A Moment in the Sun (118 page)

“Swing on around behind,” he says, “and come at em with the sun behind our backs like they done to the boys.”

There is nobody at the western outpost, dead or alive. They hide their canteens and the extra rifle in the rocks and share out Junior’s ammunition, pressing the rounds nose-down into their hatbands, then take the slings off their weapons, spreading out into a firing line. Royal realizes it is Junior’s Krag he has kept, no nick on the forestock.

“You know what to do,” says Ponder and they set off at a trot. When they get to the rice they take the irrigation ditches two at a stride, the Filipinos in sight now, little men, crouching behind the dike at the end of the field, firing into the village. The regulars run twice as close as Royal thinks they should before one of the bolomen sees and points and shouts and then they all flop on their bellies and begin to fire. The rebels can’t see how many they are because of the setting sun in their eyes and panic, the ones not hit in the first volley running along the dike but too high, exposed to the soldiers dug in in the village, and falling, falling, wet mud sounds and water splattering up into Royal’s face from the ditch in front of him, probably fire from the boys in Las Ciegas and then the rebels scatter in every direction like a startled flock of birds and Ponder yells to run them down.

Royal is up running after, the others whooping beside him and the first one he shoots is wounded already, kneeling, the round passing through his throat and spatting against the wet bank beyond and Royal running past, working the bolt as he goes, dropping one and then two from behind and seeing a third go down, just falling in the uneven paddy with his bolo flying away and Royal is over him before he can rise. The man, not young, clutches a cross hanging from a cord on his neck and says words, sides heaving from the run, and Royal waits till they meet eyes to thrust the barrel inches away and put one through his chest. He sits then on the wet ground then and listens to the man’s last wet gasping as the others splash past and the rest of the garrison steps out from the huts on the other side of the irrigation dike, cheering.

PAN AMERICAN

The Assassin begins at the Filipino Village. The tops of thatched huts are visible as he skirts along the fence, smoke rising from a breakfast cookfire inside. Roast-pork smell. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday noon. He turns right between the cyclorama dramatizing the Battle of Missionary Ridge, a limping old man in yankee blue shouting the names of dead generals to drum up interest, and the Cineograph exhibit, slowing to mingle with the crowd that flows in and out of the Pabst Pavillion. Nobody is watching him.

Nobody knows.

Across the Midway is an enormous, beautiful woman’s face, chin slightly lifted, her eyes closed in sweet reverie while people stroll through the wide entrance portal at the base of her neck.
DREAMLAND
say the letters on the rim of the corona set in her luscious, wind-blown hair. Only moments after the gates open there are thousands of spectators at the Exposition, sleep-walking, hazily grazing past amusement and advertisement to ponder which exotic world they will surrender the quarters clutched in their fists to.

Only I am awake, thinks the Assassin, and turns away to walk toward the thick brown Bavarian turrets of Alt Nurnberg.

A German brass band thumps away inside the courtyard, tuba grunting rhythmically, and a man outside in lederhosen and a feathered hat does a hopping, knee-slapping dance. The Assassin turns left at the biergarten, passing the Johnstown Flood exhibit and then the tall wood-pole fence that protects the festgoers from Darkest Africa. He hooks south along the Canal, turning his head away when a motor-gondola passes bearing two men, one cranking the lever of some kind of large camera. He turns again at the Mall, plunging into the crowd between the Electricity building and the Machinery and Transportation complex. If the monster is Capital, as the books and pamphlets have it, then this is its lair. He holds the site map, carefully marked and folded, under his arm. Mines, Railroads, Manufacturing, Agriculture and Government, Standard Oil, Quaker Oats, Aunt Jemima, Horlicks Malted Milk, and Baker’s Chocolate, all glorified in plaster and stone. There is no escaping the message-barkers and street bands hammering the air from every side, young girls in strange costumes passing out samples, concession signs boasting that their prices beat any at the Pan. The Assassin squirms through the press of bodies and emerges to face the sparkling blue-green of the Grand Basin, pausing to stare up for a moment at the massive Electric Tower that dominates the fairgrounds. It is an ivory tower with gold trimming and lustrous blue-green panels, a steadfast white sentinel over the riotous reds, yellows, and oranges of the South American buildings, with the gilded Goddess of Light herself sparkling four hundred feet above them.

