Spanish and hands the boy over and then Mei gives her a few centavos and she makes herself scarce, giving Hod a quick once-over as she leaves.

“Bo,” says Mei to Hod as she bends to open up the shed.

“Hey, Bo,” says Hod, trying to hide his surprise as the little boy shyly stares at him over his mother’s shoulder. “How’s it going?”

Inside there is a cot for a bed and a single wooden chair and a washbasin and not much more. He wonders how she cooks. Mei points to the chair.

“You sit.”

Mei sits across from him on the edge of the cot and the little boy, Bo, who is half crawling and half walking when he can get a hold on something, moves around the floor making noises, sneaking a look at Hod now and then and with each pass coming a little closer to him. He doesn’t look all Chinese.

“How old is he?”

“Almost two year.”

“And his father—?”

“Bo never gonna know his father,” says Mei flatly.

The boy definitely doesn’t look all Chinese, black hair that sticks straight up on his head but big round brown eyes and a coloring that is lighter than Mei, who is the color of Kansas soil after a drought. He’s never seen why they call them yellow. In this country there are all kinds of mixes and all kinds of shades, like the House of All Nations in Leadville, and you’ve got to look more at the clothes and how people carry themselves than their skin color to know who is a big cheese and who is not.

“They give you this place with your job?”

“Spanish people give it to me. I think the American forget.”

“Yeah,” he says, looking around. “It is kind of forgettable.”

There is a crucifix on a gold chain hung from a nail over her bed and one of the little fat gods they sell in the Binondo shops, big smile and all belly, sitting on the ledge of her only window. Bo gets close enough to stand by climbing up Hod’s leg and then yells something over and over, pointing at his face.

“He want something?”

“He points at your nose. He never see one like that.”

“Well—spose you need a closer look.”

He picks the little boy up under his arms and sets him standing in his lap and right away Bo latches on to his nose, squeezing it on the sides with a little frown on his face.

“I bust it a couple of times in the ring,” Hod says to Mei, as if she is the one who wants an explanation. “Fighting.”

“You a boxer?”

“More like a punching bag.” If he and Big Ten can pull it off there will be enough money for a start. He had a speech all planned out, practicing over and over in the cell, sure that Mei could not resist if he put the idea right. But this, this Bo all of a sudden, is a whole other deal. It wants some thought before he sticks his neck out.

The little boy butts him in the chest with the top of his head then, over and over, till Hod turns him around and sits him down in his lap and hugs him tight with his arms.

“He never have a man hold him,” says Mei, watching him carefully. “He like to wrestle.”

“Sure,” says Hod. “All boys like to wrestle.”

He decides not to ask her more about the father. There are hundreds of boys Bo’s age and size out on the streets in Manila and in the villages, cute little monkeys with dirty faces and bare feet and their naked keisters showing under the rags that have been thrown over them, eye-to-eye with the pigs and chickens and turkeys that run free here. Some have bellies like the god on the window ledge, but theirs sticking out from hunger, and some have sores on their heads or flies crawling on their faces or legs and arms that aren’t straight and the ones a little older chase after you calling “Hey you Joe!” or “Yankee soja looka me!” hoping you’ll flip them a centavo or a cigarette and maybe in a few years they’ll have a gun or an old rifle in hand and be out running with the
insurrectos
.

“This is a lucky kid,” he says to Mei.

“Kid is a baby goat.”

“It’s what we call little ones. Children. Kids.”

Mei smiles. If he can make her smile once Hod figures it has been a successful visit. “Lucky kid,” she says.

She stands then and crosses to the window ledge where next to the fat god there are two banana leaves folded in packets. Inside are small loaves of rice with meat and vegetables mixed into it.

“You sit over here now,” she says.

Go or stay, he thinks, I need some money.

He sits with Bo still in his lap and Mei puts the food in front of them on an empty fruit crate turned over and brings out the sticks they use, Hod making his into a kind of shovel and Mei deftly snatching up little bits of the food to put in Bo’s mouth or her own or even once or twice into Hod’s. The food is terrific, still hot and not strange-tasting at all but after a couple months of bread and water and the years of boardinghouse grub and Army chow and mulligan stew on the bum he has a hard time swallowing it, thinking about what she has risked to ask him in here, to show herself like this, close to tearing up from how it feels that instead of being court-martialed and thrown back into the hole it is the three of them here, sitting close together on the cot. No woman, whore or not, has ever asked Hod Brackenridge to eat dinner with her family.

