A Moment in the Sun (60 page)

Hod and Big Ten hug the buildings on the west side as they advance again, watching the rooftops across the street.

“Somebody runs up a flag,” says Big Ten, “you best hustle your hindquarters clear of it.”

It is late afternoon before they loop around and face the bridge over the flat, lazily curving Pasig River that leads to the north walls of the city. The band, following only a few hundred yards behind their lines all day, strikes up
Marching Through Georgia
. Some of the boys begin to sing along as they form up in flying columns to cross—

How the darkies shouted when they heard the joyful sound

How the turkeys gobbled that our commissary found

Even sweet potatoes leapt out willing from the ground

While we were marching through Georgia!

—singing still as they double-time across the bridge by squads, bullets from hidden assailants flying at them from every direction, from the rooftops of the tall church steeples visible over the moss-covered walls ahead of them, from the covered barges tethered in the water below, from the bamboo shacks they just left behind—

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee!

Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free!

So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea

While we were marching through Georgia!

—Hod bending over his rifle as he runs, as if there is anything but pure dumb luck keeping him, keeping any of them, from being hit—

And so we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train

Sixty miles of latitude, three hundred to the main

Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain

While we were marching through Georgia!

But there are no cheering darkies at the far side of the bridge, only Lieutenant Niles Manigault waiting for them, pistol in hand and a look of displeasure darkening his countenance.

“The next man who utters a line from that blasphemous ditty,” he announces, “will have his brains blown out.”

Blockhouse 14, though manned by the
cazadores
of the 73rd, who have never retreated before, is finally abandoned and Diosdado and his men follow the
yanquis
, marching just far enough behind that it is not worth the Americans’ effort to turn and try to disarm them, following as they circle wide around another blockhouse that is already burning, ragged shards of wood blown out from the walls as the munitions inside explode, then squatting in a rice paddy to shoot past them again as the Spaniards try to make a stand in the little
baryo
of Cingalon, the
yanquis
leaving their wounded in the church to be cared for later and moving on as the enemy retreats northward. Diosdado’s men linger in Cingalon after the Minnesotas march out, searching the dozen Spanish dead but finding no weapons.

Then the firing from the north stops. The navy guns to the left are silent. Diosdado has the sergeants form the platoon into a ragged skirmish line and they hurry to catch up.

The Americans have dug in behind the trenches on the far side of the Paco road.

Their rifles are facing south.

Bayani and Ramos walk forward with him to meet the Minnesota captain in the middle of the road.

“Show’s over, fellas,” says the
yanqui
. “This is as far as you go.”

Diosdado points. “The enemy is that way.”

“Enemy no more. We just got word, there’s a white flag been up for hours.”

Bayani asks what the captain is saying and Diosdado tells him. He asks to borrow the binoculars.

“Orders now are to make sure you
insurrectos
don’t slip in and queer the whole deal. Take revenge on the Dons, loot the city—”

“It is our city,” says Diosdado.

“Not at the moment,” says the American, his ocean-blue eyes unblinking. “I suggest you take your outfit and back off a ways. Don’t want any trouble if we can avoid it.”

“The flag isn’t white,” says Bayani in Zambal. There are tears of anger in his eyes as he takes the binoculars away from them. “It is red and white stripes, with a blue square in the corner. It’s the fucking
yanqui
flag!”

Diosdado takes the glasses and adjusts them until the field becomes clear, turning to the northwest, searching till it comes into view. There are American soldiers sitting on the ground in the Luneta, American soldiers marching on the drawbridge that crosses the overgrown moat that faces the thick walls of the Intramuros, American soldiers already posing for photographs on top of the Revellín de Real like a group of tourists, and above them, rippling in the late afternooon breeze that comes off the Bay, their gaudy banner.

There is no breeze on the Paco Road. It must be low tide, the little
esteros
that run inland from the bay beginning to smell.

“I am still waiting for orders,” he tells the captain.

“Well, you just move back on out of sight and wait for them there. It wasn’t for you little monkeys riling up the Spanish we could have marched in there hours ago without a single casualty.” The captain turns as his men cheer. Very faintly, from the direction of the Walled City, come the wobbling strains of the
yanquis
’ strange anthem.

