A Moment in the Sun (11 page)

it says—

AND ENHANCE YOUR MANHOOD

Smokey doesn’t read, and Hod can only think it can be a reminder of proper boxing posture.

Addie Lee washes her hair out into a metal pan and saves the water to pick through later. She takes her dancing shoes off and lies back on the bed and before Hod can get his pants off has fallen asleep. He takes his wool socks off and puts them in the farthest part of the room and lies next to her. Later, when she wakes, she sits up and stares at him for a long moment as if trying to remember who he is. Then she smiles.

“You,” she says, and they start in, with the lamp on the little table by the bed still on and smelling strong of coal oil and she doesn’t look away once while he is on her.

“How many times you think it will be,” he asks when he is finished and they are lying next to each other again, “to make up a hundred dollars?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Light comes in the window and the wild dogs start to snarl on the street, and then there are loud voices as the next room starts to fill up.

“That’s Babe hosting the spillover,” she says, rising to pull her stockings off. Her legs look even skinnier without them on. “She’s gonna be over to get me if we don’t go out.”

She puts on two sweaters and oversized men’s pants and her mukluks and Hod scouts the stairway so they can hit the street unnoticed. With Hod’s parka on her and the hood up Addie Lee gets barely a glance from the stunned-looking celebrants emerging from the saloons and dance halls, though a bob-tailed mastiff trails close, sniffing at her till Hod chases him away. They walk north of town, avoiding the wagon road, until Skaguay is only a hundred columns of woodsmoke in the sky behind them.

She plays at blowing puffs of breath into the air, turning in a circle to look up at the treetops, then stops and stares into his face. “McGinty aint really your name, is it?”

“No.”

“Most of the percentage girls, they got a different moniker up here than what they were born with. A lot of the men too, hidin from the law or their wives or whatever. Like there aint no rules cause it’s not really America.”

“There’s rules,” says Hod. “It’s just different people in charge of them.”

They start to climb, circling around the boulders and felled trees, the sharp air feeling good in Hod’s chest. Inside there is smoke everywhere, cigars and pipes and woodsmoke and his clothes all smell like smoke but here, where the stampeders have never been, there is only clean wind shaking the tops of the spruce trees.

There are women in the camp who aren’t for rent, not the way Addie Lee is, who do laundry and cook and wash pots and sell goods or run boarding houses, but they dress against the cold and wear big shoes and none of them, not a one, shows the least bit of interest in Soapy’s other nigger. It was the same in Butte, the same in every mining camp he’s ever worked in. He climbs slightly ahead when it gets steeper and reaches back to pull her up.

“I suppose you come here for the gold,” she says.

“Me and fifty thousand other halfwits.”

“So what happened?”

“I got to the top,” says Hod, “but I never got over.”

He motions for her to stop, taps his mitt against his lips.

There is a bear coming down the slope.

It is immense, dark brown flecked with gray, swinging its head and grunting now and then as it rubs its flanks hard against the tree trunks.

Hod feels Addie Lee slip her arm into his and pull tight, so little that is actually
her
inside the layers of clothing, a thrill shooting through him, and then the bear sees them or smells them, stopping to stand, steadying itself with a massive arm against a spruce tree, its tiny, stupid eyes trying to comprehend.

“We’ll get out of your way,” says Hod in as steady a voice as he can muster, then pulls Addie Lee sideways, neither of them taking their eyes off the beast.

It makes something between a bark and a grunt and drops back onto all fours, pawprints dwarfing the tracks of their feet as it descends on the path they took up. They watch till it is lost in the trees. Addie Lee has tears running down her face but doesn’t seem scared.

“To think there’s such a thing in this world,” she says.

They climb up a ways farther, not talking much, angling sideways so they won’t surprise the bear on the way down. Where there is enough snow she tries to slide down on her back, but it’s too powdery.

“There’s never a crust on the snow here,” she says. “It’s dry as sawdust.”

“You don’t get a thaw, you don’t get a crust.”

She is in a dark mood by the time they come back to town, making their way through the badgering merchants and frantic, ignorant stampeders.

