A Moment in the Sun (135 page)

The boy, who offers his name as Ikey Katz, stands at the head of an alleyway a block from the pier and waves him in.

“He’s down here at the end, Doc,” he says. And noticing the doctor’s suspicious demeanor, adds, “On the level.”

The spill from the streetlamps does not completely penetrate the narrow passage. A trio of eating establishments of the lower echelon back onto the alley and the smell is not pleasant.

He notes rat droppings as he walks, and trash bins that have not been emptied in some while. At the end there is a hodge-podge of discarded wooden pallets, and lying on one of these, muttering in a language Dr. Lunceford has no inkling of, is a semi-comatose young boy.

“We figgered somethin was crook wid him when he don’t show at the Newsies’ Home yesterday night,” says Ikey. “Thursdays they wash your drawers for free, and he don’t ever miss out on that. So we been checking all the spots where he flops at night, an I found him here.”

The boy is moaning and muttering, his forehead damp and hot, his pulse racing.

“He’s been like off his nut lately, the Kid, and—you know—getting
dark
er.”

“What is his name?”

Ikey shrugs. “We call him the Yella Kid.”

He is not yellow now, despite his mop of blond hair, but more of an angry bronze. Dr. Lunceford presses lightly on the swollen abdomen and the boy cries out, his eyes popping open to stare at the stranger in fright.

“Aw Jeez, not yet!” he cries. “I ain ready to go!”

“Calm yourself, son. I’m here to help you—”

“Shit you are! You’re here to stick me on the boat!”

“I don’t understand—”

“He thinks you’re the Reaper, Doc,” says Ikey. “The character that takes you unnerground.”

Dr. Lunceford removes his black homberg, forces what he hopes is a reassuring smile.

“I’m here to help you.”

The boy’s terrified eyes swing to his friend. “You member the one I showed you, Ikey? Right in the front winda at Altgeld’s. It’s all white—”

Ikey turns to Dr. Lunceford. “See? He’s been like that all week. Bughouse.”

“You got the meatwagon here, right?” says the boy. His voice is hoarse, unsteady, his eyes burning feverishly.

“I am not Death,” says Dr. Lunceford. “I am neither a butcher nor an undertaker. I am a doctor and I’m going to take you somewhere you can be treated.”

The boy’s eyes grow wider. “I aint goin to no croaker shop! They slip you the black bottle or you end up on one of them Orphan Trains—”

“Those are just stories—”

“The Orphan Trains is
real
,” says Ikey Katz. “They got their paws on Jinx McGonigal and shipped him out to some farm where there’s nothin but squareheads. Made him work like a dog and kneel on a wooden pew every Sunday. Took him most of a year to scarper and bum his way back here.”

“He won’t be going anywhere for a long time,” says Dr. Lunceford, realizing how little reassurance the phrase offers. “Do you know where the Hudson Street Hospital is?”

“Sure.”

“You run there as fast as you can, straight to the ambulance barn, tell them that it is an emergency and bring them back here.”

“You got it, Doc.”

Ikey runs off down the alley. The sick boy’s breathing is rapid, shallow. A late-phase cholestatic jaundice, the bile ducts obstructed by a tumor or, less likely in one so young, gallstones, growing steadily. Nothing to be done till he is on an operating table.

The boy squints his eyes at him, as if his features are hard to make out in the weak half-light from the street. “You gotta tell em about the funeral crate,” he pleads. “It’s right up front in the winda. I got enough saved to cover it.”

With a good surgeon, thinks Dr. Lunceford, and the helping hand of Providence—

“I’ll be sure to let them know,” he tells the boy.

The boy clutches his middle, tears streaming down his cheeks. “It hurts somethin awful,” he says. “It hurts awful.”

“I know,” says Dr. Lunceford. “I know it does.”

The boy begins to convulse then, eyes rolling up into his skull, slender limbs thrashing against the pallet until Dr. Lunceford is able to take hold of him. The doctor hugs the boy’s head against his chest, wrapping his arms around him tightly till the spasms stop, muscles exhausted. His eyes clear slowly.

“I’m scared as hell, Doc,” he says, grimly lucid now, turning his head to look up to Dr. Lunceford. “I never figgered on that.”

“Don’t you worry,” says Dr. Lunceford. “It won’t be long now.”