LAS CIEGAS

The soldiers sit on a load of track ballast in the gondola, rolling past cane fields where men crouch with curved knives flashing and past rice fields with barefoot women walking up on the dikes carrying parasols to shield them from the brutal sun and tiny clusters of huts where the people wander out to stare at them but nobody shoots. There are mountains ahead in the distance, a long jagged-top wall of them off to the left, the west, and a big one sticking up all alone ahead to the right. There is one passenger car that the officers ride in, and boxcars full of horses and mules and Chinese and supplies for the Pampanga outposts. Royal fingers a heavy, round ballast stone, angry, but the land is so flat there is nothing to throw it at.

“Got us up here on this rockpile,” he mutters to nobody in particular. “Just a load of freight.”

“Wasn’t no rocks, we couldn’t see over the sides.”

“They put on some Pullmans, we could ride in style,” calls Hardaway.

“Aint gonna let you in no Pullman without a red cap on, nigger,” smiles Cooper. “What you think this is?”

They have patrolled along the Dagupan line before but never been this far north. It is almost November but it is still hot. The ballast rocks are hot where there is no soldier to cover them. The smoke from the stack on the little toy-looking engine blows straight back over them and Royal watches the hats of the others turning gray with a layer of ash.

“Treat the damn mules better than us.”

Achille points out to a trio of smallish men hacking at a stand of cane. “You want to trade places with them?”

Royal just squeezes the rock.

“Ever chop cane, Roy?”

“No.”

“That sugar will eat a man up.” Achille frowns out at the field as they pass, their smoke spreading behind them, drifting downward. “Harvest season one year when I was only
un ti boug
, my
maman
say go find your
père
cause it was nearly dark and he not home. I walk out by the field and there I see him, lay out on his face in the red dirt of the road and I know from how he looks he is dead. Not move a thing. But when I come close he is breathing. Just so weary he can’t make it home without he lie down and sleep some, right there in the road.”

Royal turns to watch the cane-cutters disappear behind the rear of the train.

“So I sit by him and maybe one hour, two hour, he wake up and see me, don’t say a word, just stand and start out for home. Let me carry his long knife.”

“Them boys not really cuttin sugar,” says Cooper. “They just practicin. Sneak up on Corporal Junior here some night and
whack! whack!
” He makes a chopping gesture to Junior’s neck.

“Only if you fall asleep on sentry duty,” says Junior.

They pass a shacky-looking mill, a single water buffalo plodding in a circle to turn spiked, hardwood rollers while one man jams stalks of green cane in between them, snapping and cracking, the juice running down a bamboo trough the carabao carefully steps over into a huge iron pot smoking over a furnace sunk in a pit, another Filipino pulling the crushed cane out to be spread in the field while a third, a sinewy, sweat-pouring man in nothing but a loincloth, feeds the furnace from a stack of dried stalks, all of them looking like they’ve been doing this since the beginning of time. The smoke from the pot, smelling of burned sugar, drifts across the track as the soldiers roll by.

“Them people change place with any of us up on these rocks in a minute,” says Achille, shaking his head. “Workin that sugar eat a man right up.”

San Fernando is a big town or a small city and the train station is the grandest they’ve seen outside of Manila. The church and the
casa municipal
and some of the nicer houses have been knocked apart by American artillery or burned down by the rebels before they left but life is going on here, market day, women walking with big wide baskets of fruit balanced on their heads, no hands, women plucking chickens to sell while they’re still flapping, a band with an accordion and a fiddle and a boy drumming on some kerosene cans on the platform and the people about their business, putting up with the soldiers from different units walking among them like they put up with the typhoons that sweep through or the daily rain showers or the stifling heat, just another unchangeable thing in the world. The soldiers pass their rifles down and jump off the gondola and are lined up in twos with Company F and marched double time through the streets.

“I gots to wee-wee, Sarge,” calls Hardaway.

“You can do that when we get where we’re going,” says Jacks without turning around.

“Where that is?”

“They’ll tell us when we get there.”

They are marched double time through San Fernando, sweat-sticky and covered with ash, and head away on a wagon road to the northeast. A pack of little boys follow for a while, laughing and pointing excitedly at the smoked yankees, the boldest working up the nerve to dart forward and touch Royal on the back of his hand.