A Moment in the Sun (84 page)

“The Spanish-atrocity theme is wearing a bit thin,” says Mr. White. “Given the turn of events.”

Before this the only view they’ve let Harry take part in was
Did Somebody Say Watermelon?
, and that had been done in the Black Maria with Skeeter and another of the boys from today.

“One of them moved,” says Mr. Heise. “One of our
insurrectos
. After he was shot.”

“The throes of death.”

“He looked at the camera before he did it.”

“We’ll cut it short. The view is over when they hit the ground. No use in being morbid about it.”

They ride silently through the Jersey woodlands. There might be some great use, thinks Harry, in being morbid. If they’d been able to mount the Beast on some sort of runner or sled apparatus and push it forward to see the bodies of the executed men more closely at the end, or if the camera were not such a behemoth and could be thrown over the shoulder and transported, like a Kodak on a tripod, as easily as a rifle, think of what Paley, or perhaps an operator less portly, might have captured at Las Guasimas or Kettle Hill or in this new Philippine nightmare that Niles has gotten himself embroiled in. Harry thinks again of the image of a bullet leaving a rifle and followed directly to the spot between the eyes of its victim, a handsome Southerner with a constant smirk of self-love on his countenance—

The ladies could not bear to view such a thing, of course, but ladies are not the advocates or perpetrators of war, and cannot be expected to be its
aficionados
.

The coach passes the wagon bearing the Beast, and Harry leans out to look. To any other eye it is only a bulky and seemingly purposeless piece of furniture.

“I thought our Dago capitán was awfully good,” says Mr. Heise. “Haughty and officious.”

“And without a moustache to twirl,” smiles Mr. White. “Quite an accomplishment.”

Harry’s mind is racing. If you staged it, he thinks, interrupting the wide view with a closer one of the condemned men’s faces, then sighting down the line of pointing rifles, perhaps a little stage blood to increase the impact of the sledding shot of the insurgents’ bodies—or if you could be there, be there on the actual battlefield to capture forever that horrible moment, one man murdering another in the name of the flag—how could they go on with it?

If they want war, he thinks, first make them watch it up close.

TURKEY SHOOT

Mariquina has to go. Captain Stewart and Phillippi from Cripple Creek and Pynchon, the bicycle racer from Company K, and Maccoe and Danny Donovan killed in four different fights here and enough is enough. Hod trots with a torch made from a length of bamboo and a googoo’s abandoned shirt soaked in kerosene, touching it to the dry thatch roofs of the nipa huts that catch fire with a hiss like that’s what they’re made for. The church is already pouring smoke. This is how it goes, he figures, maybe not so many of the people in this town want to fight them but there’s ones who do who keep coming back and pretty soon the details don’t matter—if it shoots at you, you kill it and tear down whatever it was hiding behind.

The people are all gone, run off into the hills around them, and tonight they will come back and dig for whatever they’ve hidden in the ground and maybe just the church steeple will be left standing and maybe not even that. Lots of the other boys are whooping, eyes bright with the blaze, throwing the wood stumps the locals use to husk their rice into the burning huts and smashing their water jugs with the butts of their rifles and Tutweiler running in and out adding to his collection of statues and pictures of the Virgin and Grissom’s monkey tormenting a fighting cock that has been left pegged to the ground, its feathers starting to singe, but Hod is just trying to get the job done. The quickstep has eased off finally, but now he has the other problem, needing to piss all the time and when he does it’s like acid coming out. This Philippines is trying to kill him.

It is the most beautiful place he’s ever seen, Mariquina, looking at it from the heights by the waterworks, set in between the dark green patches of trees and the lighter green of canefields and corn and rice and bananas and sweet potatoes and watermelons that the fellas would swipe and eat on the road after cleaning the
insurrectos
out of town yet again and now it is burning, burning—nothing to see from the heights if you were up there but black smoke.

He comes upon Big Ten with nothing in his hand to set fire with, the Indian just standing in the middle of it all, watching moodily. The huts crackle and pop around them, black smoke blowing to the west.

“Some party, huh?” he says to Hod, a strange little smile on his face. “All we need is the regimental band.”