The doctor sits on the pallet holding the Yellow Kid, waiting and thinking. Thinking about his life and what has happened to it, thinking about where he should be now, with Yolanda, instead of down this filthy alley in a city of orphans. Junior was about this size the one time they thought they were going to lose him to scarlet fever, Yolanda furious at him for being a doctor and not being able to do more, only hold him and rock him and talk to him while Yolanda pressed the ice packs to his forehead. He felt it in his fingertips when the fever broke and his son was able to sleep, past all danger.

The street boy, shaking weakly, manages to lay his hand over the back of Dr. Lunceford’s.

“Lookit that,” he says in a small voice. “We’re the same color, you an me.”

RESCUE

Jacks watches the sand. The rebels are keeping close to the crashing waves but it isn’t high tide yet and they’ll have to leave track on dry sand to get into the trees. The tip was on the level for a change, some
amigo
earning himself a couple gold eagles or a pass out of the hoosegow, and if they’d gotten there a few minutes earlier they would have had the rebels boxed in. For some of the terrain here it would be good to have horses, ride down fast on the little shack towns before anybody has a chance to holler, run down whoever tries to light out. This humping around on foot won’t get it done.

“Got to be something
wrong
with these people,” says Coop. “Don’t know when they been beat.”

“Or maybe they know it, but got nothin better to do,” calls Hardaway from the rear of the squad. “Vex us with sniper fire and make us haul our narrow asses down this damn beach chasin em.”

“Army’s not paying you to eat beans and sleep, Private.” Jacks turns and walks backward for a few steps, making sure his men aren’t strung out too much. There is a good thirty yards of open sand before the tree line here, perfect for a googoo ambush.

“I forgot,” says Hardaway. “We all making a fortune here.”

Coop walks like he’s on a Sunday picnic, rifle held casually in one hand. “We ought to send the ones we caught back home,” he says. “Let them be the niggers for a spell.”

Even on a flat beach the surf can kill you. The wind is moving one way and the current another today, something like a storm collecting out over the water, and the waves are high as Royal’s shoulder with the out-sucking fierce enough that they seem to hang in the air for a moment before slamming down on the hard, bare sand. Bung maneuvers his little
banca
out beyond the breaker line, looking for an opening, turning the boat out to face the biggest of the swells, now and then raising his oar to be seen when he slides into the steep troughs. He is riding low, like he has a big haul of fish or has taken on water. The outrigger is about the only thing Bung owns in the world and Royal knows he will risk his life to save it.

Bung makes no signal when he starts in, just paddling hard, one side and then the other, trying to ride a medium-high swell in without getting too far down its slope, no reason to think this one is any easier than the others so he must be at the end of his strength. Royal stands up on the beach where the spent waves race around his calves and then hurry away, the front line of the ocean booming, churning white, and wishes Nilda was here. But it is too late to run for her and the surf too loud for him to shout and everyone else is in Candelaria for the festival of Saint Somebody. Bung is moving fast in the
banca
now, flying like a spear, and on some days when the waves aren’t high and undercut Royal has seen him glide ashore, effortlessly disengaging from the boat to grab the painter at the bow and run it up another ten feet without breaking speed. But today the water comes apart before you can get to the sand, the sea violent against itself, and Royal pulls a deep breath into his lungs before rushing in.

He stands sideways to the first wave and is almost torn off his feet by it, then runs three long steps forward to dive into the base of the next breaker the way he’s seen the boldest of the local boys do, swimming hard to push out the other side of it, and feels right away that he’s never been in anything this powerful, stronger than the water that swept him away from the company, fighting hard just to keep himself pointed out to sea. Three strides and dive, two strides and dive, not making any ground but surviving each wave and not at all sure how he’s going to help but he can’t just watch a man drown. He digs in, chest-deep and able only to duck under the next rumbling wall of water. He pops up to see Bung still coming, looking sideways and back over his shoulder as he paddles, as if trying to outrace the swell he is on. They meet eyes before it happens, Bung indicating with a flick of his oar that Royal needs to get out of the way, and then the next wave is bigger than all the others and Royal is wrenched off his feet as it breaks early and he is tumbled, the bottom smacking him in the shoulder, back, head, knee, head again, a rag doll in the churning white, saltwater driven up his nose and then lying sideways in outrushing foam being pulled back toward the next breaker till Bung, it must be Bung, grabs him by an ankle and pulls him out of the surf.

