A Moment in the Sun (110 page)

In Cuba after the Dons surrendered, the little boys, skinny and hungry as they were, would lug your rifle for you on a long march, three, four, five miles hoping maybe you’d stop to eat and they get a scrap of hardtack out of it. Raggedy-ass, smiling, every color you could imagine. Here the word has come down that you don’t even let them near, any googoo over ten year old as like to cut your throat as look at you.

“Look like we the first colored been up this far,” says Too Tall. “Folks don’t know what we about.”

“Then it’s up to me to spread the news,” says Coop.

Clouds hang low in the broad sky. Companies H and F in dusty blue march down the red dirt road between deep green rice paddies dotted white with cattle egrets, one hundred twenty men with rifles on their shoulders and two dozen coolies staggering after them under packs and cases. It is rice-harvest time, women in broad hats bending to sickle handfuls of the stalks close to the ground, then binding them into bundles hung on tentlike wooden racks to dry. The Filipinas are careful to keep their faces turned away, but a huge carabao steps forward to get a closer look, chewing, snot running from its nose, a cloud of flies lifting and following, then resettling on its glistening black hide when it stops at the edge of the dirt road.

“Lookit that, Too Tall mama come out to greet us.”

“She that good-lookin, Too Tall, how come you so ugly?”

“And what that big ole thing hanging twixt her legs?”

“Googoos come after you sorry-ass niggers,” says Too Tall, who is dark-skinned and used to this, expects it, even, “don’t count on no help from me.”

“Somethin wrong,” says Corporal Pickney suddenly, looking up into the sky.

“What that?”

“It aint rainin.”

“Got to wait till they not one tree left we can stand under,” says Gamble, “then she gonna dump on us. I see one way over there.”

“My people had come to these islands, see what the weather is like, they would of kept on sailin.”

“Sailin, shit. Didn’t nobody in your family ever get let up on the deck to look at no islands, man.”

“I’m talkin way back. Story is they sailed in boats, knew how to swim—”

“If they was ever in the water it was with a rope around their ankle, some white man trolling for alligators.”

“Couldn’t use you for bait. Scare them gators away.”

“This enemy territory, less you all forgot,” calls Sergeant Jacks. “Might want to keep that noise down.”

“We aint sneaking up on nobody, Sarge,” Cooper calls back. “Hell, they can see for clear twenty miles across these fields.”

“Yeah, right about now they gone to wake General Aggy up from his nap, tell him the 25th is coming to grab his little googoo ass.”

“Can’t catch nobody you can’t find.”

“Hey, if we
was
to catch him—”

“Aguinaldo, shit,” says Coop. “Aggy aint but just one damn general. These people got more generals runnin around in these boondocks—hell, you own a pair of
shoes
they gone make you a Captain at least.”

“What’s this?”

Junior steps out of formation and pulls off a square of paper tacked to a telegraph pole.

“Junior mama left him a grocery list.”

There is a drawing of a black man at the top of the paper, hanging dead from a tree, his head cocked at an unnatural angle.

“
To the Colored American Soldier
—” reads Junior.

“That be us,” says Hardaway.

“
Why do you make war on us, freedom-loving men of the same hue, when at home the whites lynch your brothers in Georgia and Alabama—
”

“And Mississippi and Florida and Texas—”

“
It is without honor that you shed your precious blood. Your masters have thrown you in the most iniquitous fight with double purpose—to make you the instrument of their ambition. Your hard work will make extinction of your race—
it’s very well written,” says Junior, scanning down the page.

“—and Kansas and Missouri and Indiana—”

“The googoos think we gonna join up with them?”

“Hell yeah. Lookit all they got to offer—” Gamble sweeps his free arm at the rice fields around them. “Give us forty acres and one of these water buffalos that look like Too Tall mama.”

“Maybe if they throw in one of these little long-hair gals—”

“This not our country,” says Royal.

Too Tall laughs. “That’s what old Geronimo used to say bout that sorry pile of rocks where we built Huachuca. But now it
is
.”

“That’s what old King Cannibal say when the white mens come to take your grandaddy out from Africa. And they took him just the same.”

“But what they’re saying—”

“What they’re saying don’t mount to muleshit,” says Corporal Pickney. “ ‘Freedom-loving men of the same hue—’ that’s a laugh. Aint none of these people my color.”

