A Moment in the Sun (46 page)

“Not today,” Harry smiles sheepishly to the cabman, who does not seem to care.

EL CANEY

They are up and moving before sunrise. No breakfast, not even coffee. The order is silence, though Royal and the others are too tired to have much to say. It has been days of marching since the landing, marching in the heat and the bone-soaking rain and at night only rolling the wet poncho and blanket and tent-half canvas out on the ground to try to stay dry on at least one side and feeding the mosquitoes or out on sentry. At night there are shots, shouting, crabs rustling in the underbrush. And then that whole day spent hurrying in circles in the jungle, trying to relieve the ambushed Rough Riders at Las Guasimas but never finding them, lost, a dozen men falling from the heat and Royal nearly one of them. It is a wet heat that sits heavy on you, like being a steamed oyster says Junior, only oysters don’t carry forty pounds of supplies and a horse-collar blanket roll over their necks.

Parrots and
tocororos
begin their squawking in the canopy above as the men form twos and start down the pathway that is being called a road. Light filters in through the branches, giving shape to the trees, and by the time they come out into the first canefield the morning mists are rising, then thinning to reveal the distant Sierra Maestras. Royal had never seen mountains, never left the Carolina coast before the Army and Fort Missoula, and these don’t look real to him, their slope too sudden, too steep. He is already sweating under his sodden uniform, haversack strap digging in, already feeling tired when a squad of Cuban fighters lopes past their line. The men and boys are dressed in thin, light cloth, a few with sandals, most not, and every shade under the sun. A few look like white men, a few like the Chinese he’s seen in picture books, and a few are blacker than any man in North Carolina. Achille Dieudonné from G Company who speaks Creole French and border Mex says these dark black ones are Haitians, floated over on rafts from that island where the going is even rougher.

These Cubans are smaller, mostly, than the Americans, and very thin, though that is exaggerated by how little they carry—a sugar sack and a machete, maybe a rifle, their cartridge belts rigged from stiff cloth or no belt at all, just a leather pouch worn round the neck holding the few bullets they have. Thin, but nothing like the ones back at Firmeza, the
reconcentrados
they found behind barbed wire who looked even more miserable than the drawings in the newspapers. Royal has never seen people so poor, so starving, white, black, and brown thrown in together, hollow-eyed with their bones poking up under their skin.

“I wouldn’t treat a dog that way,” said Too Tall Coleman as they passed. The people only watched them, mute, too wasted to muster an expression.

There is a sound ahead, a deep, coughing, compressing of air like truncated thunder. Four of them, one just after the other. Sergeant Jacks turns to call softly over his shoulder.

“The dance has begun, gentlemen,” he says. “Let’s keep moving here.”

They continue marching, in and out of the thick trees, and Royal can tell by the mood of the sergeants that today it will be real. Last night they were given extra rounds to carry, two hundred more he has twisted into the spare socks in his pack, and the chaplain was busy and the officers were huddling together with maps. The mosquitoes are up now and at their business but Royal knows to crush them not swat them and to strap his load tight so it doesn’t rattle and to not ask questions. He and Junior and Little Earl are rookies but not so green as they once were, real soldiers now except for the one thing and after today that will be done.

They have been marching almost three hours when volunteers begin to appear, coming in the opposite direction in twos and threes, men from the 2nd Massachusetts who have been pulled off the firing line. Many are wounded, pale and a little stunned, a few shot through the body and walking as if it is a conscious effort to hold themselves together, their gaze gone inward.

“Don’t bother, fellas,” says one man with a bloody crease across his stubbled cheek. “They’re sittin up there where you can’t even see em, pourin it down on us. You won’t have no more show than we did.”

“Volunteers can’t see through their own smoke, is what,” says Sergeant Jacks flatly after the man has passed. “Got them old shit Winchesters. Black powder will draw enemy lead like bees to honey. Smart to get them off the field.”

Jacks sees another man moving toward them against the flow, a top sergeant like himself, with a sunburned face, holding one arm close to his body.

“What they dealing out?”

The sunburned sergeant stops ahead of them. “Maybe a couple Hotchkiss guns up there, Mausers.” He grabs his wounded arm by the wrist and raises it to display a small black stain on the bicep of his uniform shirt. “Put one right through me.”

