A Moment in the Sun (134 page)

The rifle fire is closer now, closer than he’s ever heard it.

“Buck up, my friend,” he calls to the man tied to the other side of the tree. “Our salvation may be at hand.”

The rebels are running now, this way and that way to gather their paltry belongings, and the
jefe
, whose name he knows is Gallego, is walking toward them with the brute who has been charged with their security ever since the colored renegade was untied, the brute who yanks the knots so tight that both Niles’s wrists are chafed and infected, so tight that he has lost feeling in the discolored fingers of his left hand.

Gallego barks an order to the brute and stalks away. The others are nearly all gone now, fled in panic. The man has only a bolo, one of the long ones they use for killing, tight in his hand. He scowls down at them for a long moment.

“If you’re not going to kill us,” says the Correspondent flatly, breaking his long silence, “at least cut this cracker bastard’s tongue out.”

The pain is worse than Niles has imagined, the first blow snapping his collarbone close to the neck and twisting as it rends him apart, and he hears something like the bellowing of a mule before the white light—

He wakes anew, still bound, heart pounding, but far from whole. The pain is like a scream tearing at every fiber of him and there is another scream, audible, something like a baby’s constant wail, only from a grown man on the other side of the tree. When his eyes clear, Niles sees the googoo lying several yards away, a huge stain of blood spreading on his back, bolo still clutched in his outstretched hand. He goes away again, pain still there. He is only pain. And then he feels a hand take his chin and lift it up. It is a nigger staring him in the eyes, not one of theirs but one of the back-home variety, in a Regular Army uniform.

“This one still breathin, too, Lieutenant,” the man calls. “But the googoos done hack him up to pieces.”

MONSOON

It is raining again today. Nilda is already cooking when Royal wakes and sits up on the
banig
. The mosquitoes have been at him again in spite of the netting they sleep under, sneaking up through the cracks in the split-palm flooring. The thatch above makes a raspy sound as the rain hits it, and he can hear the surf, waves breaking steadily. Unless there is a storm he figures that four waves tumble in and sweep away for every minute in the long day. Maybe sometime he will get out there and count them, sunup to sunup, and do the sums and it would be like a clock. Though nobody here needs a clock.

Nilda looks at him when he stands but she doesn’t say anything. He has learned some of the words, like
lalo
which is “more,” and learned “yes” and “no,” but she is not much of a talker, Nilda. You don’t need so much talking here on the coast to get by, only the men when they sit after the fishing is done and drink palm
beeno
and tell stories or the women when they play cards and chew all that business that makes their teeth go red. Nilda doesn’t chew and doesn’t seem to be invited for cards. He wonders if that makes her sorry. It is the kind of thing they don’t have the language for. And the love-words, when they’re doing it, which is often on the long rainy days, he would like to know some of her love-words but all she’ll say is
lalo
sometimes, at least make him feel she wants it. He can say whatever he wants but hearing himself say things she doesn’t understand makes him disbelieve them, so now it is mostly just noises.

He takes the bamboo tubes and steps out onto the narrow platform, barefoot. His boots are too hot and the soles starting to pull away from all the wet, the leather with a green mold on it, and he’s only bothered with the sandals Nilda made him the few times they’ve walked in to her mother’s village. The rain is cool on his bare shoulders and when he is wet enough he rubs himself down to get the night-sweat off. He hops off the platform onto the dirt, startling one of Bung’s half-wild pigs sleeping underneath, and heads for the beach.

It’s not a village, really, eight of the bamboo and palm-thatch huts scattered along the ocean and another half-dozen, like the one he and Nilda have taken over, on the banks of the little stream that runs into it. A couple of the men are already out in the stream, thigh-deep, checking their fish weirs. They see him but don’t say good morning. A couple of the men are runaways like him, dodging something or other, and except for Bung, folks pretty much ignore him. A low mist comes up off the water as the rain hits it and Royal thinks again how pretty, in its dopey, dreamy, slow-ass way, it is in this country.