Later, back up on the hill, there is distant shelling, a hotter engagement just to the north, and the captain lets them stand and watch for a moment before they march off to help. Hod feels it coming and turns his back to the far-off battle and opens his fly and out comes a too-yellow stream of it.

Burning.

Nilda squats with the others in the cogon grass, mosquitoes feeding on them all. Her cousin’s little
bahay kubo
in Mariquina is in flames and there is another battle ahead of them, gunfire and explosions, so they hide and wait. The
yanquis
usually leave before it is dark, but this time there will be nothing left.

It isn’t her town, just a corner of the room in a tiny hut where she has curled up since they killed Fecundo, washing and cooking for the wife of the
capitán de barangay
and hiding under the copra shed whenever the
yanquis
come through. There are others like her, floating people, on the run back to their home provinces or with nowhere left to go, and she supposes she will join them on the road in the morning, heading north ahead of the Americans, feeling bound to tell Fecundo’s mother of his capture and execution. Many of the wanderers are children, sick with hunger, heads too big for their bodies. Too many of them to be cared for. The ground shakes beneath them as the
yanqui
bombs explode. The sun has a good while left in the sky and then they can creep back to whatever is left of Mariquina. Sometimes there are animals burned, cooked, after a town is razed, and Nilda hopes to find one for her journey.

You got to give the little monkeys credit—they dig a hell of a trench. Maybe not so deep as the vols with their longer legs, but deep enough to fit a lot of bodies in. Big Ten grabs the arms on the ones that still got both and Hod takes the legs and they swing them down onto the pile.

“Artillery tore these people up,” says Hod, wiping his hands on the sides of his pants.

“Some of them.” Big Ten rolls a man over and indicates the hole in his forehead. “This one, you got to say it’s superior marksmanship.”

“Stupid bastards try to fight us nose to nose. Your outfit never did that.”

“My outfit.”

“You know—”

“Sure they did, way back. Never turned out too good, though, so they gone back to Indin tactics.”

They heave the body. There is still gunfire to the north, just potshots from the sound of it, and Lieutenant Manigault is over with the brass, all of them waving their sticks around.

“Here’s another one.”

Big Ten squats to examine the hole in the man’s head. Not one of his. He is one of two dozen in the company they give a Krag to the other day for “outpost duty,” but really cause he shoots better than the rest. “Chief got them eagle-eyes,” the fellas say, “like all Indins.” Only his father had to wear glasses he bought over in Bemidji and his brother Laurent couldn’t hit a chestnut tree at ten paces. It’s either you got the feel for it or you don’t, and Big Ten knows for a fact he didn’t shoot nobody through the head. If they were squared off to fire he snapped their collarbone opposite the rifle side and if they’d started to run he put one in the thigh. What the other fellas done when they come upon these wounded wasn’t his business, he figures, it’s just one more little monkey I don’t have to deal with tomorrow.

They heave the body.

“What’s that, thirty-four?”

“I just shoot em,” says Big Ten. “Don’t ask me to keep count, too.”

He used fourteen rounds in the fight, hit fourteen men. The other fellas say they just shoot into the crowd, sitting ducks, they say, but Big Ten can see what kind of weapon they’ve got and if they’re an officer or not and whether they close their eyes when they fire. An awful lot of them, and this is supposed to be their best people up on the line, shut their eyes just as they pull the trigger. Plus their artillery is a joke, old cannons off Spanish ships that blow apart as often as they send a ball flying.

“We’re supposed to be counting.”

“Make up a number. Manly Goat aint gonna climb down in here and check.”

The next one they got to toss in pieces.

“Shell must of fell right on him.” Hod is looking queasy.

“He’s not any deader than these others. Grab them feet.”

Big Ten can knock down a squirrel in mid-leap at a hundred yards through a stand of yellow birch. The rounds run smooth through the Krag, and make half the mess the Springfield .45s do when they hit somebody. Not fit for the stewpot, as his father used to say of birds they brought back too full of pellets. Big Ten has never, he thinks, been as good at anything as he is at this soldiering business.

If only he liked it more.

“You think they’d of learned by now,” says Hod, using his feet to position a body so they can get a grip on it. The Filipinos don’t weigh much more than a middling-sized Ojibwe child, his brother’s son René maybe, and don’t carry money into battle, which has pretty much scotched the likelihood of getting volunteers for clean-up duty. “They ought to fight shoot-and-run, like your outfit.”

