A Moment in the Sun (44 page)

“I thought you was part of the choir, put out among the sinners, till I seen the uniform.” Little Earl has a terrible smile on his face. The other 2nd Georgias have surrounded him now, crowding close, watching Jimbo to see what they should do.

“Let’s hear it, then,” says Jimbo softly. “Hear how the niggers sing it.”

Little Earl, breathing hard, closes his eyes to remember the words. His voice is shaky at first—

There is a fountain filled with blood

Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains—

He gets his breathing in line with the melody and gains a little strength. Royal feels like he is watching it all from some high place, him and Junior waiting to be murdered and Little Earl singing and the white boys with their rifles gathered round and the palmettos taking detail as the sun teases the edge of the earth—

The dying thief rejoiced to see

That fountain in his day

And there may I, though vile as he

Wash all my sins away—

Jimbo joins in then, singing counter to Little Earl’s steady declamation, bending the words here and there—

Then in a nobler, sweeter song

I’ll stay Thy pow’r to save

When this poor lisping, stammering tongue

Lies silent in the grave

Lies silent in the grave

Lies silent in the grave

When this poor lisping, stammering tongue

Lies silent in the grave

It is very quiet when they finish. No nightbugs anymore. A rooster announcing itself over in Ybor. Little Earl’s breath coming hard.

“Jesus,” says Lester to his friend, his look more confused than admiring. “You sound more like a nigger than he does.”

Jimbo grins as if it’s a compliment, cocks his head at the prisoners. “You boys carryin any money?”

Tampa wakes from a fever dream, damp and confused, hoping that none of it is true.

The Georgia boys look wounded when it is Sergeant Jacks they turn their prisoners over to. They peek past him into the provost tent and there are white men there, officers, and Lester steps in to speak with one of them. The lieutenant glances out and nods that it is okay.

Lester walks back past them, muttering, and joins the other Georgians at the coffee boiler.

“They took all our money,” says Junior when he is out of earshot.

Jacks yawns, leads them back toward the bivouac. “Won’t be needing it where you going.”

“But we’re stuck here.”

The sergeant shakes his head.

“Had a bunch of our fellows shot up in town last night,” he says without turning. “Sent em to Atlanta. We short in H Company so you three and Cooper are moving over. With me.”

Junior brightens. “That’s terrific! When do we go?”

“They’ll move us to the Port tomorrow, then I spect we’ll sit some more.” He falls back into step alongside them, looks at Royal’s boots.

“Who that blood is?”

“They kilt a dog.”

Jacks nods his head slowly, as if this explains it all. “Yeah,” he says, “you lucky niggers going to Cuba.”

CAMP ALVA

Hod looks up from the chow line at Camp Alva Adams and can see the flophouse he stayed in the night before he enlisted. The camp is laid out just across from the brickyards above Denver City Park, and it is raining, as it has been for weeks now, the volunteers drilling in the mud and eating under a patchwork canvas awning that sags with collected water and promises to collapse under the weight. Runt has been taking bets as to which unit will be soaked when the inevitable occurs. He and Hod and Big Ten and the other late recruits have been reassigned almost daily, landing just this morning with Company G, whose men are mostly from Cripple Creek.

“Reinforcements,” says a private with a ratlike face as they join the group waiting with mess kits in the drizzle. “And we aint even been shot at yet.”

“We’ve been sent over to shape your outfit up,” says Runt, who is from Pueblo and claims to be a newspaper reporter, “and provide a model soldier for you to study.”

“You’d think they’d have sent a full-size model, then.”

Runt only comes up to Hod’s shoulder, fair game for the wags in every company they’ve been stuck in.

“You figure the bigger the soldier,” says Hod, “the bigger the target he’s gonna make.”

The rain comes harder then and they are soaked by the time their tin plates are weighted with stew and they can duck under the sagging canvas to sit on wet benches.

Big Ten slaps water off his hat, looks to Hod. “To think we could be in a nice dry variety hall, pounding each other’s brains out.”

“It rains every day in Cuba,” the rat-faced soldier tells them.

“You been there?”

“I read all about it in the papers.”