“It’s just what men turn into when they get up here,” she says, studying them, her face mostly hidden by the parka hood. “Or maybe that’s what they are all along and they just start to look the part more. All hairy and stinky and grunt and snuffle and climb on you and grunt and snuffle and climb off and go digging in the ground.” Smokey waves to Hod in passing from the seat of the wagon, signaling that there is work to be done. Addie Lee doesn’t notice. “And every once in a while they get sore and tear each other apart.”

Hod walks her up the stairs to her room in the Princess Hotel and leaves her there, panning her washwater for gold dust.

SOJOURNER

Father—

Please forgive the tardiness of my correspondence, but we have been
in transitu
of late and the regular mail schedule is not in effect. As you may surmise from the postmark on this missive, I am in St. Louis, part of a specially chosen unit testing a novel mode of military transport.

Our commander Moss, of whose organizational skills I have written before, has long entertained General Miles with the notion of replacing the temperamental, noxious, and oat-burning horse with a vehicle less expensive in its upkeep and more in tune with our age. Thus was born the Infantry Bicycle Corps. Though the cavalry was afforded the first opportunity to participate in this great experiment, they proved much too fond of their equine cohorts (and, I must say, of the dashing figure they cut mounted upon them) to accept. As the colored troops invariably are saddled (apologies) with whatever duties our paler brethren-in-arms abhor, and as Lt. Moss was the originator of the scheme, the honor of implementation has fallen on the 25th.

Junior kneels, tablet resting on a stump, writing. He has been left to guard the wheels while the rest of the squad are off tom-catting on the east side of the river. He had taken it for a display of trust, the lieutenant recognizing the most responsible of his troopers, till Moss went off with the mayor’s party and the others started in about all the high times he would be missing. Telling him to polish their wheels while he was at it, Army humor never subtle or kind.

The Corps has, previous to my enlistment, cycled dispatches about the Bitterroot Valley and taken one longer journey, which I am very sorry to have missed, to the Yellowstone area and its attendant natural wonders. A pair of the lieutenant’s stalwart wheelmen having since mustered out of the service, I volunteered myself and Pvt. Scott (who, by the way, sends you and family his warmest regards) to take their places. My own recreational familiarity with the device gave me a leg up, so to speak, on poor Royal, but in no way prepared me for the rigors of extensive cross-country cycling. We pedal our steel-rimmed Ramblers over the roads, such as they are, in these vast, unpeopled spaces of Montana, whenever they are available and in passable condition. Otherwise it is the bumpy course through scrub and sagebrush, flushing rabbit and antelope in our path and deploying rapidly to “hand-over” our metallic steeds when we encounter the occasional stock fence. On these training jaunts we carry only our bedrolls, on a rack bolted in front of the handlebars, and our rifles slung over our shoulders.

Junior kneels before the stump, writing, because he cannot sit, may never, in fact, be able to sit again. There is no glory in his wound, the simple mention of being “saddle sore” drawing the wrath of the former cavalrymen in their party, and he has resolved himself to suffer in silence. He talks to Royal, of course, and Royal seems to listen, but there has been a reserve in his friend lately, an edge of
What have you gotten us into?
Not just the cycling, but the whole idea of joining the 25th in hope of heroic action when there has been little more than monotony and cursing and scutwork of the lowest variety.

It wants a battle.

“The bicycle requires neither water, food, nor rest,” General Miles has written, and at times it appears that the same qualities are expected from the colored soldier. Our training at the wheel is additional to our other duties at the fort, so as you may imagine only the most intrepid (some would say “ambitious”) of the enlisted men have stepped forward. Lt. Moss’s quest this year was a sojourn from Missoula to St. Louis (over 1,000 miles as the crow hobbles) and back, to demonstrate that the only limit to this method of transport is human “spunk” and endurance. We are principally under the tutelage of Sgt. Mingo Sanders, a veteran of some years who has distinguished himself, despite being nearly blind in one eye, in several of the regiment’s more trying engagements. Largely uneducated but possessed of an ample reserve of “mother wit,” he is a man the younger soldiers look up to—sanguine under pressure, resolute in action, a sympathetic guide to the rawer recruits.

