A Moment in the Sun (88 page)

“As long as you can get it down fast,” says Diosdado, pulling the line and tying it off. There is a ragged, scattered cheer from those in his company who see the flag hanging limply above.

“Papi has a place to hide it if the Spanish come back,” says the younger boy. “Under Auntie Dalisay’s house.”

Diosdado has forty-eight men left, twenty of them with rifles that still work, and more importantly, two dozen shovels saved from the equipment shack at Malinta. Private Ontoy, who can sew up a spur-shredded gamecock so it is almost new, is the company
médico
. Sargento Bayani controls the ammunition, issuing each man fifteen rounds and no more before an engagement, making sure the caliber fits the rifle, reminding them to aim before they fire. It is Bayani who hurries along the lines during the fighting, awarding more bullets, five at a time, to those who need or deserve them, bolstering their courage with his deranged smile and disdain for the
yanqui
sharpshooters.

“The Spanish tried to kill me since the day I was born,” he explains to the men, tapping the place on his chest where his charm is embedded. “What hope do the
americanos
have?”

Kalaw and a few of the others bring out small sacks of rice and some potatoes and squash hidden in the huts. Three chickens have been cornered and bayoneted, General Luna’s order against wasting ammunition on livestock observed whenever possible, though the general himself is fond of demonstrating his pistolwork by shooting live birds off the heads of junior officers. The cooks, two brothers from Pampanga whose military skills begin and end with scrounging firewood and boiling water, have set up a
tunco
over a fire and are already tearing handfuls of feathers off the chickens. It has been a week since they’ve eaten anything but cold rice supplemented by the few minnows and frogs Kalaw has been able to scoop from the paddies with a dip net.

“We thank you for your generous contributions to the Republic,” Dios-dado announces in Tagalog to the gathering crowd. Anything his men have not found the
yanquis
will not find either. “We will fight the enemy here, and defeat him. However, once the battle has begun it will be best for you to carry what you value most and seek shelter somewhere to the north.”

They will leave tonight, he knows, only the dogs who are not afraid of being eaten and the handful of men he’s impressed for the
polo
left in the morning, and the flag with the glorious many-rayed sun will be respectfully folded and buried under the old widow’s hut. The church here is too low to give the snipers much range, and if the
yanquis
don’t lose too many men or are in a hurry there is a good chance they won’t burn the village down like they did at Malabon.

In Malabon the
yanquis
had a fright, not knowing that fireworks were manufactured there. Even his own beaten and wounded soldiers turned from their retreat to watch the display in the night sky, cheering each colorful bomb-burst.

A runner trots in from the west, looking exhausted. He sees Diosdado’s uniform, approaches and salutes.

“
Mi teniente
,” he gasps, catching his breath. “You have a man who speaks
americano
?”

“I am that man.”

“They need you right away.” He points back the way he came. “Just down the road,
una media liga
, at the great tree.”

Diosdado nods. “Stay and eat something before you go back.”

“
Gracias
,
jefe
.”

He leaves Sargento Bayani in charge and heads down the road to the west, refugees from Marilao eyeing him uneasily as they pass on their way to Bulacan. Hererra, who is head of intelligence under General del Pilar, stands with a squad of bored-looking
fusileros
guarding an American prisoner under a huge
kupang
tree. The soldier is very young and very blond and very sunburned, looking scared and defiant at the same time as he sits with his hands bound behind his back. He doesn’t seem to be wounded.

“Bring him out here.”

Hererra’s men pull the boy to his feet and drag him out into the midday sun to face Diosdado.

“You know what we want?” asks Hererra.

Diosdado nods and walks around the soldier, who tries to keep a steady gaze but has to blink as the sweat rolls into his eyes.

“Your name?”

“Winston Wall.”

“What regiment are you in, Winston Wall?”

The boy squints, frowns. “I don’t have to tell you nothin.”

Diosdado examines Wall’s uniform. They have good boots, all of them, and go into battle with belts spiked full of ammunition.

