A Moment in the Sun (91 page)

“She was an actress.”

“An actress pretending not to know there’s a man grinding his camera-box not four feet away, that’s bad enough, but if it really
had
been hidden and the girl a normal, innocent person—”

“We wouldn’t do that.”

“Somebody will.”

She hadn’t wanted to stay and watch the others prodded through the blowholes and neither had he, but all day long much of the fun has been to watch other people swept off their feet and tossed about, to see them drenched or frightened into hysterics.

“Then I suppose,” ventures Harry, “that the picture tells you something about the person who photographs it.”

“So it does,” she says. “Until yer camera learns to crank itself.”

There is music drifting from a dance pavilion behind them and after they’ve eaten Harry follows Brigid over to watch from the edge of the floor. The band is small—a piano, bass, drums, and cornet—but skilled enough to hold a hundred dancers in thrall amid the competing noise of the rides and variety halls. Harry watches Brigid watching the dancers, often two young women together till a pair of sports gather the nerve to break them up and partner off, a semicircle of males observing from one side and a semicircle of their opposites on the other. The band shifts into a livelier tune and a few of the bolder couples begin to spin, pressing their faces and bodies tightly together, one arm extended stiffly outward, pivoting around and around at twice the tempo of the music, other couples dancing away to give them room and goad them to even greater speed.

“Spielers,” says Brigid, smiling and shaking her head. “My sister Grania is mad for it.”

It is the moment he has dreaded, the place where he can’t follow her. He feels other men’s eyes on her, bold as wolves, waiting for him to step—to
limp
away only for a moment and provide them an opening.

The spielers wind down, laughing and hugging, the women repinning their fascinators on their heads, a few couples kissing openly on the crowded floor and here it seems natural, it seems proper, as if in a place where gravity itself is defied all other rules are suspended.

The piano player leads into a slow waltz then, and Brigid pulls at his arm.

“I can’t,” he says, resisting. “One of these other fellows—”

“I’m not
with
any of these other fellas, am I?” says Brigid, and leads him onto the floor.

Harry stands while Brigid holds his eyes and waltzes around him, taking first his right hand in hers and then his left, stepping in and away, and he loses sense of the others, only the music and Brigid, the grace of her, her hair framing her face, Brigid light in his hand as if she is floating.

At the end of the waltz one of the floormen gives him a nudge.

“A drink for the lady,” he says, “and one for yourself and you can dance your shoes off.”

They step to the concession and he buys a Horse’s Neck, without the whiskey, for Brigid and a Mamie Taylor for himself. He has not told any of the men at the boarding house about her, unable to bear their joking. She is a scrubwoman and he, despite all his education, a tinkerer for a penny vaudeville concern. He can imagine the stock actors who would portray them in a Vitagraph story—a bug-eyed degenerate for him and a man, preferably fat and unshaven and stuffed into a dress, for the Irish maid.

Here lies Molly O’Keene—
reads the epitaph on the gravestone at the end of one popular comedy view—
Lit a fire with Kerosene
.

“It seems we have to pay for our pleasure,” she says, bobbing the spiral of lemon peel in her drink.

“Paradise for a nickel.”

They take their time strolling on Surf Avenue, people still arriving from the excursion ships at the pier, Harry’s heart full to bursting with the wonder of it, this woman who is who she is and chooses to spend a day with him, and finally they take the steam elevator to the top of the old Iron Tower next to the train station. They stand at the rail of the observation deck, three hundred feet high in the sea air, and are watching it all from above when the sun dips below the horizon and they hear a gasp from a quarter million people below. The electric lights are coming on, white lights, colored lights, lights that spin and blink and cycle in undulating patterns, more than you could count if you made a night of it.

“Will ye look at us now,” says Brigid, leaning her head against his shoulder. “Gazing
down
at the stars. And we haven’t even left the city.”

WAGES OF SIN

Once you know the drill they let you do it in private. Hod pulls the canvas across the opening, which always reminds him of the lowest of the cribs in Leadville, the girls standing outside, smiling and deadeyed, beckoning you to come have some fun, Honey-pie. The cleaning basin is there on a stand, with the Protargol solution and a fresh syringe beside it. He is glad he can do his own now cause it still hurts like hell and the mean prick of an orderly, Corporal Spinks, shoots it up in there fast and hard on purpose.

