A Moment in the Sun

CURRENT EVENTS

“Tis gggreat news from the islands,” says Gilhooley. “Victhry has bin wan at a pittance — the haughty Dago vanquished with barely a show.”

“Manila is ours, then?” queries Officer O’Malley, jiggling his keys.

“Fer the time bein it is, it is. The Stars and Stripes gallantly flappin oer the pallum trays, the downbaten Spaniard shipped home with his tail betwixt his legs. Whither we kape the place or not, that’s another tale altogither.”

“The Fillypeens—”

“Thousands of islands it is, from the size of the Auld Country down to some not bigger than Battry Park, each with its complymint of grateful salvages.”

“We’ve enough salvages already,” frowns the roundsman. “Or have ye nivver strolled through the Tinderloin on a Saturdy night?”

“It’s markets we want, Pat, or so says the powr behind the trone.”

“Mark Hanna himself, is it?”

“An appytite with legs and a mighty repository of balloon juice, but a jaynyus win it comes to the spondoolacs. Whin the President does a jig, it’s Hanna that’s pullin the sthrings.”

“Markets in Manila,” muses the officer. “If it’s exotic goods I’m afther I could easily stroll over to Chineytown—”

“We’re not to buy from thim,” explains the horse-follower. “They’re to buy from us. As well as the Chinamen and the Japanese and the whole gang of yella monkeys as they’ve got over there. Providin a positive outflow of resarces and a ginerous influx of the auld roly-poly.”

“And can they afford it at all?”

“We’re only discussing the chayper sart of goods, O’Malley, nothin you or I might purchase. Have ye seen the suit that’s hangin in Hymie Ziff’s store winda?”

“What would a nekkid salvage be wantin with a chape Jew suit?”

“Ye’d be surprised. I’ve bin readin up on it — did ye know that on sortin iv the islands the majoority is Cathlicts?”

“They’re all Cathlicts on Skelly Michael back home,” says O’Malley, “and a more salvage, poorly dressed lot ye’ve nivver seen.”

“The idee is,” Gilhooley continues, “to bring thim the fruits iv dimocracy and cappytilism first, which projuices a desire for the finer things in life, like shoes or newspapers or whiskey.”

The policeman appears distraught. “Is there no whiskey there at all?”

“None that I’ve heard of.”

“Me admiration for our byes in uniform incrases.”

“Think iv all thim barefoot Fillypeeny byes who could be out rushin the cans fer the workingmen or shinin the shoes of thim what has shoes—”

“Unimplymint is a turrible thing—”

“—but instead have naught to do but hang about and kick the cocoanut.”

“A turrible thing.”

“Don’t I know it meself? Think if these new automobiles was within the means iv any but the Asthors and the Vanderbilks — no more horses. And without horses what’s there left staming on the streets fer yers truly to shivvel off into a wagon?”

“So it’s democracy, is it? Will they be sindin Croker over?”

“Not the Tammany brand, that’ll come later. No, I belave it’s Jiffersonian dimocracy will be the first dose.”

“The lucky divvils.”

“It’s all part iv a natural progrission — first you had the concept of immynint domain, then it was mannyfist distiny, and now we’ve got binivilint assimilation, which leads, inivitably, to cappytalism. Plant the desire to improve yer lot and thin install the twelve-hour day.”

“How long is their days at the present?”

“Sunrise to sunset, and not a moment of it spent in gainful implymint. Mostly they run errands for the friars.”

The policeman winces in sympathy. “Franciscans, is it? Ah, the poor, sufferin brown bastards.”

“Aye, Franciscans, and iv the acquisitive variety.”

“Now, Franciscans aren’t the worst of the orders. They’ll go easy with the rod, is my experience. But yer Christian Brothers—”

“Sakes, set them byes on ’im and there wouldn’t be a Fillypeeny left standin.”

The copper ponders for a moment. “So — we kape the flag flutterin above, injuice thim to buy our chape suits, and in the course of time innerjuice the finer concepts iv patronage and quid pro quo.”

“Tis the very thing Senator Hanna advises.”

“A sound course of action.”

“Ah, but there’s a sorpint in the Garden.”

“Wherivver ye’ve got pallum trays there’s sure to be sorpints crawlin about.”

“This wan’s name is Aggynaldo.”

“An Eyetalian in the Fillypeens! And is he an arnychist as well?”

“He’s only a Fillypeeny insurrictionalist, is all. Wan iv their ginrals that was on our side agin the Spaniard, and now perhaps he isn’t innymore.”

“That quick, is it?”

“Imagine, if ye will, what the poor monkeys are thinkin — here they’ve bin fightin agin the Spaniard since shortly after the Flood, and in stames Admiral Dooley to knock the tar out iv the Dago’s flotilla—”

“Our byes to the rescue, jist like at the San Wan Hill—”

“Ah, but there the Cubing insurrictos had their own flag at the ready—”

“Many’s the time I’ve seen it, hung outside the hoonta office on New Street.”

“And the Fillypeenys might’ve had some sort of a banner waiting, fer all I know, but the race goes to the swift, or in this case to thim what’s got the Great White Flate floatin in the harbor set to bombard Manila with dinnymite. So there’s a bit iv a dustup around the fort — Murphy, the policy banker from Twelfth Street, says it was in the bag before a shot was fired, and he ought to know — and poor Aggynaldo and his stalwarth companions look up to see the Star-Spangled Banner itself wavin high over the walls.”

“Ye say the battle was not on the up-and-up?”

“D’ye know Finnegan that works on the gas lines?”

“He’s felt the hard ind iv me stick more than wonst.”

“And d’ye remimber last August when his missus set out afther him with a lead sash-weight in her hand—”

“And Finnegan run into the station hollerin bloody murther—”

“And him no great friend of the byes in blue—”

“He’d curse us to Hell as soon as look at us.”

“Aye, but at the moment he was in mortal peril from a far more turrible inimy. Can ye imagine fallin into the hands iv Big Annie Finnegan in all her fury?”

“A fate worst thin Death itself.”

“Well, thim Spanish Dons trapped in the fort in Manila was thinkin the same thoughts as Finnegan. Better their kaysters thrown on a quick boat back to auld Madrid than their noggins on a pike in Manila.”

“Which manes this Aggynaldo is in Big Annie’s boots.”

“He takes a smaller size,” corrects Gilhooley, “but the principle is the same. He goes to Admiral Dooley, does Aggy, and he says — in Spanish now, fer that’s what the eddycated wans spake, none of yer googoo lingo fer thim — he says, ‘Thanks fer yer help in the matter,’ he says, ‘and whin exactly will ye be pullin anchor?’ And the Admiral strokes those great white chop-warmers he wears and he says, ‘Ye’ll be informed whin inny consinsus has bin arrived at.’ Bein a polite way iv tellin the little monkey to bugger off. So it’s our byes with their kit and rifle versus the salvages with their bolo knives, waitin fer the other brogan to fall.”

“And will they lift a man’s tonsure, the Fillypeenys?”

“Worst than that — they’ve got torters and depprydations to make a red Injin blush fer shame.”

“There’s bows and arras involved?”

“Spears even, like your African headhunters use. Oh, it’s a primitive type of conflict they’ll be wagerin on thim islands, what the Royal British who’s fightin the Boors in Praetoria are callin gorilla war.”

“Gorillas, too! A turrible thing.” O’Malley ponders. “What exactly is a Boor, then? I’ve hoord iv the thing, but I don’t have me finger on it—”

“It’s a type of Dutchman,” says Gilhooley, “that’s gone wild on the African felt.”

“That’s a soberin thought, that is — a salvage Dutchman. The worst iv two wurrulds.”

“Spakin iv red Injins,” says Gilhooley, “me own opinion is that what’s needed over there is Ginral Miles, late iv the gggreat victhry of Sandago Cuba, him that injuiced Geronnymo and his haythen band to come back on the riservation. He’s the bye fer the job.”

“Aye,” the policeman nods, “he’d make short work iv this Aggy fella.” He taps his stick absently against the wheel of Gilhooley’s wagon, thinking. “So — whin the Fillypeenys have bin subjude, d’ye think we’ll have another star on the flag?”

“Not on yer life. The Fillypeeny himself is somethin between a Hottentot and a Chinaman — with none of the positive attrybutes iv ayther race, whatsoivver as those might be. Them islands is more likely to become a Turritory, like this Porta Reeky or Oklahoma. As such they injoy some of the bennyfits iv citizenship, but kape their noses out of trouble come Illiction Day.”

“It seems like a great deal iv bother to go to,” opines the lawman, “to sell a few chape suits.”

“Tis the white man’s burthen,” replies Gilhooley, bending once again to his task. “And we’ll all need to buck up and carry our portion iv it.”

COCKFIGHT

There are roosters at the front. It has been quiet along the line all day, even with the Americans setting up their artillery on the heights across the river, quiet enough for General Ricarte and Colonel San Miguel to join Aguinaldo and the rest of the general staff in Malolos for a ball to celebrate the new Constitution.

“Keep a third at the outposts,” the colonel called down to Diosdado from his rented barouche. “But there’s no reason the rest of the boys can’t have some fun.” And then was gone.

So there are roosters in the long pit dug just behind the sentry posts, at least three sets of birds preparing to tear each other apart, and torches stuck below ground level to light their battles. Diosdado’s men crowd around, betting coins and cigarettes, using old lottery tickets as promissory notes, bantering about the relative merits of Cubans versus Jolos, feathery birds versus sinewy, orange versus black. Gambling has been outlawed by General Aguinaldo, of course, but like many of his orders this one seems to be understood in principle and ignored in practice. The boys at the outposts turn to call back their observations to those in the pit, feeling persecuted to have drawn sentry duty on this night of celebration, the war over and Manila beckoning from behind the American lines on the other side of the San Juan River.

“I’m holding the Death of all Chickens in my hands,” sings out the one they call Kalaw because of his big nose. “You bet against him, you bet against fate.” Kalaw holds his champion, a squirming bundle of rage, within inches of the beak of the other combatant still pegged to the trench floor while his friend, Joselito, yanks the bird’s tailfeathers to anger it even more.

Nicanor from Cavite squats behind the pegged gamecock. “My Butcher will cut him up,” he states calmly. “Anybody who doesn’t think so can show me their money, ba?”

Locsin, the chino from Botolan, is serving as the sentensyador, mentally recording bets shouted out by the soldiers crammed down in the pit or kneeling just above it. Kalaw’s bird, hackles up, whips its snakelike neck forward, beak snapping just short of Nicanor’s stocky half-breed. Nicanor pulls the cock back into his lap and his second, Corporal Pelaez, straps the razor-edged gaffs, still in their leather sheaths, onto its feet. Joselito is waving a cookpot from the mess at them.

“This is where your kawawa Butcher is going,” he taunts, “after we tenderize him a little!”

Diosdado pulls himself away from the fight and walks along the outposts, fully exposed to the other side. Providing an easy target and pretending not to care is part of being an officer. They had started a full hundred yards back from the river, like the Americans on the other side, but after San Miguel took over Third Zone both parties began to creep up, and now each is dug in at the foot of the bridge itself, more convenient for shouting drunken insults at each other. Diosdado has been pulled in to translate, standing with San Miguel at the center of the bridge to parley with the American officers, a volunteer general from the mountains of Colorado and a Colonel Stotsenberg.

“Encroachments,” the volunteer general stated in the direct, seemingly affectless American way, “will not be tolerated.”

Diosdado pauses to kick one of the boys who has fallen asleep face-down on his rifle.

“Wa—?”

“This isn’t a dream, soldier. What if the Americans decide to attack right now?”

The soldier looks over the lazy San Juan, the bridge paralleled by the water pipeline from El Depósito, as if the possibility has never occurred to him. Diosdado can smell that the soldier has already celebrated the Constitution.

“Then they will be very stupid.”

It is probably good, this confidence, this cockiness. Spirited. When Luna suggested digging trenches, one of the Caviteño generals retorted, in Spanish, that “true men fight with open breast.” Only Sargento Bayani seems to doubt that the Americans, most of them volunteers and soft from inactivity, will be no match if it comes to open hostilities.

“And what if General Luna were to appear and find you sleeping at your post?”

The private sobers visibly. “You speak the truth, Teniente. I will try to stay awake.”

Luna is the boogeyman, the aswang who all the officers use to frighten the troops when they don’t want to risk their own popularity. Luna has already sentenced two poor Manila boys to be executed for sneaking home while on sentry duty, has screamed at and slapped men of every rank below colonel. He is regarded as an Ilocano phantom, likely to materialize in three different places at once, implacable in his mania for discipline, fingers eagerly caressing his pearl-handled pistol. He is known as El Furioso, El Martillo de Dios, El Loco—

“Did you know,” the men whisper to each other as Luna struts past them, eyes searching for the next junior officer to be humiliated, “that his brother, the painter, murdered his own wife and mother-in-law? And got away with it?” The whole family are locos, go the stories, locos Ilocanos, and all you can do is hope that when he explodes you are somewhere else.

But Luna is the one who knew they should have taken Manila before the yanquis strolled in, no matter what the cost in lives.

Sargento Bayani sits on the slope of the riverbank at the end of the outposts, smoking, smiling his private smile. Diosdado stops by him to gaze across the water.

“You’re not interested in the sabong?”

Bayani shrugs. “I’ll have some stew tomorrow.” He jerks his head toward the American lines. “They had a busy day.”

Diosdado watched it all through his binoculars, reporting constantly on their progress till Capitán Grey y Formentos told him to leave him alone and put it in writing. Artillery positions dug and leveled and sandbagged, the pieces rolled into place, painstakingly sighted on the San Juan del Monte hill. If it starts in earnest it will be there — the Americans will try to capture the old Spanish blockhouses and push on to take El Depósito where Bonifacio’s uprising floundered not so many years ago. The powder magazine and the waterworks will be their objectives, and to take them they must pass straight over Diosdado’s celebrating patriots. It has been a week of incidents, escalating each day, insults called back and forth, rumors of American sentries taking liberties with Filipino women passing through their lines, stories of the Spanish garrison back in the Walled City acting more like conquerors on leave than prisoners, stray bullets winging in one direction or the other with greater frequency each night. But orders, from Aguinaldo himself, are to avoid engagement, to accommodate their “allies” wherever possible. To wait.

“The Americans are going to vote,” Diosdado tells the sargento. “Back in their own congress. About what to do with us.”

“What to do with us,” Bayani repeats. He addresses Diosdado in Zambal, as always now, as if it is their private language. Diosdado has not garnered the nerve to order the sargento to speak Tagalog like the others.

“The bird that loses, the talunan,” says Bayani, “goes to the owner of the one that wins.”

“We’re not the losers — the Spanish are.”

“Is that right?” Bayani stares across the bridge, shakes his head. It is too dark to see any movement but there is a harmonica playing, laughter every now and then, shouted challenges and passwords from the river’s edge.

“The generals know more than we do.”

Diosdado hopes it is true as he says it. There has already been too much dissent above him, the Caviteños resenting Luna, the veterans of ’96 discounting the newcomers, each general a warlord threatening to pick up with his regional clan and march home if he isn’t deferred to, flattered, given his proper share of glory. And this only in Luzon. Hard to imagine controlling what develops in Negros, Cebu, Samar, controlling the crazy moros on the southern islands.

“Of course,” says Bayani. “The ilustrados always know what is best for us.”

He says the word in Spanish, with the slightest touch of contempt.

“It’s what I heard up in Malolos,” shrugs Diosdado, angry to be made to feel guilty about his education. “The American congress is meeting. Important men are said to support our cause.”

Bayani cocks his head and studies Diosdado’s face, making him feel as if he is being judged for something long past repair. “If you were a yanqui,” asks the sargento finally, “and you wanted your government to vote to take our country away from us — what would you want to happen here?”

Diosdado looks down along the outposts, looks to the men lit by the glow from the torches in the cockpit behind them. Most of the sentries have their backs to the river, talking softly with each other or calling to see how the cockfights are progressing.

“The Americans are not the Spanish,” he answers, hedging. “They don’t have the priests whispering in their ears—”

“I’d want a fight. I’d want some dead American boys to throw at the feet of these voters, these ones who will decide what to do with us.”

He is a simple tao, a peasant, Bayani, in manner of speech and appearance, but there is an understanding, a cunning—

“Yesterday the Americans fired every Filipino working behind the lines for them,” says the sargento, spitting into the darkness. “Today they point their cannons at us.”

There is a burst of laughter from the cockpit, then shouting and the squawking of birds. “If they attack tonight,” says Diosdado, indicating the sargento’s lit cigarette, “the first one they’ll shoot is the tanga sitting in front of his breastworks smoking.”

Bayani leans back on his elbows, relaxed. “Unless they hit the teniente standing up next to him in a white uniform.”

The uniform is impossible, a chore to keep clean at the front. Once a week he gives it to a girl who smuggles it past the yanquis into the Intramuros and brings it back the next morning, clean, starched, and smelling of woodsmoke.

“Maybe the vote will go our way.” Diosdado starts back down the line. The men should at least be facing in the right direction.

“You know, in the sabong, if you hold the birds back from each other too long,” Sargento Bayani calls after him, “they will burst and die.”

In the daytime it seems very little like there will be a war. The land on this side belongs to the Tuason family, the rice mostly harvested, a handful of their kasamas wandering over from Santol to compete with the flocks of maya birds, gleaning what has been dropped in the fields. The Englishman McLeod has a house on the hill above them, as do a couple of the Tuasons, and the carabao, untethered, pass their days dozing in the shade of the cane thickets and lumbering down to wallow at the edge of the San Juan.

“An orderly transition,” Diosdado says in his lectures to the men about not drinking on duty and taking more care with their firearms. “We can only hope these people will be as civil as the Spaniard when they decide to leave.”

In the pit, Kalaw and Nicanor hold their cocks head to head, the birds pecking furiously at each other, neck plumage bristling—

“A ra sartada!” cries the chino and the men let the cocks go and step back quickly, the birds smacking together in a flurry and shooting upward, squawking and clawing, feathers flying, the razor spurs unsheathed.

“Vaya, Destino!” call the men who have bet on Kalaw’s bird. “Cut him to pieces!”

“Get on him, Butcher!” call the others. “Don’t let him go!”

They are both well-bred, Diosdado notes, standing with his back to the pit but looking over his shoulder. Small heads, long thighs, necks like steel cable, one rusty and barrel-chested, the other sleek, gray with black stippling and now flecks of his own and the other bird’s blood.

“Take his eyes out!” cries Kalaw, crouching with his hands balled into fists, doing a little dance as he shadows the movements of the fight. “What’s wrong with you?”

The fowl leap and flap and peck and claw, chests heaving, blood spattering, their tiny eyes red and implacable in the torchlight, till both stagger back, exhausted.

“Break!” calls Locsin, and the men gather up their champions, Kalaw spitting water into his wounded bird’s face and cooing endearments, Nicanor taking Butcher’s comb into his mouth and sucking the fighting blood back into it as Private Ontoy hovers over both with his needle and thread in hand, ready to sew off a torn artery if needed.

“Ristos!” calls Locsin, who receives a good deal of teasing because he can’t pronounce his l’s, and the men again push their gamecocks’ faces together.

“Rucha!”

The renewed struggle is easier to follow than the opening brawl, both birds clamping on with their beaks and trying to pull the other down, Destino dragging a broken wing, Butcher blinded on one side, yanking at each other desperately and then resting as if by agreement, their tiny hearts visibly hammering in their bodies, feathers slick with blood and gaffed claws digging for purchase in the trench dirt. Diosdado hears fireworks coming from the east, his first thought that at least his men are not the ones out of control with their celebrating, and then a private whose name he has never learned falls into the pit, shot through the eye.

“They’re coming!” shouts Bayani from the river. “The americanos are coming!”

The fireworks are on top of them now, the air filled with angry wasps and the men scatter, most leaping down into the pit, some going for their weapons and the rest just going.

“To the front!” calls Diosdado, standing tall and feeling sick about it. “Everybody to the front! Cover the bridge!”

The birds, excited by the noise and the movement, break apart and begin to swipe at each other again and two more that were pegged waiting for the next fight are kicked loose in the scramble and go for each other and Diosdado finds himself stepping forward to the nearest outpost and pointing at the foot of the bridge as if his men don’t know by the muzzle flashes where the attack is coming from.

“There!” he shouts, over the whine of bullets and the hysterical squawking of gamecocks. “Concentrate your fire over there!”

There is no cover, he thinks, a tiny redoubt next to the bridge on the American side but then the exposed, low-railed bridge itself and the open water — they must be insane. They will be slaughtered, even at night. He turns to shout an order to Sargento Ramos, but for some reason Ramos is down on his hands and knees, crawling—

Most of the officers have gone to what is advertised as “Warren’s Combined Shows,” but Niles has never cared for the circus. He sits in his white drill playing bid whist, no jokers, with two Nebraska lieutenants and a major from the Signal Corps. There is money on the table, gold and silver coins and paper bills, and he and his partner, the wire-stringer, are only a trick away from taking the pot. He’s pulled all the trumps from the Nebraskas, and his partner, eyebrows wig-wagging a code they set beforehand, has made clear what he’s still holding.

“I had my doubts about this game,” says Niles, pretending to consider his cards only to prolong the losers’ agony a few delicious moments more, “but I’m beginning to see its merits.”

Niles can recite the order of every card played in last week’s poker game, has memorized the nicks and flyspecks on the backside of the worn deck they are using, has caught two reneges already this evening, Lieutenant Coombs too distracted by the lizards on the rectory walls to follow suit.

“They still haven’t moved,” he keeps saying. “But if they were dead they’d fall off the wall, wouldn’t they?”

Niles has suggested that the friars glued them in place for some manner of reptilian penance, but the Nebraskan remains fascinated, much to his partner’s dismay.

“Coombs here is as much help in a card game as our little brown brethren were in taking the city,” says Lieutenant Spottiswood. “With friends like these—”

Niles slips the jack from his hand, raises it high—

It is something like the effect of rain on a metal roof. A few hard drops, scattered and tentative, then thickening, the thin pop of Mausers and louder bang of Springfields and then a hammering onslaught of gunfire, really pouring now, all coming from the defensive positions to the north.

“That sounds like us,” says Coombs, laying his hand down with a frown and rising from his chair. The lizards skitter out of sight.

Spottiswood, much relieved, begins to sweep money into separate piles, as if he can recall who wagered what. “Afraid we’ll have to call it a night. That is most definitely us. Trouble with our amigos across the river.”

Jeff Smith once held a pistol on a steamship captain, forcing him to play out his hand despite the news that his vessel was sinking off the Juneau Pier. Niles can only scowl at the Nebraskans’ abandoned cards. “If you don’t have the queen of spades in there,” he says, “those niggers are going to pay.”

It is coming out of Hod, hot and liquid and seemingly with no end as he squats alongside the convent and listens to the bullets chip the stone away. All hell has broken loose and there are signal rockets streaking across the sky and I got the trots again, fuck these fucking islands and please let me die with my pants pulled up. The googoos must be shooting high, well over the heads of the boys on the front, for their bullets to be landing this far back and now here’s Lieutenant Tarheel, chuckling, stepping around and over the men who have grabbed their rifles and laid down on their bellies to wait for orders.

“Word is we’ve got them coming in all through our lines, gentlemen,” he says, pointing to the north with his cane. “It looks like the dance has begun.”

Hod gets himself buttoned up and joins the others, shaky legged, as they are mustered on Calle Alix, Companies F, G, and E marched quickstep in Indian file out past the dark cemetery to dig in just south of the Balic-Balic road, looking across at the googoos that must be holed up in Blockhouse 6. It is all bamboo thickets and just-harvested rice fields around the road, Hod peering into the dark every few yards of the march for a good spot to flop if they run into an ambush. By the time they are in position the firing has thinned out, the blockhouse a black shape against a blacker sky ahead. Hod manages to crawl over an irrigation dike and pull his pants down around his ankles again. He is only just started when Sergeant LaDuke slides down next to him.

“You too,” he says, unbuckling his belt.

“It aint nerves, Sergeant,” says Hod, wishing he could be left alone by the Army for one solid minute, if only to relieve himself in peace. “This country’s got my bowels in a twist.”

“Artillery will start in on that at sunup,” says the sergeant, eyes bright with excitement, jerking his head back toward the enemy blockhouse as he squats to deliver. “And then the shit is gonna fly.”

The moon is just peeking over the horizon when the Chinese come with coffee, a huge tureen of it suspended on poles they carry across their shoulders, running and squatting, rising and running again with their quick bow-legged shuffle that always makes Corporal Grissom laugh so hard he almost chokes. It is quiet over by the big bridge and only a random potshot from the blockhouse now, but the Chinamen are trembling like gun-shy puppies by the time they arrive.

“No toast and jam?” says Neely. “That tears it — Sergeant, I want to go home.”

“Sugar and cream?”

“Hey, it’s still hot. Attago, Chop Suey.”

All the Chinamen are Chop Suey or Chow Mein or Foo Young or You Yellow Pigtail Bastard and they give Hod the willies. Windy Bill Bosworth who he double-jacked with in Montana worked with them in California and said they were demons in a hole, do-anything rockbusters who the white miners eventually ran out so they wouldn’t have to compete. These two just stay close to the ground and watch the tureen, wishing for it to be empty so they can hurry it away from the front.

“Just think if they’d sent us to China,” says Grissom, poking one of the coolies with his boot. “This is what we’d be facing.”

“I doubt these two are Boxers.”

The coffee is hot and acid, better than nothing but only just. Hod doesn’t expect it to stay in him for too long.

“Same breed,” says Grissom.

Donovan is shivering as hard as the Chinese. “If we’re not to fight,” he says, “lave us go back under our blankets and wait till it’s serious.”

“Do they even have rifles, the Chinamen?” Grissom is still staring at the coolies as if he’s never seen one before.

“Chopsticks. They fight with chopsticks.”

“I seen one swing one a them laundry skillets at another once—”

“And the tong gangsters use hatchets and meat cleavers—”

“Wouldn’t stand much show in this mess.”

Hod can see the front of the blockhouse, washed by moonlight now, a solid square built of wood beams with one eye-level firing slit on the side and a little roofed lookout platform on the top. He hopes if they have to make a charge the artillery will have had time to work on it some.

Grissom tosses the dregs of his coffee into the ditch at Hod’s feet. “Then they oughta get them a couple breech-loaders and a Long Tom rifle,” he mutters. “Join the human race.”

It is cold, bone-cold, when Capitán Grey y Formentos announces the counterattack, a heavy dew gathering, Bayani’s breath visible as he complains to Diosdado.

“Why did he wait?” hisses the sargento, crouching with his back to the wall of the cockpit as they wait for the order to charge. “He can’t look into the fucking sky?”

