A Moment in the Sun (76 page)

“The Americans are not the Spanish,” he answers, hedging. “They don’t have the priests whispering in their ears—”

“I’d want a fight. I’d want some dead American boys to throw at the feet of these voters, these ones who will decide what to do with us.”

He is a simple
tao
, a peasant, Bayani, in manner of speech and appearance, but there is an understanding, a cunning—

“Yesterday the Americans fired every Filipino working behind the lines for them,” says the sargento, spitting into the darkness. “Today they point their cannons at us.”

There is a burst of laughter from the cockpit, then shouting and the squawking of birds. “If they attack tonight,” says Diosdado, indicating the sargento’s lit cigarette, “the first one they’ll shoot is the
tanga
sitting in front of his breastworks smoking.”

Bayani leans back on his elbows, relaxed. “Unless they hit the
teniente
standing up next to him in a white uniform.”

The uniform is impossible, a chore to keep clean at the front. Once a week he gives it to a girl who smuggles it past the
yanquis
into the Intramuros and brings it back the next morning, clean, starched, and smelling of woodsmoke.

“Maybe the vote will go our way.” Diosdado starts back down the line. The men should at least be facing in the right direction.

“You know, in the
sabong
, if you hold the birds back from each other too long,” Sargento Bayani calls after him, “they will burst and die.”

In the daytime it seems very little like there will be a war. The land on this side belongs to the Tuason family, the rice mostly harvested, a handful of their
kasamas
wandering over from Santol to compete with the flocks of maya birds, gleaning what has been dropped in the fields. The Englishman McLeod has a house on the hill above them, as do a couple of the Tuasons, and the carabao, untethered, pass their days dozing in the shade of the cane thickets and lumbering down to wallow at the edge of the San Juan.

“An orderly transition,” Diosdado says in his lectures to the men about not drinking on duty and taking more care with their firearms. “We can only hope these people will be as civil as the Spaniard when they decide to leave.”

In the pit, Kalaw and Nicanor hold their cocks head to head, the birds pecking furiously at each other, neck plumage bristling—

“
A ra sartada!
” cries the
chino
and the men let the cocks go and step back quickly, the birds smacking together in a flurry and shooting upward, squawking and clawing, feathers flying, the razor spurs unsheathed.

“
Vaya
, Destino!” call the men who have bet on Kalaw’s bird. “Cut him to pieces!”

“Get on him, Butcher!” call the others. “Don’t let him go!”

They are both well-bred, Diosdado notes, standing with his back to the pit but looking over his shoulder. Small heads, long thighs, necks like steel cable, one rusty and barrel-chested, the other sleek, gray with black stippling and now flecks of his own and the other bird’s blood.

“Take his eyes out!” cries Kalaw, crouching with his hands balled into fists, doing a little dance as he shadows the movements of the fight. “What’s wrong with you?”

The fowl leap and flap and peck and claw, chests heaving, blood spattering, their tiny eyes red and implacable in the torchlight, till both stagger back, exhausted.

“Break!” calls Locsin, and the men gather up their champions, Kalaw spitting water into his wounded bird’s face and cooing endearments, Nicanor taking Butcher’s comb into his mouth and sucking the fighting blood back into it as Private Ontoy hovers over both with his needle and thread in hand, ready to sew off a torn artery if needed.

“
Ristos!
” calls Locsin, who receives a good deal of teasing because he can’t pronounce his
l
’s, and the men again push their gamecocks’ faces together.

“
Rucha!
”

The renewed struggle is easier to follow than the opening brawl, both birds clamping on with their beaks and trying to pull the other down, Destino dragging a broken wing, Butcher blinded on one side, yanking at each other desperately and then resting as if by agreement, their tiny hearts visibly hammering in their bodies, feathers slick with blood and gaffed claws digging for purchase in the trench dirt. Diosdado hears fireworks coming from the east, his first thought that at least his men are not the ones out of control with their celebrating, and then a private whose name he has never learned falls into the pit, shot through the eye.

“They’re coming!” shouts Bayani from the river. “The
americanos
are coming!”

The fireworks are on top of them now, the air filled with angry wasps and the men scatter, most leaping down into the pit, some going for their weapons and the rest just going.

“To the front!” calls Diosdado, standing tall and feeling sick about it. “Everybody to the front! Cover the bridge!”

The birds, excited by the noise and the movement, break apart and begin to swipe at each other again and two more that were pegged waiting for the next fight are kicked loose in the scramble and go for each other and Diosdado finds himself stepping forward to the nearest outpost and pointing at the foot of the bridge as if his men don’t know by the muzzle flashes where the attack is coming from.