“You are a private in the Kansas Volunteers,” he says, “under Colonel Funston.”

Wall tries to hawk on the ground but can’t make enough spit.

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.”

Diosdado speaks to Hererra in Tagalog. Some of the
yanquis
understand Spanish. “How was he captured?”

Hererra smiles. “This
yanqui
cannot swim. We pulled him out downstream from the fight at Marilao.”

Diosdado turns back to the private. The Kansas soldiers have already made a reputation. “It seems your
cupadres
have abandoned you.”

“I just got separated, is all.” The boy, taller by a head than Diosdado, lifts his chin and tries to look indifferent. “So you people gone shoot me?”

Diosdado shakes his head but doesn’t smile. “Not now. Not here.”

Before they would send this boy on to Malolos for questioning, would hold him for a prisoner exchange, but headquarters is preparing to leave Malolos and haven’t told anyone where they will set up next.

“You gone feed me, then? I haven’t et for two days.”

Diosdado nods at the
fusileros
, tiny-looking near the American, who follow their words with rapt incomprehension. Most have never seen a
yanqui
who wasn’t charging them with a Springfield in hand.

“When these men get to eat,” he says to the private, “I’m sure they’ll give you something. Did you fight at Caloocan?”

The boy can’t help but grin. “That was one hell of a scrap. You boys give it to us pretty hot for a spell till they brung the artillery down on you, tore the hell outta that town. Then it was pretty much butt-and-bayonet drill.”

“You executed prisoners.” A few men who submerged themselves in the water of the ditches saw and crawled back after dark to report the slaughter. The boy seems perplexed, frowning again.

“I don’t know as how we held on to anybody long enough for them to be a prisoner,” he says finally. “Int there some kinda rule about that?”

“If a man is unarmed and surrenders, he is a prisoner. Such actions have their consequence.”

“So you
are
gonna shoot me.”

Diosdado looks up into the boy’s sunburned face. His nose has begun to peel. “That depends on what you can tell us.”

The boy looks as if he will cry. “But I don’t
know
nothin. I don’t even know where this is.”

“We are on a road between Marilao and Bulacan.”

“I mean where this whole island is, like on a map. I never been out of Kansas till they shipped us out west, and I was sick on the boat the whole damn trip over. We come to that Hongkong they wouldn’t even let me ashore.”

There isn’t much to know. The Americans are driving north and east from Manila and they have better rifles and better training and officers who speak the same language as their men and aren’t threatening to murder each other. There is no great mystery to their tactics, MacArthur’s division moving parallel to the one commanded by Lawton, fighting up the Dagupan line till they can move their troops by rail. The boy knows less than Diosdado’s own ignorant
soldados
.

“You had better think of something,” he says to Private Wall. “The people where they are taking you are very angry.”

“I can tell you one thing.” The boy is shifting from one foot to the other and sweating heavily now. The
yanquis
have been in the country long enough to have the sprue and if they stay through the humid months many will die. The Spanish cemetery in Manila is full of boys who wasted away with disease and weren’t worth the trouble to ship their bodies home.

“I can tell you one damn thing,” he continues, “and that’s that you googoos don’t hold a prayer in this deal. Once Uncle sets his cap for something you can’t chase him off from it. We got an Army full of Indin fighters and wildass country boys and there aint a thing we like better than a old-fashioned rabbit hunt.” He jerks his head at Diosdado. “You’re as near to a white man as they got here—you ought to tell em they don’t have a show.”

Hererra, curious at the boy’s outburst, steps closer. “What is he saying?”

Diosdado wonders how he would act if captured by the Americans, what posture of resolute defiance befits an officer of the Philippine Republic. “He tells me that we’re losing the war.”

The capitán smiles grimly. “I’ll pass that on to my superiors.”

Diosdado gives Private Wall a last appraising look, then starts back to Bulacan. “Your prisoner is going to shit his pants,” he calls, “and then you are going to have to smell him all the way to headquarters.”