The beach is wide with a gentle slope to it, yellow-brown sand leading back to a thin strip of cocoanut palms before the thick brush begins. The stream cuts a different channel through the sand to the ocean every day, and this morning it is deep and swift-moving, churning at its wide mouth where the waves roll in over the freshwater pushing out. There are stick-legged birds skittering along the surfline and ghost crabs popping in and out of their holes, but it is too cool and rainy for the big lizards, lizards as long as Royal if you count their tails, to be out on the sand. Royal sees the pigs first, snuffling around some fallen, rotting cocoanuts, and then spots Bung way up in one of his palms. Bung waves and shouts a greeting, always cheerful.

Bung cut the notches for Royal’s first tree, somehow able to get enough mustard on the bolo while he’s clinging halfway up the trunk and not chop his own fingers off, taught him the whole routine. Royal stuffs the bamboo tubes in his belt and starts up. Bung cut the notches to fit his own legs which are shorter, but Royal is glad for so many hand- and footholds as he wrestles his way up the slippery-sided palm. They are so damn high, swaying mightily at the top on windy days, and he tries to never look down. In Cuba the little
muchachos
had a way of tying a short cord between their ankles and gripping the trunk with that but they were just skin and bone and had been doing it their whole life. It is a long hard climb for Royal, nothing like getting up in the spreading sycamores back home, and he has to rest his arms and legs a bit when he reaches the top. He pulls off a few ripe-looking cocoanuts and drops them to the sand, the time between letting them go and the soft smack reminding him how high he is.

He’s tapping just three of the flower stems, like Bung showed him, rattan strips tied to bind them over so the sap drips down into the bamboo tubes. The sap will run for half a day before the cut heals up and clogs, and then you have to climb again. Royal unhooks the bamboo tubes he’s left there, all three full with the whitish sap, carefully slipping them into his belt. He cuts a finger-long section off the end of each of the stems with Nilda’s little curved knife, then binds them down with the rattan strips and fixes the new collector tubes underneath. He licks his fingers off, sweet and sticky, clamps the knife between his teeth and begins to feel his way down the trunk.

The stems give less in this rainy season than before, but with two trees it is enough. Bung works six of them, but Bung does it as a living, selling some as frothy
tuba
in the village of Nilda’s mother and letting some pass into vinegar which he spices with hot peppers and once a week cooks down in the still he’s built to make
lambanog
which is even stronger than the
beeno
locals used to peddle to the boys in the garrison. Lift the top of your skull right off. Royal trades whatever he doesn’t drink himself to Bung for a little pigmeat.

Bung’s little herd is mostly out on the beach now, rooting for crabs, and Bung is waiting at the base of the palm, grinning, offering Royal a strip of the mangrove tanbark he crumbles into the
tuba
for color and to give it more punch. Bung talks at him, laughing and dancing around in the sand the way he does, waving his hands. He is bowlegged and keeps his hair short and bristly, rubbing the back of his head whenever he laughs. He is ripe-cocoanut colored, like when the bark first turns from green to tan, and lives with a very short, very round woman whose teeth are so red from the betel nut that when she smiles it looks like she doesn’t have any. At first Royal thought Bung was so happy because of his home brew, but has never seen him take a drop of it. Bung and his wife speak a different lingo than the other folks here, and even Nilda who has been other places doesn’t always understand them.

Royal is soaked through from the drizzle by the time he is done tapping his second tree, wearing only his pants which Nilda has cut and hemmed above his knees. He has gotten used to being wet all day. He leaves the tubes of palm sap on the bank of the stream and wades in, picking his way over the ankle-breakers on the bottom to the fish trap he has set up. There are three caught in the hemp, foot-long, bass-looking things, and he bends to snake his arm in and pull them out. He cracks their heads against a hardwood stump on the bank and strings them through the gills to carry. Food, at least enough to keep you going, pretty much just comes to you here. Fruit falls, root crops bump up from the dirt, fish are flushed down the river or swim in close to the beach to be caught. Before the rain started some of the beach men went in to work in the fields for the people in the village of Nilda’s mother, but none of them would hire Royal. They are poor, what people back home call catfish poor, having enough to eat and a roof overhead but not much else.