“What she call herself?” Spinks says, looking you in the eye with that nasty idiot grin of his. “Esmeralda? Trinidad? Consuela?”

“What’s your mother’s name again?” half the men respond. “She was squealing so loud I forgot—”

Then Spinks grins and jams the plunger in.

There is not as much gleet come out as there was yesterday. This is supposed to be a good sign. At first when he saw it, yellow and cheesy-looking on the end of his pecker, Hod was afraid it was one of the tropical diseases the men joke about and exaggerate, or even the start of leprosy which you can see people rotting away with it all over Manila, finger-missing hands out to beg for your loose centavos. The doc says the signs show up between a couple days to a couple weeks after you get it so it has to be the one night with him and Big Ten and Runt and two of his friends from the Minnesotas drunk out of their skulls over to Sampaloc. The Minnesotas have the provost with the Dakotas, wearing white and acting like company bulls, so they know where all the rum and women are kept. It was a slick-looking parlor, with red satin covers laid over the furniture, and Runt’s buddies made a show of chasing the couple Spanish soldiers out.

“You fellas lost the war,” said the big squarehead-looking one, “and got no business enjoyin yourselves. Skedaddle.”

Hod washes it carefully, gingerly, with the yellow soap and tepid water, squeezing the head to get the last of the discharge out.

“Aint handled it this much since I was twelve,” says Corporal Blount from the next enclosure. “Settin in the backhouse, thinking about Mary Jane Riley—”

“Whose name you should not be allowed to speak,” Hod calls back, “in light of your present condition.”

The fellas who only got the clap like Hod are a good deal more whimsical about it than those the doc has condemned with the pox. Medical speculation is bandied about when there are no officers present, and the accepted wisdom is that the whole mercury deal is only a way of further punishing the syphilitics and in the long run won’t cure a hangnail.

“Oh Lordy!” Blount exclaims in pain on the other side of the panel. “The consequences of moral turpitude.”

Hod lowers the syringe into the brown bottle and draws it full of Protargol. They say it’s silver in the solution that kills the bugs, fine silver dust stirred up so you can’t see it, and Hod wonders if he could have dug up any of what he’s pumping, slowly, very slowly, damn that hurts, into what the doc keeps calling his urinary meatus.

If the girl, Corazón, who seemed nice enough, had told him he was going to have to stick a needle up his peehole every day for two weeks he might have had second thoughts. Runt passed out on a couch, sick as a dog from the rum, but the Minnesotas said he always does that, can’t handle it, and them and Big Ten went too, each with a different girl, yet he is the only one of them here in the clap shack. He wasn’t even that keen on it, only full-on drunk for the first time since San Francisco and doing what the others wanted, and it is just the odds caught up to him, like how he figures it must be on the battlefield.

“Don’t hardly make sense to duck or hide,” says Corporal Grissom in his platoon, whose daddy chased Cheyenne in the regulars. “Bullet got your name on it, it’s gonna come find you.”

Hod pulls the works out and wants to pee right away, the burning and the pressure just awful, but you got to hold it five minutes.

Spinks is waiting when he pulls the canvas curtain open.

“It fall off yet?”

Hod ignores him and hobbles off toward the shitter. They give you some little woven-straw slippers that got nothing behind the heel, so the whole ward of them are shuffling like the old whiskey-soaked paretics he’s seen on Skid Road, the pox gone to their brains.

He crosses paths with the chaplain, who hangs a glare of disapproval on his mug before he comes into the ward most every day to gloat over the ones so far gone they can’t get out of bed. “Malingerers” is the nicest thing the chaplain has called any one of them, but you suppose it’s part of the treatment, Uncle paying you to shoot at Spanish boys and now the natives and not to get infected by the local
queridas
. Manigault has been riding him since Denver, like the rest of the company won’t figure out their lieutenant is a poker cheat and a humbug without Hod telling them, so it is something of a relief to be in here, now that he’s sure it’s nothing that will kill or unman him. The doc isn’t so bad as long as you hand over a glass of your pee now and then for him to ogle at under his microscope, and the chuck is passable even with meat crossed off the diet.

