A Moment in the Sun (33 page)

“Be that as it may, there are none here to be purchased.”

Wu turns and tells the assistant, in Cantonese, that Diosdado wants to buy guns for the naked savages back home, as if they could be taught to use them. The assistant has a coughing laugh that rattles his abacus. Diosdado remains expressionless.

“Do you know of anybody who might have something we could buy?”

“If you are going to fight the Spanish,” says Wu, “surely there will be wounded. I can offer you an excellent deal on medicinal herbs—”

“I’m not authorized to buy opium.” Diosdado stands to leave. “Thank you for your time.” At least this one did not promise like the Japanese, promise and never deliver. Only Dr. Sun, the Chinese revolutionist, actually sent them weapons, but the boat foundered in a typhoon and all was lost.

“So very sorry to disappoint you,” smiles Wu from his throne of crates.

“We carry one foreign power on our back,” Diosdado says in Cantonese as he bows goodbye, “while China opens her legs for a dozen.”

The streets west of Central Market are packed with the usual swarm of humanity, the only relief from the noisy mass of them an occasional unobstructed glimpse up to the slope of Victoria Peak, where the humanity thins out and the British and the wealthiest of the Chinese merchant kings have built their palaces. It is green up there, with unfouled air to breathe, quiet. Diosdado’s rickshaw boy grunts as he trots up a slight incline, weaving them through vegetable stalls and charm-sellers, past an oversized British official sitting pinkly on a pallet borne by four sweating lackeys hustling in the opposite direction. A pair of carriages rattle by, full of wealthy Chinese heading to the Happy Valley racecourse, shouting out joyously as they go.

A city built on trade, thinks Diosdado, with the soul of a whore.

Junta activities in Hongkong emanate from the two houses on Morrison Hill Road in Wanchai. Don Felipe Agoncillo lives in the smaller one with his family and whoever spills over from the other. Diosdado calls to the boy when they reach the house, steps down, and reluctantly parts with a few coins. There is, of course, no more money from Don Nicasio, and the Junta can only spare a tiny stipend for its exiled patriots. But it wouldn’t do to arrive soaked in perspiration from the climb, not with the General back from Singapore.

It is Señora Agoncillo herself who answers the door, beautiful and gracious.

“Our young linguist,” she says, smiling and stepping back to allow him passage. “You must come out of the heat.”

He is ushered to the study, where members of the Junta and a few of the exiled government stand around a table, frowning over a drawing.

“I understand why the sun has a face,” says one, “but shouldn’t it be smiling?”

“In a Masonic triangle—”

“Just a triangle—”

“All triangles are Masonic. You can’t avoid the association.”

“The three points of the triangle represent Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

“The French—”

“The French have nothing to do with us.”

“I thought the three stars—”

“They represent Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao—”

“Wonderful. Mindanao. Why not a half-moon and a scimitar?”

“The
moros
are Filipinos, whatever their beliefs.”

“And the rays emanating—”

“Eight rays, eight provinces that rose in ’96—”

“You make eight?”

“Batangas, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, Manila, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga, and Tarlac.”

“You allow a more generous definition of
revolt
than I.”

“Blue and red, like the flag of independent Cuba.”

“You’re forgetting the white triangle.”

“Red, white, and blue—”

“Symbolic,” says the slender, large-eyed man who has been sitting quietly at the head of the table, “of our hopeful friendship with the United States.” He smiles shyly. “Or at least that’s what I told their Consul in Singapore.”

The men laugh. Diosdado has never seen the General in person before. He seems too slender, too gentle a man to be the strongman of Cavite, who outfought and then outfoxed the Spanish
cazadores
, who had the grit to order the execution of the Bonifacios and risk tearing the movement apart.

“He suggested that we have a new banner, to rally the people.”

The voice is soft, seemingly without irony. He didn’t order the executions, Diosdado corrects himself, he merely allowed them to happen.

“Do you trust them?” asks Mascardo.

