A Moment in the Sun (106 page)

I can only hope that you find a way to prosper in your new surroundings, foreign and chaotic as they may be, or that reason prevails and enables you to return to W with your rightful property and position restored.

In the meantime, give my love to Mother and to Jessie (and to her little one—I am an uncle!) and tell them I think of them constantly.

Oh yes—I have been raised to corporal due to my actions in yesterday’s fracas. It is a small enough accomplishment, but evidence that merit, regardless of the obdurate prejudices of the world, may sometimes be rewarded.

I shall send what money I can when you have a more reliable address.

Ever your son,

Aaron Lunceford, Jr.

Junior steps out under the oppressive sky. The Filipina who washed his overshirt got all the blood out but sewed the new chevron on crookedly, so that it does not line up evenly with the one above it.

“You done writin to you Mama and Daddy—
Cor
pral?” Too Tall calls to him from his knees, mocking.

Junior steps into his pants. “Indeed I am,” he says. “And now perhaps you gentlemen will join me for a little stroll?”

ON THE HIP

For at least half a day nobody will tell him what to do. Coop wanders the crowded streets, the
amigos
and the pigtails taking no special note of a colored man by now, feeling like the rum has done his insides no good. He could spend his leave in the sick ward, squirming on a bench, waiting his turn to get probed, or be out here a free man looking for a better cure.

They call at him from their shops and stalls, “You buy! You buy! Yankee soja you buy!” but none are selling anything he is hankering for. There is even one Chinese, wearing smoked glasses, who follows him grinning down the street riffling a paw full of playing cards and hissing his come-on and Coop has to laugh out loud, the idea you would play a man at his own game with his own deck in his own lingo and expect to leave with your pants on. There must be some greenhorns that fall for it, drunk or stupid or both, but Coop isn’t one of them.

“Yankee soja no
tonto
,” he says finally to be rid of the little sharper, turning and waving a finger at him. “You go way yankee soja.”

But the hands that were played—

—Big Horace used to recite from his cell after lights-out in Greenville—

By that heathen Chinee

And the points that he made

Were quite frightful to see—

Where a geechie no-count like Horace ever run into Chinese was a question, but all he ever answer was with another verse from one of his stories.

The cowboy slept on the barroom floor—

—went everybody’s favorite—

—having drunk so much he could drink no more

The gambler fades and then there is a pair lugging a pig on a pole, tied by its trotters hanging upside-down squirming and squealing just like Coop’s guts and he has to bend over for a moment, head held low and hands on knees, while his stomach does some tricks. Like a tug of war going on down there. He’s had the quickstep for a couple weeks now like a lot of the boys, but now there is blood in it and there is only one cure he knows for that.

A half-dozen pigtails hustle past, each loaded down with something Coop doesn’t want to think about lifting. Just what they want back home, he thinks, niggers who don’t know how to stretch a job out. Way they hop around and jabber so fast it’s no wonder they got to burn some poppy at the end of the day, just to catch a breath.

He is able to straighten and take a few steps and right ahead there is a pair of provost guards in their white uniforms staring at him, so he flashes a big melon-eater and steps up to where they can hear and salutes, though they are both only privates.

“You gentlemens know where Division Hospital at?”

They give him directions, very polite and proper, and he heads away in that direction till he can cut out of their sight. Always somebody to throw a shadow on you, no matter where you are, and he wishes he had took his chance and run off when he got the notion in San Francisco. Not like they got his proper name or got time to go chase one darky trooper while they got so many dog-eaters to kill and such a big passel of islands to take over. Morning roll-call before they climb up that gangplank—“Where’s Coop?”

“Aint seen him, Sarge.”

“We better off without that trash. Let’s march.”

Only he let the chance slip by and here he is surrounded by
amigos
that want to slit his throat open and pigtails after his pay and a stomach knotted up like a mule-hitch and hot, Lord, even Shreveport in the dead dog of summer got nothing on this mess.

There is a pair of pigtails shuffling after him and waving, one of them lugging a stool, and hell, poorly as he feel right now he might as well sit down. He settles on the stool and the younger one outs with a pair of scissors.

