A Moment in the Sun (112 page)

This fight, announces the captain without raising his voice, will continue until one man is unable to answer the bell. Throws will be allowed, but gouging, biting, low blows, obnoxious use of hands and elbows, and lollygagging in the ring will be punished—and here he pauses to gander meaningfully at each of the sluggers—will be punished by time in the stockade. I want a show from both of you fellows—come out fighting and may the best man win.

The bit about the throws is a raw deal and I stifle the urge to give it the hoot. Throws have not been allowed since Pegasus was a two-year-old, and it dawns on me that maybe the brass have their own pool going, with the captain down heavy favoring the Chief. I have seen a referee tackle a slugger in Idaho Springs once because he was in the satchel and concerned about his percentage, but tonight I am covered, I am in fact sitting pretty with a pile of Mexican silvers and American eagles already bagged and nothing riding on the outcome.

The bonger is tapped and the melee commences. Atkins steps out sharp, throwing leather in flurries and putting lots of mustard on it, with relish on top, but the Indian covers with his big slabs of arm and the assault does not amount to much. The volunteers are on their feet and shouting in the way of all suckers, thrilled to witness a contest of skill and science and probable slaughter. Atkins wears himself out by the end of the round and just before the bonger sounds again the big redskin decides he is crowding too close and lifts him up under the arms and tosses him halfway across the ring. The rock-knocker lands on his keister and the boys all give this the hoot while the Chief circles around the ropes hollering a war whoop strictly from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Extravaganza. This gets a rise out of the more fervent of the Anglo-Saxons in the crowd and between rounds a few of them come to me and double their bets, which more than covers the five-to-one play on the Chief.

Corporal Grissom is the Chief’s second, assigned to the duty by Captain Sturdevant, and he is absent without leave, leaning with his back to the ropes and jawing with a pal up in the cheap seats while his fighter plops on the stool.

Private Neely is busy in the other corner spitting water in Atkins’s kisser and then greasing it with lard and yapping strategy at him, though the only strategy available is the one adopted by El Supremo Aguinaldo and his outfit and this Atkins cannot implement because the captain will plug him before he gets halfway to the door. What Private Neely knows about boxing I know about flower arrangement, if you do not count what wreath to choose when a fellow sporting man is planted, and Atkins is not paying mind to him, only peeping across the ring at the Chief like a spring hen peeps a butcher with a meat cleaver in his mitt.

The second and third go pretty much like the first, the lead miner throwing and the redskin catching where it does not sting, only there is no mustard left on Atkins’s punches now, arm-weary already or maybe the croakers really did pump some poison into him which they say is the only way to kill the French ache if the quicksilver does not kill you first. In the fourth the Indian goes finally on the warpath, swinging haymakers left and right, sidearm jobs that no matter how Atkins tries to block with his elbows still nearly knock him crabwise off his feet, the boys up and hollering for blood and they will see some only the Chief needs to raise his artillery a notch, happy to bat his former pal around the ring till Atkins ducks when he should not duck and catches one on the side of his noggin that puts him on one knee. The Chief seems confused and backs off, looking around at all the volunteers who have cocoanuts riding on him screaming to finish the job, even the captain waving him in for the kill, but he only frowns like he suddenly does not savvy the white man’s tongue and then Atkins is saved, or perhaps doomed, by the bell.

A dozen chalk-eaters crowd me then, desiring to hedge their previous indiscretions and get on the Indian at five to one, but I inform them that the bank is closed. The fifth begins with the rock-knocker looking like his pins are not completely beneath the rest of his corpus and suddenly there is Private Neely pulling at my coat with his mitts full of scratch and wearing a face that will make a hangman weep.

He makes me promise, says Private Neely. He wants to blow the rest of this at whatever the tilt is.

On himself? I query, judging that the whack on the noggin has relieved the miner of what little sense he possesses to begin with. Let us remember that this is an individual who tumbles for a doll he meets in the clap shack.

He makes me promise, explains the second, on my mother’s grave.

Inform him that your mother is still living.