Diosdado looks, the moon rising over the hill behind them, and then Grey y Formentos fires his pistol and cries for them to charge across the bridge and he is up out of the pit and running, men beside him shouting and he fills with pride to be leading them as their feet strike the planks of the bridge and the whine of American bullets concentrates to a roar, a solid typhoon wind of destruction sweeping across the river at them and the pride is replaced by something else as they begin to stagger and fall. “Con pecho desnudo” he thinks as he stumbles on the body in front of him. With open breast—

“Retíranos!” the capitán calls then and it is worse going back, Diosdado forcing himself to retreat slowly, facing the fire as the men rush past him, helping Bayani drag a boy hit in both his legs to the base of the bridge and then the artillery begins to blow the hill behind them apart, the shells falling just short of the waterworks, each one louder, closer, walking down the slope to the edge of the river where the remnants of his ragged company are huddled. The ones who have rifles fire, none really aiming, reloading frantically and firing again while the enfilade from the American line continues steadily, Diosdado’s men dug in only as deep as bayonets and tin cans can scratch in desperation, dew-moistened dirt spattering up to slap against his white uniform pants as he wills himself to stroll, hands clasped behind his back the way Luna does when he drills the men, some of his boys wounded, crying, Reynaldo Puyat dead, yes, that is what dead looks like up close and the bodies they left on the bridge still lying there and the whump! of the shells behind them, the shock of each blast like a thick board smacked against his body and the fighting cocks crowing and flapping and he is tired, tired as the sun seeps over the land to the west, understanding now how men can charge into certain death, so exhausted they can think of nothing better to do and he can see the others now, moving across the bridge and along the pipeline, huge men, Americans, hurrying a few steps then taking a knee to fire again and then a sharper bang tearing the air and it is shrapnel, his men beginning to run, run back up the hill where the big shells are plowing the ground or sideways along the river with canister-bursting jagged shrapnel screaming slicing and whump! the section of the bank he is standing on lifts suddenly into the air and the ground slams him on the side, punching the breath from his lungs and more earth, heavy, falling on top of him and he starts to leave, body floating out into the fragrant earth, dirt in his mouth in his nose in his hair and something wet and hot mashed against his cheek.

Something with feathers—

BETRAYAL

The soldier is young, not much more than a boy. Fit-looking in his uniform shirt and trousers, leggings wound tight over the calves, square-chinned under a battered campaign hat, but no Adonis. The rifle slipping from his stiffened fingers was at parade rest, butt on the dusty ground, no bayonet fixed to its barrel. There is a look of confusion on the young American’s face, of innocence betrayed, his lips parted in surprise, his lower back arched in where the kris has been thrust from behind. The Cartoonist has actually seen a kris, hung behind glass on a wall in a Boston museum, but has added a few extra serpentine curves for effect.

The wily Filipino is a bit of a problem. The feet are bare, the clothes the same peon’s rags he has used for the Mexicans the Chief hates so much and more recently for the noble Cuban insurrectos. The straw hat is equally ragged but less round, coming to a point suggestive of a cutting edge at the peak. Even the shade of the skin he has left relatively unaltered, a delicate cross-hatching to give shape to the exposed areas and suggest something between white and negroid. He hopes that if it pleases the Chief enough to be reprinted on Sunday the color-ink boys will render it a yellowish-tan, like a bilious weak tea. He’s done the features over several times before hitting on something that looks right, the cheekbones high and sharp, the eyes narrow, up-slanting razor slits, the mouth twisted in a cruel, treacherous grin as he drives the crooked blade through his victim’s spine. Only a slight exaggeration from the one photo published of their jefe Aguinaldo, who — though reputed to be of a Chinese-Malay mix — bears the angular, cunning stamp of the Jap.

Beneath the assassin’s feet, trodden into blood-soaked foreign soil, lies Old Glory.

The Cartoonist roughs in the caption, noting below it that he wants the heavy Gothic font they use for In Memoriam buys on the obit page, sober and declamatory at once—

THE THANKS OF A GRATEFUL NATION

HOMECOMING

They are waiting for him on the dock, notepads gaping like the mouths of baby magpies, insatiable. They are waiting for him everywhere these days, in the hallways, in the lobbies, in front of the hotels, on street corners and under lampposts, in gentlemen’s clubs and workingmen’s resorts, starved for quips, for observations, his every vocalization sandwiched between quotation marks and rehashed for the delectation of the reading public. Having sent his wife and daughter ahead, the Humorist nurses a cigar that has burned down to a stub, waiting, as the steward has requested, for the other passengers to absent themselves. No sense obstructing the disembarkation.

He has seen some of the caricatures occasioned by his political musings, forwarded to London by friends and accompanied by suitable proclamations of outrage. His favorite is the senile literary lion, toothless perhaps but still full-maned and regal compared to the bonneted schoolmarms they’ve made of Hoar, Carnegie, and poor, hapless William Jennings Bryan, his once voluminous bag these days nearly bereft of wind. The fellow at Punch had some sport with him after an interview sympathetic to the Boers, drawing him as a grimy, wild-haired Voortrekker shooting himself in the foot with a blunderbuss. There is a sort of glee in it, the illustrators attempting to outdo each other, attaching his physiognomy to a menagerie of outlandish creatures, both extant and mythical.

“All in good fun,” chortled the editor from Lloyd’s Weekly at the Travelers’ Club, though his countrymen slaughtered at Mafeking and Ladysmith might be excused for undervaluing the hilarity involved.

“Thank you very much, sir,” says the steward, appearing beside his deck chair. “I believe it will be all right now.”

The Humorist rises, lifts the tattered carpetbag he carries more as a prop than as a necessity, and descends the gangplank of the Minnehaha, flash powder fulminating with each step, to feed the Beast.

The New York Herald is there, and the Sun and the World and the Times and the Mail and Express and the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer and, for all he knows, a representative from the New Yorker Staats Zeitung.

“How does it feel to be on American soil?” The Sun.

“A good deal superior to being under it,” answers the Humorist, setting fire to a long black article and taking the first puff. “But then I’ve only just arrived.”

Chucklings of appreciation.

“What are your plans?”

“If I am drafted to serve as President, I will not shun the honor. Short of that I will settle for schnitzel and ale at Luchow’s.”

Knowing laughter. Winks. The World steps forward, features devoid of mirth.

“In regard to the statements attributed to you during your stay in London—”

“I found the Prince of Wales an admirable drinking companion and all-around good egg,” the Humorist interrupts, “and I shall defend that position with my life.”

More jollity, but the pack is on the scent now and won’t be shaken.

“I meant your reaction to the situation in China,” clarifies the newshound from the World.

“The Boxer is a patriot,” replies the Humorist, pausing for effect as pencils are jabbed into notebooks. “No less a patriot than you or I — and I am giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

The World man stiffens, not certain as to whether he has been insulted.

“He defends his land and his culture,” continues the Humorist, “barbaric though it may appear to our eye.”

The gauntlet hurled. The scribe from the Times picks it up.

“But the murder of Christians—”

“Should a handful of Celestials descend on the nether regions of your gashouse district and begin to proselytize for Confucius, they would be made equally short work of. The fate of the missionaries is lamentable, but they were well aware of, if not secretly titillated by, the risks involved.”

It is not that there is nothing left to lose. Yes, he can choose exile again, circling the globe with his stories and being well rewarded for it, can find an innovation equal to the damned compositor to squander his earnings on, can decorate the dining halls of Europe till they grow nauseous at the sight of him, but he longs to be home, in familiar surroundings with Olivia near her most trusted physician. These people can turn on him, decide there is no Humor left in the old man and hound him from their fervently patriotic shore. But he has seen too much, lived too long, to temper his opinions for the mollification of jingoes. He lays the carpetbag on the dock.

“And the Boers?” The representative from Mr. Hearst’s publication, goading him on.

“The British are in the wrong in South Africa,” states the Humorist, holding the cigar away from his face so the smoke cannot obscure his seriousness, “just as our own nation is wrong in the Philippines.”

The jasper from the Herald grins wolfishly. Pencils dance merrily on notebook paper.

The Tribune scoops up the banner. “Don’t you think that while our boys are in peril—”

The Humorist knows where this is heading and will not allow it to arrive. “I am an anti-Imperialist,” he states, raising his voice slightly. “Opposed, on principle, to the eagle sinking its talons into any other land.”

“We have had nothing but victories there.”

He is not yet clear of the dock and is already exhausted. These men have the bright, excited look of those whose experience of battle is the thunder of scareheads on the front pages of their journals, who look at carnage as a starving dog regards a beef shank dripping in a butcher’s window. It was the look on the faces of his young friends when reports of those early victories came down from the North, friends boasting, as they strutted off to enlist, of how fast and how far they would set the yankees running. It has been the young, covetous of their grandfathers’ fading glory, who have campaigned for the present war. His stomach slides up toward his gorge. He was content, happy even, on the leisurely voyage home, safe from the long reach of the telegraph, but now this queasiness, this sudden weight on terra firma. Land-sickness. Jingophobia.

“Our situation in those islands,” he says slowly, giving them time to write, “is an utter mess, a quagmire, from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extraction immensely greater—”

“Our flag has been raised,” declares the pedant from the World. “To lower it now would signal defeat.”

“Our flag, my young friend, must be wrenched from those shores before it is further sullied.”

Silence then, scratching of heads and pencils. This is not risible, this is not what they have gathered for, the return of the nation’s favorite wag with tales of European fatuity and American common sense. Then the stutterer from the Mail and Express, prudently mute up to this juncture, steps into the breach.

“So Mr. T-t-t-twain, w-w-what you are saying is that you are op-p-p-posed to w-w-war.”

The Humorist smiles, takes a lung-tickling pull on the cigar. “I could not have said it better myself. You have no doubt read in your own papers that Czar Nicholas of Russia declares he wants the entire world to disarm.” The Humorist gestures across the harbor with his stogie. “The Czar is ready to disarm.” He touches his chest with both hands. “I am ready to disarm.” His friend has arrived behind them with the hack, the Humorist recognizing the driver, a foul-breathed Fenian who excoriates his slat-ribbed nag in the Mother Tongue. “Collect the others and it shouldn’t be much of a task.”

The Humorist winks at them, lifts his carpetbag and hurries through another poofing barrage of flash powder to the open door of the cab. Only the opening salvo, he thinks, what the frogeaters would term an hors d’oeuvre. They will be back tomorrow, pencils sharpened, hungry for more.

BARREN ISLAND

The City eats horses. Dozens and dozens are floated over from New York in a day, more than a hundred when it is hot, they say. Some shot in the head by a horse doctor or one of the Cruelty people but mostly they just fell over in their traces and are unharnessed and left in the street till one of the wagons picks them up. If the shoes have been left on they get pulled off and tossed into the pile and sold back to the ferriers. Jubal yanks the hooks into the tendons just below the hocks on a big roan’s back legs so it can be winched down the slide, then pops the shoes off as fast as he can. It goes a lot faster when they’re dead.

The scrapers are next, running their quick blades over the body, razoring off manes and tails, separating the hair by color if it’s for brushes or not if it’s for plaster, and then the skinners step in slicing and tugging, tossing the heavy wet hides into a heap for the tanner’s boy to haul off in his wheelbarrow, a cloud of flies bursting apart with each new toss and then settling back on top. A man comes in to fog the whole floor three times a day but the flies always come back. The blood-smeared butchers come last, one on each side of the chute, hacking out the cuts they want and dropping them into steel carts, stripping one side of the skinned animal then digging in their meathooks to flip it over and do the other. What is left gets hauled up the ramp, unhooked, and slid into the enormous rendering vat. His first week on the Island Jubal was up there on the catwalk in the heat and the fumes and the smell, but he come on time every day and didn’t complain and didn’t fall in so they moved him to horseshoes and now they got a new colored man at the vat. It is mostly Polacks and Irish here, lots of them with the whole family working. Some of the Polacks speak American, and other ones, like old Woytak who skins the dogs and the raccoons and the fox that come in sometimes, talk old country or don’t talk at all. Mr. Tom says if Jubal does a good job and stays out of trouble on the Island a few more weeks maybe he will put him on a wagon.

His first day up from Wilmington he went to all the stables in the City, telling what he could do and asking for work. There were stables for four horses and stables for twenty and stables for more than a hundred that had three stories with wagons on the ground floor and the horses brought up a ramp to the second and their feed on the top. One place that was for trolley horses had five hundred stalls but the trolley gone electric now and near half of them were empty. Jubal asked and walked and asked and walked, teamsters on the street happy to tell him where to try, but there was no work till he come to the West Side stable for P. White’s Sons and they said they would start him out on Barren Island.

The horses on the streets of the City are all blinkered, as close to blind as you can do and still get them to work. The people don’t look to the sides much either, staring a tunnel down the street and hurrying through it. Wherever he went that first day he was in the way of something, and both times he tried to sit down a police appeared to eyeball him to his feet again. There is places in Wilmington where you got to state your business if you’re colored, but there is also a dozen white men Jubal could say he hauled for, who would stand for him as a honest worker with a feel for the animals.

The room he stays in now is not so big and belongs to P. White’s Sons, like all the other rooms and houses on Barren Island. They built the school and the firehouse and the little grocery and probly own the two saloons that he’s never seen any colored in. Rent comes out of his pay, double for the first week. A small steamer boat, the Fannie McKane, travels over to a place called Canarsie and back two times a day and once for church on Sunday. He hasn’t gone back over yet, his credit good on the Island but nowhere else. They cook garbage here too, at a plant on the other side of the pier, but it pays just the same and there’s no chance to get on a wagon. There is a neighborhood or two in the City where colored live, even some from Carolina, but this is the job for now and if you work here you got to live here.

Halecki steps past pushing a train of carts full of tankage that will be dried and sold for fertilizer. They don’t waste a thing, P. White’s Sons, and the next passel of horses bound for the City will come up grazing on grass grown on their grandaddy’s bones. Some of the horses come in you can tell they broke a leg or got hit by another carriage, but mostly they are old and gray-muzzled and just been worked out. Jubal hooks carcasses and pops horseshoes till one of the Irish who do errands, little Darby, runs up to say there is a load coming in.

Jubal is the only one suppose to come off the line. It is chilly, his breath showing white and the winter wind blowing strong when he steps out of the building, blowing black smoke from the huge brick chimney over to Rockaway and lifting some of the smell away with it. It is not so bad as he worried, kind of a old-coffee thickness in the air that never goes away, and he is used to it by now. A steam tug pushes a scow piled with carcasses across Dead Horse Bay to the pier, the dark hides nearly hidden by a blanket of feeding gulls. Most every carcass Jubal handles is missing at least one eye and he’s come to hate the birds.

No telling how they bring the horses out when the river finally ices over.

Smitty and Pops are waiting with their wagons by the wharf crane, both with a blinkered four-in-hand team. Uncle Wicklow taught him to handle a big team like that when he was in livery for Mr. Sprunt, and once Jubal got to work six mules rolling a house from Queen Street to Market. A mule won’t let you kill him with work, but horses — these ones coming in on the scow probly just got pushed past what they could do, too heavy, too steep, too fast. Driver got to make up for the sense that a horse don’t have, and Jubal has always had a feel for them. Once when they were little and times was hard Mama bought some horsemeat from Honniker and cooked it in a stew. Mama could make a sump-digger’s boot taste good, but Jubal couldn’t touch a bite and Royal laughed at him and ate the whole mess.

“Jubal think he know who this stew is,” he said. “Know the name of every horse in town.”

The gulls stir some when the scow bangs against the pilings and Jubal hops down to tie her up. He kicks at one of the birds that stays too close when he climbs onto the pile of carcasses.

“Got room for you in that renderin tank.”

Hruba who operates the crane sends the tackle down and Jubal gets busy, muscling the first cold body around with his gaff while old Inkspot fixes lines in place and sets the hardware. Inkspot is drunk whenever he’s not working but still moves quick, hopping around the jumble of bodies and legs like a flea, tapping where he wants Jubal to lift, trussing the animal to be lifted. He sits back on the rump of a Cleveland bay and jerks his thumb up at Hruba.

“You got im!”

Half the gulls are still on the pile and half are flapping in the air, looking for an opening. The winch chain rattles till it goes taut and the hooked horse is hoisted straight up, eyeless head flopping to one side, then swung over Smitty’s wagon bed and cranked down. Smitty got his whole team in feedbags for the loading — it could be sacks of concrete coming down for all they know. Some horses will shy at a corpse, but they can be trained around it. Jubal drove Mr. Rivers the undertaker’s matched black Tennessee Walkers for a spell, wearing a top hat that was a mite too big for him, and never had to use an overchuck on them, the horses raising their heads up proud the minute they saw the hearse rolled out. Except for the Phenix fire pumper, that was the finest team in Wilmington, stepping high, pulling even, standing tall. Dignified.

Jubal knows how old a horse is from twenty paces, can feel its legs and tell you is it a lead or a swing or a wheelhorse, can tell you how it’s been hitched and how much it can pull, can riff his fingers in the coat and let you know what kind of feed it’s lacking. But these ones don’t tell much of a story, just dead weight to gaff till old Inky has got the lines fixed and then you move on to the next. Uncle Wick owns a little patch out on the way to Winnabow and sometimes he move an old horse off a team and onto a single-pull and then one day when it isn’t good for even that he put it out on that patch, lets it feed and sleep all day and go rheumy-eyed and ski-footed. Might be four or five of them old horses out there at any time that Uncle say weren’t to be rode.

“That hoss done carry his share of the world,” he would say if Jubal or Royal would ask could they climb up. “Leave him rest now.”

Smitty’s wagon fills and he pulls the feed bags off and puts the bits back in and clucks the team back toward the rendering plant, steam showing out their noses, a few gulls resettling on top. Smitty is good, can dock that rig backward into the loading slot first try every time. Used to run them eight-up for a moving company, he says, till it was bought by a bigger company that wanted all white horses and all white drivers.

Jubal gaffs a broke-legged pony and rolls it back for Inkspot. The pony has been shot in the head and has a pinto hide, which the skinners always put away special. Be on somebody’s easy chair in no time. Jubal looks over to Brooklyn while the old man kneels by the pony with lines in hand. It is part of Greater New York now, part of the City. Word is that the colored man’s future is up here, even if won’t nobody look you straight in the eye.

“You just don’t stop movin, is what,” old Inkspot told him the first night in the room they share, his breath sharp with whiskey. “You stop movin, black or white, you gets throwed in the pot.”

How many horses there must be over there, for this many to come in dead every day? Every one of them horses need caring for, feeding, somebody who know how to work them. It only makes sense. This the place for me, Jubal thinks as the pony is hoisted and swings upside down next to him for a moment. I just got in on the wrong end of it.

With a piano she could give lessons. Or even just to play for Mother and Father at night. Jessie has read the bulletins posted at the Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Opera and at the Carnegie Hall. It is possible that these instructors don’t have a piano in their homes, but they have positions that give them access to one, or money to rent a music room. In this city nothing happens until money passes hands.

Even if they could afford it, of course, a piano is an impossibility in their two crowded rooms. Walls would need to be moved and a crane employed to bring one in, the lopsided stairs too narrow, too weak to bear the weight. The only music she hears now is from the pianola at the corner saloon, drifting up from the street till halfway through the night. Some of the songs are lively but the machine lacks at least a quarter of the notes and depends on the stamina and interest of whoever is pumping the pedals, and the saloon keeper insists on having his rolls played in the same order every night. If the neighborhood is being graced with Hello, Mah Baby it is a quarter past seven.

Jessie has passed the women before, standing in the cold under the elevated tracks on Ninth just north of Paddy’s Market, arms folded, chatting in small groups, waiting to be picked up. At first, unsure of their business on the street, she walked by pretending they weren’t there, but eventually began to nod politely and respond to their questions and listen to their suggestions. She has solicited as far south as Park Row and as far north as 80th Street, venturing all the way to the East River once to see about a position in a laundry. She has learned that the shops on the Ladies’ Mile do not hire colored girls to meet the public, and that most of the small manufacturing concerns employ workers who speak the same language as the floor managers. She has learned to hide rather than reveal her education when seeking a position as a domestic, and she has learned, in her two torturous half-days of employment, that she can neither cook nor sew. She has been left more than once outside an employment-agency door while dozens of white women were ushered past her and discovered how long a lady can sit alone resting her legs at a park bench before attracting unwelcome attention. It is not more than a few minutes.

“Is there a line for me to put myself at the end of?” she asks Alberta, the friendliest of the colored girls, who says she is from Charleston.

“Naw, honey, you just stan out here like the rest of us. If they like what they see they ask you over, then you make a deal and get in.”

“Sometimes they remember if they had you before,” says her friend Clarice. “Sometimes they want to look at your hands or hear you say your name or there’s a uniform you got to fit into.”

There is Alberta and Clarice and Queen, who is big and looks angrily at everyone, then an Irish woman called Wee Kate who doesn’t stop talking and four other Irish girls who listen to her and then two dark-haired girls who speak something Jessie doesn’t recognize, all of them standing in the dirty slush beneath the rattling trolleys waiting for someone to pick them up.

“They’ve been hiring to cover baseballs across the river,” says Wee Kate. “Hand stitching. It pays by the piece, but an able girl can do well for herself.”

“Ye’ve done it?” asks Sorcha, one of her listeners.

Wee Kate looks insulted. “Let them transport me to New Jersey? Of course not.”

“Then what does it have to do with us?”

“Only that there’s opportunities available, is all. Ye only have to put yerself forward.”

A white man with a stubble of beard rattles up in an old omnibus that has seen better days. There are five women already inside, staring out the windows at them.

“I need three more,” he says, and Jessie is left standing, the others all rushing forward. Two of the Irish girls climb on first and Wee Kate has a foot on the rung before Queen shoulders her out of the way and falls heavily into the final seat.

“That’s three,” she calls and the unshaven man, who has not turned to watch them, flicks his reins and the omnibus jerks away.

“Fecking black whoor,” grumbles Wee Kate, watching the vehicle rattle south toward the Market. “I’ll deal with her tomorrow.”

Jessie feels short of breath though she hasn’t moved from the spot.

“They didn’t ask what the pay was,” she says.

Alberta shrugs. “The sooner in the day you get started the more you can make.”

“Is it safe?”

“There were three of them, and more in the bus.”

“But if you’re alone—”

“Some girls do,” says Alberta. “Not me.”

Jessie is surprised that no one passing turns to stare at them. They have the snow banks to navigate, of course, and the wind cutting between the tall buildings, but still — if there is a place in Wilmington where women congregate and offer their services she does not know where it is. The two foreign girls are taken after a long conversation with a man who speaks their language and then the remaining six of them wait for what seems like hours. Wagons full of ice and meat and fish and fodder for horses pass by them and the trolleys rumble overhead and an Italian man pushing a cart goes by singing praises to his melons and uniformed servants of various races hurry to and from the Market and once a policeman looks them over but does not say hello.

“It’s the Jews ye have to look out for,” says Wee Kate when she has gotten over her tussle with Queen. “They’ll try to cheat ye out of it every time. And very free with their hands, if ye know what I’m sayin. They can’t help themselves in the presence of a Christian girl, it’s a well-known fact. And it’s them that runs the whole city.”

“And I thought it was the lads at Tammany,” says Sorcha, raising her eyes in an exaggerated way. “Croker and that lot.”

“They’re merely the custodians,” corrects Wee Kate. “It’s your Jews, the bankers and financiers and such, that own the whole shebang.”

The Jews that Jessie has seen so far in the city don’t seem to have much. Mrs. Kastner, who lives below them with her half-crippled son who sits mooning on the stoop, twists colored cloth and wire into flowers from early morning until she blows the candles out at night. A boy who wears the black hat and curls next to his ears comes every morning to take what is finished and bring her more material.

There must be different Jews.

“I was a waiter girl for a time,” says Wee Kate. “At Auchenpaugh’s Beer Garden. Now your Dutchman is tight with the gratuities until he’s poured a couple down his gullet, and then he’s as generous as the next fella. I could carry six steins of lager in each of me hands,” she says, holding her skinny arms out wide and making fists. “More than once I’ve navigated the floor with every Fritz on the East Side crowdin the place, and never spilt a drop. ‘Katie,’ they’d say to me when they was feelin no pain and waxin sentymental, ‘yer a drinkin man’s angel.’ ”

“How come you quit?”

Wee Kate raises her chin at Clarice, looking offended. “I didn’t quit at all. Auchenpaugh comes in one day, cocky as a magpie on a pump handle, and declares that from now on we’re to wear this get-up as a unyform—” she indicates with the side of her hand, “—down to here and up to there. A decent woman wouldn’t be caught dead in it. ‘Tis only the traditional costume in the village that I hail from,’ says Auchenpaugh. So I says, ‘Then, traditionally, yer women is whoors.’ ”

Sorcha keeps her eyes wide. “And he took offense, did he?”

“Thick heads and thin skins, if ye ask me. I don’t have a word of the German, and it’s a lucky thing too from the tone of what he was sputterin. Lost his best waiter girl that very night.”

“So the skirt was small, ye say?” Sorcha winks at the other women.

“Not enough to keep a field mouse warm. It’s all showgirls there now, the ones as can’t get on to wiggle their fannies at the Casino Roof. Arms like pipe cleaners that can barely lift an honest mug of ale, much less six in each hand. Strumpets, is all, and if that’s what the Dutchmen want I’m well rid of em.”

Wee Kate goes on to tell of her trials in a hotel kitchen and sewing undergarments and assembling cardboard boxes and pretending she was an experienced typewriter girl.

“They had me believe I was just to copy what was already there on the page, not to read it and make corrections,” she complains. “It’s been me own Stations of the Cross. An honest girl has nowhere to turn.”

It is nearly noon and Jessie feeling lightheaded from hunger when a drayman with a carbuncle that looks like a raspberry on his nose stops and calls them over to his wagon.

“Easy work,” he says. “Making toys. It pays two dollars a day — only half the day is gone already.”

The women look at each other, then begin to climb in. There are some crates to sit on but by the time Alberta pulls Jessie up these are gone. She sits, awkwardly, on the floor of the wagon bed, holding on to the side. A mismatched pair of horses pull them forward, one bleeding from under its harness. The women bump shoulders and knees as they roll east on 44th Street.

“Will he take us back to the same place at the end of the day?” Jessie asks, and the others laugh. Alberta looks her over.

“You aint brought nothin to eat.”

Jessie shakes her head. Her too-thin coat cannot hide from their eyes that she is several months pregnant. She feels alternately famished and bloated these days and is suddenly prone to headaches. Nobody on the street is even looking at them, a wagon full of women, colored and white, loaded like sacks of grain. Alberta pulls something wrapped in a handkerchief from her waist and unrolls it, breaking off half a corn cake and handing it down to Jessie.

“Eat this here,” she says. “You gone need it.”

“You’re very kind.”

“Yeah,” the dark girl smiles. “I feeds the crumbs to the birdies.”

It is a little stale and there is no butter but it is the best corn cake Jessie has ever eaten.