“That’s your tropical climate,” says the Runt. “Hot and wet.”

The soldier looks at him suspiciously. “How old are you, kid?”

“Old enough.”

“The Regular Army got standards,” says the soldier, considering Runt and shaking his head. “But us vols—you ought to see some of the officers.”

“Any more poop on when they ship us out of here?” asks Hod. Today he is feeling especially stupid to have signed on. Marching and saluting and yes sir and no sir and sleeping in tents on the muck and slop for food—at least in a mine you’ve got hours working alone up at the face where the bosses can’t ride you.

“Depends on how much weight Colonel Hale carries with the high mucketymucks. Every outfit in the country is trying to be the first to Havana.”

“What’s the hurry?” says Big Ten, shoveling stew into his mouth.

“No hurry,” grins the long-faced private. “Long as they save a couple Dagoes for me.”

After chow there is Battalion Drill, sloshing with rifle on shoulder through the mud and the cactus, trying to stride and turn as one man, laborers from the brickworks pausing to watch on their way home. Once the whole battalion is moving Hod feels better, losing himself in the mass of it, one little part of four hundred rifle-toting, cadence-shouting men shifting into rectangles of various sizes or swinging in great flanking maneuvers, over and over, the mind numbing with repetition as their boots grow heavy with mud. Since the news of the embarkation at Tampa hit camp there is the real possibility that they will actually get to use the old trapdoor Springfields they’ve been given, to kill and be killed. So far they’ve barely fired a round, the officers more worried about a stray shot hitting the neighbors than the fighting prowess of their troop. If it does come to a real fight, thinks Hod, then hell—the Dons are nothing but bosses, bosses of the cruelest sort, and freeing the poor Cubans from them is a good thing, a noble thing, an A
mer
ican thing to do. There will be breakfast tomorrow, possibly hot, and the next day and the next, his decisions worried out by other men and his hours regulated by trumpet calls. Men like him, homeless, desperate men, are blown about the world like cinders from a locomotive stack, and the Army is as good a place for them to end up as any.

The overcast day loses the last of its light and there is the six o’clock whistle from the Denver and Rio Grande tracks and finally they can march no more. The men stand in ranks and a major struts in front of them and barks loud noises about discipline and teamwork and then they are dismissed till evening meal. Big round Sibley tents have been put up in rows, and the men, sixteen to each, sit on their bedrolls in the gloomy interiors, pulling their sodden boots off, feet facing the center pole, smoking and talking by candlelight.

“Makes you feel right at home, don’t it Chief?” winks a corporal named Grissom to Big Ten. “Back in the old teepee.”

“I never been in a tent,” says Big Ten looking at the simple rigging above. “Except once at the circus. My people live in cabins.”

“We get to Cuba,” says their squad sergeant, LaDuke, “you’ll get a chance to lift some tonsures. Bet that greaser hair comes off easy.”

“Wasn’t nobody in my family ever a barber, neither,” says Big Ten, in a way that announces he’s done with the topic.

“I figure we either go for broke blasting our way straight into Havana,” says Runt, who is full of strategy he reads in the editorial pages of the
Post
, “or we slip around to the other end of the island and take them from behind. Santiago de Cuba.”

Grissom snorts a laugh. “Oh, they see you, Half-Pint, they’ll be shaking in their boots.”

“Long as you save a couple Dagoes for me,” says the rat-faced soldier.

There is dinner, canned bacon and undercooked beans, and then a little time for card games and another installment in the running debate over which is the finest passion parlor, accessible on a soldier’s pay, on Denver’s Holliday Street. The trumpet signals lights-out at ten. Hod lies back and listens to the rain on the canvas and, only blocks away, the music and shouting from the saloons on Larimer. Once he and Zeb made a pup tent from a tarpaulin and some fenceposts and slept out behind the barn, pretending they were Army scouts out on the range, pretending to listen for hostile Indians and thrilled to feel the ground tremble when the night train from Salina rushed past. He feels like he is pretending now, their little cluster of tents surrounded by the great city, feels like it might as well be the Salvation Army he has joined and not the 1st Colorado Volunteers.