Please, he counters, waving the rock-knocker’s boodle under my nose. Now this is paper money, the green variety that Uncle Sammy puts the ink on, the variety that is accepted in the sort of San Francisco sporting houses I shall soon be a patron of, the kind that spends plenty but does not wear a hole in your pockets the way a pile of golden eagles will. The miner has been a stalwart companion to me as far back as Denver and I am as sentimental as the next character, crying at weddings of dolls I have a yen for, the christening of screaming infants and the planting of dear friends who die owing me cocoanuts—but this waving green I cannot resist.

It is five to one, I announce, snatching the cabbage.

Could you crank that up to six? queries the second. My slugger is on his last legs out there.

This is not an exaggeration, as I have not removed my peepers from the ring, where Atkins is being pounded like a boardinghouse steak, the Indian unloading with both paws into his barely protected middle, the rock-knocker staggering backward without throwing a counter, the boys hollering their lungs raw and Sturdevant, hands folded behind his back, strolling around them with a little smile on his kisser like he is admiring the roses. I will sit through an evening of Manila googoo chicken fights before I stay put for a mismatch, but I am holding the bank and have my own pile of cocoanuts riding on it now, so I cover the play six to one in the notebook and hold my water.

Private Neely hurries back to the corner and I see Atkins look over to him after he dives into a clinch with the big Indian hoisting him clear off his toes and squeezing the wind out of him, and the second gives Atkins the thumbs up as if to give him heart. As if heart can help a cornered coon against a grizzly bear.

The Chief tries to throw Atkins clear out of the ring and nearly makes the point, the miner snatching the ropes to keep himself out of the laps of the Company D Minnesotas and then sprawling onto the canvas. While he crawls back onto his pins the Chief goes into his war dance again, whooping and chopping one hand down like it is the hatchet he will bury in Atkins’s skull. It does not appear to be a good night for Anglo-Saxon progress.

Atkins gets himself steady and when the redskin turns they exchange a look I have seen before on the front range between a timber wolf and a very old fleabag of a buffalo, a look that says This is the curtain, buster, and the miner even nods slightly, as if saying I understand, thus reads the rule of claw and fang, and then the Indian lumbers in.

He lumbers in cocking his sleepmaker behind him but the little worn-out rock-knocker quicksteps forward and whips an overhand right like a base-ball hurler flush on the redskin’s beezer, crowding to follow it with an uppercut he starts from the toes, planting it square on his opponent’s chin, and then staggers back as if that is all he has.

The Chief’s peepers roll up in his head and he totters this way and that and then somebody from the Colorados hollers “Timberrrrrrr!” and he goes down on his face like a hundred-year-old redwood. It is quiet for a moment, all of us as stunned as a catfish on an ice wagon, and then the bell rings and the true-blue Anglo-Saxons start to whoop and holler and stomp on the boards, celebrating the ineffable march of the white man and calculating their haul. Mostly I am hearing the clink of all those silvers and golds I collected rattling down the shitter, the sound of greenbacks flapping out of my pocket, and the Indian does not stir.

He does not stir as a detail of the boys carry his carcass into the back where Major Ruckheimer, our company croaker, slaps his kisser and dumps a bucket of water on him and jams a stick in his jaws so he should not swallow his tongue, does not stir until after the mittens have been untied and yanked off and Atkins has been helped in, looking beat to hell but relieved he is not dead and has earned so many hundreds of cocoanuts to blow on his china doll.

Where am I, ask the redskin then, and Who shut the lights off and things of this nature as he sits up and plops his hat-holder into his big, bandage-wrapped mitts. There is resin on his kisser where it hit the canvas, his beezer scraped a little, but he looks pretty chipper for a guy who has just been coldcocked in the ring.

Who won? asks the Indian and Captain Sturdevant and the other brass crowding around get a laugh out of that but I do not.

I do not laugh when I settle accounts with all the boys, nor when I hand over a sack of my own hard-won cocoanuts to the rock-knocker, as it should be known that the Runt, if that is how you choose to address me, is no welsher. Atkins is bruised and battered but still in possession of all his choppers.

Private Neely informs me you take my play at six to one, he says to me, laying a swollen-knuckled hand onto my shoulder. That is extremely white of you.