The building is on 25th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, six stories high, floor-length windows separated into tiny panes by iron mullions. The drayman ties his horses to a light pole and then lets the back gate of the wagon down, stepping back to stare at their legs as they climb onto the street.

“Follow me.”

There is an elevator and a board beside it with the names of different manufactories and the floors they reside on, but the six from Paddy’s Market and two more they gathered on the way are led down creaking wooden stairs to the basement. It takes Jessie’s eyes a moment to adjust. The ceiling is low, with only a few oil lamps hung from the pipes running overhead. A huge boiler dominates the middle of the room, faced by two long benches with stools placed next to them. It is sweltering and smells like food has been stored here recently, cabbage maybe, and the only exit is by the narrow, unsteady stairs. There is no place to hang their coats, so they hurry to pull them off and lay them in a pile on the floor in the corner. Jessie is perspiring already and has to fight back a panic that there is not enough air for everybody to breathe. Eight or nine women are already seated along one of the benches, painting metal figurines.

“All of you take a stool over here,” says the wagon driver. “It don’t matter which one.” He ducks under a lantern to reach the end of the first bench, frowning at several fully painted figurines lined up on a thin metal tray at the end of it.

“You gals been sleeping here, or what?”

None of the working women, who are all white, look up to answer him, faces set in the dim light.

Jessie sits at the empty bench, Alberta on one side of her and Clarice on the other. There is a glass pot of orangey-pink paint in front of her, a small paintbrush lying on a scrap of cardboard beside it. The wooden bench top is gouged and scarred but not spattered with paint like the other that has been in use.

The drayman steps to the head of their bench and picks up one of the metal figurines to wave at them. “I’m only going through this once, so keep your ears open. Anybody here don’t speak English?”

None of the women at the table respond. It occurs to Jessie that if she didn’t speak English she wouldn’t have understood the question.

“All right, this is your basic piece, and each one of youse is going to paint a different part of it. The paint dries fast but not so fast you can’t smudge it up with your hands, so you never pick it up by where the gal before you just painted.”

The figurines are American soldiers, marching men with a rifle over their shoulders. They are bigger than the lead infantrymen Junior played with when he was a boy, nearly a half-foot high. The top of each figure has been dipped in blue, the bottom in a buff color, meeting unevenly at the belt line.

“The base, all around here, is green. Number One, that’s you.”

The drayman walks down the line to point to the section each woman is to paint.

“Number Two, you do the hands and the face with this — don’t get none on the bottom of the hat — and Number Three, you got black for the belt and the boots. Be careful with that damn black, it’s murder to cover up. Four, you got the little brush, that’s brass color for the buttons. Just one little dot on each of em, don’t go crazy with it. Five, the whites of the eyes. Six, dark brown for the hair and eyebrows and the rifle, Seven, a dab of blue in the center of each eye — don’t fill the whole thing up — and Eight,” he has reached the end of the bench, “you do the hat light brown and line the pieces up on the tray here. I want them facing the same way and none of them touching. Now do we all know our colors?”

Jessie thinks that to make a figurine of the drayman they’d need a pot of red for the berry on his nose. He slaps the top of the bench with his hand.

“You mess it up, stick the wrong color in the wrong place, just put it aside on the table and keep the line going. You’ll have to fix those later. Let’s get cracking.”

He hands Alberta the figurine and goes to the stairs, turning back to glare at them just before he starts up.

“Oh yeah — I come back and catch any one of you flapping your gums — you’re out. No pay, no nothin.” He taps his temple with a finger. “A word to the wise.”

They begin to paint. Alberta has a wider brush and slaps the green onto the base sloppily, so it is dripping when she hands it to Jessie. None of the oil lamps is directly overhead and it is hard to see, but she does her best with her brush. The figurines are hollow cast iron, molded with great detail. Her paint is light but doesn’t look like any skin color she’s ever seen when it goes on. She used to love painting eggs with Mother at Easter and has done watercolors for years, but something about this makes her anxious.

“I’ve got the hardest task by far,” mutters Wee Kate, squinting as she lines a soldier’s eyebrows with brown. “The bastard done it on purpose.”

“Shut up with ye,” says Sorcha. “Ye’ll earn us all the sack.”

Jessie has passed five pieces on to Clarice when a skinny white boy steps out from around the boiler carrying a tray with a dozen of the finished soldiers on it, all the colors, especially the skin, looking better now. He is wearing gloves and a sweat-soaked undershirt, quickly unloading the figurines into a crate painted on the side with a similar-looking soldier standing in front of a giant American flag. He takes a tray of painted men from the end of the first bench and hurries back behind the boiler.

“He’ll have an oven back there,” announces Wee Kate. “To bake the color on.”

The women continue to paint, silently. Jessie already has green stains on her sleeves and wishes she had worn a different waist today. She does the neck and face first, not worrying if it overlaps with the hairline, then takes more time with the hands, careful of the blue uniform cuffs. If it wasn’t for the low ceiling and the smell and the heat from the boiler and the unforgivingly hard seat of the stool it wouldn’t be the worst of occupations.

Another man comes down, this one tall enough to have to bend over to fit under the pipes, and stands behind them, watching.

“Jesus Horatio Christ,” he says finally, kicking the back of Wee Kate’s chair. “You’re sposed to paint the damn things, not play with them!”

He stomps, stooped over, to stand in front of them. He has bloodshot eyes and long, crooked teeth, and his breath smells like his lunch when he starts to shout into their faces.

“You people got half a day to give me a hundred fifty pieces. Didn’t he tell you that? You don’t make one-fifty, nobody gets paid!”

“Ye’ve given me three things to paint,” says Wee Kate, holding up the soldier she is working on, and then nodding toward Sorcha beside her, “and this one has only got to spot the feckin eyes on it.”

“You don’t like your job,” says the tall man, raising his eyebrows, “you know where the stairs are.”

Wee Kate thunks the soldier down on the bench top and angrily jabs her brush at it.

“And the same goes for you!” he shouts at the women at the other bench before clumping away up the stairs.

“There’s a Jew for ye,” mutters Wee Kate when he’s gone.

Jessie has no idea if the man is a Jew or not, but the threat of not being paid puts a frantic energy into their work, Jessie perspiring, her brush hand beginning to cramp, and a dull pain is forming behind her eyes. A few of the women still have food with them and hurry a few bites in between soldiers. How they can stomach anything with the cabbage smell and the heat—

Jessie is aware that she needs to relieve herself. Nothing has been spoken of this, and she looks around desperately. No sign of a convenience. She paints a few more pieces, resolving to put it out of her mind. But the problem is not in her mind. She is barely keeping up with Alberta, but it can’t wait.

“M’am,” she says, turning to a woman behind her at the other bench, a woman with a touch of gray in her hair, “excuse me, but—”

“Past the boiler, on the left,” says the woman without looking up from her work.

“Now ye’ve sunk us,” snarls Wee Kate, who has three soldiers lined up waiting for her attentions as Jessie hurries past.

It is only a closet, with a toilet of sorts and a single candle for light, the ceiling open around a thick pipe that runs upstairs. She hurries through her business, holding her breath against the smell for as long as she can. There are footsteps above, and then the voices of the wagon driver and the tall man.

“It’s all that was left,” says the drayman.

“I told you before—”

“You want all white, you got to send me out earlier.”

“How am I supposed to know half of em don’t come back?”

“And what’s the difference?”

“Campbell rents the room,” says the tall man, “and he don’t want niggers in the building. That’s the difference.”

Jessie is suffocating in the closet. She arranges her clothing and steps out to see the skinny young man carefully stoop to slide a tray of soldiers into the mouth of an oven standing on stout legs near the back wall, a brazier filled with glowing coals beneath it. He turns and holds her eye for a long moment.

“You don’t want to be here,” he says sadly, and then turns back to his work.

“Here’s our ladyship, come back for a visit,” says Wee Kate, but none of the others even look up. Alberta is finishing the face on a piece for Jessie, and hands back her brush.

“Thank you,” says Jessie, sitting into her spot. There is no clock in the basement, and without a window there is no way to know how much time has passed.

“You do it for me when I gots to go,” says Alberta.

Jessie begins to paint again, head and hands, head and hands. If this were a novel, she thinks, the Dark and Brooding Man would appear at the bottom of those stairs to sweep her into his arms and carry her away. He would have vanquished those who ruined Father, restored their fortune and their home. The women left behind in the basement would be stirred by the scene, and Wee Kate, a tear in her eye, would have an appropriate and sentimental comment to put a cap on the story.

But then she is not the Wronged Heroine, honest and stalwart. She is the Fallen Woman, the lass alluded to as a caution to flighty girls, the one who through her own fecklessness and perfidy has earned her fate.

Jessie has to struggle to keep the soldier she is holding in focus. Her head is swimming. If this is the influenza, how will it affect the life growing within her? How will she not pass it on to her parents living in the cramped quarters of their apartment? She feels flushed, light-headed, she feels — ashamed. That is what she feels most acutely. What would Junior say, or Father, if they saw her here, doing this work for these men? Or Royal, if he ever overcame his rightful anger to look at her again?

Junior’s infantrymen were Union soldiers, and he fought the battle of New Bern over and over with them, using clothespins to represent the Confederates. They were all white men in blue, set in various poses, and he would erect battlements of dirt in the backyard or in the coach house when it was raining, making the noises of rifle and artillery fire and the occasional cry of a wounded man. Jessie remembers how heavy they were for the size of them, barely able to lift the box that Junior kept under his bed for years.

She wonders who is living in their house in Wilmington now. They will be white people, of course, and she wonders if they have a daughter who sits dreamily at her piano, if they have a small boy who plays in the carriage barn with lead soldiers whose blue uniforms he has painted gray—

Jessie stands shakily, takes a few steps and dips her brush into Wee Kate’s paint pot.

“Christ Almighty, what’re ye up to now?”

Jessie steps back to her place and quickly paints a soldier with brown face and hands, then sets it in front of Clarice. Clarice looks at her, giggles and starts to paint the hair and eyebrows black. The figurine moves down the line. Jessie dips her brush back into her own pot, but there is still some brown on it and this one comes out closer to Junior’s shade.

The first was more like Royal Scott.

The next one she paints might be an Italian.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” exclaims Wee Kate when the figurines reach her. “Have ye gone mad?”

“I done the rest for you,” says Clarice. “You just paint that rifle and pass em on.”

When the skinny boy takes them away on the tray he says nothing, nor when he returns and crates them with the color baked on.

Head and hands, head and hands, head and hands. Figurines pass down the line of women who have become one long, many-armed creature that occasionally sighs but does not speak. At some point each of the women excuses herself, even Wee Kate, the slack taken up by the others and the flow of pieces uninterrupted. Once, when she was little, Father let her come with him to treat a man injured at the cotton press, found her a safe place to stand and watch the gang at work. At first it was the sound that terrified her, steam exploding to drive the heavy metal press down onto the loose bales, the big, sweating men shouting at each other over the clank and grind of machine parts. But as she watched, the noise and confusion began to fall into a pattern — men hoisting bales up from the wagons with a pulley, dankeymen pushing them along a slide to the mouth of the press where the snatchers cut the ropes away and shoved them in onto the huge metal teeth and the leverman pulling the arm to trigger the press down and back up and then the tyers pushing metal bands through the teeth and then pulling them over to fasten them snug around the tight-pressed bale and jumping away when the press kicked the bale out with its tongue to slide down the chute onto the back of another wagon. And all through it the caller — singing out instructions, sometimes even riding on top of the press itself to see the entirety of the operation, nearly disappearing into the hole as the press hammered down.

Ready when you hear me call—

— he sang—

Pull that stick and let her fall!

Limbs, bodies, heads moving out of the way just in time not to be destroyed by the monstrous works—

Haul the next one when you able

Put the bacon on you table!

And the men singing back now and then, never taking their eyes off the machinery—

Won’t be liquor, won’t be sin

Cotton gone to do me in!

It was thrilling and terrifying and she felt a mixture of awe and pity for the men working there, a sadness to their labor that she thought at the time was due to their fellow worker having his leg crushed that morning, due to the danger and the deafening bursts of steam and the heat and having to breathe the cotton lint kicked up and filling the air till you were coughing, coughing without a hand free to cover your mouth, coughing blood sometimes and spitting it out onto the hot metal beast. But now she understands that it is not the work itself, so much harder and more dangerous than her own, of course, but the repetition, the repetition of the work that is nightmarish. The same process, the same motions over and over, day after day, year after year, knowing the job will not change, that it is waiting for you, impatient, demanding, insatiable, and that this is all that life will ever have to offer you. Jessie tries to become an automaton, to drive complaint from her head and to make her motions as efficient and mechanical as possible. She tries to count the pieces as they pass through her hands, hoping to mark time with the sum, but twice loses track just past thirty.

At the end her eyes are dry and smarting, the headache settled just behind them, and the brush is trembling slightly in her hand. The tall man has been down twice to check on their progress, shaking his head and muttering, and finally there are no more figurines left to paint. The skinny boy climbs the stairs, carrying a crate full of finished pieces, and promises to tell the men that they’re done.

“Are ye here all the time?” Wee Kate asks the women at the next table, who are all standing and trying to straighten their backs.

“A few of us were in yesterday,” answers the woman with the gray in her hair. “I think they set up in different places whenever they get a contract.”

“I made dolls once,” says another. “Stuck the hair in their heads. Pay was the same but at least we had a window.”

“Oh, I done worse,” says the older woman. “I done plenty worse.”

The tall man comes down with a cloth sack and begins to pay the women at the first table their two dollars, most of it in coins. When it is Jessie’s turn he gives her a pair of Columbian half dollars, the ones with the explorer’s ship on top of two globes on one side and his face on the other. Junior has a collection of them. Had.

“Don’t bother coming tomorrow,” the tall man says to her.

Jessie holds the two coins tightly in her hand, rubbing them together, as she pulls her coat back on and follows the other women up the stairs and out through the lobby into the street. It is almost dark now, big flakes of snow falling lazily between the high buildings, and cold.

“Where you live?” Alberta asks her.

“On 47th, just west of Eighth,” she says. It is the third apartment they have lived in, and if she can find steady work they won’t be there long.

Alberta nods at Clarice. “We walk you far as 39th.”

As they are leaving she sees the skinny boy and the drayman loading crates onto the wagon. Her soldiers are in there somewhere, she thinks, no telling where they’re headed.

New York is a machine with too many parts. Harry braces himself on the ice-slick sidewalk, a flood of bodies rushing past on either side of him, attempting to decipher the intermeshing rhythm of its gears, the design, if any, of its incessant motion and counter-motion. He has cranked his way through every clamshell Mutoscope in lower Manhattan, harem girls and saucy parlor maids up to their customary antics, has thrilled to the Roosevelt Rough Riders thundering off the screen at Proctor’s Pleasure Palace, mourned The Burial of the Maine Victims and marveled over Mules Swimming Ashore at Daiquiri at Koster and Bials, suffered through an interminable and decidedly unfunny comic opera at Keith’s Union Square to witness the Cuban Ambush on their celebrated “warscope” and eaten a hamburger sandwich at a counter with fellow lunchers’ elbows digging into him from both sides.

A tiny newsboy with yellowish skin starts across from the other side of 23rd, disappearing behind careening carriages and screeching trolley cars but sauntering yet, unconcerned, when they have passed, till he stands at Harry’s side tugging at the sleeve of his new heavy coat and raising plaintive eyes.

“ REBELS ATTACK MANILA, Mister. Read all about it.”

“No thank you.” The boy is peddling Hearst’s sensational Journal.

“Two cents, fer cryin out loud. How can you go wrong?”

The boy looks unwell, malnourished at the least, possibly contagious. Harry tightens his grip on his cane, takes a sidestep away. “You aren’t allowed to read this scandal sheet, are you?”

The boy makes a disagreeable face. “I look at the pitchers. You got a problem widdat?”

Harry gives him a weak smile, steps off the curb.

“On Sunday they got em in colors.”

He makes his cautious dash then, using the cane to push off on his shortleg side, narrowly evading the wheels of a rattling landau, and finally gaining the broad, recently shoveled front steps of the Eden Musee.

The building is steep-roofed and ornate in the French Renaissance style, statuary perched on decorative stone ledges, stairs leading to three high-arched entryways. Harry pays his dime to the young lady in the kiosk and waits for his heart to stop thumping before venturing on to the exhibits.

“The Passion has already started,” she informs him. “They’re probly up to Palm Sunday.”

The clientele in the Musee are more genteel than in Proctor’s or Keith’s or the Huber Museum, well-dressed ladies perusing the tableaux with their young ones, gentlemen in bowlers and ties, no crush of workmen and street urchins popping in here for a quick and prurient thrill.

“There will be a display of sleight-of-hand in the Egyptian Room at four o’clock,” adds the kiosk girl.

The first grouping of figures depicts President Lincoln at his famous Gettysburg Address. The tall wax figure, bearded and hatless with the suggestion of a stiff wind in his hair, gestures nobly with one hand, the handwritten speech clutched in the other, flanked by a pair of Union soldiers with rifles at port-arms while a half-dozen onlookers stand at the foot of the platform in attitudes of reverent attention. The eyes are dark and deep-set as in the Brady photographs, but there is no light of life in them.

“—that from these honored dead—” drones a hound-eyed older man dressed in a ’60s mourning cloak who stands beside the tableau with hand over heart, “—we take increased devotion to that cause which they here have thus far so nobly carried on—”

Harry moves on, the unalloyed yankeeness of it giving him a guilty twinge. “A freak of Nature,” the Judge was wont to say of the North’s martyred saint. “Malformed and malignant.”

He wonders how many times a day the man must repeat the speech. Perhaps a phonograph recording of it would be more effective, not placed so it seems to be coming from the motionless figure, but amplified from above, like a voice from the Great Beyond. Harry has already worked out a mechanism whereby a spectator’s foot triggers the phonograph and is pondering the nature of sound waves when he wanders into the execution of Marie Antoinette.

“—this moment, when my troubles are about to end, is not when I need courage, Father,” recites an acne-scarred youth in peasant garb. “And with that the lethal drumroll began—”

A tumbrel filled with filthy straw and doomed nobles, a long-faced curée intoning from his open Bible, the buxom Marie with her hair shorn, hands tied behind her back, kneeling with neck stretched out over the block, the sans culottes, faces distorted as they jeer from every side — there is a sudden skreek of metal and the heavy blade falls in its slot—CHOK! neatly separating the Queen from her head! There are screams and cries from the flesh-and-blood spectators and one young lady in lavender quite close to Harry swoons and is caught in the arms of a man who might be either her husband or her father.

“French degenerates,” mutters the man, legs bowing under the weight of his charge as he fans her with an orchestra program.

Harry hurries past the other gatherings — the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Moses parting the Red Sea, a rather grisly evocation of one of Jack the Ripper’s attacks — waxen, three-dimensional versions of a Kodak snap and in that way inferior, no matter what their subject, to the moving actualities he’s just seen in the variety halls. Harry is about to climb the stairs to the Concert Hall when he hears a familiar voice boom out through the open door of a workroom.

“If you don’t hurry with this I’m going to suffocate!”

Looking in, Harry sees a man seated on a workbench, his face completely obscured by plaster bandages, while another man painstakingly pries the cast away from the skin with a metal instrument coated with petroleum jelly.

“Mr. Teethadore?”

“Who’s that?” The voice, even somewhat muffled behind the appendage, is deep and resonant.

“We met in Wilmington. After a performance.”

“You find me at a disadvantage.”

Harry takes a step into the room. There are white wax heads, nearly featureless, lined up on a shelf, historical costumes hanging on a pipe and torsos made of wire. “Are you all right?”

“Having my mug reproduced. It seems that General Custer shall soon be hors de combat from his Last Stand exhibit and donating the better portion of himself — body, hands, flashing saber — to our noted Rough Rider.”

“It seems to be stuck somewhere,” says the other man, gently pulling on the mold.

“If I lose so much as a hair from an eyebrow,” says Teethadore, raising a finger, “there shall be dire consequences.”

“You said I should come see you,” ventures Harry with what he hopes is an ironic lilt in his drawl. “If I ever came to New York.”

“And you’ve followed me here?”

The recent disturbance in Wilmington seems too complicated, too tawdry to mention. “Actually I came for the views. This is something of a Mecca—”

“Foreign subjects. Very uplifting. Celluloid novelties for the carriage trade.”

“It’s really the camera that I—”

“Of course. I remember you now — waxing poetic over the mysteries of the projection device. Drat!”

“I’m sorry,” says the wax sculptor. “I told you to shave your moustache.”

In Wilmington the actor’s moustache had been applied with spirit gum. “No use dragging the character onto the street with me,” he’d said then. “It’s enough to portray the little runt on the boards.” But that had been before the San Juan Hill.

Harry watches uncomfortably as the sculptor wiggles the plaster this way and that, trying to loosen it.

“It was very nice to see you,” he says finally.

“You shall see me, my friend, when this moulage is removed from my face and not before. I suggest you go up and watch the other fellow suffer a bit. It’s quite a presentation.”

When Harry steps away the sculptor has taken up a hammer and chisel and seems about to do something drastic.

He slips quickly into the rear of the hall, a few patrons looking back with annoyance at the intrusion of light. The seats are all full. On the screen, Christ carries a huge wooden cross past idlers and loose women, a pair of spear-carrying Roman soldiers trailing behind Him. There is bright sunlight above and a backdrop painted with the stone buildings of Jerusalem, but this cannot be what they’ve advertised out front. The Oberammergau Passion, Harry knows, is staged once every ten years, and the equipment to photograph motion did not exist at the time of the last performance. Christ falters, catching himself with one hand. The soldiers snatch Simon of Cyrene from the crowd and force him to shoulder the cross for a moment. Finally, after much prodding with spear tips and flogging, Christ exits the right side of the screen, the rough wooden post dragging behind, the mob turning to jeer his passing. The moving image fades in brightness, immediately replaced by a lantern view, a hand-tinted diapositive of El Greco’s Christ Carrying the Cross. It is one of Harry’s favorites, angled as if the painter were on his knees when the Nazarene passed, his eyes fixed on the hill above, dark sky brooding behind him.

“Imagine the weight of it,” intones a white-haired gentleman wearing a pince-nez, his head barely peeking over the lectern set up beside the screen. “Imagine the rough stones underfoot, the scourge of the Roman whips, the raucous contempt of those who, only days before, had waved the palms of peace and cheered your entry into the city.”

Harry is aware of a man standing next to him in the darkness at the rear, a man nodding vigorously as the lecturer continues.

“Are these the souls He has come to save, these torturers, these blood-thirsty, mocking Jews and Philistines?”

The El Greco fades into a new still image, this the circular Bosch painting with the turbaned Pilate at the left, the soldier reaching to wrench Him away, the potato-faced onlookers. These men do look like German peasants, rough and primitive.

“ ‘Ecce homo,’ the Roman judge pronounces,” continues the lecturer. “See the man. Not the Messiah, not their Lord and Savior, but simply a man. This, we now understand, was the greatest degradation of all. Humble as He was, this was the only Son of God brought to His knees before the dregs of humanity, beaten and reviled, driven, at last, to Calvary.”

Harry can hear several women in the audience begin to weep as the Bosch is replaced by a moving view. Three crosses, three crucified men, low hills in the background, a tall palm to the right, the centurions crouched below, throwing dice upon the ground and laughing. The shadows of the crosses are visible on the backdrop sky, of course, and no breeze stirs the painted palm fronds, but there are gasps and outcries in the hall when one of the Romans thrusts his spear into Christ’s ribs, and then a sigh of wonder as He lifts His eyes one last time to Heaven before letting His head drop in death. A golden nimbus, some sort of dye-process, no doubt, spreads from His body and suddenly a choir, previously unseen, is lit on the other side of the screen, a dozen angelic voices singing When I Survey the Wondrous Cross and it is then that Harry has his revelation. What drives the picture forward, the vital armature, could at the same time drive some phonographic device in synchrony with the celluloid. Not only could this holy music be joined to the film strip, but His dying words, “Lord, hath Thou forsaken me?” audibly delivered by the actor portraying Christ as if he were in the room.

Or is this sacrilege?

The man who stands beside him has joined in the singing, a rich, full basso—

His dying crimson, like a robe

Spreads o’er His body on the tree

Then I am dead to all the globe

And all the globe is dead to me!

The moving view gives way to a lantern-slide of Rembrandt’s moody Descent from the Cross, Joseph of Arimathea hugging the Body as he descends the ladder, Mary swooning into sympathetic arms in her own golden patch of light. The choir finishes the song, softening their voices into mournful oohs and aahs as the professor intones once more.

“There is, of course, a simple human side to our story,” he says. “That of a mother’s love for her Son.”

The Rembrandt gives way to the final moving view, the Pietà staged before the same backdrop. The thieves still hang on either side, the Roman soldiers gone now, replaced by nascent Christians who watch in sorrow as Mary clutches His thorn-crowned head to her breast. Harry can’t help wishing they had moved the camera closer so that the Virgin’s face could be seen, wishes he could walk into the view to comfort her.

“A mother’s grief knows no bounds,” says the lecturer. “But we can take comfort, we can find solace, in this story. For the Lord God on high loved us so much,” and here the projectionist, for it must be his hand, causes the image on the screen to begin to glow and then brighten further to a blinding whiteness as the voices of the choir climb to an almost unbearable crescendo, “that He gave His only begotten Son that we might be saved!”

The electric house lights flash on then and there is stunned, then uproarious applause.

“What did you think?”

It is the man beside him, dark-haired, with an intense, hawklike face.

“Very powerful,” says Harry. “But it can’t be Oberammergau.”

The man smiles. “A ruse to deflect the protestations of clergymen,” he says, offering his hand. “Such as myself. Reverend Thomas Dixon.”

“Harold Manigault.” Harry shakes the preacher’s hand. “You had no objection?”

“On the contrary. I’ve hosted a similar production at my church down the street, though I must admit our moving views were not as — as sumptuous as these.”

“I wonder, though, if the spectacle does not overwhelm—”

“We are poised to enter a century of light, my friend.” He grips Harry’s arm and looks deep into his eyes. “This—” nodding toward the screen, “—this in the proper hands will move men’s souls. I detect that you are of my home section.”

“Wilmington.”

“Goldsboro, in the Piedmont,” smiles the reverend. “And I pastored in Raleigh for a year.” He leans close, lowering his voice conspiratorially as his eyes move over the departing audience. “Some rather propitious events have taken place in your lovely city.”

Harry looks around — the room is nearly empty of spectators but it feels close. “Unfortunate events—”

“I am something of a novelist, in addition to my efforts from the pulpit, and your Wilmington situation strikes me as one of those instances in which history does not need to be greatly modified to instruct us. There is a great lesson to be learned.”

“And what might that be?” Harry asks.

Dixon regards him with a hot gleam in his eye. “That corruption unaddressed will fester,” he says. “And that the leopard, no matter how one paints him, does not change his spots.”