Jacks cocks his head at the wound. “Mauser ball make a nice clean hole, don’t it?”

“We lost a boy in an ambuscade on the way, some of these guerillas up in the trees. Went in over the lung and come out his back the size of a fist.”

“That’d be a Winchester round. She’ll tear the hell out of you.”

Royal wonders if he is saying this for effect, trying to scare the greenhorns like the other veterans do. The two sergeants could be talking about fishing.

“You like a bullet to stay in one piece when it hits you,” adds Jacks.

The white soldier shakes his head. “Don’t know what they think a man can do,” he says. “Aint nobody going to take that hill.”

They continue to move forward, the men watching the treetops now. On the third day ashore they saw a few of the
guerillas
, hacked dead with machete blows and laid out on the side of the road, already stripped of equipment and some of their clothes. Cubans who fought on the Spanish side of this mess, but not looking any different from the
insurrectos
.

“Why would a man want to fight against his own people?” Junior wanted to know.

“We used the Crows to track the Sioux,” said Achille, who did a stretch in the 9th Cavalry when he was a young man. “Used the Tonkawa to fight the Comanches. But to a man outside they all just Indians.”

They march past a dead American, sitting propped at the base of a huge ceiba tree bordering another canefield. His whole middle is wet with blood, and there are a half dozen vultures circling in the sky. If the man’s head was at a normal angle it would look like he was resting.

“There’s the music,” says Bevill ahead of Royal and yes, he can hear it now, very light and distant but lots of it, no break between gunshots, just louder ones and softer ones.

They cross the field and fall out under the shade of the mango trees by a big plantation house. Men hurry their fixings out, rolling smokes, Too Tall cutting open a green cigar he has bought from some roadside
muchacho
and wadding the tobacco into his pipe. Royal drinks, realizes his canteen is already half empty. It is a beautiful spot. It is all beautiful country but for the heat and if you had the right clothes and nothing much to do and nobody was shooting at you it would be a paradise. Royal’s stomach is still not right from the green mangoes they boiled down for dinner last night, smelled like turpentine but tasted sweet. His stomach hasn’t been right, in fact, since the trip over on the
Concho
, the drinking water warm and brownish, the food no better than usual and all that rolling in the hold, sick even at night and having to take turns for time up on deck.

“Somebody’s catching hell,” says Gamble. “That firing aint let up once.”

The men listen. Birds are still singing, the high-pitched frogs are awake and throbbing, and through it they can hear the rattle and roll of rifle fire punctuated with an infrequent bass note of artillery.

Junior points. “Over there.”

They look and can see a cloud of white smoke rising above the jungle canopy to the right, maybe a half-mile away.

“That’ll be our battery,” says Sergeant Jacks. “Four pieces. Working kind of slow.”

They listen awhile, then lose interest, some men unhitching their loads and lying back on the ground, some talking quietly, most sitting alone with their own thoughts.

“
Insurrectos
say they cut the Spaniards’ heads off if they catch em,” muses Achille. “Say the Spanish do the same, put em out on a stake.”

“What that mean to us?” asks Coop, who lays back with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his chest.

“Means maybe some of them Spanish boys been wanting to surrender, get sent back home. Now they got us to give up to.”

“Don’t sound like nobody surrenderin to nobody up there.”

“They got their officers behind em, stick em with a sword they don’t keep fighting.”

“So alls we got to do is kill all their officers.”

“That would do it.”

“Good,” says Coop. “I keep that in mind.”

Sergeant Jacks comes by to inspect rifles, just the rookies, and Royal pulls out the oiled rag he keeps stuffed down the muzzle.

“There’s a village called Caney,” says the sergeant as he handles the Krag, “behind a fort on a hill. We sposed to take that, then swing over and help the main force at San Juan.” He has never volunteered this kind of information before, never explained, and Royal wonders why he wants them to know this now. “We get into the shit, you just do what you see everybody else doing.”

The sun is directly overhead when they are formed up again and marched toward the gunfire. Royal is out off the path as a flanker with Junior, struggling through the brush, when they come to a man hanging upside-down from a tree, a rope tied to his ankle. Another Cuban, a
guerilla
, with palm fronds fastened around his body. Blood has run from the hole where his eye used to be to collect in his hair and spatter down onto the broad-leaved plants below.

