A Moment in the Sun (116 page)

“And inside this here is goldfish—”

“That stuff is poison,” says Royal, stepping over as casual-looking as he can manage. “Even the coolies won’t eat it.” There is a Chinese who sneaks up once a week to sell the men
beeno
, and canned salmon is the one thing he won’t take in trade.

“She get a taste of me, she won’t worry about no food.”

“She’s not interested in you.”

“Get your own damn squaw, Roy.” Coop, a bit taller, harder, turns back to the woman and wiggles the can inches from her face as if she needs to smell it. “You aint never had nothin like this, darlin.”

“If she needs food just give it to her.”

Coop turns to step back close to Royal. They are both in their undershirts, pouring sweat from the heat. When the clothes are washed and dried they feel good on your skin for a few minutes and then you are soaked through again.

“You triflin with me?”

“There’s plenty of jiggy-jiggy girls in Manila.”

“We aint in fuckin Manila.”

“Then you’re gonna have to try someone else.”

Coop smiles. “You know I can whup your ass.”

“Most likely.”

Coop half turns as if to say something to the woman, who still hasn’t looked at him, then pivots to smash Royal on the side of the head with the can, knocking him off his feet.

The woman freezes, bent over the clothes basket.

The nearest of the dogs gets up with some effort, watching the men warily as it slinks several feet farther away, then pancakes itself to the ground again. A few of the men peek groggily out of the huts they are billeted in. A few natives look out too, but see it might be a fight and duck back inside.

Royal gets halfway up, decides, and bullrushes Coop, catching him around the hips and driving him into the bamboo clothestree which collapses into the dust with them.

He has a chunk of Coop’s cheek in his fingers, trying to rip it off while Coop thumps him on the back and neck and ribs with the fist that isn’t pinned down. He wants some distance so he can really hit but Royal is strong and won’t let loose, their boots scraping the dirt for purchase, the two writhing crookedly across the plaza like a half-stomped cinch bug that just won’t die and the men come out now, the ones not on outpost or patrol, most just in their underclothes and barefoot forming a shifting ring around the pummeling men on the ground.

“What they scufflin about?”

“Don’t matter much, do it?”

“Got that woman’s wash all dirtied up again.”

“Too damn hot to fight.”

“Yeah—ought to just shoot each other and be done with it.”

Royal is underneath, his forearm wedged under Coop’s throat, trying to feel out a way to break his neck but if he moves anything Coop will be able to pound him again in the ribs where they feel broken. The thumb in his eye might be his own. There is a little bit of shade from the men closed in around them and then it is gone and a bucketful of warm water smacks down on them and it is Lieutenant Drum’s voice.

“You men get on your feet.”

The lieutenant has dressed himself in a hurry, the buttons on his tunic out of line with their holes. The bridge of his nose has been blistered by the sun. He seems more weary than furious.

“Since you obviously don’t appreciate your rest time,” says the white man, “we’ll have to find a way to make use of it.”

Royal can’t tell if he’s bleeding or not. The water cooking away on his skin and hair feels good, and he is glad that Sergeant Jacks is out on patrol. It has been all marching and guard duty and aimless patrols—Las Ciegas to Bamban, Bamban to Iba, Iba down to Subig to San Pedro and Botolan and Angeles and Castillejos and the place they never learned the name of and now stuck back here in Las Ciegas, their lives dragged out between bugle calls, sunup and sundown the same every day. Junior says it’s because they’re on the Equator. Royal stands at attention, eyes forward, as the lieutenant announces their punishment. Behind, the woman stoops to lift wet, dirt-dragged uniforms from the ground.

It is the outpost they hate the most, no shade, no cover, just perched on an outcropping of limestone rocks with a long view in three directions. Hardaway and Gamble and Corporal Pickney are out of sight but within shouting distance. There is a finger-sized lizard in a shaded crevice of rock a few yards from him, and except for the little orange bubble working in and out on the side of its neck it hasn’t twitched for hours. How many hours Royal doesn’t know because he doesn’t have a watch and they’ve taken all the clappers out of the bells, even in Las Ciegas, and today there will be no relief, not after two, not after four, just Sergeant Jacks coming by to be sure he is still awake and remind him whose ass he has also put in the sling and Coop is out on the other side of the village doing the same thing. The side of his head is swollen, pounding, and his ribs hurt with every breath. He saw the can of salmon lying on the ground as he left, a huge dent in it.