Royal snorts out water and sand. The
banca
flips and tumbles down the breaker line, both outriggers snapped off, and Bung is frantically running, bowlegged, to toss flopping fish higher onto the sand before the sea can take them back.

Royal stands. One knee has been twisted, his shoulder scraped, his jaw sore. There is sand in between his teeth. Bung is pointing at Royal, giggling now but with his arms and legs trembling from the struggle and fish, dead and dying, scattered all around him. He sees something beyond and the smile dies on his face. Royal turns to look.

They are coming up from the south, moving fast like something is behind them, with the Teniente in front. He hasn’t shaved or cut his hair for a long time and looks skinnier than ever. Kalaw is still with him, and Locsin and Pelaez and Ontoy and the little boy Fulanito. The
segundo
, Bayani, is missing. All of them have rifles.

The Teniente speaks to Bung first, but the man is frozen, too terrified to answer. Royal steps in front of him.

“Yall people still running?”

The Teniente does not smile at him. “We need the road to Candelaria.”

“I take you there.”

The men all stare at Bung as they step past him, eyeballing a warning, and Kalaw quickly gathers some fish to stuff in his
mochila
. Though nobody is pointing a rifle at him Royal feels like a hostage again.

“The war gone come up here?”

The Teniente looks back as they wade across the mouth of the stream where it hits the beach. “It has already arrived. Your men are behind us.”

They squeeze through the stand of nipa palm that lines the far bank, then step carefully over the gnarled, guano-spattered roots of the mangroves, branches laden with sleeping fruit bats hung upside-down, the only thing Nilda ever cooked for him that he wouldn’t eat. Royal leads the band through a maze of boulders then, turning inland when the dunes begin, sandy, palm-studded mounds that lead to the Candelaria road without taking you past any of the fishermen’s huts. The Teniente pauses at the top of the first one, giving Fulanito an order, then waves for the others to keep going.

The boy lays on his belly at the top of the dune, facing the beach, rifle by his side.

“Fulanito will fire when they come into view.” The Teniente’s face is grim. He looks as if he hasn’t slept for a long time. “If they believe they are attacked they will delay their pursuit.”

“They aint gonna care he’s so little,” says Royal as they hurry away. “They kill him anyways.”

There are a few shacks up by the tree line and a broken dugout boat tumbling in the surf and Coop finds a fish lying in the dry sand, gills still pumping.

“This got to be a googoofish,” he shouts before flinging it over the breakers and into the sea. “Don’t know where it suppose to be.”

“We could of ate that.”

“I aint eatin no more fish in this lifetime.” Coop has been the one most eager to believe the rumor that they will all be replaced by Texas Vols and sent back home. “Rice neither. I get back it’s gone be steak and potatoes or nothin.”

There is a woman, youngish, eyeing them from up the bank of a little stream that empties out into the ocean, standing motionless. There are still a lot of them up here never seen an American, colored or not. A number of the palm trees have bolo slashes on their sides, footholds, and Jacks looks into the tops for snipers. It has become that kind of fight, like a handful of wasps worrying a water buffalo. No way they can bring you down, but now and then you get stung.

The tracks of the band, six of them now, appear on the far side of the stream past the nipa fronds, cutting away from the roaring surf and into a jumble of boulders. The new one is bigger, barefoot. Jacks holds his arm up and Gamble and Ponder scoot ahead into the rocks, ducking low as they run. The rest of the patrol squats or takes a knee. There is no shade here, and Jacks has his midday headache, the rhythmic pounding from the shore working on him all morning long. Huachuca and Bliss would cook you but it never made you wet like this, like you been steamed through. He wonders how Lupe would make out here. He misses her.

Gamble and Ponder pop out and wave them up.

“Single file,” he says, and they head into the boulders.

The rocks are near shoulder-high, no reason they should be there, just something God didn’t have noplace else to put. The men walk silently, rifles held high and ready. Jacks doesn’t have to do much sergeanting with this bunch, all of them experienced soldiers now, turning quick but holding fire when the rustling off to the left turns out to be only a monitor lizard, one of the big long ones that all start to sing when the sun drops out of sight.