“The hulls of their Great White Fleet have been painted gray for battle and they have been asked by the British, in the interests of neutrality, to leave the harbor. We can only hope that they are trustworthy.” The General turns and looks directly at Diosdado. “And what do you think, Argus?” He indicates the drawing. “About my design?”

The men of the Junta all turn toward Diosdado. He is speechless at first, that the General would recognize him, would know his code name, would ask his opinion.

“We are a complex nation,” he answers in Tagalog. “We deserve a complex flag.”

The General laughs. “You went to see the Hong man?”

Diosdado nods. “Not a single rifle.”

Malvar, who sent him on the mission, scowls, but the General’s expression does not alter.

“No matter,” he says. “The Americans have promised to sell us as many as we need.”

“When?” asks Riego de Dios.

“We are to wait here for their summons,” says the General.

“Our people are already fighting in the Ilocos.”

“There is little else to entertain oneself with in the Ilocos,” says Alejan-drino, and the men laugh again.

The General turns back to Diosdado. “We will be waiting here for the summons,” he says, “but you, young man, are to go immediately to Manila.”

Diosdado takes a deep breath, trying to appear unfazed by the order. Manila. He has been condemned there as a traitor, drawings of him, poorly rendered, circulated by the
guardia
. He thought he might never see the city again.

“And what is my mission?”

The General smiles. “To wait for our American brothers,” he says, “and embrace them when they step ashore.”

THE CLOUD CITY

Leadville is a wound festering between the Mosquito Range and the Wasatch Mountains, a high-plains sprawl of new-built structures surrounded by treeless hills pocked with diggings, hills that at closer look are only piles of tailings excreted from the holes men have torn into the earth. Blasted rock spews from tipple chutes into ore cars that rattle and slam down tramways behind coal-devouring engines, wooden headhouse towers marking the mine portals where hoist cables screech lowering men crammed in steel cages down tomb-dark vertical shafts, tongues of candles flickering on their hats, oil lanterns in hand, dropping with stomach-shifting speed past the played-out silver, the abandoned tunnels, past Level Three, Level Four, Level Five, down four hundred feet more sucking air hammered into the ground by a compressor, Level Eight, Level Nine, then
thunk
to bedrock and the door clanging open and the men spilling out into the main chamber to face a half-dozen galleries. The newest of these, the rawest, leads back a thousand feet, only half that distance with track on the floor. At the end of it, in the nervous light of three candles, Hod braces himself in a narrow fissure and rams a seventy-five-pound stoper drill straight up into the stony roof above him, rock dust filling the crevice, filling his nose his mouth his lungs, ear-shattering trip-hammer roar as he drives the cutting bit into hardrock a thousand strokes per minute, vibration coursing through his chest down his backbone and out through his legs into the rock he is wedged in, muscles of his arms taut cables pushing the drill steel up, up, every part of him straining and concentrated on the shoot-hole above till Cap Stover reaches up to swat his leg. Time to change bits.

Sudden quiet.

Hanging rock dust.

Hod hands the drill down to the chuck tender, who twists the bar stock and pulls out the old steel, still hot to the touch. The edges of the star-shaped cutting bit have been hammered smooth. Cap jiggers in a new rod of drill steel, twists it to lock.

Grimes, the foreman, calls up through the winze from the level below. “You all right up there?”

“Changing steel, boss,” Cap calls down into the little opening.

“How’s it coming?”

Cap looks up to Hod, who shows him fingers. If he tries to talk it will start the coughing again.

“Three more to go, then you can shoot,” calls Cap.

“Keep on it,” calls the foreman, and then nothing.

Hod starts the tip of the steel into the shoot-hole, then guides the rod as Cap hoists the body of the hammer drill back up to him, unkinking the wire-belted cable that leads back to the compressor at the head of the gallery.

“Need a minute?”

Hod shakes his head, then braces himself again and muscles the heavy drill upward till the bit jams against the unyielding top of the hole. The air is almost clear now and he takes a big gulp of it and squeezes the trigger—shriek of metal cutting rock, vibration filling his body once again.

Maybe he’ll find her tonight.