“There!” he shouts, over the whine of bullets and the hysterical squawking of gamecocks. “Concentrate your fire over there!”

There is no cover, he thinks, a tiny redoubt next to the bridge on the American side but then the exposed, low-railed bridge itself and the open water—they must be insane. They will be slaughtered, even at night. He turns to shout an order to Sargento Ramos, but for some reason Ramos is down on his hands and knees, crawling—

Most of the officers have gone to what is advertised as “Warren’s Combined Shows,” but Niles has never cared for the circus. He sits in his white drill playing bid whist, no jokers, with two Nebraska lieutenants and a major from the Signal Corps. There is money on the table, gold and silver coins and paper bills, and he and his partner, the wire-stringer, are only a trick away from taking the pot. He’s pulled all the trumps from the Nebraskas, and his partner, eyebrows wig-wagging a code they set beforehand, has made clear what he’s still holding.

“I had my doubts about this game,” says Niles, pretending to consider his cards only to prolong the losers’ agony a few delicious moments more, “but I’m beginning to see its merits.”

Niles can recite the order of every card played in last week’s poker game, has memorized the nicks and flyspecks on the backside of the worn deck they are using, has caught two reneges already this evening, Lieutenant Coombs too distracted by the lizards on the rectory walls to follow suit.

“They still haven’t moved,” he keeps saying. “But if they were dead they’d fall off the wall, wouldn’t they?”

Niles has suggested that the friars glued them in place for some manner of reptilian penance, but the Nebraskan remains fascinated, much to his partner’s dismay.

“Coombs here is as much help in a card game as our little brown brethren were in taking the city,” says Lieutenant Spottiswood. “With friends like these—”

Niles slips the jack from his hand, raises it high—

It is something like the effect of rain on a metal roof. A few hard drops, scattered and tentative, then thickening, the thin pop of Mausers and louder bang of Springfields and then a hammering onslaught of gunfire, really pouring now, all coming from the defensive positions to the north.

“That sounds like us,” says Coombs, laying his hand down with a frown and rising from his chair. The lizards skitter out of sight.

Spottiswood, much relieved, begins to sweep money into separate piles, as if he can recall who wagered what. “Afraid we’ll have to call it a night. That is most definitely us. Trouble with our
amigos
across the river.”

Jeff Smith once held a pistol on a steamship captain, forcing him to play out his hand despite the news that his vessel was sinking off the Juneau Pier. Niles can only scowl at the Nebraskans’ abandoned cards. “If you don’t have the queen of spades in there,” he says, “those niggers are going to
pay
.”

It is coming out of Hod, hot and liquid and seemingly with no end as he squats alongside the convent and listens to the bullets chip the stone away. All hell has broken loose and there are signal rockets streaking across the sky and I got the trots again, fuck these fucking islands and please let me die with my pants pulled up. The googoos must be shooting high, well over the heads of the boys on the front, for their bullets to be landing this far back and now here’s Lieutenant Tarheel, chuckling, stepping around and over the men who have grabbed their rifles and laid down on their bellies to wait for orders.

“Word is we’ve got them coming in all through our lines, gentlemen,” he says, pointing to the north with his cane. “It looks like the dance has begun.”

Hod gets himself buttoned up and joins the others, shaky legged, as they are mustered on Calle Alix, Companies F, G, and E marched quickstep in Indian file out past the dark cemetery to dig in just south of the Balic-Balic road, looking across at the googoos that must be holed up in Blockhouse 6. It is all bamboo thickets and just-harvested rice fields around the road, Hod peering into the dark every few yards of the march for a good spot to flop if they run into an ambush. By the time they are in position the firing has thinned out, the blockhouse a black shape against a blacker sky ahead. Hod manages to crawl over an irrigation dike and pull his pants down around his ankles again. He is only just started when Sergeant LaDuke slides down next to him.

“You too,” he says, unbuckling his belt.

“It aint nerves, Sergeant,” says Hod, wishing he could be left alone by the Army for one solid minute, if only to relieve himself in peace. “This country’s got my bowels in a twist.”

“Artillery will start in on that at sunup,” says the sergeant, eyes bright with excitement, jerking his head back toward the enemy blockhouse as he squats to deliver. “And then the shit is gonna
fly
.”