“White folks calls em niggers just like they do us,” says Hardaway.

“A wolf and a dog may both be referred to as canines,” says Junior, folding the paper and slipping it inside his shirt. “But there is no confusing the two.”

“Junior—I’m sorry—
Cor
poral Junior—have got that right on the money,” says Coop. “Even if he is a in
iq
uitous sumbitch. But in this story
we
the wolves.” He jerks his head at a pair of the Filipinas across the field, shaking grains loose from dried bundles of rice straw. “And these people just shit out of luck.”

They come on the village of Las Ciegas in the late afternoon, the usual cluster of nipa huts scattered around the plaza in front of a tiny stucco church, Jacks sending a squad around to the rear of it to catch anyone trying to sneak away and the rest of them rushing in with bayonets fixed and voices barking.

“Front and center!” they shout. “All you googoos come on out!
Fuera, fuera!
” Two men rushing up each of the little ladders and onto the platforms of the huts and chasing people out, mostly old or women with children but a handful of younger men who scurry out with their hands on top of their heads crying “
Amigo, yo soy muy amigo!
,” herding them all into a mass in front of the church and telling them “
Bajo, bajo!
” to sit on the ground and some crying while the search is made, bayonets poked and probed and stashes of supplies dragged out and chickens and turkeys flapping and dogs hysterical at their boots and a bristly black hog tied to a tree with a knotted rope through its ear squealing in panic, squealing and trying to bolt, like to tear that ear right off till Coop puts one between its eyes to shut it up and impress the googoos and Royal biting his cheeks the whole while, hating them for this, pushing a man twice his age who is the size of a middling boy, all bone and gristle, pushing hard enough that the man falls over on his face.

“Get up!
Arriba
, goddammit, don’t make me be draggin your sorry ass over there! Up!”

One squad surrounding the villagers while the rest stab their bayonets into walls and floors and bedding, Coop and Too Tall digging with theirs under the hut platforms hoping for buried gold.

And then Captain Coughlin singles out one or another of them, jerked up and slapped onto a beautifully carved wooden chair in the middle of the plaza to face him and the turncoat interpreter whose name is Dayrit but the men call Stubby. Royal is the one supposed to pull them out, stepping over the cowering, crying mess to stand over the one he thinks they’re pointing to and saying “This one? You want this one?” and then grabbing hold of skinny arms to yank them up and drag the suspect stumbling over the others, gabbling and crying, to be interrogated.

I am death, he thinks. I am their angel of death.

One musket, useless to fire, is found in Las Ciegas, and a store of rice maybe too big for one family, and, under the mayor’s big hut that sits behind a little staked fence, a stack of Mexican silvers buried in a bamboo safe.

“I knew it!” cries Coop when he pries the lid off the bamboo section and pours the coins out on the dirt. “They just pretendin to be so raggedy-ass. Got their whole deal hid away somewhere.”

And the story from the ones set in the chair is always the same. This is a poor village. Some of the young men were killed by the Spanish, some have been kidnapped by the
insurgentes
or by gangs of bandits. If you take our food we will starve. We are
amigos
, friends of the Americans, and know nothing about fighting. And then, when it is clear that the
soldados negros
are not moving on, that they are going to garrison this town, they point out the mayor who is the only one with shoes on and can explain how the Spanish used to do it.

There is one young woman who does not cry and sits a little apart from the others. When Royal stands over her she gets to her feet before he has to grab her. He can smell cocoanut oil in her hair.

“She say her husband is died,” Stubby tells the captain when she is planted in the chair. “She say the
kastilas
kill him in Manila.” He puts his hands around his fat neck and makes a choking gesture. “Some time ago.”

“They all say their husbands were killed,” growls Captain Coughlin. “There’s nothing but widows in this country.”

Stubby grins and nods. “Widows, yes. We have many of these.”

“Tell her I don’t believe her. Ask her where he is.”

Royal watches the woman as she answers the shouted questions. She looks like she is maybe his same age. She looks like she is past hurting.

“She say he is
en la tumba
,” says Stubby. “He was called Fecundo Maga-puna.”

Captain Coughlin bends to put his face very close to hers, but her eyes are unwavering.

