A Moment in the Sun (104 page)

Hod is on a knee next to Vásquez as the Lieutenant comes up, crouched low, the pistol out and ready. Please let there be shooting, he thinks, shooting and running and confusion like this morning on the heights and bullets winging this way and that and anybody likely to get plugged in the heat of it. The best would be to pick up a Mauser from the googoos once they’re overrun and do it with that, a tidy hole between the peepers that nobody will question, only they leave their dead and wounded sooner than they leave their weapons, two bolomen behind each soldier with a firearm, ready to scoop the rifle up and continue the fight. I want him to be looking at me when I do it, too, so a stray round from behind is out, though there’d be a dozen men in the platoon they’d have to consider as its author. Manigault kneels by the Spaniard.

“Why have we stopped?”

Vásquez points. “The bridge is down there.”

The Lieutenant rises to gaze over the top of the razor-edged grass and sees what they all have seen, googoos in number on both sides of the river at the base of the stone-span bridge, working in spite of the brutal heat to reinforce their breastworks, digging in for a serious smoker.

Manigault kneels again, turns to stare at Hod. “You,” he says. He hasn’t called Hod anything else since his return from the clap shack. “Get up there and take a look.”

They have been spotted by now, the lack of gunfire meaning only that the googoos know they’re just out of range, and this demented cracker wants to waste time just to get him killed.

“I can see well enough from here,” says Hod, not moving.

Niles brings the pistol up into his face. Ever since he got the Webley he has been overly free with it, as if the pistol alone bumped him up a few bars in the pissing order. “Are you refusing an order, Private?”

Big Ten is off to the left and Hod hears the bolt on his Krag first, followed by several others. No telling who will take which side in the disagreement if it comes to blood, but if he goes forward now the googoos will shoot at him and miss high like they always do and then start running and waving their bolos and it is too fucking hot to run, even to save your own hide. So he might as well just settle it here.

“If that’s the way you want to hear it, Lieutenant,” Hod answers him, “sure.”

He can’t tell from Manigault’s eyes if he is too sun-baked to know he will be the second one to die, and damn quick too. They are still pounding the hell out of Las Piñas, the
whump! whump!
north of them now, and the shellbursts punctuate the long silence between the men.

“When we return,” says the Lieutenant finally, “you shall be court-martialed.”

“Fair enough.”

Manigault turns to eyeball each man in the platoon. “You all witnessed what has just transpired. Sergeant LaDuke, relieve this man of his weapon.”

LaDuke takes Hod’s old Springfield, then gives it to Corporal Grissom to carry, who lays it off on Neely as they come out from the tall grass and back onto the road, Hod walking ahead with the Macabebe scout, who seems unperturbed as usual.

“Son of a bitch,” gripes Neely behind them. “You done that just so’s you wouldn’t have to lug your damn rifle comin back.”

They have not gone too far when Lieutenant Manigault starts to weave on the road, drifting from this side to the other and muttering to himself.

“I can’t feel my limbs anymore,” he says. “They must be frozen.”

And then crumples to the ground.

There are no oxcarts around to commandeer and for a moment LaDuke stares at the heap of lieutenant like he might just leave it there in the road. Finally he has Tutweiler take Big Ten’s Krag and tells the Indian to help Hod carry. Big Ten hefts Manigault up under the arms and Hod takes his feet and it is awkward and still scorching and no way to wipe the stinging sweat out of their eyes.

When they stagger past the mutilated body of the suspect there are already buzzards, three of them, picking at it without enthusiasm, as if the heat has ruined their appetite.

DEVOLUTION

Cross-hatching won’t do for it. To set off the white of the bone in the nose, the white of the rolling cannibal eyes, the hanging shell beads and stiff fronds of thatch around the waist, you need pure black, midnight black, so much ink that it soaks through the pad to stain the desk beneath. The photos of the little nignogs coming down from the exposition in Buffalo have been useful—who knew they had their own pygmies?—but it has been necessary to blend the googoo with his Ubangi cousins, also well-represented at the Pan, in order to convey the true, primitive horror of what our boys are threatened with on that Godforsaken splatter of Pacific islands.