Their
bahay
has a steep-pitched roof for all the rain, hinged thatch shutters propped open and a little rough hemp mat on the platform to wipe your feet on. Nilda dries his hair with a cloth and has fish and rice hot for him when he comes in from the rain, pulling it off the indoor stove that is nothing but a hollowed section of log lined with mortar. It tastes like geechie food, only hotter when it is hot and sweeter from the cocoanut when it is sweet. They eat with their hands from the same bowl, sitting cross-legged on the woven sea-grass
banig
with their shoulders touching. Everything she fixes tastes fine but it is always the same things mixed in different ways.

Better than Army food.

When they are finished Royal sticks his hands out in the rain to wash them and then drinks some of yesterday’s
tuba
juice, already tangy with alcohol, from a gourd. Nilda will take some with food when it is maybe a half day old and still sweet, calling it
lina
, but Royal needs the extra kick.

He sits in the opening and watches the rain come off the thatch, watches the stream roll by, taking another sip now and then. The
tuba
softens the sound of the water hitting the roof, dulls the sound of the waves pounding the sand, smooths the edges off any thoughts that try to force their way into his mind. After a while he will lie out on the mat, not so much tired as waiting out the long day, and if she wants it Nilda will be lying next to him when he wakes. She is careful never to wake him, explaining in a complicated pantomime that when you sleep your soul wanders away, and that a person startled from sleep might lose it. Royal doesn’t have the words to tell her he left his behind long ago, in a cactus patch outside Bisbee.

In the early evening, hard to be exact in this season where you never see clear sky, he will climb to tap the palms again. Bung has a store of rice and he will trade some sap for it and then maybe sit and listen to the sea fishermen when they come in with whatever they’ve netted and drink and tell their long stories, eyes and voices growing soft with liquor, talking along with the slow rhythm of the waves. If there is news from the war, or if the war is still going on, nobody is trying to tell him about it. He feels his eyelids growing heavy. He senses Nilda moving around behind him, always with her hands busy, sewing mostly. She can make all kinds of pictures and patterns with the thread, and other women, the ones who don’t ask her to play cards and the ones in her mama’s village who won’t hardly look her in the eye, pay her in goods or sometimes in Mex money to put fancy borders on their clothes. Sometimes she will get up and step over to just touch him, like she needs to check that he is still there, that he is real. He knows she is there, always. This is where she is from, where she belongs, and he is just something that has washed up and doesn’t really fit. It is not so bad, a dreamy sort of life, the waters he has given himself up to warm and gently flowing. Royal drifts on the palm wine, barely able to hear the drops hit anymore, the air just a kind of water that is not so thick as what is in the slow, meandering stream outside, the sky is water and the earth soaked and overflowing with it and he lies on his side right where he is. A little
chacón
lizard is scuttling across the wall, hunting for insects. He can’t hear the waves but knows they haven’t stopped rolling. It will rain again tomorrow.

REAPER

The boy has been following him for two blocks, eyeing the bag, undoubtedly seeking the perfect moment in which to spirit it away. Dr. Lunceford has never been this far south, below Canal Street, and is unfamiliar with the neighborhood. It is his last day in Manhattan, the apartment across the river arranged for, and he has exhausted the appetite for Dr. Bonkers’ elixir in the tenements farther north. There is alleged to be a settlement of colored people down here, but thus far he has not discovered it.

“Hey Mister!” calls the boy.

Dr. Lunceford stops and turns to face him. The boy is perhaps eleven or twelve, though it is difficult to be certain with the more undernourished of the street Arabs. The boy glances down to the bag.

“You a croaker?”

The license has been promised, but given the vicissitudes of state bureaucracy there is no telling when it will be delivered.

“Are you in need of a doctor?”

“It’s me pal,” explains the urchin. “He’s awful sick.”

The boy leads him to Duane Street, then toward the West River. Dr. Lunceford is wary, not discounting the possibility that the boy has older confederates in waiting. He has been waylaid twice uptown, once losing several bottles of Dr. Bonkers’ to a gang, boys who were not, surprisingly, interested in the more valuable leather bag or the rest of its contents. He assumes they were disappointed upon drinking the nostrum. In the other incident he merely fled, prudently if not with dignity.