“Sniper,” says Junior, pausing to look up into the nearby treetops. “No telling how many of ours he killed.”

The battle is louder now, flankers called in as they approach the end of the cover. Now and again there is the whine of a closer bullet, leaves and palm branches fluttering down from above, snipped by the spillover from the fighting in front of them. A sharp crack here and there and wood chips flying. The men strip off the load of bedrolls and haversacks, jettison everything but rifle, rounds, and canteen. Royal imagines he is dead.

If he is dead they can’t kill him.

He crouches with the others at the end of the woods and looks through the trees at what is waiting. A rugged stretch of mostly open ground, green-brown chaparral with a few spindly trees leading to a steep hill crowned by a stone fort. There are wooden blockhouses stretching off to the left of it, and then, on another hill slightly behind, a village with a tall stone church. Royal imagines his mother at her table, quiet and all cried out. He imagines Jessie with a black armband over her white shirtwaist sleeve, wearing it for him, solemn for a year, maybe more. Being dead is nothing, exactly that, nothing, so much better than being afraid, being injured, in pain, maimed.

He is dead and whatever happens next cannot hurt him.

Lieutenant Caldwell strolls in front of them, still inside the first line of trees, shouting to be heard over the gunfire that seems to be mostly off to the right of the hill.

“We will need to step into the open to form ranks,” says the lieutenant. “And we will advance in extended order at once. We are part of a larger maneuver—people are counting on us and we cannot fail them. Sergeants!”

They step out and form a firing line then, sergeants trotting parallel and shouting, getting the intervals right while the volleys from the fort swing their way. There is nothing to hide behind, and though most of the rounds sing over their heads a few men fall and soldiers sidestep to fill in the gaps. G and H Companies are out front in the firing line, Royal near the far left, with C and D to follow a hundred yards back in support, the rest crouching back in reserve. Royal sees the 4th Infantry, who had been with them on the
Concho
, whites to port and blacks to starboard, step out to form on their left flank. There had been lots of jokes across the bowline stretched between them about who was being protected from who.

“Firing line, forward—march!”

Kid Mabley blows the order and they quickstep ahead.

The idea seems to be to keep moving forward and hope all of them are not dead by the time they reach the top. Royal checks to each side to be sure he is not getting out front too far and sees that more men are falling. He feels the bullets singing past as much as he hears them and keeps walking through the chaparral, everything very bright, very clear and thinking he should be firing like some of the others but there is nothing, nobody up there visible to shoot at. The line reaches some small trees and there is barbed wire stretched between them, a half dozen strands of it and posts every three feet to kick and club through, something to concentrate on furiously as chunks of wood crack into splinters and more men fall. Somebody is screaming behind him. The line is scattered when he comes into the clear again, Royal trotting with the few left on either side of Sergeant Jacks.

“In rushes!” shouts the sergeant. “Keep moving!”

There are whistles and bugle calls behind but now it is just rush and flop, rush and flop, desperate lunging forward then extending the Krag and diving to the ground. It’s a wildly uneven field with spiky pineapples in rows upon the churned earth and hard to navigate without tripping. Royal flops in a furrow and fires his first shot, not really using his sight but just pointing at the fort and pulling the trigger. Others are firing and the sergeant said to do whatever they did. The thick spat of a bullet near him and there is hot sticky fruit on his cheek and he is up and rushing forward again.

He can see something at the top of the hill, movement, behind the line of barbed wire staked in front of the rifle pits before the fort, and he fires again, trying to aim this time, if not at a person then at a spot a person might be in. The hill is steep, steeper than the sand dunes back in Tampa, Royal holding his rifle in one hand and using the other to grab roots, plants, anything to help haul himself up and something sprays his face again, not a pineapple this time but somebody, a wet part of somebody, men dropping, men stopping movement around him but he climbs upward, upward till he is exhausted and needs to lie with his face on the hot ground a moment, then roll on his back and let his lungs work. The dead can be exhausted, they can be thirsty, but they are never afraid. Royal drinks from his canteen and sees down the hill to the second line coming up past the bodies of the first, sees D Company double-timing forward on the right as flankers, then rolls and struggles upward again.