Amok
, they call it, this state of blood-lust, this disregard for your own body’s vulnerability to shot and shell, that hurls the ink-black savage forward with razor-edged bolo in hand to wreak havoc on American boys in their shallow trenches. To run
amok
. How does one defend against a foe with no care for his own well-being, who sweeps forward though thoroughly drilled with pistol shot, who, like the fanatic Chinese Boxer, believes himself invulnerable in his rush to murder and mutilate? If this be, indeed, the White Man’s burden, to civilize, to Christianize this creature of darkness, we have accepted a task far greater than that of our forefathers who confronted the red-pelted tribes of wood and plain, and face an opponent too base to elevate and too numerous to exterminate.

The bolo is suspended from one sinewy arm, the wooden spear held ready to launch in the other, the kinky locks, a maddened squirrel’s nest of hair, springing in every direction.

Behind this apparition sits the humble Cuban Peasant, brim of his straw hat turned back to reveal an honest if uncomplicated face, building a sand castle with the ripe-breasted, silken-haired Hawaiian Girl, the grass of her skirt fuller, looser than the googoo’s spiky fringe, simple, but elegantly becoming to this daughter of Nature. Uncle sits on a beach chair, sleeves rolled up, arms crossed, balefully staring down at the wretched, threatening Filipino, who comes only to his shins.

AMERICA
’
S PROBLEM CHILD

—
says the caption. Horrible as the Tagalo bandit is, the petulant futility of his resistance must be kept in sight.

And no, cross-hatching will not do for it. The Cartoonist opens the top of his pen, and the ink spills forth.

PEARL OF THE ORIENT

Even the coolies are staring. Sergeant Jacks leads the company along the north side of the Pasig, a hodgepodge flotilla of hemp barges and shallow-draft boats covered with curved, palm-thatched roofs bobbing to the right. Barefoot Chinamen balance on long planks leading from the boats to the cement dock, each pair with a huge basket filled with fish hung from poles over their shoulders, pausing to gape at the smoked yankees of the 25th. Small boys snap their switches against the flanks of water buffalo pulling wood-wheeled carts full of bulging rice sacks, the boys giggling and shouting to each other when they see the soldiers file past the steep-roofed warehouses where Filipino brokers in white suits sit on crates to watch, holding parasols over their heads to block the suddenly brutal sun, even the towering crane arms throwing no shadow at this hour. There are boat horns and steam whistles and tethered goats bleating and the shouting of the boys and the brokers and the coolies, none of it in anything Jacks can recognize as Spanish. The dock is puddled from the downpour just ended, what they call an
aguacero
in El Paso, and another threatening in the sky behind.

Jacks looks across the wide, placid river to the Walled City and just from what is visible over the parapets he can tell Manila is a bigger deal than Juarez could ever hope to be.

Company E, just ahead of them, cuts left up a street along the side of the customs building. The boys don’t have the usual strut, legs still wobbly from the choppy trip on the launch from the anchorage and their two weeks at sea out of Hawaii on the
Valencia
, but orders are to march them without pause through what is supposed to be secure territory all the way out to the reservoir at El Depósito.

“Companyyyyy—
left
!” calls the sergeant and they follow him up the side street. Like most folks, he never heard of the Philippines before Dewey steamed into the Bay. There was some possibility, just before climbing aboard in San Francisco, that it would be China to fight the Boxers, but it looks like they got their share of Celestials here, doing all the nigger work with their long braids hanging down their backs. He wonders if they speak the same brand of Chinee as the ones on St. Louis Street in El Paso.

“Let’s pick us up a couple of these yellow men here, Sarge,” calls Cooper from behind him. “Leave them Army mules behind.”

There seems to be no glass in the windows, just panels with a lattice-work of little pearly squares set in them, oyster shell maybe, ground thin to let the light through. The panels slide back and forth in grooves and are pulled open now for the break in the rain, what he figures must be more Filipinos sticking their heads out to stare at them. So far they seem to come in as many shades as his troopers, only straight-haired and pint-sized. Old women and near-naked children have come out to try to sell something like a
tamale
wrapped in a leaf
,
walking alongside and calling to them and Jacks feels like he’s in Mexico again only the heat, thick and liquid still despite the hours of rain dumped this morning, is more like Cuba. Like Santiago just before they left, half the outfit down with fever and feeling like you could drown on dry land. The white folks still call his men all the same things they ever did, good and bad, except for “Immunes.”