I do not laugh either when later, being of a suspicious nature, I sneak back and shake the lumps of sponge from their boxing gloves, the last substance one would expect sworn enemies should be stuffing into their mittens, nor when I see them together in the mess a few days after, chumming around like there is no hard feeling betwixt fellow ring warriors. I judge from his haymakers that the Chief has not previously taken part in a contest of skill and science, but somewhere, perhaps in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Extravaganza, he learns to take one hell of a dive.

And as for sentiment—unless you have got both fighters in the satchel you can forget about it.

SQUAW MAN

“Arizona,” he lies.

It has gotten to be a habit, like calling himself Tommy Atkins. If the railroad man has noticed Hod’s cheek swollen from the fight he’s at least not staring at it.

“Arizona and New Mexico, mostly. Little outfits digging for gold and silver, though the ore isn’t as rich there as they hoped.”

The recruiter eyes his uniform. “And when exactly do you become a free man?”

“Ship leaves Friday.”

“And if I was to check with your lieutenant—”

“Googoos got him about a month back. But any of the other officers—you know—‘Service honest and faithful.’ ” If they bother to check he is sunk, but this is not the minefields and they are pretty hard up for white men.

“We won’t be digging tunnels right away. How the line is set up now, it’s just maintenance—”

“Hell, I helped build the White Pass Railroad in the dead of winter,” he lies again. “Back in the Klondike. And I spent a good deal of time on the Northern Pacific and the Denver and Rio Grande.”

The recruiter, who says he is from Idaho, narrows his eyes. “You been all over the damn map, haven’t you?”

Hod gives him a smile and speaks softly, thinking how Jeff Smith would play it. “Yes, sir, and I think I finally found a spot that suits me.”

The recruiter has an electric fan pointed straight at the back of his head, making his little bit of hair stick up, and does not appear happy to be in the Philippines.

“Your work gangs will be mostly coolies. You speakee any of that?”

“No, sir, but we had em to carry our supplies on the march. You just sing the right tune in American and they’ll hop to it pretty good.”

Mei has taught him a few words, useful to tell a shopkeeper he is a thief and a liar and you might pay half of what he says but not a penny more.

“Foreman’s wage is fifteen a month, which is plenty when you think how cheap it is to live here.”

“Bout what I get now,” Hod nods, as if agreeing on the salary. “Course nobody sposed to shoot at a section boss. How far up the line you think I’ll be?”

It is always good to talk like you already got the job. Make their mind up for them.

“From here to Dagupan, wherever we need a road crew. Till we start to expand.”

“And that would be—?”

“Whenever they get the damn bandits under control. You people,” and here he points at the single stripe on Hod’s uniform sleeve, “been taking your sweet time about it.”

“Yes, sir, I spose we have.”

Hod pictures the recruiter sweating it out, surrounded by a bunch of
insurrectos
with their bolos in hand. Hearing that guff from the regulars is one thing, but from a civilian—

“And you know we don’t give any pay in advance.”

“I’ll draw a full month when I muster out. That should tide me over.”

The recruiter looks like he still isn’t sure. “You a temperate man?”

There has been more shooting in Manila lately than any time since the first days of the war, men bored and drunk and dreading the confinement of the long ship ride home. A provost guard got killed the other night by an Oregon crazy on
beeno
, some of the men still preferring jungle juice to anything with a label on it.

“I haven’t taken the Oath,” Hod smiles, “but liquor don’t set right with me in the heat.”

The recruiter nods. The front of his face is running sweat. “And you understand the deal with your citizenship?”

General Otis has decreed that volunteers may not remain in Manila to engage in business, forced either to be shipped home or re-enlist for immediate service.

“I think so—”

“Mr. Higgens prefers you go for a British passport, since they own the road. He can help at their embassy—”

Hod grins. It is a big step, he knows, giving up on America, but so far he’s surprised at how little the idea bothers him. “Long as they don’t send me off to fight them Dutchmen.”

The recruiter doesn’t think this is funny. “Africa,” he says, writing Hod’s made-up name onto a list, “can’t be any worse than this.”