“Takee hat off.”

Coop laughs and loses his topper. “Brother, you aint never cut this kind of wool.”

The pigtail frowns and grunts and walks in a circle around him, studying the problem, while the other squats on the dirt street and lays out a little wooden case full of all kinds of truck that looks like a doctor’s tools only made from bamboo.

“What’s all that?”

The barber grabs an earlobe and wiggles it.

“Takee out dirt.”

“From my ears?”

“You hear everything better, ha?”

Mostly what there is is people giving him orders and blowing the damn bugle and he hears that just fine, but there was that boy from Company L had a bug crawl up in his ear and get stuck there and he near went crazy with it.

“Guess it can’t hurt,” says Coop, giving the ear-cleaner a hard look. “But you better be damn careful about it.”

The crowd on the street keeps flowing past them up and down, paying no mind, while the barber snips away at the edge of his hair with the very tip of the scissors, cautious, and the other one slips a long, bendy strip of bamboo into Coop’s left ear and begins to slowly dig and wiggle. Coop tries not to laugh thinking of what the boys would say if they seen him here. His mama always told him to clean his ears but he never did and then she’d catch him and scour them so hard with a lye-soaked rag they’d burn for days.

The cleaner goes in with a set of pinchers and plucks something out—a dirty chunk of wax near as big as a shelled peanut—and Coop wonders if it really come from him or if the pigtail just palmed it from his kit to have something to show for his pay, some heathen Chinee trick the two of them will laugh about when he’s gone.

At least it’s not a bug.

The cleaner goes in again with a long stick with a little scoop on the end then, scraping out the smaller bits, while the barber gives up his snipping away a hair at a time and lathers the back of Coop’s neck to shave beneath his kitchen. Coop gives a listen to see if he can hear any clearer. Somebody is playing a guitar not too far away, got to be a colored man from the sound of it, only when the ear-cleaner pulls the scraper out and he can turn his head to look there is only a little
amigo
, barefoot and in rags, with a guitar nearly half his size hung over him. Coop watches the boy’s fingers, one with a piece of curved sea-shell around it that he uses to slide up and down the strings on the neck while he picks with the other hand. The music is too familiar to be Filipino.

Coop’s stomach suddenly tries to climb out of his body through his asshole. He grabs his sides and holds himself together till it passes and then takes the barber by the wrist.

“I needs smokee,” he says and mimes a long draw, sucking air in and closing his eyes.

The barber looks to the ear-cleaner, who holds out his hand and wiggles the fingers like a bug crawling and says something in Chinese.

“Plenty smokee, Olmigo Street,” says the barber.

“Olmigo—”

“
Hormiga, Señor
,” says the little
amigo
, who has come over with his hand out. He makes the bug wiggle too. “
Es muy cercano
.”

Coop digs out a handful of centavos and the pigtails take some and he flips a couple to the boy and says Take me to Hormiga Street.

The boy smiles from ear to ear and takes off up Analoague where the carpenters are out working on chairs and tables with the little dogeater calling proudly to the other boys selling candy or shining shoes or hawking the
lotería
which is supposed to have been shut down, showing off the
americano
he’s hooked, the guitar making a little hollow sound as it bumps against his body and damn if that ear business didn’t work, the whole racket of the streets like it’s right inside his skull now, like it or not.

Hormiga Street cuts off to the right, short and narrow and leading to the bustle of Rosario, with its street hawkers and tailor shops and painted portraits of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Admiral Dewey. Coop flips the little
amigo
another coin and does his viper again.

“
Fumar
,” he says. “
Dónde?
”

The boy giggles and points out a shop with scrawny plucked ducks hanging by their necks on either side of the door. “
Al bajo
,” he says and runs off with the big guitar slapping against his backside. Coop steps in between the ducks.

A pigtail with pox scars and a moustache nods to him from behind a counter where he is chopping apart a small pig, then waves a bloody hand toward a beaded curtain that leads to the back. Coop can smell the bitter smoke already.