“We should have been first into the city,” Diosdado says bitterly, and turns to stride back to his own lines.

More
yanquis
, the reserve units of the day’s campaign, step around Dios-dado’s men as if they are fence posts, crossing the road to join their countrymen. Bayani and Ramos follow Diosdado back.

“You fucking people,” says Bayani, in Tagalog for the sake of Ramos, “you fucking people have given them our country.”

He means all of the
ilustrados
, of course, the educated, the wealthy, the ones who make treaties and wear tailored uniforms and get to float safely to Hongkong in between massacres, but under Bayani’s unwavering glare Diosdado feels personally responsible.

This wasn’t a battle, he realizes—it was a show staged by white men. Not a liberation but a changing of the guard. And still not a word from Aguinaldo.

Ramos is red-faced, chest heaving as if it is hard for him to breathe. “What do we do now,
mi teniente
?”

“Now?” The platoon has gathered around them, confused, suspicious, angry. They stare into his eyes. He is the only one of them who has ever been out of the country, the only one, excepting maybe Bayani, who can read. He feels exhausted, though they have not traveled so very far today.

“If the Americans have the city,” he tells them, feeling his own fury rush to his head, “we will have to take it back.”

ANGLER

The fishhook pokes up through the northern tip of Luzon, snagging it securely.

The Cartoonist has arranged the other islands, eliminating many of the smaller ones, to suggest the body of something long and twisted, a fighting pickerel perhaps, with Luzon the head and Mindanao representing the tail flukes. Sitting forlornly upon the northern isle, under a drooping, sickly-looking palm, is a Filipino man, hatless, elbows on knees and head in hands, his tattered shirt open to reveal the slat-ribbed torso of the undernourished. A poor brown little bugger despondently facing away from the hook and its line, which extends tautly across the Pacific to the tip of the slightly bent cane pole held in Uncle’s firm, knobby-knuckled hands. Uncle has rolled his striped trousers up and cools his bared legs to the shins in the rolling sea.

SHALL I REEL HER IN?

—asks the caption, Uncle turning his head to query the reader with bushy eyebrows raised. An extremely unseaworthy-looking dinghy is being rowed away to the northeast of the hooked fish by a white-moustachioed Spanish admiral, with a greasy merchant balancing a bag of loot at the prow, and a fat, tonsured friar in the rear, turning his head back for a last sad glimpse of his Paradise Lost.

The Cartoonist has modeled the friar after Hastings in editorial, and hopes no one will notice till after the paper hits the street.

SOLDIERS OF MISFORTUNE

Hod watches the cards pile up in front of him, still a little dizzy from the wine Neely smuggled in. Company G is back from the defensive line that’s been set up north of the Pasig, scattered now in the nipa huts serving as their cantonment by the reservoir at the edge of a neighborhood called Sampalac or Salampoc or something just as hard to get your mouth around. They’ve named it Camp Alva after the governor, just like back in Denver.

“The women won’t show in public without their chaperones,” explains Corporal Grissom, who has declared himself the squad’s expert on local customs and has a nasty-faced little monkey named Aggy perched on his shoulder. “Daylight catches a señorita on the street, you can bet she’s got one or two old bulldog aunts clearing a path for her.”

“You mean the Spanish girls,” says Big Ten.

The Spanish haven’t all gone, merchants and friars and even a few soldiers awaiting transport still hanging on in the Walled City, depending on their new
amigos yanquis
to protect them from the locals. There are days Hod feels like a militia guarding a mine boss.

“I mean the Spanish girls.” Grissom finishes the deal, takes a gander at his hand. He has managed to teach the monkey to throw cocoanuts and other fruit down from the trees and to shit anywhere but on his own shoulder. “And the half-breed ones with money. The dark ones, the whatever—Indian ones, that sell stuff on the street and slick their hair with cocoanut oil, they’ll stare you straight in the eye.”

“Which leaves the field open for you, Chief.”

Big Ten shrugs. “Don’t talk the lingo.”

