A Moment in the Sun (14 page)

SPANISH AMBASSADOR

DE LÔME

FLEES COUNTRY

AFTER TENDERING RESIGNATION

The Editor’s ultimate test of a split head is to imagine it shouted by one of the pack of newsboys who peddle their wares by the hackney stand where he hires his ride home, particularly the jaundiced little street Arab who bellows every word over 20 points high as if the fate of the world were in balance—

AMERICAN GENERALS WANT

INCREASE IN TROOPS IF WE ARE

TO FIGHT SPAIN

The correspondents will file their copy, succinct narratives peppered (never, they argue, laden) with whatever facts they might stumble upon. Facts, however, are complex, facts are often inconclusive or contradictory. The reader who buys on the street is not looking for information about a crisis, he wants guidance as to how he should
feel
about it—

WAR? SURE!

The facts will take care of themselves.

THE MARCH OF THE FLAG (I)

A crowd of men have gathered in front of the Mondamin, listening to Jeff Smith up on a barrel of nails. Hod sees Smokey standing a few feet back from the throng, nervous.

“Our boys asleep,” says Smith. “Defenseless. Then the furtive approach, the infernal device installed at water level, the fuse ignited—”

“What happened?” Hod whispers.

“Seattle papers come in,” says Smokey. “This is bad.”

“Then the dormant city shaken by a terrible explosion!” Jeff Smith has his hat over his heart now, a tear in his voice. “Our brave lads blown to smithereens. Dismembered. Horribly burned. Drowned in the unforgiving waters.”

“They gone blame this on me,” mutters Smokey, shaking his head.

“Bodies float to the surface.” Smith is using his soap-selling voice, dark eyes burning with indignation. “The malefactors feign innocence.”

Hod is confused. “What do you have to do with it?”

Smokey looks around at the red-faced men, steam rising from their mouths and noses, jaws clenched in anger. “Cause I’m the closest thing they got to a Spaniard in this camp.”

“But will Americans countenance this treachery?” Jeff Smith raising a fist in the air. “Will we quail and run? Will we falter before the swarthy Dago assassin?” The men shout
No!
to each tremulous query. Smith spreads his arms wide and smiles. “I knew it in my heart. Our country needs us, gentlemen. I have wired the Territory requesting commission. Any red-blooded American among you—” and here he points with his hat toward a tent that has been set up in the middle of the street at Broadway and Seventh, “—may strike a blow for liberty by signing on with the Skaguay Guards! God bless America!”

There is cheering and fist-waving and then the band from the Garden of Joy steps out to play
The Stars and Stripes
and most of the crowd, townsmen and busted stampeders alike, hurries to enlist, loudly describing the beating the wicked Spaniards are about to suffer. Jeff Smith hops down and crosses to Hod and Smokey.

“Most of them are hoping Uncle Sam will provide free passage back to the Outside,” he winks. “Let’s see how bold that reform outfit been nippin at my heels is when I’ve got my own army.”

“We gone to war?” Hod hasn’t looked at a newspaper since he’s been in the Yukon. It all seems very far away.

“We will, son, soon enough.” He claps Hod on the shoulder. “I’ll expect you to join the roll, of course. Sergeant McGinty.”

A long line has formed in front of the tent, getting longer every moment.

“I suppose I ought to.”

“That’s the spirit!” Jeff Smith’s eyes are glowing. He hasn’t changed from last night’s poker game, cigar ash on his pants, whiskey on his breath, the butt of his Navy Colt jutting out from the open front of his otterskin coat. “But first you two must bring me an eagle,” he says, and steps back inside the hotel.

“Eagles been gone for months,” says Hod.

Smokey is already on the move. “I know who find us some.”

They take the wagon out to Alaska Street. Voyageur lives in the last cabin at the end of the Line, the only one without cold-stiffened undergarments hung outside to advertise a woman within. Voyageur is a fisherman and meat hunter who sells his game to the grub tents at White Pass City.

“You lookin for a three-dollar whore you come too far!” he calls when Hod bangs on the door. He is a white-stubbled, sharp-smelling old man who dresses like a Tlingit and is scraping the flesh off a marmot hide as they step in to state their business.

“Birds mostly follow the salmon up into Canada when the spawning peters out,” he tells them. “But now that you got this run of fools going over the Pass year-round, why bother?”