The place behind the laundry in San Francisco was tiny compared to this, just a few bunks in a storeroom. This joint could hold a dozen fiends, with narrow shelves built into the wall, woven mats and pillows in red silk covers on them, every nook with a spirit lamp and pipe layout ready to go. A silver-haired man in the loose blue suit they wear seems to be in charge, while the chef sits carefully scraping ashes from the bowl of a pipe into a small lacquered box. There are four or five already here on the hip, glassy-eyed, mostly Chinese with one well-dressed white-looking man who might be Spanish.

“You lie down,” smiles the silver-haired man, “you feel better chop-chop.”

“How much for a pipe?”

“Fittee centavo.”

Coop has a couple American, a couple Mexican in his pocket but knows you have to jawbone them a bit.

“Twenty centavos a pipe.”

The man smiles. “Twenty centavo, fuck you.”

Coop laughs. “All right, six pipes for an eagle.”

The man holds out his pudgy hand and Coop lays a gold dollar in it. If he was a white boy he could say he was military police and threaten the price down some, but even the pigtails know there’s not any colored provost. Coop pulls his boots off and climbs onto one of the shelves, lying on his side and resting his head on the pillow. The chef sits on a stool by him, working an iron wire into a little pot of the sticky stuff till there is a gob big as a blackberry on the end of it, which he holds over the open flame of the lamp by Coop’s side, turning it this way and that till it starts to blister and crack with the heat. He used to watch his mama make johnnycakes with the same attention, his mouth watering and hoping his other brothers wouldn’t smell and come in to eat them all. The chef takes the bubbling ball of dope and pokes it into the center of the clay bowl on top of the end of his pipe, then moves away to deal with one of the other guests.

Coop takes a long draw, pulling it in through the pipe and into his lungs and then slowly letting the bluish smoke escape through his nose. Got to give it time to soak in.

He has to reheat the ball after every draw, tilting the bowl toward the open flame and then sucking the bitter heat into himself, but the knots in his belly begin to unravel and at the end of four long pulls the ball of dope is nothing but ash and he can’t feel any of it.

The chef cooks another up for him. The first time he got the quickstep was in the Memphis lock-up, from the food, and when he and Tillis got out they broke into a pharmacy but could only find some bottles of paregoric which they drank down even with the awful camphor smell and then some of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup which made Tillis, who didn’t even have the dysentery, chuck the whole mess up.

You are supposed to have these crazy dreams but really for Coop it’s just peaceful, nobody blowing bugles at you and now with his ears unstopped all the little sounds, the crackling of the dope ball in the flame and the in and out of the others as they breathe their smoke down and the scratch, scratch as the chef scrapes the ash from the bowls to save in his lacquer box and Coop’s own heart, beating long and easy now like waves on a broad beach and more pipes come, hard to keep count, and the thought floats through his head that the heathen Chinee are maybe shorting him but then the thought goes curling up to the yellow-stained ceiling and who cares when you are so high above them all? Floating, with them all below, white and black and Spanish and Cuban and
amigo
and pigtail looking up as he floats over like the observation balloon that morning at El Caney, above it all, but no, no, they shot that down and all of them are shooting at him now, pointing and shooting but he is too fast for the bullets that rise up slow like bubbles from the muck in Silas Tugwell’s bog where they used to swim, why are they even bothering to shoot when he is so high, a hawk soaring, Cooperhawk that he took his name from, Cooperhawk that catch all the other birds in its claw and take them away, that fly so fast even through the thick woods and somehow don’t ever hit a branch and how can bullets hope to reach him? But then the ants start coming out, out of his ears, going in the right direction at least but so many of them, tickling his neck where it was just shaved but there’s a reason they are leaving, it’s to make room for the music, the notes from the little
amigo
sliding back to him, so familiar, so like the music he heard the Mississippi boys playing on the rail gang down south, a new kind of music but familiar, simple on top but bubbling and twisted underneath, who knows what be hiding in that muck at the bottom, can’t see the end of it from the surface and it wants words, the music, words to make it a story—