Of these we had the addition, shortly before our departure, of a fellow Royal recognized as a figure of some ill-repute in Wilmington. Cooper (not his real name according to Pvt. Scott) is the devil-may-care type often attracted to the service in search of adventure, or, as I suspect in his case, refuge from legal authorities. Though no shirker when it comes to our daily routines, he is lacking in the esprit de corps one would wish for among fellow rookies, repeatedly suggesting that the bicycle experiment is a ruse designed to humiliate the colored soldier rather than an opportunity for him to stand out from the pack. Our reception, however, has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic and cordial, a seemingly endless celebration, though some disappointment is voiced on the discovery that we do not also play instruments. (Our 25th band is lauded as the finest musical aggregation in western Montana.)

We have passed through mountain, meadow, desert, and prairie on the way, alternately slogging through rain and “gumbo mud” and baking, with insufficient water, for days through the aptly named Badlands, vagabonding in conditions many a cavalryman would not deign to expose his mount to, averaging something less than forty miles a day on vertical terrain and something more than sixty on the horizontal. For this odyssey we carry a full kit including half-tent, rifle slung over the back, and fifty rounds of ammunition in our belts, plus food, water, and cooking gear, but severe rain and hailstorms and the great distances between points of resupply have often forced us to travel on extremely short rations. The mountains require “walking” the bicycle up the slope and a cautious, serpentine descent to avoid loss of control. Where wagon roads do not exist we follow the railroad—our machine is not designed for progress on stone ballast or cross ties, and Lt. Moss imagines a special attachment enabling us to “ride the rails.” We camped one night on the Custer battle site, wild roses of various colors growing on the hills that witnessed that great slaughter. Most trying, as it turned out, were the sand hills of Nebraska, the roads unpaved, the temperatures well over 100 degrees each day, and water only available from railroad tanks erected at considerable distance from each other. Despite these deprivations, or perhaps because of them, I shall never forget this trip, particularly Sgt. Sanders’s fine tenor cutting through the hail that pelted our faces somewhere in the Great Plains to lead us in a heartfelt chorus of
The Girl I Left Behind Me
or
Marching Through Georgia
(humorously replacing “darkies” with “crackers” in the second verse of the latter) or the thousands, yes, thousands of spectators here in St. Louis, black and white, who cheered our drills and demonstrations upon our arrival yesterday at the Cottage in Forrest Park.

Father, I have seen (and cycled across) the Mississippi River. It is not a disappointment.

There is some talk that we will be returned to Ft. Missoula by rail—whether prompted by recent events in Cuba (or, perhaps, China) or merely that we have made our point to the Dept. of War, I do not know. The people we speak with throughout the country are “spoiling for a fight,” especially the youth, and it seems not to matter who the opponent shall be. Our near neighbors at the Fort, the Salish (popularly termed Flatheads, though their heads are not flat at all), have never developed a taste for the warpath, due either to a congenitally pacific nature or the ministration of the Jesuit worthies in their midst. Their chief, one Charlo, seems if not content at least resigned to their recent removal from the Valley to a reservation farther north, and our Missoula post remains an “open fort” without walls to block our sight of the magnificent vistas nor to shelter us from the punishing winter winds. (I do hope that October affords us the opportunity of battle in sunnier climes.) The tales Sgt. Sanders relates of our regiment’s role during the labor troubles haunting the Northern Pacific in Coeur d’Alene and other locales sound more like police work than “Injun fighting,” and at times I worry I have chosen the wrong unit in which to prove myself. But a soldier’s lot is to keep himself prepared for hazardous duty at all times, and to accept that he has no say in how his services will be employed.

A humbling lesson for Yrs. Truly.

(But if the next war is to be fought on bicycles, the 25th shall be in the van.)

Please share this offering with Mother and Jessie, and let them know they are ever in my thoughts. Do inform me of the latest concerning the “politicking” at home. The other fellows are much entertained by accounts of our little struggles there.