They follow E Company to the right now, old women with red teeth setting up shoe-shaped earthen ovens on the ground, feeding sticks to the fires within and arranging kettles filled with anybody’s guess above, and then they pass between a stand of bamboo with leaves like spearheads and a huge, oak-looking tree covered with red blossoms and Sergeant Jacks asks himself for the thousandth time how else a narrow-ass little cane chopper from the Texas border get to see all this?

And maybe when the brushfires here are all stamped out, on to China.

They come to an estuary of the Pasig, more like a canal from how they’ve built along it on both sides, and head toward a little bridge Jacks can see to the north. Good we’re here, he thinks, nothing for the boys to do at Bliss but get into trouble, the Army like a horse that needs to be rode or it gets sullen and ski-footed. He knows they’ve been talking on the ship about Indian-fighting, but this far behind the lines it looks like a fairly peaceable tribe, nothing a steady flow of government beef and some vigilance over the firewater can’t control. There are lizards skittering on the walls of the stone buildings, the little thumb-sized ones Mingo Sanders in B Company always calls “Apache breakfast sausage.” It is puddled up pretty deep here and the boys enjoy splashing through it,
one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four
, but slogging all the way out to these waterworks in wet socks isn’t a good start for troops penned up sitting on a ship for a month. Jacks is sweating from everywhere now, blue shirt stuck to his back, but smiling. Beats Missoula in fucking January any day.

He leads the company over the bridge, a pair of local sports in white linen outfits gawping at them from some sort of high-wheeled pony carriage stopped in the middle—that’s right, fellas, there’s people darker than you in this world—and then they jam up behind Company E and the rest in a little plaza.

“What’s the deal, Sarge?” calls Hardaway. “What we waitin for?”

Hardaway has a burning need to be informed, a hopeless business for anyone pursuing a career in the military.

“We are waiting,” Jacks answers, “because we stopped moving ahead.”

“Oh,” says Hardaway, for the moment accepting this as an explanation.

There are shops and stalls all around the plaza and the proprietors, mostly Chinese, come out to stare.

“Where this is?” asks Cooper.

Sergeant Jacks looks at the map they’ve given him. “Binondo,” he says. “Does it matter?”

“We gone billet here?”

“No.”

“Then it don’t matter.”

When you come into a place like this you never know if you’ll be back. Jacks waits for what feels like ten minutes of being steamed, then breaks rank and saunters forward. Take a look, at least.

“Where you going, Sarge?” asks Hardaway.

“General MacArthur is supposed to be somewhere up ahead,” he calls back. “Figure I ask him what’s for supper.”

“I don’t like the look of it,” says Royal.

“You didn’t like the look of Hawaii either,” Junior reminds him.

“I saw a rat in a palm tree.”

“All the places in the world you could be a rat,” says Too Tall, “up a palm tree in that Honolulu would be my pick.”

“They don’t want us here.”

“Didn’t want us in Missoula at first, neither,” says Corporal Pickney, who has been in since before the Pullman strike.

Royal turns a full circle. They are supposed to stay in rank and be ready to march but Jacks is gone and there is no brass in sight. He meets the eye of a red-faced Chinese pacing in front of his storefront. The man gets even more agitated, yanking his broad-brimmed white hat off then slapping it back onto his head several times. A pair of white soldiers, volunteers from their uniforms and drunk from the wobble in their progress, come past them heading for the bridge. The two stare like they’ve never seen such an apparition in their lives. The dirty sky that was hanging offshore has crept forward and hangs over them all now, low and threatening to rain.

Coop, grinning from ear to ear, calls out to the vols.

“Where you boys from?”

“Oregon,” says the shorter one, tapping an insignia on his arm like it should be clear to anybody.

“Damn,” says Coop, acting impressed, “did we win that in the war too?”

The Oregons glower at him as the other boys laugh, then change their direction and go to join the red-faced Chinese, all three disappearing into the shop. Unlike most of what they’ve passed, this building has a proper glass show window, full of brightly painted gimcracks that Royal can’t make any sense of.