“
Cabrón!
” Hererra shouts, grabbing the private and shoving him toward the stream that parallels the road, yelling at his men to pull the boy’s pants down.

The first line of trenches is dug at the south end of the village, women and boys running with water held in joints of bamboo for their own men and for the soldiers who toil beside them. The Pampangano brothers have something resembling a
tinola
cooking and many of the men are chewing on unripe mangos they have knocked down. It is the time of day when Diosdado feels like he would resign his commission and surrender to the enemy in exchange for a
café con leche
and a
buñuelo
at La Campana on the corner of the Escolta and San Jacinto. He did not appreciate the sweetness of his student days, the dreamlike quality of life in the Walled City, and now it is gone forever.

“What was he like?” asks Sargento Bayani, helping the men reinforce the trench walls with lengths of bamboo and palm trunks. “The prisoner?”

“Big,” says Diosdado. “Like all of them. Giants.” He sits on top of the piled earth. His uniform pants can’t get any filthier. “Above all else, the
americanos
are not the Spanish.”

“You still believe that?”

“The
peninsulares
are capable of wickedness. And they’re weary—three hundred years of fighting us here.”

“And the
americanos
—?”

“The
americanos
are—innocent. The way a crocodile is innocent.”

He has seen them shoot unarmed men, men begging to live, has seen them set fire to a palm-thatch hut to drive whoever is inside out onto their bayonets. But still they seem guileless, childlike in their murder.

“Innocent and hungry,” he says.

Bayani spits. “I grew up hungry.”

It seems that he is from Zambales like Diosdado, though they have avoided speaking of it.

“I mean hungry for everything. Hungry for our lands, our souls, hungry for the world. These people,” he waves to the south, to where he knows the Americans are marching, steadily moving forward, “they could devour every one of our islands and never be satisfied.”

The
capitán municipal
shuffles up to Diosdado, bowing twice as he approaches, and holds something out to him. It is a flintlock pistol from the time of the Peninsular War and smells like the cigar box it has been kept in.

“My grandfather owned this,” he says. “He fought against the Spanish.”

“All alone?”

“Whenever they turned their backs. I offer it to the Cause.”

“Do you have bullets for it,
hermano
?” asks Bayani.

The man scratches his head. “My grandfather kept them hidden in a different place, so we wouldn’t be tempted to shoot each other. But he is dead now.”

“After the battle has passed and you’ve come back,” says Diosdado, gently pushing the pistol back into the capitán’s hands, “send the children out onto the field to pick up the shell casings. We have a
factoría
in San Fernando where they are filled and become bullets again.”

“
Por supuesto, mi tentiente
.”

“And when you talk to the
yanqui
officer, tell him that you were forced to help us dig, that there were hundreds and hundreds of us and you were afraid.”

“If you wish, sir.”

“And when those boys who raised the flag are a bit older—”

“My sons?”

“When your sons are a bit older, send them to join with us.”

The
capitán municipal
is clearly troubled by the idea that the war may last so long. “But where will you be?”

“With the Igorots,” smiles Bayani, “in the Cordillera. Sharpening our spears with the true Filipinos.”

CONEY ISLAND

“It’s a poor cut of meat that wants special wrapping.”

Brigid tries to pull her stomach up under her ribs as Grania laces from behind. When she bought the corset, the shopgirl called it an investment in her future.

“Ye should wear it more often,” says Grania. “It wouldn’t hurt so much.”

“And trussed up at work as well? On my knees scrubbin the boards with this takin me breath away?”

Maeve holds the pitted mirror she salvaged before the trash man got it. “But look at the shape it gives you.”

“It isn’t natural.”

“All the girls will be lookin the same,” says Grania.

Grania is an authority on what all the girls are wearing, what all the girls are saying and doing. Not a thought in her head but boys and how to get them to pay mind to her, impatient to escape from school and begin what she likes to call her “proper life.”

“None will hold a candle to our Brigid,” says Maeve. Brigid has hope yet for Maeve, who is sweet and clever at books and speaks like an American and still has her hair in braids.