One of the girls on the Row who recognized him from Skaguay said Addie Lee is in town, staying at the Crysopolis, but the desk jockey said there were no redheads upstairs and nobody going by any of the names Hod recalled her using. Hod drills and thinks how it would be to be with her, to hold her. He searched the town last night and the night before, she’d been there and gone, sure, happy to pass it on, what was his name again? Hod drills and concentrates on a single image, her cheek resting in sleep against his bare breast, the smell of her hair, her breath warm and steady against his skin. He’ll find her tonight, or she will find him.

The shooters are on their way into the drift by the time Hod and Cap come out on the tracks.

“Got some holes need packin,” says Cap to Greek Steve as he passes with a box of blasting powder and a spool of fuse cord. “And you might ought to shore the roof up some before you set anything off.”

“Fockeen guys,” says Greek Steve, his usual greeting and the only English he’s ever been heard to utter. They step out into the gallery to join the others coming off shift, Hod’s arms floating slightly without the bulky widowmaker in them. Flem Hurley is honking into his crumpled bandanna, trying to muffle the echo in the stone chamber. The other men look away. Miners’ con is carried as a dirty secret, something shameful. A weakness in a tough business.

Me in six months, thinks Hod. He only smiles and nods as the others swap reports from their different drives, each ore face a more grievous affront to the human body, darker, narrower, dustier, the timbers bent with stress, the sides unstable and the top threatening to come down.

“Damn roof make more noise than a Chinaman in a fish market,” says old Arlie Bogle through cheeks bulging with tobacco. “The more you wedge it the more it complains.”

“The sides where I’m at is all crumbling,” mutters Dog Dietrich. “Got so many hay bales piled up you got to walk sideways to get through, but it aint but sand holdin the whole deal up.”

“Leastways it’s dry, down this level.”

“Hell, you don’t ever know,” says Cap. “She be dry as a bone and one day some mucker pokes his shovel into the wrong crack—”

“Seen a couple fellas blowed straight out of a hole down Idaho Springs once, long with a half-ton ore car and a quarter-mile of track. Busted through to a whole underground lake—”

“All that pressure built up, waitin there centuries for some dumb hunkie—”

Fell down shaft

Hod was on the Grievance Committee in Butte, had memorized the litany of Cause of Fatality they had stolen from the coroner’s office—

Fall of ore

Crushed in machinery

It was all in the same handwriting, and he imagined the functionary, poker-faced as he listened to the shift boss’s explanation, trying to compress each man’s grisly end into a one-line epitaph—

Rock fall

Suffocated by carbonic-acid gas

Shot of dynamite

Struck by cage

Explosion of powder

Bucket fell down shaft

Hod has been on rescue crews, has helped dig the flattened remains of a half-dozen miners out from a collapse, bodies spread and pressed to the thickness of a floor plank—

Car tipped on man

Returned to blast area too soon

Caught between loaded ore cars

Rope broke on cage

Pinned against post

Cave of dirt while timbering

Fell into ore bin

Caught between trippers, bled to death

Refiring missed hole

Killed by gas in bag house

There were quick deaths and slow deaths, deaths that blew out the lights in the drive and deaths not discovered till the next shift stumbled on the scene—

Picking out missed shot

Caught between timbers and cage

Pinned under a motor

There were deaths caused by stupidity—

Thawing powder in open fire

—greenhorns fed to the mines, men from desperate countries who nodded with incomprehension when instructions were given and marched into the drives armed with every tool they needed to murder themselves and the man next to them. There were deaths caused by the inescapable nature of the job—

Bad air

There were mines that rumbled and growled and warned you not to challenge them, and sneaking mines, mines that invited you deeper and killed you with gases invisible and odorless. The truth was that the air was always bad and the roof always unstable and the laws of gravity without pity. Hod has them all in his head, the jacks and the shooters, the muckers and timbermen, the chute-loaders and motormen and cagers and jigger bosses and whistlepunks, the seasoned miners and the hapless immigrants, and knows they are a scant fraction of those dead or dying from what he already carries in his lungs.