He lets them borrow a square of weir netting and tells them the best place to look. “Anywhere there’s dead things, you find you some birds.”

They leave the wagon at Feero’s and travel the Brackett Road, able to skirt past the pack trains and the hapless stampeders trying to haul their own goods. The ice won’t break for months but still the greenhorns are in a rush, desperate to add their tents to the cluster at the edge of Lake Lindeman and start eating through their supplies.

“Skaguay got no use for you less you got cash money to spend, and it gone take some of that every day,” says Smokey as they pass a party that includes two women dragging a woodstove loaded on a sled over the corduroy road. “Stay here too long, they be nothin left of you.”

Hod talks them through the toll, explaining their mission, and they reach the base of the White Pass by noon. Even in the freezing cold it stinks.

“That’s some that aint gone yet,” says Smokey.

The Gulch is full of carcasses, mostly horses. Some are just bones, or frozen and dried to leather, while a few must have fallen or faltered and been pushed off the trail in the last few days. They lie twisted and broken on the rock, bones ripped through their hides, clusters of eagles picking at their exposed innards while ravens waddle anxiously a few feet away, waiting their turn.

The eagles barely flap out of the path as Hod and Smokey walk through the carnage.

“Let’s us turn our backs on this bunch here,” says Smokey. “Then when I say three, turn and toss it over em.”

The ravens all manage to squawk away before the net lands on two feasting eagles. The men sit on the trunk of a deadfall tree on the side of the slope, covering their noses with their mittens, and wait till the scavengers tire themselves out under the mesh. “Mr. Jeff gone want that big one,” says Smokey. “We let the other fly.” The bird he points at has blood speckling its white neck feathers and smells of dead horse.

Hod can hear a pack train climbing on the trail above them, can hear a man cursing a mule and a child crying, just crying.

“So how you end up here?” Smokey is the only negro he has seen in Skaguay, the only one he’s seen since the deckhands on the steamer to Dyea.

Smokey pokes a stick into the tangle of net and the larger eagle strikes at it. “Too many of them ring battles, twenty, thirty, forty rounds. Livin high on the hog in between—it wear you down. Then there was the bottle.” Smokey is quiet for a long moment, drawing patterns in the snow at his feet. Hod has never seen him take a drink. “What it come to, they was a little carnival I hooked on with, takin dives. Pay you a nickel and you hits the bullseye with a baseball, it throw open a trap door and I go in the tank.”

“I seen that once.”

“And it keeps me in the liquor and they lets me sleep in one of the wagons but that’s about all. Livin day to day. Only once we gets up to this north country, figure the people is starved for entertainment, the water in the tank won’t stay water, it’s always
froze
. So they just cut a hole in a curtain, I sticks my head through it. Hit the nigger on the noggin an you wins a prize.” He frowns and gives the eagles another poke. “Then Mr. Jeff see me and offer me a real job workin for him. That very day I took the vow and aint took a drop since.” He stands to stretch his legs. “Near about everybody stays in town owe Mr. Jeff
some
thing.”

When they carefully disentangle the smaller bird it doesn’t fly, just backs away from them stiff-legged, skreeking its raspy cry and holding its wings out, trembling, before flapping over to chase a trio of ravens out of a horse’s ravaged belly.

There is already bunting hung, red, white, and blue, from the façade of Jeff Smith’s Parlor when they get back.

“The noblest of the scavengers,” Jeff says, holding his head eagle-like and staring back down at the bird in the bundle of netting. “And a fitting symbol for our proud nation.”

“It looks awful, Jeff,” says Syd Dixon.

“Throw a couple buckets of water over him, hang him out in the sun, he’ll be good as new. If not, I’ll have him stuffed.”

They manage to slip a deerskin gold-poke over the eagle’s head, pulling the drawstrings to shut off any light, and the bird calms enough that they can cut the net away and put him in a cage that held a bandicoot Jeff Smith bought from Smokey’s carnival, displaying it in the corner of the Parlor till a sourdough shot it because he didn’t like the way it looked at him.

“Anybody who desecrates the national symbol in my saloon,” says Jeff Smith when they have hoisted the cage and its hooded occupant onto the bar counter, “shall be dealt with summarily.”

“What you gonna name him, Jeff?” asks Old Man Triplett.

“Liberty,” suggests the Sheeny Kid.