“Get her away from me,” he says and Royal moves but she is already on her feet. He follows her back to where she was sitting, cocoanut oil the sweetest thing he’s smelled in weeks, and when she turns to look into his eyes he mutters to her.

“
Perdóname
,” he says.

He is not sure if that’s right, if it’s only what you say if you bump a lady on a crowded trolley, if it doesn’t count unless you take your hat off first, but she does not glare back at him, only keeps looking, and for the rest of the questioning he can feel her eyes on him.

Nilda, he heard her say when Stubby asked her name. Nilda Magapuna.

They are bigger than the Spanish, much bigger. And dark, some of them, some as dark as the
negritos
up north and some closer to her color, but the ones in charge are all white men. So it works the same with them. They are men with rifles and do what is always done. At home in Zambales when she was a girl the Spanish did the same, and took everything there was to eat, but these men seem to be staying. If they stay long she will leave, after they relax their vigilance, leave and try to go back to Zambales. There is nobody here in Las Ciegas for her anymore, Fecundo buried and his mother gone to the coast so now they can talk about him openly, how he left owing money to so many, a gambler and a layabout and where did he find that girl?

When she looked into the eyes of the one it surprised her at first. They are just men. Just men with rifles like the Spanish are men or the ones fighting still to the north are men and if she doesn’t leave, soon, that will be trouble.

Hilario, the
capitán de barangay
, is pointing her out now.

She really is a widow, he says. She lives in the house of her dead husband’s mother who has left for the coast and that house is a good place to put some of your soldiers. If you pay her she can cook and wash your clothes. Hilario’s wife is glaring at Nilda because the wife knows Hilario has been after her since the day she arrived from Mariquina. The dark soldiers are all under the houses now, stabbing the ground with the blades on their rifles, looking for treasure. She hopes if they find any more they don’t start to fight over it. Some of them are looking at her, too, and the other young women. We are treasure, Nilda thinks, but only for a moment.

WARRIORS

Call it sentiment, but a guy will naturally back a slugger of his own complexion. Of course, if the scrap is a mismatch and his own pile of cocoanuts is on the line it is a different proposition. Which is why I, Private Runyon of the Minnesota Volunteers, give no odds when the mess-hall donnybrook between the Chief and the rock-knocker becomes a public event.

Previous to the incident they go for pals, these two, as much as any pair of one-stripers in the vols—the Chief being as talkative a representative of the feather-and-warpaint outfit as you are likely to bump up against and the rock-knocker, a hard-luck case out of Montana, an area where such individuals are in oversupply, always happy to give him an ear. Before their dust-up you could figure that whither goest one of them the other is never far behind, to the point where when the rock-knocker lands his tail in the jug for nixing his looey in the line of battle, in goes the noble savage as well. Fortunately for them, said officer is snatched by the googoos whilst on an excursion of dubious intent out of town, and charges against the two evaporate.

The exact cause leading to their sudden exchange of knuckle bouquets is difficult to nail down, though the dope which circulates after suggests that Atkins, which is the handle the rock-knocker chooses to be known by, commits the error of revealing a Kodak of his innocent sister back in Bozeman or whichever such burg he hails from, and the Indian, who states that his moniker is McGinty though everyone addresses him as Chief, makes a comment inappropriate to his stripe and hue. What with the mercury popping high and the general boredom served our hitch here in the Pearl of the Orient it is not unusual for rank-and-filers to altercate with each other based on one does not care for the manner in which the other peeps at him over their morning java, and when skirts are involved, no matter what color hide they are wearing, the stakes are likely to double.

Whatever the kick-off, here comes Atkins flung over from where the Colorados are laying on the feedbag, smack down onto our table with tin cups of java flying this way and tin plates of mutton stew flying that way and the Chief right after on top of him like Strangler Lewis attempting to twist his hat-holder off. Threats and remonstrations are traded—dirty savage this and red nigger that and I will kill you you paleface son of a bitch and things of this sort while all of us Minnesotas step back and provide them room to settle their disagreement—Atkins using the opportunity to test a rattan-mesh sitter on the Indian’s skull and the Chief lifting the rock-knocker by his shirt several times and throwing him against the floor to see if he will bounce until Captain Sturdevant arrives to spoil the entertainment.