The clap patients outnumber the syphilitics three to one and there are a couple fellas who got other problems with their kidneys that they put up right next to the shitter. Hod nods to one of them from his company, Loftus, who is propped up to almost a sitting position.

“How’s it going?”

Yesterday Loftus said “Not so good” but today he is a bad color and just looks at Hod like he’s somehow at fault for it all. There is white folks and black folks, thinks Hod, rich folks and poor folks, Spanish and Filipinos, but there is no greater gulf than the one between the sick and the well.

And he’s not that well.

There are maybe a half-dozen of his fellow sinners, what the wags in the hospital have taken to calling “Rough Riders,” lined up at the trough, a couple of them with their pocket watches swinging in front of their faces. Every few seconds one will let it go and moan in anguish or curse or just gasp a quick deep breath as the Protargol and what it carries splashes down onto the metal. Hod is careful not to stand too close to any of them.

“Back on the firing line,” says Blount, shuffling up beside him.

“I figure another minute.”

“Yeah.”

“You wonder who she got hers from.”

“We are all brothers under the foreskin.”

“What’s that mean?”

“If you follow the chain, somebody gives it to somebody else, they pass it on—hell, it could go back to Moses.”

“Moses had the clap?”

“No, but I bet a couple them old boys dancing around the Golden Calf had it. Only they had to persevere without the wonders of modern medicine. Half the damn population must have been in tears every time they took a leak.”

“I say it’s five.”

“Feels like ten. Ready, aim—”

Blount makes a high whine that comes out through his nose, while Hod grunts an “
ah—ah—ah—ah—
” as he urinates, both men tilting their heads back and squinching their eyes shut. Afterward there is water and soap set out to wash it again and towels for drying and then a fresh-cleaned sock to pull over it and keep the new discharge from staining your hospital togs.

“I’d have worn this sock over it when I rolled that señorita,” Blount observes, “I wouldn’t be in this fix.”

She wore a lot more powder than Addie Lee ever did, this girl who give it to him, but seemed nice and friendly and not in a hurry. She was rounder than Addie, too, round in a nice way, and looked to be some kind of mix of Spanish and Filipino, though the people here look so many different ways it’s hard to get a handle on them. She called him “Yankee Boy.”

When he’s finished Hod goes to look for Lan Mei. The corpsman, not Spinks but the other who doesn’t seem to want to be there, says that she was left behind by a pack of nuns who used to run this ward till they set sail for the motherland. Some of the fellas say she was a whore like all the Chinese girls who come from Hongkong and the sisters brought her to the light and give her a job dumping bedpans, but that is only a rumor. There are no women allowed on the venereal ward at all but they’ve seen her in the hallway and one sergeant from the Nebraskas who has since been shipped home smuggled a pint in and got pickled and started railing about how she sneaks in at night and smothers white men with a pillow.

Hod finds her in the little room just off the kitchen, wearing gloves and using tongs to drop the syringes from the morning irrigation into a large kettle of boiling water.

“Mei.”

“You still here, huh?” She shouts a little when she is teasing him, but otherwise has a nice voice, soft and deep for a woman.

“I could go back to my unit any time,” says Hod, “only I’m stuck on you.”

“Stuck.”

“Enamored.” He is a little embarrassed to use the fancy word and wonders if she understands it. Their eyes don’t show as much as a white girl’s, and maybe that means they can’t pretend so much.

“You don’ think right,” she says, attending to her work. “Too much time inna sun.”

She knows that is not what is wrong with him, knows which ward he comes from, but doesn’t seem to care. The steam from the kettle turns to a thin film of water on her face and her hair is wet where it peeks out of the cloth she has tied it back in. He’s seen the other fellas say things at her or about her but none ever really stops to talk and she seems alone, alone as a person can be, though this is more her country than his.

“So where you come from, Mei?”

“Born in Guangxi.”

“What’s that like?”

Mei looks up at him, wipes the wet from her face with the back of her sleeve. “Work in a field. Leave there when I’m a little girl, go to Hongkong.”