“Columbia,” counters Niles Manigault. “Proud beacon of freedom, torch-bearer to the peoples of the world—”

“I had a buddy in Seattle, used to rock side-to-side on his legs just like he’s doing,” says Red Gibbs. “We called him Wobbles.”

“I christen him Fitzhugh Lee,” says Jeff Smith, trying to reach in and snatch the gold-poke off the bird’s head. “General of the Confederacy and present American consul to the besieged island of Cuba.” He looks sharply to Hod. “If you don’t hustle down to that recruiting station, McGinty, you’re likely to lose your place.”

Despite the dropping temperature there are still dozens of men outside the tent waiting to be processed.

“I seen a drawing of that Havana once,” says a busted stampeder, shivering, gloveless, in a tattered mackinaw. “They got palm trees.”

“You think they’ll send us there?” asks the man in front of him, Gott-shalk, who sells sawdust he steals from Captain Billy’s mill to the saloons and peddles useless goldfield maps to the greenhorns coming off the steamers.

“Hell, maybe if it really gets cooking we’ll go all the way to Spain,” says the stampeder. “Tangle with them conquistadors.”

“Wherever we fight em,” says Gottshalk, “it got to be better than livin in Hell’s frozen asshole.”

When he gets inside the recruiting tent Hod finds Reverend Bowers sitting behind the table, taking names, with Ox Knudsen standing over his shoulder, picking his teeth with a splinter.

“We only take men with balls between their legs,” he says as Hod reaches in to sign the roster.

“You on this list?” asks Hod without looking up.

“Right at the top.”

“Since when do squareheads count as Americans?”

And then he is on the ground with the Swede on top trying to throttle him, men shouting and yanking as they roll around, finally pulled away from each other and out of the tent by the legs and somehow Jeff Smith and the boys from the Parlor and Tex Rickard and Billy Mizner and half of Skaguay is there gathered around as Ox shouts threats and nearly lifts the three men holding him clear off their feet.

“Dissension in the ranks will not be tolerated!” Smith steps between them, raising his voice so all can hear. “Not while there is a desperate foe to be defeated, not while the defense of our great Northwest is in the care of the Skaguay Guards!” He turns a full circle, waving his hat, and even Ox Knudsen shuts up to listen to his pitch. “These two gentlemen,” he cries, “have agreed to settle their differences in the roped arena, this Friday night.”

There is a cheer from the crowd and the men holding Hod in a headlock thump him on the back in encouragement.

“Details of the event may be read in tomorrow’s
News
. Volunteers for the Skaguay Guard shall receive a one-dollar discount at the gate.”

And with that Hod is released and Ox pulled away by Rickard and Mizner and a couple other men and the recruiting tent closed till morning. The crowd disperses, returning to the beckoning saloons, and Hod hurries to catch up with Smith and the others.

“I’m not really a fighter,” he says, joining them on the boardwalk. “Just cause Choynski let me stand up for a while—”

“Nor are any of the hash-slingers in this outpost actually cooks, nor the shylocks who collect quitclaims lawyers, nor the Skaguay sparrows who parade at the Theater Royal dancers or singers,” says Jeff Smith, putting an arm around him. “You, my boy, are not a fighter any more than Doc, who has been known to prescribe laudanum for a hangnail, is a physician. In this benighted corner of the globe, however, you will have to do. Smokey has been training you, has he not?”

“How many rounds I got to go?”

Smith raises his eyebrows in something like shock. “Why, as many as you are able, my boy. In an affair such as this there can be no breath of scandal.”

“The audience will be almost totally local,” Niles Manigault explains before he follows the others into the Parlor. “And it is never wise to defecate where one resides.”

“Rickard wants it catch-as-catch-can, but Jeff is holding out for the Marquis of Queensbury,” says Frank Clancy in front of the Music Hall. “He says we’re not savages here.”

“I hear they want a twelve-foot ring,” says Billy Saportas from the
Skaguay News
. “Might as well hold the scrap in a piano crate.”

“Soapy says it’s twenty feet or no go,” says Goldberg in his cigar store. “Is this a fight or a bicycle race?”

“No gloves, that’s what I heard,” says Arizona Charlie, lounging in the Pantheon as Hod and Smokey roll barrels of beer across the floor. “Going back to the true spirit of the game.”