A Moment in the Sun (50 page)

They are ordered to move to a ridge overlooking Santiago under light fire, intermittent pops and the occasional cry, a man from Company C catching one that smashes the bone of his elbow, his forearm hanging useless. Some of the red-tile roofs below them show damage from artillery. Black smoke rolls up from a fire. Only Cooper seems serious about hitting the few uniformed Spaniards moving behind the breastworks.

“Them I didn’t get yesterday, Imonna get em today,” he says, up on the firing step in the trench some other outfit has left them, peering over his Krag. “Counted a dozen I’m sure is dead and a couple I knows I winged em.”

“Watch out for them truce flags,” says Willie Mills. “You pop one whilst they under that, Sergeant Jacks nail your ass to the shithouse door.”

“White flag only last till I hear a shot comin our way,” Cooper tells him, squinting to aim at a spot where he’s seen movement. “Then all bets is
off
.”

There is thunder from the bay in the afternoon, the men wondering if the counterattack has begun, if the Spanish reinforcements have come with artillery. It lasts less than an hour, then stops as suddenly as it began.

By dusk Cooper’s count is up to seventeen despite the white flags hustled back and forth and Royal has identified three different kinds of lice living on his body. The regiment is marched back down to the base of the ridge and told to hack a new trench from the hard ground. They were given three days’ rations before the attack and there is nothing left to eat. They dig through the night.

“What they got us down here doin nigger work for,” grumbles Cooper, “when they Spanish left to kill?”

Royal’s hands are bleeding, his bowels starting to twist. The Captain has them pile the breastworks on the rear side, as if they might be attacked from behind.

“You don’t eat nothin,” says Willie as they finally lay out their gear to sleep in the open again, “you starts to shit your
body
out. Keep this up and we won’t be nothin left but eyes and assholes.”

In the morning, refugees from Santiago appear on the road that cuts through their trench line. Hundreds of them, hungry-looking and scared, old men, women and children, even a few dogs skulking along nervously at the edges of the sorry stream, casting a suspicious eye on the watching soldiers.

“Dog look like stewmeat to me,” says Willie.

“If you kill it, I’ll eat it,” adds Cooper, but nobody shoots the dogs, preferring not to scare the wretched Cubans any worse. Some of them are dressed well enough, one lady wearing cotton gloves and walking stiffly under a parasol, but most are barefoot in rags with a numb, unfocused look on their faces. Where they can all be going is unclear.

“Counterattack comin today,” says Corporal Barnes. “Rats always climb off the ship when it’s set to go down.” Barnes, whose experience of ships is like their own, puking over the rail when he could get to it and in the hold when he couldn’t.

A mule train comes, teamsters haggard and mud-spattered, with sacks of raw beans and cans of embalmed beef and the news that the Spanish fleet attempted to run the blockade the day before and was smashed by the American gunships. There is a cheer, echoed along the lines as the word spreads.

“It’s the 4th,” says Junior, stabbing a can of the slimy meat open with his knife. “We ought to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” asks Cooper, who has sworn off the beef since it made him sick in Tampa.

“Celebrate our naval victory,” says Junior. “Freedom from tyranny.”

Cooper and some of the others laugh. “Why’nt you step up on that ridge and make us a speech?” he says, pointing to their former perch, occupied now by a white regiment. “I guarantee we see some fireworks.”

They stay just beneath the ridge the next day, and the next, when the rain starts in the evening and the men push rags into the barrels of their Krags and the water runs down the slope and into the backside of the trenches and Royal just barely makes it to the tiny ditch of a latrine before the beef runs through him. He has been thinking about Jessie but decides to give it up, something dirty about even the memory of her while he’s in this obscene place, this place where dead men and dead animals lie still unburied. There are a dozen other men squatting in the rain beside him, pants at their ankles, including one being held in position by his bunkie.

“He got the shakes,” says the standing bunkie apologetically, holding his moaning friend by the wrists, head turned sideways to provide the illusion of privacy. “We aint gonna fight no more why don’t they pull us the fuck out of here?”

It rains through the night, wet coming up through their groundcloths and soaking the little half-shelter tents, water over their ankles when they climb back in the trenches, rubber peeling off the flimsy ponchos of the men who bother to wear them. Royal is shivering too, now, though the rain feels warm on his face.