Harry tries to approximate the carefree grin that Niles would use. “What a pity — I’ve been hoping to change my own.”

Dixon pats Harry’s arm as he would to comfort a child, and starts away with an indulgent smile on his lips. “Breeding will out, I’m afraid.” He pauses in the doorway and spreads his arms as if to indicate all of New York. “Where better to bring our struggle than to the belly of the beast?”

Harry is sitting alone when Teethadore, face raw from scrubbing, comes to join him.

“Did you get here for Salome’s dance?”

“I’m afraid I missed it.”

“Charming girl. Travels with a sister act, the Singing Simpsons, but she’s the only one who hasn’t had her knees glued together. Did you see me?”

“In this?” Harry finds it unsettling to think of the diminutive variety artist rubbing elbows with the Savior.

“Herod’s minion, Elder of Zion, St. Matthew, Pilate’s clerk, bad Samar-itan — I’m all over the thing. The days we spent on that rooftop—”

“And Christ—?”

“Splendid fellow. Long-suffering. He and those thieves were strung up there for hours, waiting for the clouds to open. I suppose you’ll want to examine the device?”

“Do you think that would be possible?”

Teethadore gives him the smile and a wink. “The operator is an old friend.”

A youngish man named Porter is blowing air from a bellows into the workings of the cinematograph as they enter.

“The hero of Santiago,” he observes.

“Merely his theatrical counterpart,” grins Teethadore. “I bring you a worshipper at the altar of celluloid.”

Harry nods but can barely take his eyes off the machine. It is even smaller than he imagined.

“This is the French model?”

“Greatly modified,” says Porter. “This can’t double as a camera.”

“The image was so smooth.”

“Thank you.” Porter gives the crank a whirl. “Two revolutions per second.”

Harry looks out through the small window toward the screen. “You watch the view as it’s projected—”

“Only the edge of the screen, I’m afraid. We’ve improved the pull-down claws quite a bit but she’ll still jump around on you. Nothing like that mess Biograph uses.”

“I witnessed some this morning.” Harry puts his hand on his stomach. “Still queasy.”

“Did you notice the odor?”

“There’s an odor?”

Porter pokes at Teethadore. “From this fellow’s acting. For whom, I believe, the term rank amateur was coined.”

“Touché. Mr. Porter is a photographer as well. We have toiled together in the wilds of New Jersey.”

“Gramps Gets Hosed. You can catch it on the Bowery.”

The apparatus is dark metal and glossy wood, mounted on a sturdy tripod. Harry fights the urge to put his hands on it. This is closer to the thing, to the intricate, holy apparatus, than he has hoped to come—

“Mr. Porter,” he ventures, “if you were ever to hear of a place, of an opening within the—”

“Edison’s always looking for new lackeys,” says the projectionist, rewinding a strip of celluloid onto a spool. “I can give you a name.”

Harry holds the folded slip of paper with the name written on it in his hand, thrust safely into his jacket pocket, as he crosses back through the maze of waxen statuary. He pulls up short at the French Revolution, a young cleaning woman on her knees scrubbing what looks like vomitus from the floor.

“Oh my,” says Harry, stepping back from the spreading puddle of wash water. “Someone’s been ill.”

“We get one or two every day when the Missus loses her head,” says the girl. She is Irish, and when she glances up she has the brightest, clearest green eyes Harry has ever seen.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s none of yer fault, is it?”

“I meant — that you have to deal with it.”

She looks up at him again, cocking her head, then she indicates the bloodstain painted on the guillotine block and the floor around it.

“And wasn’t it a poor girl like meself had to mop up that mess after the killin was done?”

“You work here?”

“At the moment, yes.” She goes back to scrubbing.

“Have you seen the attraction in the Hall?”

“The death of Christ? No, I haven’t, as a fact. But I know the story well.”

Of course she would. Harry resists the impulse to hand her a dime, not knowing how the gesture would be received. “Have you ever seen a moving view?”

The young woman sits up on her knees. She has a breathtaking smile. “Ah, I love the fillums, I do, but I rarely have the money nor the time. They take my breath away.”

He feels a little dizzy and wonders if the hamburger was a miscalculation. “Do you think,” he asks, once she has turned her head back to her task, “you might like to attend a show with me some time?”

The eyes grow sharp. “Yer foolin with me.”

“I assure you I’m not.” He lifts his skimmer off. “My name is Harry Manigault. I’m very new in this city—”

“Brigid,” she says, still suspicious. “It’s another name in Irish but here they call me Brigid.”

“May I call for you?”

“Fer that ye’d need to know where I’m situated. Number and street.”

Harry flushes, in deep now and not sure how to get out of it. “I suppose I would.”

“And what would ye think of a girl who told that to a man who’d just stumbled upon her workin?”

He hadn’t thought of that, with her on her knees in bucket water, an immigrant. A scrubwoman. He wonders if he could ever capture those eyes, not the color of course, but the brightness, the life of them, in a photograph.

“Quite right.”

What would Niles say? Even if he didn’t mean it, he would have something.

“Perhaps I could return at closing time and escort you—”

“My work is just beginnin then. It’s only me and the wax heroes, havin a grand time together.”

“Ah.”

She watches him for a moment with her green eyes. “Sunday afternoons,” she says finally, “I’ve been known to pop into the Hippodrome on Houston Street. A persistent gentleman might find me there. By accident, ye might say.”

“A most happy accident.” He puts his lid back on, then tips it to her. “A pleasure making your acquaintance, Miss Brigid.”

“And where do ye come from, Mr. Mannygalt?”

“North Carolina.”

“Right,” she nods sagely. “I had ye spotted fer a foreigner. Twas a pleasure makin yer acquaintance as well,” she says, raising her scrub brush, “considerin the circumstances.”

Harry tries to walk as steadily as he can around the wet spot, not using the cane till he reaches the stairs outside. The cold hits him like a fist, still a surprise. It is night now, the streetlights glowing. He stands on the walk in front of the Eden Musee, the folded paper forgotten in his pocket, slightly dizzy. His heart is racing again, and he hasn’t even started across 23rd Street.

REGULARS

The armbands are supposed to make it all right, but you never know in El Paso. Royal is holding the reins, Junior never much with a wagon team, as they roll along Second, white folks’ brick houses to the left and Mexican baked adobe to the right. They are both wearing the armbands and strapped with pistols, usually forbidden, but this is a provost detail. Royal keeps his eyes straight ahead, glad it’s noon and most everybody is inside.

“We’ll be back in the thick of it in no time,” says Junior beside him, rubbernecking around like a tourist. “The Philippines, China—”

“You don’t know that.”

Junior has been on him all week to reenlist, their hitch officially over tomorrow and lots of the boys who come in with them at Missoula saying they’re going to hang it up.

“It stands to reason.” Junior holds tight to the seat as Royal turns the team left on Campbell. “We’re experienced, disciplined—”

“Don’t want to shoot them people any more than I wanted to shoot a Spanish.”

“We don’t get to choose our enemies, Royal.”

“If you’re not in the damn Army you do.”

“It will be more like police work by the time we get there. Maintaining order—”

“Don’t care for that neither.”

Junior scowls. “Suppose you were to accept discharge. What would you do?”

Royal has been trying not to think of this. He shrugs. “Go back to Wilmington.”

It is a sore point between them, Junior bragging after every letter he gets about how good his people are making it up in New York, like they never lost a step, while Royal, who gets no mail at all, doesn’t call out the lie. If he even says the name Wilmington, Junior gets all tight and says that’s over, that the colored man’s future all up North now.

Or in the regulars.

“What I’ve heard,” says Junior, turning his head away, “is they even told Mr. Sprunt he can’t hire colored anymore.”

All Royal knows, from the other Wilmington men in the unit, is that his mother wasn’t hurt and Jubal took off and hasn’t been back. It was Junior who told him Dorsey Love is dead and Jessie gone up to a better life in New York.

“Set me there with one dozen of these wildass colored regulars,” said Coop when he heard, Coop who used to be Clarence Rice at home and didn’t come back from leave last night, “and they be a mess of redneck crackers floating in that Cape Fear River.”

Royal pulls the wagon off the street, hitching the pair in the shade of the alleyway next to the jail. He and Junior straighten their uniforms out, set their hats, and step inside.

The deputy leans back in a swivel chair behind a scarred-up desk, chewing tobacco and spitting the juice into a coffee cup in his hand while an electric fan blows air on his face. Another man, an Easterner by his dress, sits across from him writing in a notebook.

“We don’t use it so much as the old days,” the deputy is saying, “but we keep the hinges oiled. I’ll show it to you in a minute, up on the third tier of the tank.”

“And is it usual to have multiple executions?” asks the dude, who must be a reporter.

“Hell, there probly been a double-header before this,” chuckles the deputy. “But not since I been here in El Paso.”

“Excuse me, Deputy—” Junior starts, and the white man just holds his hand out and keeps talking.

“The thing is, we had Flores set to go, and we been trying to get old Geronimo Parra back here to stretch ever since he kilt Charlie Fusselman in a shootout up in the Franklins near ten years ago.”

Junior steps forward and places the folded order in the deputy’s hand. The white man does not look up, and Junior takes two military steps back to stand by Royal again, not quite at attention.

“But Parra slipped under the border, then got caught rustling over in the Territory and ended up coolin his heels in the Santa Fe lockup.”

The deputy glances at the paper.

“Cristy!” he shouts, then spits a big gob of black liquid into the coffee mug.

The newsman never stops scribbling. “You tried to extradite?”

“They wouldn’t stand for it. Only our Captain Hughes, who’s from the same Marfa outfit of Rangers that Charlie Fusselman come from, has been on Parra’s trail all these years and that old boy don’t quit. He runs into Pat Garrett in a saloon—”

“Garrett who killed William Bonney?”

“The very same, still a Territory lawman. Garrett says how they’d do anything to get holt of this bad character name of Agnew, spose to be hiding out in Texas, and proposes a swap.”

“An exchange of prisoners.”

“Agnew wasn’t a prisoner yet,” grins the deputy, teeth flecked black with tobacco. “But with a chance to bring Geronimo Parra home to justice, Captain Hughes jumped on his pony and went looking. Caught Agnew working as a ranch hand on the Big Bend, and we had our deal with the Territory.”

A jailer in a blue uniform appears, the deputy waving the colonel’s paper at him.

“Bring that nigger trooper out.”

Sergeant Jacks, who grew up in this town, has warned them all about dealing with Texans, the white ones, told them scare stories about John Wesley Hardin and lynch law and the Rangers, especially the Rangers, who are death on Mexicans and not much fonder of colored. The colored and Chinese here live in the Mex section, Chihuahua, and there’s even supposed to be a couple of the old black Seminole scouts left over in Juarez. Royal has come in on leave with the others a dozen times, tequila making quick work of him.

“Cristy there,” says the deputy, nodding after the jailer as he leaves, “was one of them got stabbed by our desperadoes.”

“They had knives in jail?” the reporter’s bowler sits on the desktop beside him. He writes with a pen that doesn’t need to be dipped in ink over and over.

“Made them some daggers. When boys are gonna make the drop, you got to let them say farewell to their families, which with a Mex is half the damn county. And they go in for all that hugging, even the men. Abrazos. Don’t know how you spell that—”

Royal is used to white men not looking at him, pretending not to see him, but with the uniform on it is more of an insult. He is just a private, “lower than muleshit” as Too Tall would say, but still—

“Some one of these folks slipped some fence wire to them that they twisted into shape and sharpened on the wall blocks that night. Next day, there’s thousands outside, mostly Mex, fillin the streets, up on the rooftops, like they gonna see us do our business inside here. The hour arrives and we open the cells, and they both jump out — Parra and this Antonio Flores who’s already stabbed to death some little señorita over in Smelterville who’d turned him down one too many times. Flores commences to jabbin my buddy Ed Bryant in the gut with this wire contraption while Parra goes after Cristy there and Officer Ten Eyck who was the first ones in. Took a half dozen of us to pull them frog-stickers away and get the cuffs on. The Mexicans call handcuffs esposas,” winks the deputy. “The same word as wife.”

But the uniform, thinks Royal, is something. Enough, maybe, if you break no laws and stay south of Second, east of Santa Fe Street, to keep a cracker deputy off of you. He wasn’t much back in Wilmington, just another nigger millhand, and from what they tell of the white folks’ takeover he be even less now. At least in the regulars it’s always clear where you stand — look on a man’s arm and you know how tight your asshole got to squeeze.

“None of the wounds were fatal?” asks the writer.

The deputy grins, spits into his mug. “You can’t hurt a Texan with no fence-wire dagger,” he says. “Nothin but chicken scratches. We sent Flores up first, and he wasn’t too pleased about it, from what I could tell with the hood over his head. Made a good loud snap when he run out of rope, didn’t need no doctor to know the job was done right. With Parra, well — Geronimo put on some weight in the Santa Fe hoosegow, and with his drop it popped that vein in your neck, blood pourin out from under the hood and all over the floor, and when Captain Hughes pulled it off the man’s head was just barely holding up his body by one little strap of tendon.”

“Oh my,” says the Easterner, laying his pen down.

The deputy spits. “He needed killin.”

Royal sees someone coming down the corridor toward them, a colored man in a regular’s uniform, with the jailer Cristy behind him.

“We let the gory details out to the Mex crowd right away,” says the deputy, raising his voice and turning his head slightly toward Royal and Junior. “See, what we got here in El Paso is just a colony, handful of decent white folks sandwiched between thousands of them bean-eatin sonsabitches on both sides of the Rio.” He looks Royal in the eye for the first time. “Now and then you got to make a display.”

The prisoner is Cooper, barefoot and without his hat.

“Get him out of town,” says the deputy to Junior. “And tell your colonel to keep better track of his niggers.”

Cooper sits alone in the bed of the wagon as Royal eases past the courthouse.

“Where are your boots, soldier?” asks Junior, turning back to glare.

“Talk to me like that, you sididdy little butt-wipe,” says Cooper, almost calm, “I cut your heart out.”

“You’re a deserter.”

“I only got two goddam days left on my hitch — what the hell I want to desert for?”

“Then what were you doing out on the International Bridge at midnight, out of uniform and—”

“I been to the Chinaman.”

Cooper says this quietly, looking away from Junior, as if it explains everything.

“That where you left your boots?” asks Royal, pulling the reins to take them right.

“Maybe. You know how it is — puts you in a different mind.”

Royal doesn’t know how it is, has never gone with the few that smoke it, but did pass out drinking mescal one night and wake to see his father, ten years dead, tipping one back at the other end of the bar.

“I come out and it was dark,” says Coop. “All that nice music they play comin out from the cantinas, and it hit that they wants me, they needs me to come over to Juarez.”

“To do what?” asks Junior.

“You ever been?”

“No. It’s off limits—”

“Then I can’t explain, can I?” Cooper looks around to get his bearings, sees the post office. “That Alligator Plaza just up here, Roy. Got to get something before we go back.”

Royal steers the pair over the Southern Pacific tracks and into the plaza, pulling the wagon up beside the gazebo. There are a couple dozen people scattered around, all colors, and the fountain in the middle of the circular moat is spilling halfheartedly.

“He’s our prisoner,” Junior protests. “We can’t—”

Royal giving his friend a hard look. “I can do any damn thing I please.”

Coop laughs and hops down, crossing barefoot to the low wall around the moat. Royal ties the horses off to a post on the gazebo and follows with Junior. There are two alligators, six-footers, sleeping on the ground just inside the low wall, so still they might be dead and stuffed, and another slowly swimming, eyes just above the surface of the murky green water in the moat. A metal statue of a little boy stands by the fountain on the little island in the center, right leg bare and holding a boot up with real water running out of the toe.

“Look like that boy found his boots,” says Coop, rolling his pant legs up.

“You left something here?”

Coop looks about to see there is no one near with a badge or a stripe, then high-steps over the wall. “First thing into town I got my ashes hauled over on Utah Street,” he says, passing between the two sleepers, “then I come down here to set a spell. Bought some chicken necks in case they still hungry.” He steps into the water, begins to move in a slow zigzag, head cocked, searching with the bottoms of his feet.

“Junior,” he calls, “you see that gator make a rush at me, I needs you to shoot it.” He touches an eyeball. “Right here.”

Junior turns, scanning the plaza for somebody who might disapprove, but the noontime idlers seem to be used to people wading in with the reptiles.

“I was carryin my protection,” says Coop, moving sideways now, “which a man be crazy to do without in this town, no matter what the damn post regulation say, and these two police start to pass by me, up and down, three-fo times, and I figure it’s either have it out with the crackers right then and there or put it where they can’t find it on me.”

Junior turns back. “You had a pistol?”

Coop shows all his teeth in a smile, reaches up to his shoulder into the water and comes up with a slime-dripping, short-barrel Bulldog.

“Just this little ole thing. Don’t look like much, but she bite you.”

The alligator floats just in front of Cooper’s legs then, not more than two feet away. He watches it pass.

“They don’t care for the dark meat.”

Royal has Cooper’s revolver tucked in his boot when they come back to Bliss, Junior dealing with the sentries, the armbands and the colonel’s name getting them onto the parade ground.

“So what do you think?” he says to Royal. “They’re making the pay up, and once you’re off the books—”

“Give me one more reason,” says Royal, easing the pair to a stop in front of the stockade. “One good reason.”

Junior leans in and speaks quiet enough that Cooper, brooding in the back of the wagon, can’t hear.

“Because you’re my friend,” says Junior. “And I can’t do it without you.”

Sergeant Jacks is in the little guard shack with Lumbley, the duty officer.

“You didn’t make it to the other side,” says Jacks, looking Coop up and down.

“I was about to the middle of the bridge when I trip over them trolley tracks,” Coop shrugs. “And then it feel so good, layin on them boards, my head in Old Mexico and my feets in the United States, I just decide to take a nap.”

Jacks steps close and looks into Cooper’s eyes, searching. “You wonder what could put an idea like that in a man’s head.”

Junior makes a noise to get his attention. “I’ve come to a decision, Sergeant,” he says, straightening up and locking his eyes forward the way you only need to do with captains and higher. “I’ll be reenlisting.”

“I’ll call the War Department,” says Lumbley. “They been holdin off on their plans.”

Cooper starts to laugh. “Me too, Sarge. I mean after I does my little stay in here, you can sign me up.”

Jacks shakes his head. “If you survive the next three weeks’ punishment, and if the 25th Regular Infantry, Colored, in its ill-advised generosity, agrees to accept your petition,” he says, “you will have to earn those boots back, Private.” He turns to Royal. “How bout you?”

Fort Bliss is like Huachuca, is like Missoula. Some mountains on one side and then just open land with hardly a soul upon it. Nothing out there. Royal sees himself walking in the great emptiness, on and on, no uniform on his back, a part of nothing with nowhere to go.

Junior won’t look at him but is listening hard.

“Yeah,” says Royal. “Count me in.”

INCENDIARY

This is not the first time Tondo has burned. Twice while he was at the Ateneo the chapel bells rang and the Manila firemen stumbled over each other and the British sent their shiny wagon into the streets and the sky was alive with floating embers all through the night. Diosdado ducks low and zigzags through the maze of nipa huts, thrusting the torch to anything not already ablaze. Men and women and children scatter before him, barefoot, carrying whatever they value most and searching for a pathway through the flames. The plan is to move from east to west, advance runners warning the people and the next wave firing their homes, driving everyone before them to the sea. But the wind has shifted several times, torch-men have run ahead of the ones crying the alarm and there are screams now, lifting above the crackle and roar of the conflagration, screams of fear and more hysterical screams that Diosdado doesn’t want to think about and bamboo timbers exploding like rifle shots and the pop-pop-pop of real rifles to the east as their snipers engage the first of the Americans to respond. He has to backtrack quickly as a nipa hut ahead erupts into flame, a burning dog squealing as it scampers out, tail on fire, the rush of heat like a blow to the side of his face and there is panic in the firelit eyes of the scattering people, panic in their shouts to each other and the pop-pop-pop closer now with what must be every chapel bell in Manila ringing at once. The local firemen are out there somewhere and the British, no doubt, never miss a chance to show off their new steam pumper, and the Americans with whatever equipment they’ve loaded off their great ships — but when Tondo burns it burns to the ground.

A small boy is staggering under the weight of the plaster statue of Saint Joseph he carries on his shoulder, trying to escape but driven back from a wall of heat in each direction. Diosdado shouts and the boy whirls, sees the torch in his hand and backs away from him, terrified, before turning to disappear into the thick black smoke rolling in from the west.

Diosdado edges away from the smoke and tries to gasp a clean breath, the scorched air searing his lungs, worrying that his clothes and hair, despite their dousing before the raid, will burst into flame. He is trapped. The burning is only a diversion, meant to draw some of the Americans away from Binondo before General Luna’s attack on their northernmost lines. It is the last hope, more desperate even than the defense at Caloocan when the enemy first pushed north from the river, Diosdado’s company among four thousand dug in by the chapel and the Chinese cemetery, lying in the muck of the rice fields with the American artillery raining down from La Loma and the Gatling gun tearing the sod off the ditches and the yanqui infantry advancing like a murderous flood tide as the colonels flapped and postured and squawked at each order from Luna saying Aguinaldo, Aguinaldo was the supremo and they would obey only him while their men fought bravely, desperately, uselessly and the railhead and the five locomotives with all their cars sitting on the tracks were lost.

Diosdado tries to strip his uniform tunic off but the buttons are too hot to touch. Luna insisted the officers keep them on for the raid—“So they know we are not tulisanes,” he said, “not a rabble of bandits but the Army of the Filipino Republic, saviors of the nation.” Saviors, Diosdado thinks as the shifting curtains of flame drive him one way and then another, of the very people whose homes we have put to the torch. He is afraid, more afraid than he was on the night the fight with the Americans started, buried in the wet earth as the shells burst above him, or at Caloocan trying to keep his face toward the enemy as he stumbled backward over the paddies, firing his pistol methodically till his ammunition was all gone, the huge Americans in their blue uniforms pausing only to chop and hack with rifle butt and bayonet at the wounded men he’d left behind, Diosdado finally turning and running to catch the ones still living and gather them back into some kind of coherent unit.

The Lake of Fire. Every story Padre Inocencio terrified them with in the primario ended with the Lake of Fire and the agonies of the sinners cast into it, their shrieks of anguish unheard in Paradise, their flesh rendered from their bodies, limbs twisted with spasms of pain, bones blackened and cracking in the molten inferno but not dying, no, doomed to endless torment. Once he held Diosdado’s hand over a candle flame till the skin of his palm blistered, reciting the litany of tortures reserved for the damned and holding a scapular with the image of a woman engulfed in flames close to his face. “Imagine this pain a thousand times hotter, all over your body,” he hissed into the little boy’s ear. “Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, without hope, without release. This is Eternal Damnation.”

Burning to death has always been his worst fear, the nightmare that wrenches him awake in a sweat. Diosdado drops his torch. The leather of his holster feels like it is melting, the metal butt of his pistol like a sizzling griddle as he forces his hand closed around it. I will not say a prayer, Diosdado thinks, cocking it. And if there is a Hell, Padre Inocencio will be there to greet me.

He is lifting the pistol toward his head when Sergeant Bayani emerges from the black smoke, a torch in each hand, eyes gleaming with flame, a lunatic smile lighting up his face. There is vino on his breath as he shouts over the crackling of the nipa and the screams and the bells tolling everywhere and the rifle fire on all sides now, Bayani who threw Diosdado unconscious over his shoulder on the first night of the war with the yanquis and carried him halfway to Malolos, who was waiting for Diosdado with the survivors of the rout at Caloocan, dug in and ready to resist again, on the outskirts of Tinajeros, Bayani who the men say is insane and invincible, the anting anting sewn beneath the skin just over his heart protecting him from evil thoughts and enemy bullets.

“This is one baryo,” he shouts gleefully, “that the Americans will not get to destroy. Sígame, hermano!”

Bayani hurls his torches into the hottest part of the fire blowing toward them, then turns and strides again into the black smoke. Diosdado fights the urge to shout an order to him, any order, before holstering his pistol and hurrying after.

He holds his breath and runs till they fall out of the smoke, coughing, eyes streaming with tears, into what is left of the mercado. Only charred bamboo uprights are left where the stalls once stood — shops gutted and roofless, a pile of cocoanuts blackened and cracked and oozing, chickens crisped in a cage no longer hanging, bundles dropped by the fleeing residents burst open and littering the street. Diosdado has been to Tondo only once when it wasn’t burning, a long drunken night in a rented calesa with Scipio and Hilario Ibañez from Santo Tomás, Hilario who wanted to achieve in epic verse what Dr. Rizal had in prose, improvising stanzas about the true soul of the nation residing in this hodgepodge of narrow, blighted streets along the fetid Canal de la Reina as its residents sullenly spit and muttered and moved aside to let their carriage pass. Bayani seems to know it, though, leading Diosdado at a trot through the smoldering maze till they reach the swampland to the north of the colonia, flattening themselves in the cogon grass to let a platoon of fire-addled yanquis, volunteers by their uniform, hustle by. They catch their breath, then struggle wordlessly through the bamboo thickets and mires and tangling brush, fat embers blown over their heads and settling in the tops of the cabonegro palms to glow like fireflies. They hear noises to the left, Bayani pausing to call in Tagalog and answered with a curse. It is Kalaw and Rafi Agapito, blackened with soot, and the four of them continue for an hour before anyone speaks.

“Did you see any of the others?” Diosdado asks when they stop to rest, Bayani scouting ahead.

“Once or twice in the fire,” says Kalaw. “There were so many people running. And I saw the sargento.” He lowers his voice as if Bayani might be near. “He was in front of a liquor warehouse he set fire to.”

“Drinking.”

Kalaw shrugs. “It would be a sin to let it all go to waste.”

“I saw Ninong Carangal get shot.” Agapito has a sandal off, poking at his bleeding foot. The bamboo poles towering over their heads knock together in the early-morning breeze, and there is distant gunfire. “He ran out with an ax to cut the fire hose and the Americans saw him and shot him dead.”

Sargento Bayani reappears and squats by them, his manner completely sober now, calculating. “Our battalion is just ahead at Balintawak, but there’s trouble.”

“Yanquis?” asks Agapito, wincing as he pulls his sandal back on.

“Worse. Filipinos.”

They step out of the bamboo forest to find four companies of Caviteños seated on the ground by the side of the road, disarmed and under guard, while Colonel Román tries to convince General Luna it is a poor idea to fire a bullet into the skull of their capitán.

“He’ll be punished, he’ll be made an example,” says Paco Román, his long criollo face tight with apprehension, speaking as calmly as possible. “But not here, General, please. Not now.”

Luna’s men, rifles leveled at the Caviteños on four sides, look more frightened than the sitting troops. Diosdado and his survivors halt a few yards away, Kalaw and Rafi Agapito looking from officer to officer with anxious incomprehension as the Ilocano general and the kneeling capitán argue in Spanish.