The lizard doesn’t move.

The lizard understands how to be in this country. Royal’s stomach isn’t right and he can’t sleep, troops of monkeys screaming all night in the forest just west of town and something, rats or maybe a snake, rustling around in the thatch of the hut. Royal tries to touch only the wooden parts of his rifle as he shifts it from shoulder to shoulder. If Jacks or any of the other officers catch him sitting or just not at attention like a damn tin soldier it will be more punishment under the sun.

She comes from behind over the rocks, so silent that if she was a rebel his throat would be cut. She offers him water in a stoppered length of bamboo and something folded in a banana leaf. When he pulls the leaf open there is a yellow-orange rice ball with bits of chicken and onion and peppers in it. It smells of cocoanut and is still warm from the pot. She sits on a rock near the lizard, which does not move, and watches him eat.

Royal points at her. “Nilda.”

She nods. She is short, sturdier than Jessie, her face maybe a little flat but with that good long hair and her eyes—

“
Bringhe
,” she says, pointing to the rice ball, then to herself. “Nilda.”

CORRESPONDENCE

They have a new hero. And, the Humorist supposes, he is fitting for the age. Not a Washington, stoic, patriarchal, erect upon a towering steed on a hilltop surveying the conflict; not a Lincoln, haunted by carnage, magnanimous, no, positively be
reft
in victory, understanding that too harsh a palliative may vanquish not only the disease but also its host; not even a Grant, steadfast, straightforward, implacable—it is a Funston.

A banty rooster that crows at the opening of a news scavenger’s notebook, a bully boy on the field of battle whose idea of sport is to take no prisoners, a Kansan Custer who leaves caution (and humility and compassion and, that antiquated notion, honor) to the wind, and whose biography, when inevitably published, can bear no title more apt that
Pluck and Luck
.

The subterfuge is nothing new. Homer is chock full of it, the wily Odysseus time after time proving to be more a confidence man than a warrior. Intercept the messenger, yes, decipher the code, forge documents—such intrigues are all accepted in the Great Game. Aguinaldo, in his jungle retreat, believes he is to be reinforced, General Lacuna writing to confirm he has sent a company of his men, along with five yankee prisoners. A bold plan, and admirable in that aspect, with an element of risk. Funston himself, with his chosen officers, dressed in rags of uniforms, marched through the hostile wilderness by loyal Macabebes disguised as Filipino insurrectionists. Ninety miles of pain and privation, through enemy territory, lost at times, hunger and thirst a constant, fearing discovery, or, perhaps worse, mutiny. Finally, exhausted and starving, unable to go farther.

“Only eight miles from the enemy stronghold,” he boasts, “and
too weak to move
.”

This is where the story diverges from the parable of the Trojan Horse.

Emissaries, Macabebe scouts able to pass as Tagalos, are sent ahead
to beg for food
. Sustenance is delivered to their camp, the ruse maintained. Nourished, their fighting spirit restored, the party marches triumphantly into Aguinaldo’s bailiwick, his much smaller compliment of soldiers turning out in parade dress to welcome them, and then—

The Humorist imagines himself a man at the prow of a lifeboat, peering over a restless sea. Perhaps it is in time of War. He spies a figure tossed on the waves, desperately swimming, survivor of some maritime calamity, each stroke more feeble than the last and about to go under. He bids the oarsman put his back to it, the lifeboat plowing through murderous swells, till he can lean forward and stretch his arm out to that solitary victim, reaching, reaching, and finally the exhausted wretch able to clasp his wrist with one hand—and plunge a dagger into his heart with the other.

Funston is the man with the dagger.

He is the toast of the Nation.

“Villia, shot in the shoulder,” Funston says of Aguinaldo’s chief of staff, “leapt out the window and into the river, but the Macabebes fished him out, and kicked him all the way up the bank, and asked him how he liked it.”

Not only intrepid and fearless, but a wag of the first order. This proud jokester is the new model, his name and deeds on every tongue, the paragon of Patriotism, the unbashful subject of glowing editorials and stentorian orations, the centerpiece of an overnight industry of hagiography and boy-admiration. Here is a man, say the politicians, say the churchmen and the public-school teachers, to be proud of. A man to emulate. He has captured Aguinaldo and thus ended the war (the war that was declared over a full year ago, that somehow continues to claim, despite the surrender of its putative instigator, hundreds of new victims each week).