The moon is just peeking over the horizon when the Chinese come with coffee, a huge tureen of it suspended on poles they carry across their shoulders, running and squatting, rising and running again with their quick bow-legged shuffle that always makes Corporal Grissom laugh so hard he almost chokes. It is quiet over by the big bridge and only a random potshot from the blockhouse now, but the Chinamen are trembling like gun-shy puppies by the time they arrive.

“No toast and jam?” says Neely. “That tears it—Sergeant, I want to go home.”

“Sugar and cream?”

“Hey, it’s still hot. Attago, Chop Suey.”

All the Chinamen are Chop Suey or Chow Mein or Foo Young or You Yellow Pigtail Bastard and they give Hod the willies. Windy Bill Bosworth who he double-jacked with in Montana worked with them in California and said they were demons in a hole, do-anything rockbusters who the white miners eventually ran out so they wouldn’t have to compete. These two just stay close to the ground and watch the tureen, wishing for it to be empty so they can hurry it away from the front.

“Just think if they’d sent us to China,” says Grissom, poking one of the coolies with his boot. “This is what we’d be facing.”

“I doubt these two are Boxers.”

The coffee is hot and acid, better than nothing but only just. Hod doesn’t expect it to stay in him for too long.

“Same breed,” says Grissom.

Donovan is shivering as hard as the Chinese. “If we’re not to fight,” he says, “lave us go back under our blankets and wait till it’s serious.”

“Do they even have rifles, the Chinamen?” Grissom is still staring at the coolies as if he’s never seen one before.

“Chopsticks. They fight with chopsticks.”

“I seen one swing one a them laundry skillets at another once—”

“And the tong gangsters use hatchets and meat cleavers—”

“Wouldn’t stand much show in this mess.”

Hod can see the front of the blockhouse, washed by moonlight now, a solid square built of wood beams with one eye-level firing slit on the side and a little roofed lookout platform on the top. He hopes if they have to make a charge the artillery will have had time to work on it some.

Grissom tosses the dregs of his coffee into the ditch at Hod’s feet. “Then they oughta get them a couple breech-loaders and a Long Tom rifle,” he mutters. “Join the human race.”

It is cold, bone-cold, when Capitán Grey y Formentos announces the counterattack, a heavy dew gathering, Bayani’s breath visible as he complains to Diosdado.

“Why did he wait?” hisses the sargento, crouching with his back to the wall of the cockpit as they wait for the order to charge. “He can’t look into the fucking sky?”

Diosdado looks, the moon rising over the hill behind them, and then Grey y Formentos fires his pistol and cries for them to charge across the bridge and he is up out of the pit and running, men beside him shouting and he fills with pride to be leading them as their feet strike the planks of the bridge and the whine of American bullets concentrates to a roar, a solid typhoon wind of destruction sweeping across the river at them and the pride is replaced by something else as they begin to stagger and fall. “
Con pecho desnudo
” he thinks as he stumbles on the body in front of him.
With open breast
—

“
Retíranos!
” the capitán calls then and it is worse going back, Diosdado forcing himself to retreat slowly, facing the fire as the men rush past him, helping Bayani drag a boy hit in both his legs to the base of the bridge and then the artillery begins to blow the hill behind them apart, the shells falling just short of the waterworks, each one louder, closer, walking down the slope to the edge of the river where the remnants of his ragged company are huddled. The ones who have rifles fire, none really aiming, reloading frantically and firing again while the enfilade from the American line continues steadily, Diosdado’s men dug in only as deep as bayonets and tin cans can scratch in desperation, dew-moistened dirt spattering up to slap against his white uniform pants as he wills himself to stroll, hands clasped behind his back the way Luna does when he drills the men, some of his boys wounded, crying, Reynaldo Puyat dead, yes, that is what dead looks like up close and the bodies they left on the bridge still lying there and the
whump!
of the shells behind them, the shock of each blast like a thick board smacked against his body and the fighting cocks crowing and flapping and he is tired, tired as the sun seeps over the land to the west, understanding now how men can charge into certain death, so exhausted they can think of nothing better to do and he can see the others now, moving across the bridge and along the pipeline, huge men, Americans, hurrying a few steps then taking a knee to fire again and then a sharper bang tearing the air and it is shrapnel, his men beginning to run, run back up the hill where the big shells are plowing the ground or sideways along the river with canister-bursting jagged shrapnel screaming slicing and
whump!
the section of the bank he is standing on lifts suddenly into the air and the ground slams him on the side, punching the breath from his lungs and more earth, heavy, falling on top of him and he starts to leave, body floating out into the fragrant earth, dirt in his mouth in his nose in his hair and something wet and hot mashed against his cheek.