I will bring this down.

The Assassin turns and walks past the Cascades, each towering plume of water a different color of the rainbow, then takes a seat on the wall of the Fountain of Abundance to wait.

The Kodak fiends are hiding them in their wicker baskets. Or shoeboxes, if less prepared. Word has gone out about the extra charge at the gate, a squad of sharp-eyed boys collecting fifty cents per camera, but with so many visitors blithely carrying their own food onto the grounds for bench picnics it only makes sense to smuggle your Brownie or Bull’s-Eye past them. Harry sees the devices everywhere, pulled out to snap the family grouping in front of one of the Exposition juggernauts or immortalize a comrade with his arm around some Midway exotic or a sweetheart precariously astride a dromedary’s back, then quickly nestled back into their hiding places. There is no hiding Mr. Edison’s apparatus of course, and immediately upon hauling it from the gondola Daddy Paley is surrounded by shutter bugs and small boys wanting to examine it. Ensconced in Luchow’s Nurnberg restaurant with the machine at his feet, a platter of steaming wursts and a nickel draught before him, he gives Harry leave to explore until the President comes at noon.

“Find us some good views,” he says, flicking excess foam off the beer with a finger. “But I don’t want to lug this thing up any stairs.”

The mirror maze at Dreamland is no good, of course, not enough light and the problem of seeing the camera itself in reflection. Sig Lubin’s Cineograph parlor is next door, peddling their copycat views and counterpart boxing dodges, a bold venture considering Lubin himself has fled Philadelphia for foreign climes, avoiding indictment for patent infringement. Or perhaps he is only hiding out in the Gypsy Camp or the Streets of Mexico or sweltering with the sled dogs in the Esquimaux Village. Their own Mutoscope parlor is doing lackluster business so far, what with a live Fatima undulating her torso only one door over in the Cairo Bazaar.

Even here, in the mildly salacious Midway, there are twice as many women as men. Young and old, rich and relatively modest of means, in pairs and groups, a few dowagers squired about on wicker-seated roller chairs, women with picture hats and rented parasols strolling, observing, judging. “The American Girl,” as the periodicals like to label her, is here in abundance, and Harry can’t help but think of the fun it would be for Brigid and her sisters to do the Pan. He casts a professional eye up at the Aero-Cycle, a kind of giant teeter-totter with a revolving wheel full of screaming enthusiasts at either end. Perhaps a view from a distance, then the dizzied, excited passengers dismounting—but to film on the ride itself seems pointless, too many axes of motion for a viewer to keep a handle on. Those roller chairs, though—remove the old biddy and replace her with a camera operator, the device rigged just above his lap somehow, with a trained man to push him, and they could approximate a long moving shot on land similar to what they just filmed on the Canal—

Something to consider. Harry hurries under the wildly swinging armature and pays fifty cents for a Trip to the Moon.

Several dozen spectators gather in the darkened Theater of the Planets, their guide, a basso-voiced gentleman with riding goggles perched on his forehead, lit dramatically from below while the screen behind him glows with the whorls of the Milky Way.

“We are about to embark on a journey,” he intones, “to a landscape on which no human foot has ever trod.”

At least not since the last twenty-minute tour, thinks Harry, as they are led into the
Airship Luna
by the crew members. It is a beautifully designed fantasy, with multiple wings and propellers and large open portholes to see out from.

“Please steady yourselves, ladies and gentlemen,” suggests the guide, wearing a fancifully adorned football helmet and with his goggles pulled down over his eyes now. “We have some inclement weather reported over the Buffalo area this evening.”

It is not evening outside, of course, but as the wings begin to flap madly and the body of the Airship tilts and shakes, rear propeller buzzing as it picks up speed, what they see below them outside the wind-blasted portholes is the Pan-American Exposition at night, lit up in all its electric glory, surrounded by the city of Buffalo and yes, that must be it—

“Those are the Niagara Falls down to your left, ladies and gentlemen,” announces their guide from his pilot’s seat. “One of the Great Wonders of our own dear Earth, to which we bid a fond adieu—” and here a sudden swift upwrenching that causes the ladies to gasp and grab out for their men, Harry with a sudden pang, missing her here, his Brigid, not so much on this Midway as anywhere on the grounds, pointing things out to her, listening to her beautiful laugh, sitting quietly, perhaps, in the Botanical Gardens, floating in a gondola with his hand in hers—

“We’re going to fall!” cries the matron sitting beside him, hugging her bag tightly to her chest. “We’re going to fall and smash to the ground!”