“There is a gap in our line of attack,” says Luna, spitting his words. “I need to reinforce it.”

“My men will go nowhere unless I lead them,” says Capitán Janolino, so Spanish-looking his friends call him Pedrong Kastila, his voice strained but his gaze steady.

“I’ll have them all shot!”

“Whatever you do,” says Janolino, “it is not as my commanding officer.”

There is a battle raging to the west of them, rifle fire steady and deep from the Springfields of the yanquis, higher and more ragged from the British Mitfords and captured Mausers of their own troops, and suddenly the whistle of shells overhead and the solid whump! as they reach their killing ground in the Binondo cemetery.

Luna gives the capitán’s head a final shove with his pistol and then lowers it to his side. Luna stood firm throughout the day at Caloocan, exposed to the murderous fire, running forward to protect the wounded till they could be carried away, coolly sighting and firing his pistol as if it was one of his target-shooting exhibitions. It was thrilling to fight beside such a leader, and then, as the church was shelled to ruins and the rice fields plowed with explosions and the yanqui horde advanced, it was suicidal — General Luna determined to fight to his death and expecting the same of the men around him.

“Take a company,” he barks to Colonel Román, “and march these traitors to Malolos.”

He turns then, and there is fury in his eyes as he discovers the torch-men.

“Who are you people?”

Diosdado salutes. “Incendiary squad, mi general. One dead, seven unaccounted for.”

“Tondo?”

“Tondo is burning. Santa Cruz and San Nicolas are burning.”

“There are two hundred of our people entrenched by the bridge, waiting for the yanquis,” adds Sergeant Bayani. “And all the chinos have gone to hide in their embassy.”

Luna grunts. Behind him one hundred forty scowling Caviteños are rousted to their feet and herded into formation.

“Grab a weapon and join us,” orders the general, jerking his head toward the stacks of rifles Janolino’s companies are leaving behind. “There are plenty to choose from.”

AN EXECUTION

The officer walks rather casually before the others. He doesn’t look Spanish. They march out of the trees, parallel to the abandoned building, till the Spaniard gestures and the prisoners, four of them, are halted and told to face the stone wall. The prisoners are all dark-skinned men, in motley combinations of clothing. Insurgents. The officer draws his sword as the firing squad, four soldiers, fix their man in place with a hand on the left shoulder, then step back five paces. The officer runs across in front of them and stands parallel to their row, then brings his sword down. A crackling volley from the four rifles — smoke fills the air, and the insurgents drop to the ground.

Harry looks over to Mr. Heise, who nods and steps away from the Beast.

“You can get up now!” Harry calls, and the sprawled insurgents roll slowly to their knees, grinning at each other and at their executioners.

“That’s it for today,” says Mr. Heise to Harry. “We can pull the film back at the shop.”

Harry signals to a pair of the colored boys and they come trotting over from the wall, swatting dust off their clothes.

“I hold my breaf just like you tole me to,” says Zeke, smiling.

“You looked perfect, all of you.” Harry nods to the wagon. “Time to pack the instrument up.”

He supervises as the boys lift the heavy camera on the carry-boards they have rigged up and stagger back to hoist it onto the wagon bed. Stempl back at the shop is the one who started calling it the Beast, though never if the Wizard is close enough to read their lips. No wonder that Paley’s mission to Cuba was a fiasco. With the camera weighing as much and requiring far more maintenance than a field-artillery piece he managed only a few shots of swimming mules and one scene of a very small horse suffering under the enormous General Shafter before rain fouled the apparatus and tropical disease forced his return.

“My people see this, they gone get a start,” says Zeke, still excited by his acting debut. “Aint noner them ever been in no photograph, movin or not.”

The movement, of course, is an illusion. Inside the Beast there are cylinders that move in concert with other cylinders, celluloid coated with chemicals cranked on a spool and held in its groove by a claw mechanism, and passed, hopefully at a consistent rate, in front of an aperture that allows a finite flash of light to hit it before being wound back into darkness. The image borne by that light and captured in the chemicals is only a photograph, as still as any other. But rolled in succession with the other photographs caught on the strip of film, the human eye is fooled—

“They gone think this real? I mean the other people who don’t know me that sees it?”

Harry helps guide the body of the Beast as they slide it forward on the wagon bed.

“That depends on who displays it,” he says. “We’ll send this out as a facsimile, but as to how it is presented in the halls—” he spreads his arms. “It looked very real.”

“That’s what I was thinkin,” says Zeke, securing a rope around the camera body. “They was just a second there, before the man yell ‘Fire!’ where I got to feelin they might be real bullets in them rifles.” He touches his chest. “Made my heart skip a beat.”

“You were very convincing.”

Zeke nudges the other boy with his elbow, winks. “Skeeter here done wet his nappies when they shoot.”

It is not so different in principal from the Gatling gun, Harry thinks, though one device makes itself repeatedly vulnerable while the other deals out lead with precision. At the moment of the execution volley he had been struck by the notion that if Heise’s arm were quicker, four cranks per second perhaps, or the instrument driven by a dynamo with sufficient speed, one could capture motion faster than the capacity of the human eye. One could slow down time itself. The bullets could be seen in their deadly trajectory, the instant of their penetration into the skulls of the insurgents — but of course that would give away the illusion. There were no bullets, only the wadding from blank cartridges, and there was no smashing of bones, no spilling of brains.

When the equipment is secured Harry joins Mr. Heise and Mr. White in the coach to take them back to the shop. The old stone house, windows missing, overgrown with creepers, is quickly left behind them.

“The Spanish-atrocity theme is wearing a bit thin,” says Mr. White. “Given the turn of events.”

Before this the only view they’ve let Harry take part in was Did Somebody Say Watermelon?, and that had been done in the Black Maria with Skeeter and another of the boys from today.

“One of them moved,” says Mr. Heise. “One of our insurrectos. After he was shot.”

“The throes of death.”

“He looked at the camera before he did it.”

“We’ll cut it short. The view is over when they hit the ground. No use in being morbid about it.”

They ride silently through the Jersey woodlands. There might be some great use, thinks Harry, in being morbid. If they’d been able to mount the Beast on some sort of runner or sled apparatus and push it forward to see the bodies of the executed men more closely at the end, or if the camera were not such a behemoth and could be thrown over the shoulder and transported, like a Kodak on a tripod, as easily as a rifle, think of what Paley, or perhaps an operator less portly, might have captured at Las Guasimas or Kettle Hill or in this new Philippine nightmare that Niles has gotten himself embroiled in. Harry thinks again of the image of a bullet leaving a rifle and followed directly to the spot between the eyes of its victim, a handsome Southerner with a constant smirk of self-love on his countenance—

The ladies could not bear to view such a thing, of course, but ladies are not the advocates or perpetrators of war, and cannot be expected to be its aficionados.

The coach passes the wagon bearing the Beast, and Harry leans out to look. To any other eye it is only a bulky and seemingly purposeless piece of furniture.

“I thought our Dago capitán was awfully good,” says Mr. Heise. “Haughty and officious.”

“And without a moustache to twirl,” smiles Mr. White. “Quite an accomplishment.”

Harry’s mind is racing. If you staged it, he thinks, interrupting the wide view with a closer one of the condemned men’s faces, then sighting down the line of pointing rifles, perhaps a little stage blood to increase the impact of the sledding shot of the insurgents’ bodies — or if you could be there, be there on the actual battlefield to capture forever that horrible moment, one man murdering another in the name of the flag — how could they go on with it?

If they want war, he thinks, first make them watch it up close.

TURKEY SHOOT

Mariquina has to go. Captain Stewart and Phillippi from Cripple Creek and Pynchon, the bicycle racer from Company K, and Maccoe and Danny Donovan killed in four different fights here and enough is enough. Hod trots with a torch made from a length of bamboo and a googoo’s abandoned shirt soaked in kerosene, touching it to the dry thatch roofs of the nipa huts that catch fire with a hiss like that’s what they’re made for. The church is already pouring smoke. This is how it goes, he figures, maybe not so many of the people in this town want to fight them but there’s ones who do who keep coming back and pretty soon the details don’t matter — if it shoots at you, you kill it and tear down whatever it was hiding behind.

The people are all gone, run off into the hills around them, and tonight they will come back and dig for whatever they’ve hidden in the ground and maybe just the church steeple will be left standing and maybe not even that. Lots of the other boys are whooping, eyes bright with the blaze, throwing the wood stumps the locals use to husk their rice into the burning huts and smashing their water jugs with the butts of their rifles and Tutweiler running in and out adding to his collection of statues and pictures of the Virgin and Grissom’s monkey tormenting a fighting cock that has been left pegged to the ground, its feathers starting to singe, but Hod is just trying to get the job done. The quickstep has eased off finally, but now he has the other problem, needing to piss all the time and when he does it’s like acid coming out. This Philippines is trying to kill him.

It is the most beautiful place he’s ever seen, Mariquina, looking at it from the heights by the waterworks, set in between the dark green patches of trees and the lighter green of canefields and corn and rice and bananas and sweet potatoes and watermelons that the fellas would swipe and eat on the road after cleaning the insurrectos out of town yet again and now it is burning, burning — nothing to see from the heights if you were up there but black smoke.

He comes upon Big Ten with nothing in his hand to set fire with, the Indian just standing in the middle of it all, watching moodily. The huts crackle and pop around them, black smoke blowing to the west.

“Some party, huh?” he says to Hod, a strange little smile on his face. “All we need is the regimental band.”

Later, back up on the hill, there is distant shelling, a hotter engagement just to the north, and the captain lets them stand and watch for a moment before they march off to help. Hod feels it coming and turns his back to the far-off battle and opens his fly and out comes a too-yellow stream of it.

Burning.

Nilda squats with the others in the cogon grass, mosquitoes feeding on them all. Her cousin’s little bahay kubo in Mariquina is in flames and there is another battle ahead of them, gunfire and explosions, so they hide and wait. The yanquis usually leave before it is dark, but this time there will be nothing left.

It isn’t her town, just a corner of the room in a tiny hut where she has curled up since they killed Fecundo, washing and cooking for the wife of the capitán de barangay and hiding under the copra shed whenever the yanquis come through. There are others like her, floating people, on the run back to their home provinces or with nowhere left to go, and she supposes she will join them on the road in the morning, heading north ahead of the Americans, feeling bound to tell Fecundo’s mother of his capture and execution. Many of the wanderers are children, sick with hunger, heads too big for their bodies. Too many of them to be cared for. The ground shakes beneath them as the yanqui bombs explode. The sun has a good while left in the sky and then they can creep back to whatever is left of Mariquina. Sometimes there are animals burned, cooked, after a town is razed, and Nilda hopes to find one for her journey.

You got to give the little monkeys credit — they dig a hell of a trench. Maybe not so deep as the vols with their longer legs, but deep enough to fit a lot of bodies in. Big Ten grabs the arms on the ones that still got both and Hod takes the legs and they swing them down onto the pile.

“Artillery tore these people up,” says Hod, wiping his hands on the sides of his pants.

“Some of them.” Big Ten rolls a man over and indicates the hole in his forehead. “This one, you got to say it’s superior marksmanship.”

“Stupid bastards try to fight us nose to nose. Your outfit never did that.”

“My outfit.”

“You know—”

“Sure they did, way back. Never turned out too good, though, so they gone back to Indin tactics.”

They heave the body. There is still gunfire to the north, just potshots from the sound of it, and Lieutenant Manigault is over with the brass, all of them waving their sticks around.

“Here’s another one.”

Big Ten squats to examine the hole in the man’s head. Not one of his. He is one of two dozen in the company they give a Krag to the other day for “outpost duty,” but really cause he shoots better than the rest. “Chief got them eagle-eyes,” the fellas say, “like all Indins.” Only his father had to wear glasses he bought over in Bemidji and his brother Laurent couldn’t hit a chestnut tree at ten paces. It’s either you got the feel for it or you don’t, and Big Ten knows for a fact he didn’t shoot nobody through the head. If they were squared off to fire he snapped their collarbone opposite the rifle side and if they’d started to run he put one in the thigh. What the other fellas done when they come upon these wounded wasn’t his business, he figures, it’s just one more little monkey I don’t have to deal with tomorrow.

They heave the body.

“What’s that, thirty-four?”

“I just shoot em,” says Big Ten. “Don’t ask me to keep count, too.”

He used fourteen rounds in the fight, hit fourteen men. The other fellas say they just shoot into the crowd, sitting ducks, they say, but Big Ten can see what kind of weapon they’ve got and if they’re an officer or not and whether they close their eyes when they fire. An awful lot of them, and this is supposed to be their best people up on the line, shut their eyes just as they pull the trigger. Plus their artillery is a joke, old cannons off Spanish ships that blow apart as often as they send a ball flying.

“We’re supposed to be counting.”

“Make up a number. Manly Goat aint gonna climb down in here and check.”

The next one they got to toss in pieces.

“Shell must of fell right on him.” Hod is looking queasy.

“He’s not any deader than these others. Grab them feet.”

Big Ten can knock down a squirrel in mid-leap at a hundred yards through a stand of yellow birch. The rounds run smooth through the Krag, and make half the mess the Springfield.45s do when they hit somebody. Not fit for the stewpot, as his father used to say of birds they brought back too full of pellets. Big Ten has never, he thinks, been as good at anything as he is at this soldiering business.

If only he liked it more.

“You think they’d of learned by now,” says Hod, using his feet to position a body so they can get a grip on it. The Filipinos don’t weigh much more than a middling-sized Ojibwe child, his brother’s son René maybe, and don’t carry money into battle, which has pretty much scotched the likelihood of getting volunteers for clean-up duty. “They ought to fight shoot-and-run, like your outfit.”

“Sure,” says Big Ten, heaving. “Just look how good we come out.”

“Well, if I was their general,” says Hod, wiping something sticky and yellow off his hand onto the side of his pants, “I sure wouldn’t waste any more people in these trenches.”

Corporal Grissom wanders back and looks at the jumble of bodies in the pit.

“How many we got in there?”

“Forty-one,” says Hod without blinking. Grissom looks to Big Ten.

“We got a smoker goin ahead at the river, Chief. Lieutenant wants you up there on the double.”

“What about me?” asks Hod.

The corporal shrugs. “Didn’t say nothin about you.”

Hod picks up his old Springfield. “Well I aint draggin these dead men around on my own.”

“Suit yourself.”

They pass more enemy dead on the walk to the river, a few on their bellies with triangular bayonet wounds in the back. The flying column wasn’t supposed to take prisoners unless they might have important information. From the look of these little monkeys, nobody asked. They pass the porters kneeling in a circle in their cast-off Army clothes, throwing dice next to a small hill of equipment, and Grissom shouts for them to go back and cover the pile of Filipino that Hod and Big Ten left. Chinks will do about anything you pay them for except fight or touch dead bodies.

Lieutenant Manigault and some bigger brass are back in the trees, while the boys are hunkered down wherever there is cover from the snipers on the other side of the water.

“This is the one I told you about,” says Manigault. “Never misses.”

“Then get him cracking,” says a colonel with a big moustache.

The Lieutenant and Corporal Grissom lead Big Ten and Hod to the riverside, where Sergeant LaDuke lies cursing behind a tree stump.

“Every time we send somebody out he gets plinked by those sonsabitches over there. They must be renegade Spaniards.”

“Spanish can’t shoot worth shit either,” observes Corporal Grissom.

“Maybe it’s Lenny Hayes from I Company,” says Hod.

Hayes fell in love with a Filipina and went over to the other side, and is supposed to be moving fast up through the ranks of the googoo army.

“Can you see them?” Manigault asks Big Ten.

“Not unless they pop up to shoot at somebody.”

Manigault looks to Sergeant LaDuke. “Well?”

“Stick your head out there,” LaDuke orders Hod.

Hod gives Big Ten a dirty look. Big Ten points.

“Just haul your freight over and get behind the bank where it rises up there. They won’t get more than a couple off.”

Big Ten sights on the tangle of trees across the narrow river. “Go.”

Hod runs and two men rise slightly from behind a downed tree trunk to fire at him. Big Ten sits one of them down with a round through the collarbone.

Crack! a piece of bark flies off next to his face. LaDuke curses.

“That came from high,” Big Ten says to Manigault. “They probably got a bunch in the trees.”

“Can you get them?”

“Only if they got a reason to show themselves.”

Manigault turns to the sergeant. “Take your squad,” he orders, “and trot along the bank like you’re looking for a good place to cross.”

“Like ducks in a goddam shooting gallery.”

“On the double, Sergeant.”

LaDuke curses and calls his men over. Hod pretends he can’t hear but Grissom goes to get him. As the sergeant begins to run Big Ten rolls into his spot, bracing the Krag on top of the tree trunk and firing, one — two — three — four — five — six — the other volunteers along the bank cheering as they see bodies drop out of trees and then the 1st Kansas is up and whooping, charging into the water.

The colonel with the moustache and some of the other brass and everybody else but the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration come up to congratulate Manigault on having such a valuable asset in his company. Only one of the squad, Clete Standish, was hit by the snipers while running decoy, shot through the hip, and he is being carried back by Hod and little Monroe who used to tend bar at the Arcade in Denver.

The colonel thumps Big Ten on the back. “If your outfit had a few more bucks could shoot like you do,” he winks, “I might never have made it out of Arizona.”

Big Ten watches the 1st Kansas wading neck-deep under halfhearted fire with their rifles, bayonets fixed, held high over their heads. Never miss a chance, the Kansas, to stick whoever is left crawling on the other side. He knows he hit at least three of the men in the trees, not showing much of themselves, right between the eyes.

“My outfit never crossed an ocean to kill nobody, either,” he mutters, and heads off to help Hod with the wounded man.

ROUNDSMEN

You don’t like to see a white foot on a dray horse. Hooker got three of them, and Jubal checks them over after he brushes her, getting her to lift each foot so he can look for splits and see how the shoe is wearing. She is a dapple-gray Percheron, seven, maybe eight years old, and been used hard, which is why they give her to Jubal when Mr. White sent him over from the Island. New man get the sorriest ride. Somebody had bob-wire in her mouth, probly back on the farm, she got some scars and don’t feel the bit lest you put some boss into it. Call her Hooker cause she always pull to the left but that was only a shoulder sore let go and Jubal has healed it up. He makes sure to do everything in the same order in the morning, like you need to with the jumpy ones, which means he lets her eat hay from the iron manger while he looks her over for rub spots.

“You take this to keep her off you,” Duckworth said on the first day they moved him onto the city job, handing him a rusty railroad spike, and she did try to crowd him against the stall boards, but every time he just duck under and go to the other side till she give up on it. Horse can’t kick back on you when you between its legs and it don’t have the patience for mischief that a mule does.

Jubal ties her lead line off to the post, hangs the collar over her neck, straps it shut, and then fixes the hames in the groove.

“Gone be a good day for us, Hooker,” he croons, crossing the trace lines over her back to keep them out of the way. “Get out and see the world some.”

He is only started laying the harness saddle on her when her tail goes up. He steps back and lets her pee like she always does, still got the nerves even with how he treats her. He waits for it to soak into the straw a bit, then cinches the harness saddle, keeping it loose. Horse like her only got one question in its head — how they gone hurt me next? She’ll bloat on you at first so it’s no use pulling that cinch too tight. Jubal lays the britching over her rump, lifting her tail gently to fix the backstrap and then buckling the cropper down to it before snapping the top strap onto the saddle. This was the hardest part when he first come, maybe somebody twist her tail or put a stick up her behind before. Lots of ignorant people think they know how to make a horse act right.

He replaces the halter with the bridle then, slipping the nose band over, working his thumb into the space between her front and back teeth to get her to open and pushing the bit into place. He gets the crown piece over her ears and snugs it all up, being sure the blinkers don’t rub on the eye and tightening the throat latch strap. She holds nice and still for him, lazily switching flies with her tail, not twitching under the skin like she done the first week. He had to come in a hour early those days, but now they know each other and got a understanding.

“Gonna be a hot one,” calls Jerrold Huxley, walking past with Spook, who is a light sorrel Belgian. “Be quite a number of em fore it’s over.”

“Spect there will.”

It was Jerrold he rode with to learn the job, Jerrold who helped him find the room on 27th. There is colored from just about everywhere in the building, from the Carolinas and Maryland and Virginia and up from Georgia and Mrs. Battle from the country of Jamaica and even one big-headed boy says he was born right in the City, that his people go back here from before it was United States and didn’t never belong to white folks. Rent is more than on Barren Island but it smells better and there is something to do at night.

Jubal runs the narrow end of the reins through the terret ring on the saddle, pulling them back through the horse-collar guides and then up to the bit rings on the bridle. He tucks the loose ends of the reins under the back strap and backs her out of the stall.

Tiny Lipscombe is on the ramp ahead of them leading Pockets, a beautiful bay with black points who will bite you if you come at him from the right. At the bottom they pass the grooms throwing dice on a blanket and move on to the wagons.

He backs Hooker up between the wagon shafts, then loops an arm’s length of rein around a post to keep her in place. Butterbean comes over from the dice game and holds the shafts up for Jubal to get the tug loops over them. He threads the traces back through the belly-band guides and hooks them to the wagon body, Butterbean stepping away the minute he’s not needed. None of the stable boys like to deal with Hooker. Jubal tightens the cinch another few inches and checks the traces for twists. Jerrold is doing the same at the next wagon over.

“Mulraney in yet?”

Jerrold shakes his head. “Aint seen the man, but he might be about. Likes to tip up on people when they not looking.”

Mulraney is the dispatcher and is always out to catch you with a bottle. Duckworth says it’s cause he can’t drink no more, doctor’s orders, and can’t stand the idea of somebody getting away with a nip under his same roof.

“He catch a sniff of liquor on your breath when you come back to the stable,” Duckworth told him the first day, “that is the end of you.”

Jubal takes the reins in hand and climbs onto the seat of the tip-wagon, watching Hooker’s ears to see that she is ready to go. He clucks and gives the slightest jerk on the lines and Hooker starts them out of the stable.

Mulraney is not in his office when they pass, old Doucette who stays through the night sitting there watching the telephone, afraid he will have to pick it up. They don’t really start to drop until noon, though now and then there is one that has laid out all night before somebody reported it.

Jubal gees her out through the doors to join the tail of the line on the Avenue. It is all kinds of horses they got working for White’s Sons — Shires and Suffolks and Haflingers and Belgians and big tall Percherons like Hooker. The breweries take up the Clydesdales for their delivery teams, and it seems like all the saddle horses gone off to the Philippines or been sold to the English for their war in Africa. There are six wagons waiting in a row, horses blinkered with their heads down and ears slack, some of them probly asleep, while the teamsters lean back and tilt their faces up to the sun rising over the tenements to the east. He’s never known Hooker to sleep in the traces, not even with a long standing spell, too busy worrying what somebody might surprise her with. No telling how many owners she been through to this point. Had her on a farm buggy maybe, mowed some hay, then when she got her size was sold into the City. Before the electric come in they run the streetcar and omnibus teams in all weather, uphill and down, till they were wore out. Every time a horse change hands it got someone new to deal with, someone got a whole nother way of doing to you. It puts Jubal in mind of his Mama’s stories about slave days and people being traded out for livestock or stores. Hell, he thinks, I’d balk plenty you put a hand to me. Get away with whatever I could.

Jerrold calls out as a couple of the shitwagon boys roll by, bringing their street manure to the pier.

“You boys had a busy night.”

“Yeah, we gonna lose these road apples and put the nags away,” answers the lead driver. “Then I’m gonna look up that gal you been keepin with.”

The teamsters laugh. Jerrold’s wife is a big, rawboned woman who scares the daylights out of everybody but him.

“Aint no woman got a nose will let you near em,” calls Duckworth after them. The shitwagon boys ride all night between sanitation stations and then ship it out at dawn. White’s Sons sends a dozen wagonloads upstate every day, stable manure bringing a price while the road puckey just gets dumped somewhere. “You boys is ripe.”

Mulraney shows up then, nodding sharp at them all. “Gentlemen,” he says, like always. Mulraney is not so bad for an Irish, he don’t call you nothin or tell you how to do your job if you do it right. Knows his horses, too, and word is he trained racers before the bottle got the best of him. He’s the one who says when it’s time to sell a horse out or send for the Cruelty people and put it away. You need a horse doctor to say it’s an accident and shoot it if you want insurance, but the Cruelty people are free if you say it can’t work no more and will suffer. Hooker was almost out the door to whatever ragpicker would buy her when Jubal came.

“She’s found her man, she has,” the dispatcher says whenever he sees her back in the traces. “It’s a remarkable phenomenon.”

The sun is two fingers over the rooftops when Jubal’s turn comes up, one of the stable boys ducking his head out the doorway.

“Thirty-eight between Nine and Ten,” he calls, and Jubal puts Hooker into motion.

He tries to keep to the streets with paving block, cobbles dealing hell to a white-footed horse, and keeps her to a slow trot. Hooker likes to run, which makes him think she was maybe once on a fire truck, and you got to keep some drag on the reins. Ninth is already crowded with traffic, hacks and delivery wagons and ice carts, a few pony phaetons and fancy carriages and the streetcar sparking up and down the middle. The hacks you have to watch out for, and the two-wheel cabs are even worse, cutting in and out of the flow to pick up or leave their fares, drivers waving their sticks and yelling at each other to stay clear. On the busiest day of the year in Wilmington it was nothing like this. When he first came, on foot, Jubal made his neck sore staring up at the buildings, one taller than the next, but driving you have to watch the cross streets, watch the rig ahead of you, watch for little ones trying to get under your wheels and you don’t dare look up at anything. At the end of the day he can barely open his hands, which never happened back home no matter how long he drove.

White’s Sons has the Board of Health contract and guarantees removal within three hours of notice, which is usually by a police from a callbox. But there is no police at the location, only a handful of little ones, Irishes they look like, daring each other to go up and sit on the dead horse’s rump. Jubal walks Hooker past it, the little ones, mostly boys and one little girl sucking on her fingers, moving away to watch. He stands in the seat to look behind as Hooker backs the wagon up to the horse’s head.

“The Dago left it,” says the oldest of the boys, stepping closer. “The one that sells melons. It wouldn’t go no more and he whips it and hollers at it in Dago and it still won’t go so he jumps off and hits it on the nose and it just kneels down on its front legs and stays that way. So he grabs some crates from the alley here and busts em up with his feet and sets a fire under its back end. Only then it just falls down on its side and don’t move no more.”

“I seen one explode once,” says a boy who keeps putting his thumb up his nose. “Back when we lived by the river. Its belly blowed up like a balloon and then kablooey—all over the street. My old lady wouldn’t let us outside till they come get it.”

If you’re lucky the owner is still there and the harness is on and you can use that to pull it up. But this horse has been stripped clean, a dusty chestnut mare that maybe has the glanders, nose still running snot. Have to wash the wagon bed out good when he’s shed of it.