“Guess I’m not one of them Immunes,” he says to Junior, who looks away without comment, mouth tight. Royal’s hands shake as he tries to shovel muck on one of the pointless details the officers are inventing to keep them busy during the endless back and forth of negotiations with the Spanish.

“I can imagine they’re eager to surrender,” Junior says. “Even if they do have us outnumbered. They’ve spent a fever season here before.”

“Don’t let your guard down,” warns Sergeant Jacks, glaring at the make-work he’s been ordered to supervise. “It aint over till the Fat Man says so.”

The Fat Man is Shafter, who they have seen only once, being loaded into a carriage after a visit to the front, the huge, gouty pile of general in charge of the whole circus.

“Spanish just got to wait,” says Pres Stiles, who has been coughing up black, tobacco-looking hunks of phlegm. “Nother week in this shithole gone do us in.”

Heads have been counted. In their company Cousins and Strother are dead and Little Earl is lying under a tent back at Siboney waiting to be shipped home. When Royal left him he couldn’t talk but was still breathing. Lieutenant McCorkle from G was killed right at the beginning with Leftwich, and three men from D were lost on the barbed wire. A few more of the wounded might not make it, but considering the volleys that were poured into their firing line, the impossible open slope they had to cross, it is a wonder to have so few casualties.

“Aint been the bullet made can bring me down,” brags Cooper, who was a good ten yards ahead of the rest of them during the charge to overrun the trenches.

“Yeah, but they makin new ones every day,” says Sergeant Jacks. Royal remembers Jacks walking backward up the hill, heedless of the Spanish volleys, checking to be sure the men didn’t bunch up and blowing his whistle when it was time to flop or rush ahead.

“There’s a lot of stupid things you can do to get yourself killed,” Jacks likes to say, “but there aint much
smart
you can do to stay alive, except quit the damn Army.”

On the 11th they are marched back to the front lines in the pouring rain. Royal has a fire in his throat and something pressing behind his left eye, has to step out from the column twice to drop his pants and let go. By now it is one man out of four with the aches and chills and they are down to hardtack only, which they break apart to fry in the little bit of rancid sowbelly left to them. Royal threw away his last bit of that days ago but the smell clings to the cloth of his haversack, grease spots attracting swarms of tiny ants if he lays it on the ground during the few hours it isn’t raining. Pete Robey sings at dinnertime when they are making their desperate little fires, smashing charred coffee beans with the butts of their bayonets—

There’s a poor starving soldier

Who wears his life away

Clothes are torn and his better days are oer

He is sighing now for whiskey

With throat as dry as hay

Singing “Hardtack, come again no more!”

Pete has a deeper voice than Littler Earl’s, a voice that rumbles out of his barrel chest, and the others are too beaten to join him for the chorus—

It’s the song, the sigh of the weary

“Hardtack, hardtack

Come again no more

Many days you have lingered

While worms crawl at your core

O-oh hardtack, come again no more!”

When they reach the trenches overlooking Santiago again the white unit who has been holding them staggers away, scrawny and unshaven, filthy uniforms hanging from their bodies.

“You boys are welcome to it,” says a sunburned, runny-eyed sergeant. “Skeeters’ll get you if you don’t drownd first.”

It rains all through the night and for most of the rest of the week. The officers, some of them just as sick as the men, give up on everything but keeping the pickets out and every day another dozen can’t hold themselves upright in the morning.

The day the Spanish leave Santiago, Royal is shitting blood.

Not mixed with anything, just a hot slick stream of blood out where it shouldn’t be coming from and he is on his way to tell Sergeant Jacks something might be wrong when he sees the Spanish marching out, hears the bitter grandeur of their drums and horns as the side of the hill tilts up and smacks him hard in the cheek. He lies in the mud a while, dry-heaving, before Junior comes to find him.

“You o.k.?”

Royal manages to roll himself on his back.

The sick tent is just back down the hill, too many men down in all the regiments to transport the private soldiers all the way back to the coast. There is no medicine but for a spoonful of bismuth once a day and the treatment amounts to checking for dead every few hours and hauling them out.