“Mind yourselves, fellow adventurers, we’re passing through a storm!”

And a storm it is, the wind moaning past, a cloud bank enveloping the
Luna
, lightning flashes and the boom of present thunder, even a few drops of precipitation whipping in through the portholes and then—

The passengers sigh as one. Through the front panel, beyond the guide at his controls, the full moon sits like a giant pearl in the suddenly clear night sky, sparkling stars beyond it.

“There she is, dead ahead,” calls out the guide. “Our destination, ladies and gentlemen. The Queen of the Heavens.”

It grows larger and larger as they approach, a wonderful illusion, thinks Harry, looking around at the delighted, awe-stricken faces of his fellow passengers. Méliès knew it from the beginning—the viewer will soon tire of what he can already see, with all its color and immediacy, in the world. Even our actualities with the original fighters instead of Lubin’s counterparts, our rushing trains and fire wagons, our scenes of exotic or everyday wonder, are illusions, are a series of still photographs, devoid of color, flashed rapidly on a screen to fool the human eye. But treat that eye to something that could never exist—

The light in front of them grows blindingly white as the moon’s surface fills the panel.

“Shield your eyes, earth beings, for the intensity of the Lunar Rays may damage them!”

The Airship makes a sudden sweeping turn and there is a thump and scrape as they toboggan along the rough terrain, the faintly lit, cratered surface rushing past the portholes. Some of it is electricity, Harry decides, powered by the Falls not so many miles away, driving the Airship along some sort of rail past sets that have been artfully created. Some is only lantern projections, a horizontal strip, perhaps, or a turret revolved to give the sense of motion. Whether the ship moves past the landscape or the landscape past the ship, it is, with the rocking and buffeting and blasting of air, enormously effective.

“The inhabitants of the realm we have intruded upon are known as the Selenites,” says the guide, turning to them and deepening his voice in sober warning. “They are thought to be friendly to visitors, but please, if we should encounter any members of the race, be careful not to provoke them.”

The crew members help the voyagers out of the Airship and onto the moon’s craggy surface then, Harry refusing the proffered hand. The ground feels spongy underfoot, and his walking stick leaves tiny dents in it as they head away from the craft.

Above their heads hangs a carpet of stars. They are led around the raised lip of a large crater, stepping carefully, till they reach a small hill with a large cavern opening at the base of it.

“This is the Grotto of the City of the Moon. I must plead that we be allowed egress.” The guide steps ahead and cups his hands around his mouth, calling into the dark abyss. “Hello! We hail from Buffalo, on the planet Earth! May we enter?”

A gasp of surprise then, as a large-headed, spiky-backed creature in a green and red outfit and sharply pointed slippers appears at the mouth of the grotto. Harry estimates that the fellow barely comes up to his hip. He looks the passengers and crew over for a long moment, then holds a tiny hand straight out to them in greeting.

“Hail, Erse-Dwellairs!” he calls in a strange, high-pitched voice. “I welcome you to ze City of ze Moon.”

If Harry is not mistaken the Selenite has a touch of a French accent.

There are more little Selenites inside as they descend into the twisting, turning grotto, weaving through eerily glowing stalactites and stalagmites on a green concrete floor, past towering columns carved with the faces of fierce and unearthly creatures, some of the little inhabitants toiling away with miniature picks and crowbars, revealing veins of glistening gold or jewels gleaming in unimaginable colors. Among them glide lovely Moon-Maids of more human stature, dark-haired beauties dressed in diaphanous robes who stare at the visitors shyly with their huge eyes. They are led into a large chamber, and suddenly there is music, the liquid rippling of a harp, a sweet mandolin, and voices now, as the tiny Selenites and ghostly Moon-Maids join in a melody—

My sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon

I’m going to marry him soon