Jubal sets the brake and hops down to the street. The rest of the boys step up, leaving the little girl staring from the sidewalk. Sometimes the street children will cut the tail off before you get there, twisting horsehair rings for each other.

“Can we help?”

“You stay clear of her,” he says, pointing to Hooker. “Come too close she maybe kick your head in.”

The boys look at Hooker with new respect and a few take a step back. Jubal unwinds the cable and pulls it down to the carcass, then lets the tail ramp of the wagon down. He ties the forelegs together just above the knee, yanks a leather strap tight around the neck and then links the two together with chain, slipping the cable hook through the middle link. The boys squat to watch him work.

“You want to get these off the street before they go stiff,” he explains, “or else they maybe don’t fit on the wagon.”

The tip-wagon is low-sided and extra wide, with a pulley block bolted to the frame behind the seat, and the ramp has skid boards that he greases every morning. Jubal runs the free end of the cable through the pulley and then unhitches Hooker, knotting the traces together and then clipping the cable to them. More little ones come down from the stoops to watch, and women stick their heads out from the tenement windows all around. He leads Hooker away from the wagon, waiting for a furniture van to rattle past before heading her on a diagonal across the street till the cable is taut.

“Hold,” he says to the horse, using the reins like a lead line to keep her grounded, and goes to check that the carcass is lined up right. Even hooked to a load you never know what a horse might get up to — a loud noise or a bee in the blinkers and they can go off trompling people till they run into a wall. He comes back to her, holding the reins a couple inches from the bridle bit.

“Yo!”

He doesn’t have to yank on her or even slap with the reins, Hooker pulling steady and straight and the pulley squeaking and the carcass dragging up the ramp onto the wagon bed. A couple of the boys clap their hands when it is done.

“Where you gonna take im?” asks the second boy.

Jubal grins as he backs Hooker between the wagon shafts. “Straight to the butcher shop. This gone be your supper.”

The other boys laugh and call out Kevin eats horsemeat, Kevin eats horsemeat, pointing and dancing around the boy.

“We eat nuttin but cabbage,” he answers them, face going red. “Cabbage and beans.”

He has almost got Hooker back in the traces when a panel wagon pulled by a hackney horse, half lame and too small for its load, stops alongside him. The panel is new-painted in red and black and gold and says—

EDISON COMPANY PICTURES

HIGHEST-GRADE SPECIALTIES

The white man sitting next to the driver leans out to talk to him.

“There is another one that wants dealing with,” says the man, who wears a straw boater and looks like somebody Jubal knows. “At the corner of 39th.”

Jubal lifts his hat off. “Can’t carry but one at a time, suh,” he says. “But I thank you for the lookout.”

The man frowns at him for a moment, then points. “I know you.”

White folks always think they know colored because they don’t look so close, but then it comes to Jubal and he smiles. “That’s right, suh, you Judge Manigault’s boy.”

He does not add “The one who don’t walk right” which is how most of the colored in Wilmington know them apart, the ones who don’t say “the good one” or “the nasty one.” This is the good one.

The white man narrows his eyes, starting to smile. “And you are—?”

“Jubal, suh. Jubal Scott.”

“Of course.” The white man almost reaches down to shake hands, then catches himself. “What brings you up here, Jubal?”

Jubal keeps smiling. “How things come out, there’s a whole lot of us come north.”

It sits between them for a moment. As he remembers it this Manigault didn’t have no part in it, always being left out from what the big white folks was up to.

“Of course,” Harry says, smile fading. He points at Hooker. “I remember you now — you were a drayman.”

“It got four legs and a tail, I can make it move.”

The white man smiles again. “You own this horse?”

“Nawsuh, this belong to Mr. Tom and Mr. Andrew — that’s P. White’s Sons what keeps the street clear. They got three, four hundred horses.”

The good Manigault nods his head, figuring something. The colored man beside him squirms in his seat, eager to get going.

“Do they have horses for rental?”

“Don’t know but they might. Horses to do what?”

He waves a hand at the wagon panel. “To be in a motion picture. They should look like cavalry horses.”

Jubal shakes his head. “Don’t have none of that kind. Maybe you try the police, they always got some for auction.”

The man nods, pulls a small card from his vest pocket and hands it down to Jubal. “If you ever tire of this service, I might have some employment for you. Feel free to call on me.”

Jubal takes the card, squints at it. “Thank you, suh.”

“Harry Manigault.”

The name would have come to him sooner or later. “Like it say on your card.”

The man smiles again, just about the first real smile Jubal has seen since he’s been in the City. “Good day, Jubal. It is nice to see a familiar face.”

The driver smacks the hackney with his stick and the panel wagon jerks away. Jubal sticks his hat back on.

“We get that horse off the street, Mr. Harry,” he calls. “Three-hour guarantee!”

Dr. Bonkers’ does no harm. It would take a detailed chemical analysis to discover the specific ingredients, but the taste indicates that it is mostly vegetable oil with a dose of cayenne and some camphor to impart a suitably medicinal smell. The recommended dosage is small enough — a teaspoon before retiring — and the taste sufficiently off-putting that subscribers are unlikely to make themselves ill ingesting the Brain Food. Until the licensing imbroglio can be resolved it affords him access to people’s homes, and perhaps more importantly, a shiny black-leather physician’s bag with which to impress and intimidate them.

Dr. Lunceford is not a gifted traveler, his “spiel” limited to inquiries surrounding the prospective purchaser’s ailments and those of their loved ones, and has thus far moved only enough of the product to avoid being discharged and losing the totemic satchel.

“Do you suffer from epilepsy, spasms, convulsions, insomnia, hysteria, dyspepsia, paralysis, alcoholism, St. Vitus’ dance or other nervous disorders?”

The woman looks at him blankly, her door open only enough to see him with one eye. “Aint got none of those.”

“And how is the general health of your family?”

The woman looks behind her into the dim-lit room, then back to him. “Got a boy bust his arm.”

“Ah. Perhaps I can be of some assistance.”

Her eyes flick down to the leather bag. “You a doctor?”

Technically, at this time and in this state, he is not. “Madam,” he assures her, “I have set countless broken limbs. Countless.”

She looks at him suspiciously. “How much it gone cost?”

He is pushing, gently, against the door. It has been the most difficult lesson for him in this great city, that aggressiveness is valued, required, in fact, instead of being considered poor manners. “You should think about what you can afford. Is the young man in pain?”

He is by her then, surrendering to the now-instinctual New York habit of evaluating the apartment in relation to his own. There is light only from the street, coming in through a pair of dirty windows, revealing walls with patches of lath showing through and the remains of two layers of wallpaper in patterns that disagree with each other, wrinkled with moisture. They have pinned up a few color pictures torn from magazines, drawings of white people doing pretty things. No, thinks Dr. Lunceford, ours is not as bad as this.

The boy is small and dark-skinned, a permanent dent, most probably the work of forceps, in one side of his head. The injured arm lays slack in his lap as he sits on the only chair with upholstery in the two rooms, his legs sticking out straight from the seat. He looks up and Dr. Lunceford can read his thoughts—What is this man going to do to me?

He sits cautiously on the arm of the chair. “What’s your name?”

“Cuttis.”

“Curtis?”

“Cuttis.”

“How did you injure your arm?”

“Gettin co’.”

“In the basement?”

“On the train. When the co’ train come by slow enough I climbs up an thow some down to Montrose and James.”

“And you fell off the coal car?”

“Naw, I ain that stupit. After all I thown down Montrose and James wouldn’t gimme my share an we commence to fightin.” The little boy touches his arm, as if to bring back the memory. “James thow me down on the rail.”

The mother looks on, standing, waiting to see what he will do next. He has had women, back in Wilmington, repel him at gunpoint to keep him from vaccinating their children.

“Never forget,” Dr. Osler used to say when he took his students on city rounds, “that when you are in a person’s home, you are a guest.”

“I’m going to touch your arm, Cuttis. This one first.”

The boy reluctantly offers up his good arm, and Dr. Lunceford pushes his fingers to the bone, getting a feel for what should be. There is no way to be precise without a Roentgen, of course, but a few generations of cotton loaders who can still bend their arms will vouch for him.

“Now I’m going to straighten out the arm that you’ve hurt and have you try a few things.”

The boy looks at his face as he supports the broken arm under the elbow and slowly, gently straightens it.

“Can I see you make an o.k. sign with your fingers? That’s good — now push your fingers against mine—”

“It hurt.”

“But you can do it, can’t you? Now I’m going to hold around your fingers and you have to try to spread them — that’s good, this is all very good.”

He runs his fingers lightly up from the elbow to the wrist several times. “You were in this fight, what, two or three days ago?”

“Three days,” says the mother. “But we aint got nothin to pay a hospital.”

Dr. Lunceford ignores the statement, looking into the eyes of the boy. “Now I want you to pretend that your pain is a voice. When I touch a certain part, you tell me if the voice is humming, talking, talking loud, shouting, or screaming.”

“It hummin all the time.”

“I’m sure it is. You’ve been very brave about it.”

He begins to pinch around the bone, very slowly, moving toward the hand.

“She talkin now.”

“Uh-huh—”

“Louder.”

“How about here?”

Tears come to the boy’s eyes and he can’t speak. Dr. Lunceford eases the pressure, turns to the mother.

“I’ll need one of your stockings — it can be old but it must be clean. And if you’d boil a panful of water, please.”

She looks at him for a moment, as if the words take time to penetrate, then steps into the other room. He knows he should have phrased it differently—“something you’ve just washed” instead of implying that most objects in here are filthy. Which they are. There is a thin blanket hung over the back of the chair and he imagines the little boy stretches out on it and the threadbare ottoman to sleep, perhaps sharing the chair with a sibling. He waits till he hears pots banging in the kitchen.

“Your arm is broken up near the wrist, Cuttis, and if I don’t set it it’s going to heal but in the wrong position—”

“It be crookit.”

“That’s right. Now you’re going to have to help me—”

If it was a Monteggia fracture he’d insist they see a licensed doctor, somebody with a fluoroscope, but this is relatively standard — a distal fracture of both bones, the radial fracture complete and displaced, the ulnar of the greenstick variety, no obvious neural or vascular damage.

He gets a grip above and below the radial fracture. “I want you to take a deep breath now—”

The reduction is simple, rapid traction and torque, the boy crying out sharply and the mother rushing back in with a black cotton stocking in her hand.

“He ain counted to three,” complains the boy, tears running down his cheeks.

But Dr. Lunceford has the bag open, fishing in it for the can of rolled bandages. Most of the space is taken up with bottles of Dr. Bonkers’, but he manages to crowd a few useful articles between them, most of them purchased from a notorious thief on Tenth Avenue, a young Irishman who had never seen or heard of a colored physician.

“Barbers, I knew you had them,” he said, laying out his wares on a tabletop. “And the ginks who soak you to plant you under the ground. But a colored croaker, who’d a thought that?”

The bandages, already permeated with plaster of Paris, must have been prepared in a hospital, and Dr. Lunceford assumes the crime was perpetrated during a sojourn in one of the city wards, the thief making his rounds while still convalescing. “The quicker the patient can return to preferred activities,” Dr. Osler used to say, “the speedier the recovery.”

“I could use that water now,” he says to the mother.

She hands him the stocking and backs out of the room. He has the boy slowly supinate and pronate the wrist, feels the bones to make sure the reduction is holding, then helps the boy off with his shirt and slips the stocking over his arm, attempting to smooth out the wrinkles. A long-arm cast is not specifically called for, but with young boys the more immobilized the limb the better, discouraging their more rambunctious instincts.

The mother returns with a pan of hot water and he asks her to set it on the floor.

“The break will hurt quite a bit for the rest of the day,” he tells the boy as he wets the bandage and begins to wind it around his crooked arm, “but tomorrow most of the pain should be gone.”

He has seen no facility in the apartment, perhaps everybody sharing an outhouse in the alley, or common toilets, tiny closets, placed on every other floor. He has seen every possible unsanitary solution as he has moved Yolanda and Jessie from building to building, structures thrown up to maximize profit per square foot, not to house human beings.

“Do you have any sort of medicine you use for the children? For toothaches or that sort of thing?”

The woman frowns, then walks to a rickety cupboard and pulls out a box of baking soda and a bottle of Mrs. Pinkham’s panacea.

“I got this for bad stomach,” she says raising the baking soda, “and the other for my lady problems.”

He nods to the Vegetable Compound. “Give him two tablespoons of that before he sleeps tonight.”

The potion is largely alcohol and will certainly have a soporific impact on a small boy. Kopp’s Baby Friend, basically morphine in sugar water, would be more effective, but Dr. Lunceford has refused to represent it.

“I got to buy your bottle too?”

He smiles. “Dr. Bonkers’ Brain Food is a tonic for a remarkable panoply of afflictions. A broken arm, however, is not one of them. I shall visit, if you don’t mind, in a week to be sure this cast is not causing problems. If you can’t spare anything now, perhaps at that time—”

The return visit is both responsible and good commerce, as only the most indigent or unembarrassable will allow you to walk away empty-handed more than once.

“I get you something.”

She steps out and Dr. Lunceford turns to the boy, who is watching his arm as the bandages begin to harden around it.

“Which arm do you throw with?”

“One that’s bust.”

“If you can be patient it will get strong again. Strong enough to bounce a lump of coal off this James’s noggin.”

The boy smiles. He has a beautiful face, really, and Dr. Lunceford vows to carry that smile, like a talisman, with him through the rest of the day’s adventures.

Dr. Lunceford knocks on every door in the next two buildings, then navigates through the crowd of humans and vehicles to begin on the structures across the street, the stairways unlit and coffin-like, each with its own particular odor, none pleasant. A few people answer, more just call and ask who he is, and none are in need of Brain Food. It is a wonder, given the conditions they live in, that the denizens of Hell’s Kitchen are not in a constant state of epidemic. Many people down home are poor, yes, certainly with less to their names than these urban colored, but they are not crushed into narrow, disease-breeding dwellings in such numbers, not part of an anonymous and vaguely threatening multitude. Dr. Lunceford finds himself, when on the more peopled avenues, walking in a kind of protective daze, eyes focused just beyond any approaching stranger, whereas in Wilmington each pedestrian requires a greeting tailored to their status and circumstance. Once, in their second week on 47th Street, he walked past a throng, taking only fleeting notice of a young pregnant woman, only to have Jessie call him back from his daydream. It troubled him to see her in such a context, his daughter only one more dismissable face among the millions. There is a harmony of purpose, despite its seemingly frantic activity, in a beehive or a colony of ants, but so much of the busyness here resembles nothing more than poultry overcrowded on their way to slaughter, each animal climbing over its neighbor for the last breath of air.

There are young men, and some not so young, lolling on the stoop of the next building. There are layabouts in Wilmington, most notably in the dead season between cotton crops, but there the men tend to congregate at a handful of drinking resorts and barbershops. In this city the front steps of many buildings are draped, by noon, with the unemployed, colored or white depending on the dominant population of the street.

“Bout time somebody come for that girl,” says one of the loungers as Dr. Lunceford steps carefully over his outstretched legs.

“She aint passed yet?”

“You know that she aint if you been hearin her Mama boo-hooin on the landing every night. ‘Oh my po’ daughter, Lord Jesus help my po’ daughter!’ ”

“We in the back. Don’t hear nothin but cats.”

“She enough to drive a man to bad habits.”

“Like you got none of them already.”

The men laugh.

“May I ask,” says Dr. Lunceford from the doorway, “where I can find this afflicted individual?”

The men eye him without respect or annoyance. He is a passing phenomenon, to be commented on when he is gone, a part of the meager entertainment afforded by the street that lays before them.

“Up five an in the front,” says the first young man. “And mind them steps by the second flo’.”

The steps just below the second-floor landing have fallen through on one side, Dr. Lunceford stepping carefully on the risers and supporting himself by pressing the wall rather than trusting the treacherously loose banister. He wonders how long they have been in this state, wonders that none of the men relaxing in front has access to a hammer and nails or the inclination to borrow such items. In their first apartment after the move from Philadelphia, in the tenement near the corner of 51st and Ninth, the toilet that served their floor was a swamp. After futile entreaties to the landlord’s somnolent representative, a hunchbacked Pole who dwelt in the basement, and marked indifference from the tenants who shared the level, Dr. Lunceford spent a day cleaning, scraping, painting, and doing his best to repair the rudimentary plumbing. When finished he could bear the idea of his wife and pregnant daughter employing the facilities, but within a week the room was back to its former squalid condition.

The woman who answers the door seems frightened at the sight of him.

“Who send for you?”

“No one, but I—”

“She not dead.”

“I am a medical man, not an undertaker.” He holds the bag up where she can see it. “If you’ll let me in perhaps I can be of some service.”

There are lighted candles in the first room, one placed carefully next to a tiny chromo of the Virgin Mary. The woman wears a red cloth wrapped like a turban over her hair and sports a large crucifix, carved from yellowish wood, outside of her housedress. Catholics, Dr. Lunceford guesses, up from somewhere in Louisiana. Two very small children, a boy and a girl, play on the bare, sticky floor with a stewpot and a wooden spoon, while a child not yet a year old squats half-immersed in soapy water in the stone basin that also serves for kitchen needs. A girl of perhaps eight years stands by the half-open curtain that separates their two rooms.

“You wash the baby,” the woman says to this girl. “This man gone look at Essie.”

Essie lies on the larger of the two beds crowded into the back room, a cracked window affording her a view of the grimy brick airshaft and the trio of pigeons nodding sleepily on the sill. Sound asleep, on the other bed, is a fully clothed man of about thirty.

“That Mr. Ball,” says the woman softly. “He work nights, so we rents a bed to him.”

Dr. Lunceford feels very tired, though it is only eleven in the morning. Too many stairs. “Hello, Essie,” he says.

The girl, possibly as old as twelve or thirteen but wasted with disease, does not respond, her huge, frightened eyes following as he squeezes between the beds and steps to her side. She is propped on a pair of yellowed cushions, her neck swollen, breathing noisily and with extreme difficulty. Dr. Lunceford lays his palm on the girl’s forehead.

“How long has she had this fever?”

“She been po’ly more than two weeks now,” says the woman. “Her daddy, he work loadin the boats, he been to the hospital but they won’t send nobody.”

“There are visiting physicians.”

“Suh, we just come up here. We can’t affo’d none of that.”

Dr. Lunceford nods. “Would you bring the lamp over, please?”

The woman squeezes in next to him, holding the oil lamp. “First she tired all the time, then she coughin, and then she can’t even swallow.”

“Would you open your mouth for me, Essie? Wide, like when you have to yawn—”

It clearly causes the girl some pain to open.

“And could you hold the light closer, please?”

The next time I see that thief, thinks Dr. Lunceford, I’ll have to ask him to purloin a laryngoscope. He pushes her tongue down with a depressor and inserts the little ball of a mirror as far in as he can get it. The tonsils, uvula, and pillars of the fauces are all swollen, covered by the grayish pseudo-membrane, which extends up to the posterior nares and down over the epiglottis and into the larynx. The membrane is relatively thick, adhering tightly to the mucous membrane in most places, the windpipe nearly completely occluded. It is a wonder the girl can breathe at all.

There is only one course open to him. Her pulse is weak and irregular, the exudation, though not yet gangrenous, beginning to slough off and spread the sepsis. Five years ago she would be doomed, his role limited to supplying enough opiates to allow her to leave on a cloud. But there is an anti-toxin now, manufactured by the Board of Health itself, a serum he has no access to.

Dr. Lunceford touches the girl’s cheek lightly. “You can close for a moment, Essie. Thank you.”

“That look bad, don’t it?”

He turns to the mother. “I will need some alcohol — three inches’ worth, in a glass. It doesn’t matter what sort.”

The woman leaves and Dr. Lunceford sits on the side of the bed. There is an illustration of Christ on the cross, torn from a newspaper and at some point folded many times, tacked to the wall over the headboard of the bed. The folding has left the image divided into many squares, each one featuring an isolated locus of agony — a spiked and bleeding palm in one square, a section of thorn-pierced hairline in another. The effect makes it seem as if one of the Savior’s eyes is raised to Heaven and the other, with a glint of challenge rather than supplication, squarely fixed on Dr. Lunceford.

And what shall you do for My lamb?

“It’s hard to breathe, isn’t it?”

The girl nods weakly.

“We’ll try to do something about that.”

The smallest boy is out of the basin, being wrapped in a blanket by his sister, and the woman is pouring gin from a square bottle into a glass. A hinged wooden lid has been lowered over the washbasin and there is a huge pile of dusty field greens spread out on it.

“She gone die?”

“Your daughter is very ill, but there are things that can be done for her. The first and most vital is to make sure her breathing is unimpeded. There is a procedure I will need to perform, and I need your permission to go ahead with it.”

It is a matter for the Board of Health, of course, but by the time their representatives arrive the girl will be gone. In a race between the Klebs-Loeffler bacillus and city bureaucracy, there is no question as to which will win.

“You gone cut her?”

“No, M’am, but she will be made very uncomfortable for a short while.”

The woman holds out the glass of gin to him, which he takes as acquiescence. Dr. Lunceford stacks several bottles of the Brain Food on the table in order to gain access to his instruments. The woman stares at the bottles. Women such as these, feeding their children on pork fat and road-clippings, are the principal consumers of the Bonkers elixir, and for an instant he feels ashamed to be associated with it. He slips the metal instruments he’ll need from the pocketed canvas roll and stands them up in the alcohol. He has only one O’Dwyer tube, medium-sized, something the hospital thief threw in for free with no idea of its purpose.

“We just come up here,” the woman says again, shaking her head. “Didn’t count on nobody getting sick.”

He has performed the intubation dozens of times, often on infants, in the days before the serum. Very few of those children survived. He pushes the tongue to the side with his curved forceps, then uses them to help guide the tube past the epiglottis and into the larynx, the girl heaving and gagging despite his care not to press on the vagus nerve. Her sputa, fine and poisonous, spray upon the lenses of his spectacles. The tube is brass covered with rubber, not very flexible, and when it is in place he tugs very slightly on the thread to be certain that the retaining swell is anchored below the vocal chords. When he leans away with the device in place the girl is soaked with sweat, but her dyspnea has been vanquished, her chest expanding and contracting heroically.

“Just breathe normally,” he tells her, tying the thread around the stub of a pencil. “There’s plenty of air for you now. And if you should begin to swallow the tube, which can happen sometimes, you can pull on this and cough and it will come out.” He hands her the pencil, then touches her face again. “You’re going to feel better now.”

In the kitchen he scrubs his hands with carbolic soap, gargles with Condy’s fluid and carefully cleans his spectacles. He explains to the woman that her daughter should be fed in a supine position with nothing more solid than rice with milk, that she will likely fall asleep immediately, her body sensing that strangulation has been circumvented. He does not tell her the rest. If you warn them the authorities are coming they are likely to hide things, and the bacillus continues to travel. She makes the sign of the cross in the Catholic manner, thanking God several times and Dr. Lunceford once.

“Antoine come back near seven,” she tells him, “but he don’t get paid till Sa’day.”

As he leaves the young men stare at the bundle of greens under his arm.

“Doctor got him some groceries,” calls one of them as he heads east. “Maybe he got a ham in that bag.”

It is a long walk to the apothecary on Broadway. There is only a young white man in a white apron inside, dusting bottles on one of the half-dozen shelves. Dr. Lunceford lays his bag heavily on top of the pharmaceutical counter. A gaudily painted sign on the wall proclaims that the establishment sells his celebrated Brain Food.

“May I use your telephone?”

The young man frowns. “Telephone is a nickel.”

Dr. Lunceford digs a coin from his pocket and lets it spin on the counter. The greens will not be especially filling, but excellent nutrition for a woman in Jessie’s state.

“The City Board of Health, please,” he says when a female voice comes over the wire. “Pathology, Bacteriology, and Disinfection.”

Everyone in the apartment will be quarantined, most likely, the poor dockworker and the snoozing boarder likely to lose their employment. Clothing will be destroyed, the rooms fumigated, but there is no other course if epidemics are to be controlled. They will ask, even before they administer the anti-toxin, who performed the intubation, and the mother will pass on the name he gave to her. The official who informed him of the licensing difficulties clearly did not believe he was a physician, even with the references from fellow McGill alumni, and went into detail outlining the punishments that would ensue if he were caught impersonating one.

“I’d like to report a case of diphtheria,” he says when a male voice asks why he has called. “This is Dr. Bonkers, Dr. Jeremiah Bonkers—”

THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE

Diosdado tries to read their smiles. The people, old men and women and children, have come out to greet their army, standing in clusters in front of sawali-grass huts, a few pulling the salakots off their heads in respect. A dozen of the more prosperous-looking citizens flank the capitán municipal in front of the little church.

“This is a great day,” beams the capitán, who is wearing his best camisa of Canton cloth, shoes shined and hair slicked back with brilliantine. He is missing several teeth. “We have been expecting your arrival.”

Diosdado nods toward the northern calzada, down which Sargento Bayani and his squad herd eight or nine young runaways at rifle point. “It appears that some of you couldn’t wait.”

The capitán’s face darkens. “Those men are not really from our town.” He speaks Spanish with some difficulty, eager to impress.

“Don’t worry,” says Diosdado as the rest of his men spread through the village to flush out the chickens that have run under the houses and search for hidden stores of food. “Nobody will be forced to fight. But everybody has to help dig.”

General Luna’s latest directive is to present to the enemy a series of trenches, one behind the other, making it less likely that they’ll be overrun and forcing the Americans to bleed for each foot of ground. Strategic withdrawal.

“Nine captured, one escaped,” calls Sargento Bayani in Zambal, grinning as he approaches with the conscripts. “I shot over his head but he didn’t stop running.”

“Waste of ammunition. Get them started.” Diosdado frowns as he recognizes one of the young men, a barefoot tao in kundiman trousers with a face cratered by smallpox.

“I’ve seen you before.”

“Yes sir.” The young man dips his eyes to the dirt. He is missing two toes on his left foot. “At San Francisco del Monte and at Novaliches and at Malabon.”

“You should enlist,” says Bayani. “Save us the trouble of catching you every time.”

The capitán, who has not stopped smiling, supervises two boys trying to hang the banner of the Republic from the flagpole by the convento, which seems to also serve as the municipal building. Diosdado steps over and helps untangle the lines.

“Do you know what this flag means?” he asks.

“That Padre Wenceslao is gone,” says the older boy, “and he won’t be coming back.”

“It sticks on the wheel,” says the other, pointing to the pulley above them.

“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.

“None will be my age, either.”

“Ye look no older than ye are,” says Grania, pulling the laces taut and tying them off. “Turn sideways — there, d’ye see?”

“Hand me the waist.”

“Yer not wearin the plain one—”

“And why not?”