“Sure,” says Big Ten, heaving. “Just look how good we come out.”

“Well, if I was their general,” says Hod, wiping something sticky and yellow off his hand onto the side of his pants, “I sure wouldn’t waste any more people in these trenches.”

Corporal Grissom wanders back and looks at the jumble of bodies in the pit.

“How many we got in there?”

“Forty-one,” says Hod without blinking. Grissom looks to Big Ten.

“We got a smoker goin ahead at the river, Chief. Lieutenant wants you up there on the double.”

“What about me?” asks Hod.

The corporal shrugs. “Didn’t say nothin about you.”

Hod picks up his old Springfield. “Well I aint draggin these dead men around on my own.”

“Suit yourself.”

They pass more enemy dead on the walk to the river, a few on their bellies with triangular bayonet wounds in the back. The flying column wasn’t supposed to take prisoners unless they might have important information. From the look of these little monkeys, nobody asked. They pass the porters kneeling in a circle in their cast-off Army clothes, throwing dice next to a small hill of equipment, and Grissom shouts for them to go back and cover the pile of Filipino that Hod and Big Ten left. Chinks will do about anything you pay them for except fight or touch dead bodies.

Lieutenant Manigault and some bigger brass are back in the trees, while the boys are hunkered down wherever there is cover from the snipers on the other side of the water.

“This is the one I told you about,” says Manigault. “Never misses.”

“Then get him cracking,” says a colonel with a big moustache.

The Lieutenant and Corporal Grissom lead Big Ten and Hod to the riverside, where Sergeant LaDuke lies cursing behind a tree stump.

“Every time we send somebody out he gets plinked by those sonsabitches over there. They must be renegade Spaniards.”

“Spanish can’t shoot worth shit either,” observes Corporal Grissom.

“Maybe it’s Lenny Hayes from I Company,” says Hod.

Hayes fell in love with a Filipina and went over to the other side, and is supposed to be moving fast up through the ranks of the googoo army.

“Can you see them?” Manigault asks Big Ten.

“Not unless they pop up to shoot at somebody.”

Manigault looks to Sergeant LaDuke. “Well?”

“Stick your head out there,” LaDuke orders Hod.

Hod gives Big Ten a dirty look. Big Ten points.

“Just haul your freight over and get behind the bank where it rises up there. They won’t get more than a couple off.”

Big Ten sights on the tangle of trees across the narrow river. “Go.”

Hod runs and two men rise slightly from behind a downed tree trunk to fire at him. Big Ten sits one of them down with a round through the collarbone.

Crack!
a piece of bark flies off next to his face. LaDuke curses.

“That came from high,” Big Ten says to Manigault. “They probably got a bunch in the trees.”

“Can you get them?”

“Only if they got a reason to show themselves.”

Manigault turns to the sergeant. “Take your squad,” he orders, “and trot along the bank like you’re looking for a good place to cross.”

“Like ducks in a goddam shooting gallery.”

“On the double, Sergeant.”

LaDuke curses and calls his men over. Hod pretends he can’t hear but Grissom goes to get him. As the sergeant begins to run Big Ten rolls into his spot, bracing the Krag on top of the tree trunk and firing, one—two—three—four—five—six—the other volunteers along the bank cheering as they see bodies drop out of trees and then the 1st Kansas is up and whooping, charging into the water.

The colonel with the moustache and some of the other brass and everybody else but the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration come up to congratulate Manigault on having such a valuable asset in his company. Only one of the squad, Clete Standish, was hit by the snipers while running decoy, shot through the hip, and he is being carried back by Hod and little Monroe who used to tend bar at the Arcade in Denver.

The colonel thumps Big Ten on the back. “If your outfit had a few more bucks could shoot like you do,” he winks, “I might never have made it out of Arizona.”

Big Ten watches the 1st Kansas wading neck-deep under halfhearted fire with their rifles, bayonets fixed, held high over their heads. Never miss a chance, the Kansas, to stick whoever is left crawling on the other side. He knows he hit at least three of the men in the trees, not showing much of themselves, right between the eyes.