Big Ten begins to snore and it seems as if the ground is trembling.

In the morning the sun is out, and after breakfast the men in Company G decide to kangaroo the Runt in celebration.

“Think of it as an honor,” suggests Corporal Grissom as they toss the boy up from the blanket again and again, one soldier at each corner and dozens gathered around to cheer. “An initiation into the brotherhood of fighting men.”

“I’ll tear your fucking heads off!” the Runt replies, red-faced, trying to keep from turning face-down as he is flung skyward. Hod stands at the edge of the crowd, not bothering to smile. Runt is new and wears glasses and is small enough to throw really high, but it could as well have been him and he doesn’t like the look on Grissom’s face or the way Sergeant LaDuke chants “
Up
she goes,
up
she goes—” with each toss. Hod has his usual morning regrets, uncomfortable in the uniform, Army breakfast sitting heavy in his stomach.

They heave Runt higher each time, bringing the blanket almost to the ground on the catch, till a familiar voice calls out that that will be enough.

Hod feels dizzy. It is Lieutenant Niles Manigault.

“Put that soldier down.”

The men are confused at first, not recognizing the new officer, but field the Runt in the blanket one last time and lay him on the ground. Manigault, wearing a spanking-new tailored uniform, stares at Runt as the little soldier crawls to find his glasses on the ground and stands unsteadily, still red-faced.

“Name?”

“Runyon, sir. Company G.”

“That is
my
company now. And I won’t have anyone in it more fit to be shot out of a cannon than to charge one on a battlefield. Collect your gear and see the pay clerk.”

“But sir—”

“You are mustered
out
, soldier. Remove yourself from the training field.”

LaDuke laughs out loud. Manigault turns to the gaping men.

“Let’s get those haversacks squared away,” says the Lieutenant. “We’ll be laying siege to Cherry Creek this afternoon.
Move
!” He holds a hand up to Hod and Big Ten as the others hurry away, Runt moving dazedly in the opposite direction. “A word with you two.”

This is some confidence trick, thinks Hod, that they planned all along. The bait and switch. Niles steps close to speak quietly, drilling them with his eyes.

“You gentlemen left me in a rather untenable position.”

“Our nation pleaded,” says Big Ten, “and we answered the call.”

“I owe the Blonger brothers a considerable sum. Your participation,” he pokes Hod in the chest with a finger, “in the fistic enterprise would have squared me. Instead I have been forced to seek, like yourselves, refuge in this aggregation of halfwits and slackers.”

“You made lieutenant awful quick,” says Big Ten.

“I was a major in the Skaguay Guards,” Niles corrects him, “but have accepted a lesser commission for the good of the cause.”

Hod snorts. “But that was just Soapy doing the whole town.”

Niles pokes him with the finger again. “You are the last person who should be telling tales from the Yukon, Private McGinty.”

“Atkins,” sighs Hod, and nods toward the Indian. “He’s McGinty now. It’s what we told them when we enlisted.”

“Whatever. I hope you understand that any assumptions based on our familiarity have been precluded by rank. You stand warned.”

“What about me?” asks Big Ten. “I’m not familiar.”

“You, Private,” explains Lieutenant Manigault, arching his eyebrows, “are not even
white
.”

BOOK II

A MOMENT
IN THE SUN

BEACHHEAD

Nobody is shooting at them. Royal has been imagining it, dreading it, the green mat of jungle facing them crowded with armed Spanish, every one of them sighting his rifle at a spot dead between his eyes. But nobody is shooting, nobody here but a passel of sick-looking locals, nary a one of them got shoes on their feet. At least that, with all the orders shouted and screamed, with the waves washing over the rowboats and the mess with the livestock. The muscles in Royal’s stomach ache from all he’s thrown up on the big ship, his legs feel weak and it is hotter than it ever got in Tampa, but as he lunges out of the boat, waves breaking around his knees, and hurries after the others onto the little strip of sandy beach he is flooded with relief to be here, on solid ground, on Cuba.

“Company H stack rifles here!” shouts Sergeant Jacks, standing on a small rise in a swarm of mosquitoes he chooses to ignore. “Then get on those crates.
Move
!”