“Because yer going to see the Elephant, not to a temperance meeting.” Grania pulls her own striped blouse from the peg beneath Father’s fading portrait of Parnell. “This might fit ye.”

“The Elephant burned down, and I’ll not wear that, whether it fits me or not.”

“Ye liked it when ye bought it for me.”

“It’s too flossy for a woman of my—” she is about to say age, but that isn’t it. They bought it from a jewcart because it looked like the one Grania had admired in a store window on Grand Street, the three of them out dream-shopping together one night when Brigid wasn’t too tired. But the material is not the same and up close you can tell that it is only an imitation.

“Ye have to wear somethin.”

“Give me the black.”

“That ye wore for Father’s funeral?”

“It’s the best I own.”

“But—”

“Black will set her hair off,” says Maeve, putting the mirror down and hurrying to the dresser. Trying to spare her feelings, it’s clear, but Brigid appreciates the effort. Maeve jiggles the broken drawer till it opens, then pulls out the blouse, black bombazine with vertical pleats that Mother brought from Donegal.

“And it goes with my skirt—”

“He’ll take one peep,” says Grania, sighing with exasperation, “and offer his condolences.”

“One more word,” says Brigid in the tone that Mother would use when she’d had her limit with them, “and I’ll jerk a knot in ye.” She feels a fool, standing there in corset and gauze stockings, girding herself for an excursion with a man she hardly knows, and her sister’s mockery on top of it—

Maeve has to climb on a chair to deal with her hair, plaiting it first then artfully piling it over the pompadour frame on the crown of her head. She does it with the same nimble care as when she hung the cloth to cover the grimy walls, as she applies to the funeral wreaths assembled by lamplight each evening after school. “A dexthrus hand,” Father used to say. “She’ll earn a handsome wage someday.”

“If ye had a poof,” says Grania, “ye could wear it higher.”

“Any higher and I’ll topple from the weight of it. And I haven’t even got the shoes on yet.”

Rivka who scrubs with her at the Musee has loaned her the shoes, calf-high leather with a heel as long as her middle finger.

“They’ll shape up your legs,” she said, winking. “Just in case he gets a gander at em.”

Brigid can’t bend over with the corset on so Maeve kneels to button them up.

There is much discussion over the hat, ending with Grania allowing her the simple black straw as long as Maeve is allowed to decorate it with ribbon and rosettes. Grania studies Brigid’s face as she buttons her collar tight.

“Ye should do yer lips over.”

“I’m a working woman,” says Brigid, “not a streetwalker.”

“It’s not who ye are, it’s the idea of ye they carry in their heads.”

“And what do you know about men?”

Grania sneaks out with older ones, girls sixteen and seventeen with money from their shops and lunchrooms, and Brigid has warned her and threatened her and pleaded with her not to be so fast, to enjoy what she can of life before giving up to the hard weight of family the way that Mother did, just a girl herself when Brigid was born. Mother who was wore out at thirty when they took the boat, and dead within the year.

“I know enough,” says Grania. “Take a few steps and lookit yerself.”

Grania holds the mirror for her and she totters around a bit, getting used to the shoes.

“You look lovely,” says Maeve, on the chair again to pin the newly adorned hat to Brigid’s hair. “Like a queen.”

Brigid turns to kiss her cheek. “Yer a darlin to say so. But I don’t feel like meself at all.”

“It’s only a different you,” says Grania, taking her hand. “A special you.”

“You’ll have a grand time,” says Maeve. “Ride the wheel, shoot the chutes—”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

Neither of the girls has ever been to Coney, and Brigid only the once with Mick Cassiday the bricklayer who was so full that halfway through the day he pulled her out on the crowded beach and proceeded to fall asleep right on the sand, herself sitting on his little square of a handkerchief till his snoring attracted a gang of little mischief-makers and she took the steamer back alone.

“It’ll be loads of fun whatever you do.”

Brigid turns her head this way and that, studying the damage in the ancient looking glass. “Fun,” she says, “has nothing to do with this.”

The girls accompany her down the five dark flights and watch from the stoop as she starts down 38th toward the river in her borrowed shoes. Father stood that way, watching them when Maeve went to make her First Communion, chuffed with pride but firm in his promise never to set foot in a priest-house again after the way they’d banjaxed the great Parnell. A trio of cadets lounging at the corner make their kissing noises at her but stay where they are. After the one incident when Grania was little, words mostly, but words a young girl shouldn’t be hearing, Father had asked a few of the lads from the Clan na Gael to come by and remind the gang they weren’t the only Hibernians in the city with some clout behind them. Since then it’s been the occasional dirty-mouthed pleasantry, but never a hand laid on any one of them.

Harry offered to come for her, of course, gentleman that he is, but if the sight of her wreck of a tenement on Battle Row didn’t chase him the Gopher boys surely would. He’d have given her trolley fare too, if she’d asked, but the boldness of it, asking a man for coins in the hand, made her blush at the thought. American girls could manage such things — Grania was full of stories how’d they’d get this one or that one to treat them, how they did the town and never parted with a cent. Brigid turns left on Ninth, weaving through the crowds and pushcarts of Paddy’s Market, trolley cars rushing overhead, each shopkeeper with a barker in the doorway shouting out wares and prices, scullery maids searching for bargains for their mistresses, dray wagons empty and full rattling up and down the Avenue. The shoes aren’t as bad as she thought, only a matter of leaning forward on her toes, but the corset is a mortification. It is a warm day, and even in the shade under the shop awnings or the Elevated tracks Brigid is soon damp all over, sweat running down her forehead, and begins to feel resentful. This is it, she thinks. Our only adventure, our great single drama in life over in a flash, and then motherhood and the labor of home until the grave. Mr. Manigault is stepping into a hack about now, she imagines, comfortable in his clothing and not a worry on his brow. No wonder the men in Bunbeg were known to wait till their first gray whisker before they married, no wonder the silver-haired gents in the offices she cleans are full of laughter and boasting. Even Rivka’s own intended, a Second Avenue sport Brigid has never liked the look of, nipping off to this new war as if it is a weekend excursion. Her collar is choking her.

Brigid pauses a moment at the corner of 24th Street. Father died here. Scraping horse-pies off the stones, the job his cousin Jack Brennan high in the Twentieth Ward Democrats had secured him, and a pair of university boys racing their phaetons, Father able only to stand and face them and hope they’d pass on either side. The Brotherhood had paid for the funeral, so the eulogies quickly turned to calls for Home Rule and the expulsion of Tory landlords.

“Saint Patrick drove the first nest of serpents from Ireland,” said Jack Brennan, mourning band on his arm and golden harp pinned to his lapel, “and it’s our lot to finish the job!”

Brigid has gone to a few of the IRB dances and thrilled to hear Maud Gonne, tall and elegant, scold the British in her triumph at the Grand Opera Hall, but the blighted nation’s problems are not hers anymore. If she woke tomorrow with Mount Errigal itself looming outside the cottage window she’d throw the blanket back over her head and pray for the nightmare to end.

“The most beautiful spot in the world,” Mother would sigh. “But beauty never filled a stomach.”

He’d been trampled into the stones, Father, first the hooves and then the carriage wheels. Brigid had been called away from work to identify his remains.

She turns west, breathing through her mouth as the stench from the slaughterhouses thickens the air, hurrying now, afraid he’ll be there early and give up on her, looking out for the Tenth Avenue cowboys, young lads who ride up and down ringing their bells to warn of an approaching freight train, then high-stepping over the tracks and there are others now, the girls all putting on style in bright colors and gaudy hats, American girls by the ease of their movement, people joining in streams from north and south, a human flood driving shoulder to shoulder toward the pier, crowded like the flocks of sheep that follow their belled Judas to be butchered at 42nd. Grania was right, she thinks, among this lot I look like a grieving widow and an old one at that. There are some couples, but more groups of girls and groups of young men, pairs, trios, quartets of them, laughing and shouting from group to group and now the smell of the river and thousands on the pier, it must be thousands.

“I’m an eejit,” Brigid says out loud, too late now to turn and fight the current of bodies. She can tell that every eye that falls on her sees nothing but a poor Irish scrubwoman from Hell’s Kitchen itself, an ignorant country cailín tarted up like a spud in a silk handkerchief.

“An eejit,” says Brigid McCool out loud. “And when he sees me he’ll know it for sure.”

It is more people in one place that he’s seen in his life. Harry is not a small man, but his view is blocked by any number of young giants with bowlers tilted high on their heads, and the hot, indecent human crush of them all, men and women together, has him anxious and wet-browed, struggling to keep his feet. This is not his crowd. Many, if not most, are younger, loudly dressed and raucous in their speech, a half-dozen foreign tongues as well as the grating New Yorkese shouted past him as he pushes through with his uneven gait and tries to locate her in the multitude. I’m the freak attraction they’ve come to see, he thinks, or merely an annoyance to be trodden underfoot in their rush for the pleasure boat.

And then there she is, striking in satiny black among the garish stripes and dots of the shouting girls, her glorious red hair pulled up on her head, a calm watcher amid the frenzy. Her smile when she sees him seems reserved and he feels his knees go watery with uncertainty. What can a woman like this see in hapless Harry Manigault?

“I’d almost given up on you,” she says when he reaches her.

“Next time I’ll come for you in a carriage,” he says, stomach tightening at his own boldness. As if he assumes there will be a next time.

“We’d better get on board.”

Harry holds up the tickets he’s bought, limp from the wet of his hands. “They said there’s another in twenty minutes.”

“It won’t be any less of a mob then.”

They walk side by side toward the gangplank, ropes narrowing into a chute, the crowd pressing in on them and Harry takes her arm, trying mightily to even his step and be the leader. The bored-looking ferryman yanks the tickets from his hand—

“Step to the rear, keep moving, step to the rear—”

They push their way to a spot on the starboard rail, bodies and noise all around them, and Harry is twisted with a sudden shyness.

“And how was your week?” he asks finally.

She gives him a sideways glance. “Thursday we polish the glassware,” she says, “and ye can stand or sit. I do look forward to a Thursday.”

He feels chastened by her tone. A cheer goes up, then, as the ferry horn blasts and the boat begins to churn the water, backing out of the slip.

“And yerself?” she asks.

“We made a story. Little boys fool their grandfather with a garden hose.”

“I think I’ve seen it.”

“That would be the French version.”

“Ah,” says Brigid, nodding her head. “If I had any French I would have known.”

She is mocking him, he knows, but in a gentle way.

“And yer machine is well?”

“I’ve been working on a swivel mount for the tripod. It would allow the camera body to be moved—”

“From side to side,” she interrupts, swiveling her head to take in all of the far shore, “like this.”

“Yes, actually, that would allow us to—”

“It would be grand,” she says. “I saw one that was the general who led the byes in Cuba, the fat man—”

“General Shafter—”

“—and he rides on the poor little horse across the variety screen and off into nowheres, not more than a few seconds—”

“Bill Paley shot that before he got sick and the device was damaged—”

“But where is he riding? That’s what we want to know. If you could turn the head — ye told me ye call it that—”

“We do—”

“—ye could follow him along the trail. Even—” and here she raises a finger, imagining the scene, “—swinging the camera view ahead, and see if there’s any Spaniards up in the bushes waiting to do the man harm. I’d have me heart in me throat to see that.”

It shocks him sometimes, how much she understands his work, how interested in it she seems, and then he chides himself for seeing the cartoon and not the woman.

“I’ll have to bring you to the shop sometime,” he offers.

“I’m sure it could use a good cleaning.”

“I meant,” he has to look away, suddenly embarrassed, “I meant to talk to the boys. Your ideas.”

She says nothing, but slips her arm into his again. “Will ye look at Her-self, now.”

They are chugging past Liberty, gulls swooping around her handsome face.

“I saw the photographs when I was a boy. Postcards. But I must say, close up—”

“She came out of a fog.” Brigid turns to look after the statue. “We were all of us sick with the waves and sick with not knowing what was here for us and then Herself—” She shakes her head. “If it had been your eagle, or a man with a rifle in his arms — but one look at Her and I felt, all right now, Brigid McCool, this might turn out well. And then they took us there,” she points to the brick buildings on the low island beyond the Statue, “and they put a hook in me eyelid and peeled it back and asked Father a thousand questions, each one I was sure would be our undoing.”

“You coming on your boat.”

“Yes.”

“I wish I’d been there to greet you.”

She turns to study his face. The ferry churns past the Battery.

“And what would ye have said to me then, a great Donegal brute of a girl in a dress made of sacking and her father’s old brogans?”

Harry feels himself blushing, her bright emerald eyes digging in to him. Niles would have something clever to say, some bon mot to win a girl’s heart that he’d refined through a dozen flirtations. But he is Harry, the quiet one, the lame one, and can only say the first thing that comes to his head. Which might be the truth.

“I would have been made speechless,” he says, “at the sight of you.”

They are quiet then. Brigid squeezes his arm in hers as they lean on the rail together and watch the wheeling seabirds and the river currents clashing and the other boats speeding to and fro, marveling at the great newspaper towers visible from the water, at the structures being built that will soon dwarf them, steaming around the point of Manhattan and churning giddily, if a boat can be allowed an emotion, toward the Brooklyn shore.

They are nearly to the Island when a group of young sports begin to sing—

I’ve seen the Tower of London

The lights of gay Paree

Now I’m off to see the Elephant

Though it mean the end of me

When the Judge speaks of going to see the Elephant it is stories of slaughter from his service during the Great Lost Cause. But these singers are too young for that War. Harry has been told that in the years before he came to New York there was a hotel on Coney, built in the shape of an enormous pachyderm. The rooms in the creature’s head, with their eye-windows and view of the beach, were more expensive than those in the legs, and for a small fee a non-guest could ascend to the observation deck in the howdah on the elephant’s back. But as the immediate neighborhood grew less wholesome the significance of the term was debased until it could be applied to a visit to any house of ill repute—

You may be wise and worldly

They sing—

A rambler bold and free

But until you see the Elephant

You’re as green as green can be!

Brigid, unaware of this darker connotation, trills along gaily.

There are an unthinkable number of people already on the sand and boardwalk at West Brighton.

“Will ye look at us?” says Brigid as they are swept down the gangplank, bright-eyed and pulling him forward into the crush. “It’s the whole city here to throw off their cares.”

Their feet are no sooner on firm ground then a half-dozen touts begin to chatter at them, vaunting their amusements. The West Brighton Hotel is the only solid body in a Bedlam of activity, the rides ahead gyrating and rolling and tumbling and swooping, a cacophony of musics blaring out from them, leaving Harry stunned and looking to Brigid for guidance.

“I’ve never been to the sea creatures,” she says.

The “park” is fenced in, next to the lot where the Elephant Hotel burned. Captain Boyton’s sea lions leap and dive, balance on balls, play the xylophone with their flippers, juggle objects on their noses and pause frequently to gulp down whole fish thrown into their sharp-toothed maws. There are lots of children in the gallery, their wails of wonder and delight mixing with the screams of the adventurers risking life and limb on the Flip-Flap Railroad behind them, whipped completely upside-down for a terrifying moment. The bodies of the sea lions are shiny and supple and Harry cannot keep himself from thinking how beautiful they would look on film.

“I’ve only seen them dead on the strand,” says Brigid, holding a hand to her chest in awe. “Our fishermen kill them with gaffs when they can.” She looks to Harry, apologetic. “It’s that they tear the nets.”

One shoots up from the depths just in front of Harry, flinging water, twisting to stare at him with liquid black eyes. “They look frantic,” he observes, “but not happy.”

“The sea lions or the spectators?”

Harry smiles, but is not sure if she’s being ironic or not. “I meant the animals.”

Brigid watches as each of the dozen clap their flippers together, then dive backward into the pool. “Content, I would say,” she judges, “but no, not happy. Happiness is only something in the human mind, poor creatures that we are.”

The sea lions scoot away through an underwater passage and are replaced by Captain Boyton himself, demonstrating his famous life-saving suit. He lays on his back in the rubber suit, feet forward as he employs a double-bladed paddle to move himself about the pool.

“There are air-pockets in the suit—” Harry explains.

“No doubt.”

“He had the idea of transatlantic ship passengers wearing it. In case of an accident.”

“The women as well?”

“Of course.”

Brigid watches as the Fearless Frogman paddles below them, a small circle of his face visible within the tight rubber hood.

“They’ll never put it on,” she decides. “To be seen in public dressed like that—”

“Death before dishevelment.”

“If my corpse is to be pulled up from the cold ocean, it will be in decent attire.”

Captain Boyton emerges from the water and gives a very brief lecture, finishing with an invitation to observe the celebrated Diving Dobbin perform in the Lagoon behind them. Harry and Brigid make their way with the others, standing together craning up at the platform where a riderless horse steps cautiously to the edge, head low as a boy raps a rolling tattoo on a snare drum, then at the clash of a cymbal gathers itself and leaps splay-legged into the air. Harry feels himself gasp with the others and then the huge splash and the beast churning its legs to reach the ramp at the far end of the lagoon and he can only think of the haunting Biograph view they’ve been showing at Koster and Bials, mules and horses swimming in the waves off Cuba. Niles and some friends had unhitched an old negro’s carriage horse on an excursion to Lake Waccamaw when they were boys, driving it deep into the water by throwing stones, the horse snorting spray out of its great nostrils as it tired, eyes rolling white in panic, treading desperately till some white men came to chase Niles and his friends and catch Harry, too lame to outrun them, and yank him by the ear to where the Judge sat in the shade telling war stories. The Judge had not whipped him, saving that for Niles later, but forced him to apologize to the old uncle.

“That’s a mean way to do him,” the negro kept saying, shaking his head and dabbing at the cuts the stones had opened on the horse’s hide. “That’s a mean way.”

Once Diving Dobbin has climbed out and been led off, shaking himself dry, the Shoot-the-Chutes is back in business.

“Would ye like to try it?” asks Brigid, squeezing his arm and with a hopeful glint in her eye. He hesitates, a lifetime of embarrassments holding him back, and she senses it, adding, “But of course I’d hate to get wet, wouldn’t I?”

They settle for the bleachers and watch the flat-bottomed skiffs sluicing down the channels then flying off the final lip to smack and skitter across the surface of the Lagoon, passengers shouting and laughing and sprayed with water as they desperately grasp the sides and try not to spill out.

“They must have made quite a number of tests for this,” says Harry. “Deciding on the slope of the chute, the design of the boat.”

“Dangerous,” says Brigid, “but not fatal.”

“I’ve never been much of a dare-devil,” Harry admits, then regrets pointing it out.

“There’s not many who are,” says Brigid, rising to leave. “Which is why your fillums are such a sensation.”

They pass under the obscenely grinning Funny Face then, demonic eyes and tombstone choppers gleaming, and into Steeplechase Park. It is another machine with too many moving parts, thinks Harry, and at first he is frozen with indecision, finally allowing Brigid to tug him to a booth where a nickel buys you a dozen chances to break a china plate by throwing a hard black ball. They are a far cry from actual china, of course, but Brigid squeals with glee at each of the three she manages to shatter.

“I knocked one over in a lady’s cupboard last year,” she says, “and it was a day’s wages lost.”

He had thought at first that the plates were prizes, not the object of pleasurable destruction, and is impressed with her skill. “I’d never have hit as many.”

“Oh, we Irish are known for our hurling,” she says, teasing him. “It’s bricks through the landlord’s window and on from there.”

The Steeplechase horses come whizzing around a curve in the track above them, trailing excited screams from the riders. Harry is still smarting from his cowardice at the Shoot-the-Chutes. “There’s not much of a line,” he says, pointing. “We should go.”

Brigid stops to look at him. “Are ye sure?”

“A half a mile in half a minute,” he says, quoting the painted advertisement at the entrance gate. “We have to experience that.”

They climb the stairs, Harry pulling himself up the railing, and are in the second group of eight couples waiting to mount. The height and the steep decline of the first section of track begin to work on his nerves, and he calms himself by imagining what alterations would allow a camera operator to ride with the device in hand and crank film through the aperture. Certainly an assistant behind to keep him from falling off, and a special housing to reduce the bulk of the apparatus. But would the image be only a blur? Would the spectator in the theater grab his hat, gasp in fear, suffer a queasy stomach?

“Who’s first?” barks the loader, a slightly cross-eyed man in shirtsleeves.

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” says Brigid.

“But I’ll block your view.”

“Ladies first, then,” says the loader and taps his foot with impatience as Brigid anchors her hatpin securely, then steps onto the box and takes his hand, deftly arranging her skirt to throw her leg over the back of the hobbyhorse. Harry has a moment of panic but the loader squats down without comment, offering his shoulder for leverage, and he is able to drag his bad leg over the saddle and get himself centered as the other couples arrange themselves. He feels ridiculous for an instant, a grown man on a wooden horse, but then the starter yells “Ready?!” and he puts his arms the only place they can go, snug around her waist, and the nape of her lovely neck close to his lips, the smell of her hair — he has half closed his eyes with the rapture of it when the bell rings and the horses are released, eight across, eight couples screaming as they plunge down and veer sharply this way and that, Brigid clasping his wrist with one of her hands and he can’t tell if that’s her heart beating with excitement under his fingers or his own, pounding his blood out into his extremities, bits of track and safety wall and sky whipping across his eyes, his hat blowing off his head, squeezing the wooden horse between his knees to keep from being flung out into space and then they are falling abruptly and speeding down the final straightaway, second across the finish line and coasting hoarse-voiced to a stop.

They are helped off the wooden steed, Harry reeling with dizziness and taking her hand as they step through the exit tent and all of a sudden there is air blasting up from the floor lifting Brigid’s dress up over her stockings and a negro dwarf in clown paint and horns poking him with a staff that gives him a jolt while a taller white clown jabs a pitchfork at him, trying to separate him from her, Brigid holding her skirt down with her free hand and the other couples around them now receiving the same, the blowholes flouncing colorful lacy undergarments and the men’s hair shooting up at the dwarf’s electric prod and then Harry hears the laughter and realizes they are on a raked stage, being tormented for the jollification of the people who have just come through the ride themselves.

They escape the Blowhole Theater to the bright outdoors together, both blushing, Harry not letting go of her hand and Brigid not asking him to.

“We almost won,” she says finally.

“All else being equal, the heaviest couple will always win.”

“Well, then I certainly did my part.”

She is perhaps an inch taller than Harry, with broader shoulders, but slender of waist and ankle.

“It felt like more than half a minute.”

“If ye hadn’t been there to hold me,” she says, talking loudly over the shouts and music from the Wonder Wheel to their left, “I’d have fainted dead away.”

There is a bin full of hats by the exit gate, and Harry recovers his own.

They wander then, hand in hand, past the pushcart vendors with their clams and corn, their pretzels and red hots, through the Bowery with its penny arcades and Kill the Coon games, its slot machines and dime museums and kinetoscope parlors, Harry cranking the machine to demonstrate how it is the same but different than his motion-picture camera, past the side show with its lackluster freaks of nature slouching out front, settling finally at a restaurant deck overlooking Tilyou’s Bathhouse and the crowded beach beyond. Harry orders clam chowder and crackers for them and they watch the bathers cavort in the waves.

“One of our earliest numbers was taken here,” says Harry. “Cakewalk on the Beach. There are new copies going out every week.”

“You turned a camera on the poor souls.”

Women and men jump and somersault and splash each other in their wet wool costumes, shrieks of joy carried over the steady crash of the waves.

“They were enjoying themselves. You can see that in the view.”

“But they’re being photographed while they’re at it. That changes everything.”

“Does it?”

“Without a doubt. People become shy or they prance about like fools. But they don’t act naturally.”

“Then I suppose we should use a lens that can see from a great distance, like field glasses. Or hide the camera somehow—”

“That would be indecent.”

“To share the joy of these bathers with those who live far from the sea—”

“The story you showed me in the box just now—”

“The kinetoscope.”

“Peeking through the boo-dwar door at some poor woman getting ready for bed.”

“She was an actress.”

“An actress pretending not to know there’s a man grinding his camera-box not four feet away, that’s bad enough, but if it really had been hidden and the girl a normal, innocent person—”

“We wouldn’t do that.”

“Somebody will.”

She hadn’t wanted to stay and watch the others prodded through the blowholes and neither had he, but all day long much of the fun has been to watch other people swept off their feet and tossed about, to see them drenched or frightened into hysterics.

“Then I suppose,” ventures Harry, “that the picture tells you something about the person who photographs it.”

“So it does,” she says. “Until yer camera learns to crank itself.”

There is music drifting from a dance pavilion behind them and after they’ve eaten Harry follows Brigid over to watch from the edge of the floor. The band is small — a piano, bass, drums, and cornet — but skilled enough to hold a hundred dancers in thrall amid the competing noise of the rides and variety halls. Harry watches Brigid watching the dancers, often two young women together till a pair of sports gather the nerve to break them up and partner off, a semicircle of males observing from one side and a semicircle of their opposites on the other. The band shifts into a livelier tune and a few of the bolder couples begin to spin, pressing their faces and bodies tightly together, one arm extended stiffly outward, pivoting around and around at twice the tempo of the music, other couples dancing away to give them room and goad them to even greater speed.

“Spielers,” says Brigid, smiling and shaking her head. “My sister Grania is mad for it.”

It is the moment he has dreaded, the place where he can’t follow her. He feels other men’s eyes on her, bold as wolves, waiting for him to step — to limp away only for a moment and provide them an opening.

The spielers wind down, laughing and hugging, the women repinning their fascinators on their heads, a few couples kissing openly on the crowded floor and here it seems natural, it seems proper, as if in a place where gravity itself is defied all other rules are suspended.

The piano player leads into a slow waltz then, and Brigid pulls at his arm.

“I can’t,” he says, resisting. “One of these other fellows—”

“I’m not with any of these other fellas, am I?” says Brigid, and leads him onto the floor.

Harry stands while Brigid holds his eyes and waltzes around him, taking first his right hand in hers and then his left, stepping in and away, and he loses sense of the others, only the music and Brigid, the grace of her, her hair framing her face, Brigid light in his hand as if she is floating.

At the end of the waltz one of the floormen gives him a nudge.

“A drink for the lady,” he says, “and one for yourself and you can dance your shoes off.”

They step to the concession and he buys a Horse’s Neck, without the whiskey, for Brigid and a Mamie Taylor for himself. He has not told any of the men at the boarding house about her, unable to bear their joking. She is a scrubwoman and he, despite all his education, a tinkerer for a penny vaudeville concern. He can imagine the stock actors who would portray them in a Vitagraph story — a bug-eyed degenerate for him and a man, preferably fat and unshaven and stuffed into a dress, for the Irish maid.

Here lies Molly O’Keene—reads the epitaph on the gravestone at the end of one popular comedy view—Lit a fire with Kerosene.

“It seems we have to pay for our pleasure,” she says, bobbing the spiral of lemon peel in her drink.

“Paradise for a nickel.”