“You got it easy now,” says Junior, trying to seem cheerful. “Just lay back and wait to ship out.”

After Junior leaves, a delirious man, a corporal from D Company, starts to thrash in his cot and rave about missing buckwheat cakes.

“I catches the one who took em,” he repeats, over and over, “I cut him to the
bone
.”

There is a different kind of time inside the sick tent, fever-time, each man in his separate sticky hell. It keeps raining, rivulets, then streams running under the tent edges and cutting away the ground beneath their cots. Royal finds himself tilting, feet higher than his head, and no one comes to set him level again. The delirious man is shouted at, told to shut up, threatened, but none of them lying there has the strength to get up and strangle him.

When he is conscious enough to sustain a thought, Royal realizes that all of it—the drumthumping of recruitment, the long training, the weapons and uniforms, the soul-wearying marches, the waiting in vomit-sloshing ship holds for the bilious, ocean-tossed transport of their blue horde to this steaming island, the flags and the stirring horns and the frank judgment in his comrades’ eyes pushing him forward, willingly if not eagerly, one foot in front of the other, obeying the order of the moment—are just parts of an intricate, implacable process meant to bring a sharp-nosed, shrieking bit of metal and his own forehead to the same spot at the same instant.

But the machine has failed somehow, too many moving parts, too much room for error, and so he lies here with rotting bowels waiting to feed the sweet-smelling, poisonous green jungle that grows and decays around him.

Royal is swept by waves of fever. The heat generates inside him then flashes through his body, a shimmering liquid heat beneath his skin cooking out in fever-sweat, his clothes sodden with it, heat concentrating as it rises to a place behind his eyes, brain boiling, images flashing, images first of battle, of the angry whine of bullets sizzling by, of metal ripping through flesh, but then as the days pass (if they are days and not only waves of clarity and unconsciousness) the images soften and swoon and there are times that Jessie comes to him, Jessie in a way he’s never dared to imagine her, loose and naked and steaming amid the hot green jungle plants, Jessie smiling, her tongue impossibly red, her breasts oozing sticky white pulp that drops,
spat
, on the broad green blades of the foliage below, her skin slick and oozing like the fleshy succulent plants and hot and wet and her sex a purple orchid red at the pistils yielding hot and wet and fleshy to embrace him, tightening in a sweet hot grip around him, squeezing, constricting, pulsing hot until he bursts and she is gone, his uniform cold and wet and heavy as a shroud on his trembling body.

The chills start then, shimmering through bone-aching limbs, pulsating Northern Lights of sensation that flutter, icy and electric, clear through him and he understands that he is dying despite Junior talking somewhere close You’re o.k. you’ll be fine don’t worry and piling on blankets—where did he find blankets?—that press on Royal but bring no relief from the icy wind that blows in his blood. And sometimes, suddenly, a patch of smooth water after the chilling rapids, Royal vaguely conscious and aware of sounds, a snatch of voices from the living outside the tent, the ones who can still prop themselves up at their posts and shiver under the searing noon sky, aware of where he is and who he is, aware of bright light strained through dirty white canvas overhead and mosquitoes whining by his ears and dying men groaning and Junior there again, giving him a drink from his cool metal cup and Royal hasn’t the strength left to lift his own head, then, slipping back down, flushing hot with fever as he is swept under another wave, lost to another steaming nightmare.

Days pass in waves of heat and chill.

Rain drills the tent canvas at night, stormwater cutting a deeper furrow below the cot, somebody weeping, weeping.

And Royal is a sidelong bulge of panic in a horse’s eye.

The horse is churning without direction in a hot, acid sea, snorting saltwater after each new wave slaps its upstretched head, nostrils barely above the surface, legs pedaling desperately, hooves seeking solid ground and finding none, not lathered despite the effort but huffing and pedaling in a lather of ocean, slapping waves incessant and blocking sight on every side, the powerful forelegs beginning to tire, saltwater rushing into the nose and down the long gorge and still it struggles, frantic, without the sense to surrender to liquid, a machine of slamming heart and burning muscle torn from its mooring but powering forward nonetheless, no thought, no plan in the beast’s mind only a shrill unwavering note of fear—