The Humorist once proposed, as a jest, a statue of Adam, the First Man, only to have one civic booster take the idea literally and mount a campaign to construct the thing. Perhaps, with his wide celebrity, he can now arouse interest in a suitable monument to Funston—the doughty colonel on his knees, in tatters, raising a trembling hand in supplication to the diminutive but haughty Tagalo
generalissimo
—while craftily concealing the blade, gilt-edged for glory, behind his back.

Enough to stir the pride of the dullest American schoolboy.

But no, this might be misunderstood.
He has discarded the grin of the funny man
, chided the
Times
after his first mildly satiric writings on the Philippine disgrace,
for the sour visage of the austere moralist
. For what place do morals have in the National Business? His merest whisper, not of reproach, but of frank disillusionment with the feisty Funston’s exploit, has brought the Humorist a veritable flood-tide of correspondence from all corners of the Republic, impressive in its profusion, inspiring in the forthrightness of its sentiment, no finer example than the missive that now lies unsheathed on his desk.

Dear Traitor
, it begins—

QUANDARY

There is no telling which one they’ll run until the Chief comes in. The Cartoonist pins them to the wall side-by-side. He prefers the first as a drawing, a contrite Aggy in short pants writing
I Promise To Stop Fighting
on the blackboard as his new teacher, Miss Liberty, confiscated slingshot in hand, looks on benignly. The other sepia-tinted ragamuffins—Hawaii, Guam, Porto Rico—sit obediently in their labeled chairs, hands folded on desktops, a tiny American flag propped in each inkwell. The focus of the drawing, however, is the lad’s mother, a jowly Hoar in a calico dress and straw bonnet, sympathetic tears pouring down his cheeks. The Cartoonist has lettered
ANTI-IMPERIALIST LEAGUE
on the hem of the frock, unsure if enough readers will recognize the Senator. He’s tried Carnegie, but the Scotsman never looks right unless seated on a pile of money bags or the stooped back of a beleaguered ironworker. By now he can draw Bryan with his eyes closed, but the Chief has kept a candle lit for the old warhorse despite his lackluster account in November, and Twain remains beyond the pale.

HIS FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL

—
says the caption, condescending but not vindictive, a nod to the elation felt by most citizens at the daring capture of the little
supremo
.

The other sketch keeps the heat on McKinley and the jingoes. A runty, demented TR in his outsized Rough Rider togs and an equally diminutive Colonel Funston (whose mug has been plastered all over the dailies in the last week) shoulder a pole from which they’ve slung scrawny, bedraggled Aguinaldo like a slaughtered hind.

WE
’
VE BROUGHT YOU AN APPETIZER

—
proclaim the boys as they rush toward the President and Mark Hannah, bibs tucked into their collars, knife and fork poised in hand, greedily surveying the map of the world laid out on their table. A sobering thought that transcends the moment’s euphoria, muses the Cartoonist, but not one likely to satisfy the man on the street.

The Chief, when he stampedes in from whatever theatrical event or soirée he has escorted his young ladies to this evening, will not ask the Cartoonist’s opinion. He will frown at the drawings, the frown turning to a scowl when he spies the hated Roosevelt, eventually grunt, and, hopefully, jab his finger into the center of one of them. “Print it,” he will say, a newsman’s newsman, charging uphill as heedlessly as the toothy Vice President during his “crowded hour” on San Juan Hill.

Or maybe he’ll ask the Cartoonist if plucky Funston couldn’t appear to be just a few inches taller than TR.

There are ten of them, with Junior, a buck sergeant now, in charge. The days have been getting cooler since the end of the year but they have been off the road for most of the patrol, up and over the rice-field dikes, working their way through prickerbush and scrub, chasing another rumor of a rebel build-up. The two collections of huts they’ve walked through, not big enough to be on the lieutenant’s map, were deserted, but that might only be for one of the endless religious marches, people here with more saints to celebrate than days to do it on, or else they’ve heard the rumor too and don’t want to be around for reprisals from the losers. Royal sees one man the whole morning, standing thigh-deep in the muck of a flooded rice field whipping a switch on the butt of a sweat-lathered carabao, itself mired to the chest, trying to get it to drag a wooden harrow through the mess and neither of them going anywhere. He feels more like the water buff than the man, hard to say if it is really trying to pull itself forward or just satisfied to sink deeper and ignore what’s happening to its hind end.