The locals, the ones who aren’t in Aguinaldo’s so-called army, just stare at you. There are rich folks’ houses here with Filipinos living in them, even the bigger bamboo huts in this neighborhood look comfortable enough, but it is hard to get a peep into their lives with them scowling at you. Worse than being a Gentile in Utah.

“Ye just rattle some of them Mexican cartwheels in front of their noses,” says Donovan, who has already been busted down to private for wandering into a posted district. “They’ll get the idea, all right.”

“I wouldn’t fuck a googoo on a bet,” says Grissom.

“Ye’d fuck a rockpile if ye thought there was a squirrel in it. A dead squirrel.”

Hod has had the trots for a week now and the Dhobie itch real bad and it feels raw where he sits. Some of the guys wear red flannel bands around their middles, even to sleep, but they’ve been getting sick just like anybody else. The wine was a bad idea. Hod is tired of their talk, always the same, tired and bored and worried about his insides turning to mush. He hasn’t been right since a day out of Honolulu, stuffed in the three-tier bunks, only two hours on deck a day, trying to eat the slump they shoved in front of you with puke sloshing around your feet. Here inside the hut there are mosquitoes that come out at dusk and dawn, lurking at the edges of the light from the single kerosene lamp they’ve hung over the ammo box they play on, a half-dozen men sitting around it on a woven-mat floor. They don’t buzz, these mosquitoes, and the only strategy seems to be to let them land and fill up with some of your blood before you crush them.

“The young ones don’t look so bad.”

“Monkey faces,” scoffs Grissom.

“Just close your eyes,” says Winston Wall, a private from the Kansas Vols who it seems is a third cousin of Hod’s, demonstrating with his hips. “And then imagine the woman of your dreams—”

Neely reddens, slaps his cards down on the crate. “She wouldn’t do nothin like that.”

The men laugh.

“You in this game or not, Atkins?”

It takes Hod a moment to react to his Army name.

“Let’s go, buddy, shit or get off the pot.”

Hod doesn’t want to think about shitting. He spreads his cards out. Garbage. “Sure. Gimme two.”

A boy in a white provost uniform ducks into the hut, squints at them through his glasses.

“Hey fellas,” he says cheerfully, “long time no see. What we playing for?”

The men take a moment, in the weak light, to recognize the boy.

“It’s Runt!” grins Big Ten.

“How the hell you get over here, son? Thought they threw you back for being too puny.”

Runyon squeezes onto the floor next to Hod. “Stupid bastards. I snuck on the train to Frisco, hung around the camps—” He shrugs. “There was a Minnesota company that come up a few men short one morning, I talked to the sergeant—”

“They must be desperate.”

“It’s a good outfit—”

“That uniform appears a might roomy on you—” says Winston Wall.

“It fits just fine. They got us policing the city now.”

“Well,” says Sergeant LaDuke, scowling at his hand, “least there’s one of you short enough to look the googoos in the eye.”

The boy scrutinizes the backs of the men’s cards as if he could see through them, cards decorated with a lanky Gibson Girl holding a bicycle. “They’re not a happy group of people, our comrades in arms,” he says. “Had their hearts set on chopping up the Spanish, and then along we come—”

“What I want to know is where they keep the sportin gals.”

Runyon grins. “Just down the street here in Sampaloc. What’re you, blind?”

Grissom deals Runt in, the boy throwing a ten-centavo piece into the ante.

“So you Minnesotas are pullin the provost.”

“For the moment, yeah,” he says, studying his hand. “But we were in the thick of it the day the city fell.”

“
We
were in the thick, what there was of it,” corrects Sergeant LaDuke. “I don’t remember seeing you.”

“Me neither,” says Wall. “Less it was way back in our dust.”

“We hooked up with the Astor Battery, hauling their pieces with those water buffalo,” says Runt, standing pat, “and all day long whatever we run into, Spanish in a blockhouse, Spanish holed up in a church, whatever, we get the Astor boys set up and they blast the hell out of it.”

“Imagine having so much money you can field your own artillery,” muses Big Ten.