They take their time strolling on Surf Avenue, people still arriving from the excursion ships at the pier, Harry’s heart full to bursting with the wonder of it, this woman who is who she is and chooses to spend a day with him, and finally they take the steam elevator to the top of the old Iron Tower next to the train station. They stand at the rail of the observation deck, three hundred feet high in the sea air, and are watching it all from above when the sun dips below the horizon and they hear a gasp from a quarter million people below. The electric lights are coming on, white lights, colored lights, lights that spin and blink and cycle in undulating patterns, more than you could count if you made a night of it.

“Will ye look at us now,” says Brigid, leaning her head against his shoulder. “Gazing down at the stars. And we haven’t even left the city.”

WAGES OF SIN

Once you know the drill they let you do it in private. Hod pulls the canvas across the opening, which always reminds him of the lowest of the cribs in Leadville, the girls standing outside, smiling and deadeyed, beckoning you to come have some fun, Honey-pie. The cleaning basin is there on a stand, with the Protargol solution and a fresh syringe beside it. He is glad he can do his own now cause it still hurts like hell and the mean prick of an orderly, Corporal Spinks, shoots it up in there fast and hard on purpose.

“What she call herself?” Spinks says, looking you in the eye with that nasty idiot grin of his. “Esmeralda? Trinidad? Consuela?”

“What’s your mother’s name again?” half the men respond. “She was squealing so loud I forgot—”

Then Spinks grins and jams the plunger in.

There is not as much gleet come out as there was yesterday. This is supposed to be a good sign. At first when he saw it, yellow and cheesy-looking on the end of his pecker, Hod was afraid it was one of the tropical diseases the men joke about and exaggerate, or even the start of leprosy which you can see people rotting away with it all over Manila, finger-missing hands out to beg for your loose centavos. The doc says the signs show up between a couple days to a couple weeks after you get it so it has to be the one night with him and Big Ten and Runt and two of his friends from the Minnesotas drunk out of their skulls over to Sampaloc. The Minnesotas have the provost with the Dakotas, wearing white and acting like company bulls, so they know where all the rum and women are kept. It was a slick-looking parlor, with red satin covers laid over the furniture, and Runt’s buddies made a show of chasing the couple Spanish soldiers out.

“You fellas lost the war,” said the big squarehead-looking one, “and got no business enjoyin yourselves. Skedaddle.”

Hod washes it carefully, gingerly, with the yellow soap and tepid water, squeezing the head to get the last of the discharge out.

“Aint handled it this much since I was twelve,” says Corporal Blount from the next enclosure. “Settin in the backhouse, thinking about Mary Jane Riley—”

“Whose name you should not be allowed to speak,” Hod calls back, “in light of your present condition.”

The fellas who only got the clap like Hod are a good deal more whimsical about it than those the doc has condemned with the pox. Medical speculation is bandied about when there are no officers present, and the accepted wisdom is that the whole mercury deal is only a way of further punishing the syphilitics and in the long run won’t cure a hangnail.

“Oh Lordy!” Blount exclaims in pain on the other side of the panel. “The consequences of moral turpitude.”

Hod lowers the syringe into the brown bottle and draws it full of Protargol. They say it’s silver in the solution that kills the bugs, fine silver dust stirred up so you can’t see it, and Hod wonders if he could have dug up any of what he’s pumping, slowly, very slowly, damn that hurts, into what the doc keeps calling his urinary meatus.

If the girl, Corazón, who seemed nice enough, had told him he was going to have to stick a needle up his peehole every day for two weeks he might have had second thoughts. Runt passed out on a couch, sick as a dog from the rum, but the Minnesotas said he always does that, can’t handle it, and them and Big Ten went too, each with a different girl, yet he is the only one of them here in the clap shack. He wasn’t even that keen on it, only full-on drunk for the first time since San Francisco and doing what the others wanted, and it is just the odds caught up to him, like how he figures it must be on the battlefield.

“Don’t hardly make sense to duck or hide,” says Corporal Grissom in his platoon, whose daddy chased Cheyenne in the regulars. “Bullet got your name on it, it’s gonna come find you.”

Hod pulls the works out and wants to pee right away, the burning and the pressure just awful, but you got to hold it five minutes.

Spinks is waiting when he pulls the canvas curtain open.

“It fall off yet?”

Hod ignores him and hobbles off toward the shitter. They give you some little woven-straw slippers that got nothing behind the heel, so the whole ward of them are shuffling like the old whiskey-soaked paretics he’s seen on Skid Road, the pox gone to their brains.

He crosses paths with the chaplain, who hangs a glare of disapproval on his mug before he comes into the ward most every day to gloat over the ones so far gone they can’t get out of bed. “Malingerers” is the nicest thing the chaplain has called any one of them, but you suppose it’s part of the treatment, Uncle paying you to shoot at Spanish boys and now the natives and not to get infected by the local queridas. Manigault has been riding him since Denver, like the rest of the company won’t figure out their lieutenant is a poker cheat and a humbug without Hod telling them, so it is something of a relief to be in here, now that he’s sure it’s nothing that will kill or unman him. The doc isn’t so bad as long as you hand over a glass of your pee now and then for him to ogle at under his microscope, and the chuck is passable even with meat crossed off the diet.

The clap patients outnumber the syphilitics three to one and there are a couple fellas who got other problems with their kidneys that they put up right next to the shitter. Hod nods to one of them from his company, Loftus, who is propped up to almost a sitting position.

“How’s it going?”

Yesterday Loftus said “Not so good” but today he is a bad color and just looks at Hod like he’s somehow at fault for it all. There is white folks and black folks, thinks Hod, rich folks and poor folks, Spanish and Filipinos, but there is no greater gulf than the one between the sick and the well.

And he’s not that well.

There are maybe a half-dozen of his fellow sinners, what the wags in the hospital have taken to calling “Rough Riders,” lined up at the trough, a couple of them with their pocket watches swinging in front of their faces. Every few seconds one will let it go and moan in anguish or curse or just gasp a quick deep breath as the Protargol and what it carries splashes down onto the metal. Hod is careful not to stand too close to any of them.

“Back on the firing line,” says Blount, shuffling up beside him.

“I figure another minute.”

“Yeah.”

“You wonder who she got hers from.”

“We are all brothers under the foreskin.”

“What’s that mean?”

“If you follow the chain, somebody gives it to somebody else, they pass it on — hell, it could go back to Moses.”

“Moses had the clap?”

“No, but I bet a couple them old boys dancing around the Golden Calf had it. Only they had to persevere without the wonders of modern medicine. Half the damn population must have been in tears every time they took a leak.”

“I say it’s five.”

“Feels like ten. Ready, aim—”

Blount makes a high whine that comes out through his nose, while Hod grunts an “ah — ah — ah — ah—” as he urinates, both men tilting their heads back and squinching their eyes shut. Afterward there is water and soap set out to wash it again and towels for drying and then a fresh-cleaned sock to pull over it and keep the new discharge from staining your hospital togs.

“I’d have worn this sock over it when I rolled that señorita,” Blount observes, “I wouldn’t be in this fix.”

She wore a lot more powder than Addie Lee ever did, this girl who give it to him, but seemed nice and friendly and not in a hurry. She was rounder than Addie, too, round in a nice way, and looked to be some kind of mix of Spanish and Filipino, though the people here look so many different ways it’s hard to get a handle on them. She called him “Yankee Boy.”

When he’s finished Hod goes to look for Lan Mei. The corpsman, not Spinks but the other who doesn’t seem to want to be there, says that she was left behind by a pack of nuns who used to run this ward till they set sail for the motherland. Some of the fellas say she was a whore like all the Chinese girls who come from Hongkong and the sisters brought her to the light and give her a job dumping bedpans, but that is only a rumor. There are no women allowed on the venereal ward at all but they’ve seen her in the hallway and one sergeant from the Nebraskas who has since been shipped home smuggled a pint in and got pickled and started railing about how she sneaks in at night and smothers white men with a pillow.

Hod finds her in the little room just off the kitchen, wearing gloves and using tongs to drop the syringes from the morning irrigation into a large kettle of boiling water.

“Mei.”

“You still here, huh?” She shouts a little when she is teasing him, but otherwise has a nice voice, soft and deep for a woman.

“I could go back to my unit any time,” says Hod, “only I’m stuck on you.”

“Stuck.”

“Enamored.” He is a little embarrassed to use the fancy word and wonders if she understands it. Their eyes don’t show as much as a white girl’s, and maybe that means they can’t pretend so much.

“You don’ think right,” she says, attending to her work. “Too much time inna sun.”

She knows that is not what is wrong with him, knows which ward he comes from, but doesn’t seem to care. The steam from the kettle turns to a thin film of water on her face and her hair is wet where it peeks out of the cloth she has tied it back in. He’s seen the other fellas say things at her or about her but none ever really stops to talk and she seems alone, alone as a person can be, though this is more her country than his.

“So where you come from, Mei?”

“Born in Guangxi.”

“What’s that like?”

Mei looks up at him, wipes the wet from her face with the back of her sleeve. “Work in a field. Leave there when I’m a little girl, go to Hongkong.”

Hod decides not to ask her what she did in Hongkong. She is skinny like Addie Lee but not from the consumption or they wouldn’t let her work in a hospital.

“We stopped by there for coal,” says Hod. “But they wouldn’t even let us off the ship.”

“You pretty sorry bugger, then, huh?”

He has to laugh. “Yeah, that would be me.” Disgrace to his uniform or no, Hod thinks, before I go back to the company I am going to try to kiss this woman.

One of the doc’s adjutants steps in then and asks what he is doing there.

“I found a syringe on the floor,” Hod tells him. “I just brung it in.”

The officer looks at the black mark on Hod’s sleeve and makes a disgusted face. “Get back to your ward.”

“Yes sir.”

He pauses in the kitchen to listen and is relieved when the adjutant has nothing to say to Mei. A sad-eyed private who looks sicker than most of Hod’s bunkies is stirring a huge cauldron full of bubbling oatmeal with a wooden paddle.

“Got any bacon loose?” Hod asks.

“Venereals don’t get bacon,” says the mess private. “Scramble, pal.”

Baba always blamed it on her clown feet. Baba was his father’s only son and started with twenty mu to plant but liked to drink and liked to gamble and by the time Mei was born he had lost half of it. Her mother was very beautiful and had the lotus feet and gave him two sons, but the winter Mei was old enough to have hers bound Ma was under the influence of the yang gweizi and only got as far as cutting her toenails. She had a bowl of pig’s blood and the bandages ready but when Mei came in from numbing her feet in the snow Ma said “No, this is why the yang gweizi say we are stupid people and I will not do it to her.” It was the first time she saw Baba hit her mother, chasing her out in the yard with a stick of firewood and Mei crying, crying because he was beating her mother and because now she would never have lotus feet. Baba came back in alone, saying “What do these yang gweizi have to do with us?” but he had no idea how to bind feet and when Ma came back later, her face bruised, she threw out the pig’s blood and gave the bandages to Mrs. Hong for when her daughter turned four. When Mei’s brothers came inside they sensed that something was very wrong and did not speak. Nobody spoke for days.

Baba never liked Mei after that. Before, he would let her walk behind the donkey to the market to sell their sweet potatoes and then let her ride in the side basket on the way home. After, he would only look at her and say that she was born in the year of the Great Famine and was a curse on the family, and if she was going to have clown feet she would have to work in the fields with the boys.

Ma had followed the White Lotus way until the governor started putting those people in prison and many of them went to join the yang gweizi, who were yellow-haired beings from a land in the north where there was always snow. At that time if you bothered their followers they would complain to the other yang gweizi in Pekin, who would tell the Empress who would send soldiers to whip you. Even though Ma was a Christian she still bowed to the sun once every morning, noon, and evening and when she went to her knees to pray it was the old sutras she repeated over and over.

“What good is it for you to be a Christian,” Baba said, “unless they give us food in the winter?”

“They have taken a vow of poverty,” Ma would explain. “And besides, the kalpa is about to end and we cannot know what will follow.”

When she was eight, Baba gave Mei a basket to collect dung. She spent most of her day by the road that passed the sheng-yuan’s fields because he had more land than anybody, more than one hundred mu that he planted with giaoliang, and more animals to work in it. She hid in the ditch by the edge of the field, watching the mules or the oxen being driven, and when one unburdened itself she would wait till the man driving the beast had moved it past a ways and then run to gather the dung, scooping it into the basket with her hands and running back to the ditch before he could turn the animal around. The best were the days when a caravan would pass by on the way to Qingdao and she could follow the camels. It only took a few camels to fill the basket. Ling-Ling, who was the sheng-yuan’s puppy, would find her in the ditch some days and they would play. Sometimes he would try to follow her home and Mei would have to throw a ball of dung as far as she could for the puppy to chase and then run away with the basket. Eldest Brother said she was the fastest girl he had ever seen, but of course that was because even the other Christians in the village let their daughters have lotus feet.

Ma was always pleased if it was camels, especially in the winter when fuel for the fire was scarce. Mei hated winter because there was no hired work for Baba and he drank more and because it was always smoky inside their hut and freezing when she had to go out and squat to make her own dung on the pile next to the door. She didn’t like it in the summer either when the flies tickled your bottom but the cold was worse.

One day in the winter when she had a basketful from the camels and it was almost dark and she was hurrying home there was a wolf eating something in front of the Chans’. The Chans were very poor, only straw on top of their mud hut instead of reeds like at Mei’s, and at first she was afraid because Mrs. Chan had just lost a baby and the poorest people would throw the little bodies outside for the animals. But when the wolf stepped away to look at her Mei saw that it had killed a pig, black bristles stained with red. The wolf’s eyes were like ice watching her. Mei circled around in the stubble on the far side of the road, but when she came back to the path the wolf began to walk after her. Mei walked backward. She used to practice walking backward sometimes because Second Brother said it was a good way to confuse evil spirits. The wolf began to catch up and she tossed a handful of the camel dung, which was still warm, onto the road and kept backing up. The wolf stopped to sniff the dung for a moment and she walked faster but still didn’t turn her back to it. As terrifying as the wolf was to look at she knew it would be worse if it was behind her and she couldn’t tell how close. It began to trot toward her, making up distance, and this time when she threw dung at it the wolf only shied away and kept coming. They were only halfway to her home, which was at the edge of the village, and it was winter so there were no men in the fields. Even the fastest of girls cannot outrun a long-legged wolf.

That was when she heard Ling-Ling barking. The dog was in the last of the sheng-yuan’s fields, ears back and shaking all over, taking three steps forward and three back as she barked, her little paws nearly lifting off the ground with each high-pitched yip. The wolf looked at Mei, then took a few steps toward Ling-Ling and Mei began to run backward, dropping the basket to the road. The wolf turned and started after her again, loping, and Mei turned toward home and ran faster than she had ever run to gather dung.

Mei could hear her own breath and hear the feet of the wolf on the dirt of the path behind her and Ling-Ling running parallel to them, barking, and then she could hear the wolf getting very close and Ling-Ling too, barking hysterically, and then a low snarl and Ling-Ling yelping and Mei ran, hollering now, hollering for her mother and there was Ma coming out into the yard tottering with her lotus gait, arms spread wide for balance and screaming, picking up the rusty ax with the split handle that Baba used to cut wood if there was ever wood and Mei hearing the wolf after her again, Mei running, running straight past her hobbling mother into the hut to leap on top of the k’ang and shake, breathless and crying, and Ma scolding the wolf as she backed into the hut with the ax in her hands, the wolf stalking her on one side and then the other with its head so low it almost touched the ground until Ma backed inside and slammed the door shut.

Mei was still shaking when Ma put a new pile of sticks and grass into the fire under the k’ang, still shaking, even with Ma holding her, when both her brothers came home, surprised by the story, and said there was no sign of a wolf outside. And shaking still when Baba came in, drunk from the baijiu.

“A wolf is a very bad omen,” he said, reeling around the smoky room. “A very bad omen. She has cursed us again.”

“If I listened to you about her feet,” said Ma, “we would have no daughter.”

Mei waited for him to say that was right, that they were all very lucky, but he only snorted. Her brothers went to sit in the far corner and scowl then, because they knew there would be no dinner tonight. Ma sat on the k’ang holding Mei, rocking her, not even looking at Baba while he paced the few steps from wall to wall and complained that the foreign devils had cursed them all.

“They dance naked to stop the rain,” he said. “They poisoned our donkey and called the locusts onto the field. They steal the part that comes out after a baby is born and keep it in a jar to make potions, and they dig up the dead to steal their eyes.”

Ma only looked away and rocked Mei, waiting to see if he would tire and lie down first or if she would be beaten, but then there was shouting outside and someone banging on their door.

It was the lantern-bearer for Zhou, the sheng-yuan. Zhou himself was behind, sitting in the wheelbarrow that Mr. Chan’s eldest son wheeled him around in. Baba could not speak at first, the sheng-yuan never having stopped at their hut before, certainly not on a winter night, and could only kowtow with his mouth hanging open.

“The sheng-yuan is looking for Ling-Ling,” said the lantern-bearer.

Baba only stared, not understanding, as smoke from the fire poured past him out into the dark night.

“Ling-Ling is his dog,” Ma hissed softly from the k’ang.

The sheng-yuan pointed through the doorway at Mei.

“I am told this girl plays with it. And steals dung from my fields.”

Mei still trembling, chilled to her bones with fear, could only shake her head. The sheng-yuan, who could barely read and had bought his position, had eyes like the wolf.

“She has not seen it,” said Ma softly, not looking at anybody.

“She says she has not seen it,” said Baba, his voice shaking. “I am sorry.”

The sheng-yuan made a grunt then, and immediately the lantern-bearer was trotting away in front as Mr. Chan’s eldest son hustled Zhou away in the wheelbarrow.

Baba shut the door and sat heavily on the floor and began to weep.

“Now we are ruined,” he said between sobs. “He thinks she has killed his dog.”

After that there was no more Ling-Ling to play with in the ditch and at night when they rolled their mattresses out on top of the k’ang Baba was always on the far side and then Eldest Brother and then Second Brother and then Mei and then Ma. Ma’s legs started to hurt her more than ever, though she never complained about it. Sometimes before Baba came home she would sit on the k’ang and stretch them out one at a time for Mei to rub.

“I used to feel bad,” she said to her daughter, “and sometimes I wondered if it was not too late to turn your toes under. But now I know. If we have lotus feet the wolves will catch us.”

For two years there was no rain and the next year there was too much rain and there was only boiled millet to eat with no salt or soy and sweet potatoes that were rotten by the end of the winter and even the sheng-yuan, who grew his sorghum to brew into baijiu, began to look hungry. He was the only one in the village who lived in a house behind walls like the yang gweizi in Weifang did, the only one who wore clothes of cloth that was not spun at home. There were mulberry orchards in the next village, and oak for pongee, and years ago Ma’s family had all been silk weavers, but now nobody had the money to buy silk unless it was for a wedding. For a wedding people bought it to make a dress and hired a boy as a crier to warn you there was a bride coming by and Mei would stand out front of the hut with her mother, her mother’s hand on Mei’s shoulder for balance, and watch the bride be carried past in her chair. Mei would always look first to the red veil, trying to see through to the girl’s face and know if she was crying or smiling, and then her eyes would go to the tiny feet, delicate triangles in beautiful beaded slippers. The men carrying the brides were professional porters, paid by the number of li they had to travel, and kept the chair as steady as if it was floating down a peaceful river.

“Don’t worry,” Ma would always say, reading Mei’s thoughts when the procession passed out of sight. “When this kalpa ends things will be different. Men will want girls with feet like yours.”

At the rumor of the next spring Baba kicked her awake and told her she was coming with him and her brothers to work in the field. The field was full of weeds and every one of them had to be pulled and burned before the ground could be broken to receive the seed. Baba stood over Mei, scolding whenever she missed a weed or broke the stem without pulling up the roots.

“If you are going to look like a man,” he said, “you will learn to work like one.”

Mei didn’t mind the work, which was different than what Ma did in and around the hut. You breathed less smoke. She only felt bad when people would stop on the road to stare at her.

“You have a mule there,” said Yip who did not own land but lived in a hut where men went to drink baijiu and gamble and meet with wicked women. “Neither a horse nor a donkey.”

A week later Baba hired her brothers out to work in the sheng-yuan’s fields. Most days after that he would just sit and smoke tobacco and watch Mei work, shouting if he disapproved of something she did or did not do. Mei missed being with her mother and wished she had a puppy like Ling-Ling to walk along with her and chase butterflies while she was pulling weeds or driving the young ox rented from Mr. Hong around the wet field with a switch or poking holes with a stick and planting seed or spreading the dung from the pile next to the door or pulling up the next growth of weeds. But when there was not too little rain nor too much and the locusts decided not to come, the millet began to grow, and Mei was proud. She had made that happen. She began to watch the sky and smell the air like the other farmers did, began to search the stalks for insects whenever she walked in the field, began to dream about things that might hurt her crop. Sometimes, if she watched very carefully, she could see it growing taller.

One day while she was pulling more weeds and Baba was sitting on the little stone wall smoking tobacco, Feng, who hired men for the sheng-yuan’s fields and supervised his harvest, stopped to talk to him.

“This soil is weary of millet,” he said looking out at the crop, which was then no more than two feet high. “It will yield very little.”

“I would grow pearls,” said Baba, who according to Ma had been a clever man when he was young, happy even without drink, “if only I could afford the seed.”

“There is something better than pearls,” said Feng. “Everybody in Dang-shan is planting it.”

Baba tried not to look the foreman in the eye, instead staring out past Mei to his little ten mu.

“Is the sheng-yuan going to grow it in his fields?”

Feng shook his head. “He is not so hard-hearted. He would not deprive his neighbors of their sorghum wine.”

“Growing poppy flowers in forbidden,” said Baba, looking into the sky.

“What is forbidden here,” smiled the foreman, “is determined by the sheng-yuan. If you decide to change your crop, as many here are doing, I can give you the seeds without charge. But when you gather the gum you must sell it to me.”

“How much is it selling for?”

Feng put his finger to his lips. “We must not speak of such things. I only wish to leave you something to consider.”

Baba left the field in millet and it was the best crop in years. But the men who had grown poppy flowers were boasting and wearing real metal coins strung around their necks after their harvest and every night there was noise from the crowd at Yip’s hut.

“Pay no mind to those people,” Ma told Baba. She was saying her sutras more than ever and calling on the Eternal Mother even though she could no longer kneel like a Christian. “What is won too easily does not last.”

“They do not work as hard as I do,” said Baba, who only helped Mei during the harvest when he was afraid the grain might shatter if left too long on the stalk. “But they have twice as much in their palms at the end of it.”

There was enough to eat that winter. Ma made noodles once, and once Baba brought home a chicken he had won gambling.

“Too bad you don’t eat meat,” he said to Ma. “It will be torture for you to cook this.”

Most years he only got to tease her about being a White Lotus at New Year, when they spent their savings to buy pork buns and Ma would only eat the outside.

The next year Feng came to talk to Baba even before planting, but he had Mei put in the millet seed again. That was the year Quan Chuntao, who was Mei’s age, was taken as a bride by a young man in a village outside of Weifang and Eldest Brother was taken by the soldiers to fight against the Dwarf Bandits. Once again there was not too much or too little rain and only the usual insects and the crop was nearly up to Mei’s chin when Second Brother came home to say he had been let go from working in the sheng-yuan’s fields.

That night they were already asleep on the k’ang when there was a banging on the door and Baba went to it holding the rusted ax. It was poor Mr. Chan, who had taken to begging and sleeping outside since his wife died, shouting that there was a fire in Baba’s field.

There was a big moon and if Mei had not weeded and planted and weeded till her hands bled she would have thought the fire beautiful. As the night breeze swept it across the field, grasshoppers, some of them on fire, buzzed into the air just ahead of the flames. The breeze pushed the fire to the stone wall by the road and soon there was nothing left.

“We are cursed,” said Baba, his face black from the blowing soot, flecks of ash in his hair. “She has cursed us.”

The next day Mei was with Baba in the charred field, looking for burned animals they could eat, when Zhou stopped on the road. He had a sedan chair now, with silk curtains and four porters wearing a kind of uniform who carried it, and he wore a long silk vest and a hat that had a jeweled button on it to signify that he was a sheng-yuan. Mei stood by the wall while Baba climbed over to squat by Zhou’s chair and be spoken to.

“You are an unlucky man,” said the sheng-yuan. “We will have to discover who has done this to you and see that they are punished.”

“I have nothing,” said Baba, looking at the ground.

“Nobody starves in my village,” said Zhou. “I will have Feng bring you some seed, and you will plant again. They say a fire is good for the soil.”

“You are very kind.”

The sheng-yuan looked at Mei then with his wolf’s eyes and gestured for her to come forward. When she put her leg over the stone wall he began to laugh.

“What clown feet!” he said. “Your daughter is very beautiful — above the knees. You are truly an unlucky man.”

When the sedan chair and its passenger had passed Baba slapped Mei in the face.

Mr. Chan was arrested then and charged with setting the fire, worse, accused of lighting it with a match he had been given for that purpose by the yang gweizi. The village was told to gather by the gate in front of the sheng-yuan’s house, gathering obediently to watch Mr. Chan beaten one hundred strokes with the bamboo cane before he was taken away with a yoke around his neck. The sheng-yuan came out to warn all of them to be wary of the foreign devils, who were all spies for the Dwarf Bandits who were making war on the Empire. He offered free baijiu for the men then, and when Baba finally danced home he was with a half-dozen others, all of them ready to go to war. Ma was having her bleeding and he held her down and yanked away the rag and went out to the others saying they were going to Weifang to wipe the dirty blood on the house of the yellow-hair yang gweizi and break their spells.

It took Mei a week to rake the ash in the field till it was even. Then after a little rain Feng came with the seed and watched her plant the first handfuls.

“Not so deep as the millet,” he said. “Put it in rows with space to walk in between. This is gold you are planting.”

Ma’s left foot had begun to smell, and soon she could only walk on one leg using a crutch that Second Brother made for her.

“I was as pretty as you,” she said to Mei one night before either of the men had come. “Would you believe that? And then I was married. Mei, your feet have saved you again.”

“If I don’t marry,” Mei asked, “what will I be?”

Ma thought a long time about it. She was in less pain than usual but weaker, her eyes growing cloudy, and she smelled too sweet, like fruit fallen to rot.

“When this kalpa ends,” she said finally, “and it will be very soon, there will be a way for you. It will be a difficult way, terrifying, but you must stay on the path and never despair.”

“Like when I ran from the wolf.”

Ma squeezed Mei’s arm then. As Mei’s arms had grown stronger Ma’s had turned to sticks.

“Running may not be possible.”

Baba was very worried about the new crop, never having grown flowers before. Every day he scolded Mei, telling her not to crush the new plants under her big feet as she searched for weeds to pull. In only two weeks the sprouts came out, and after a month and a half it looked like they were growing tiny cabbages. And then the plants began to rise. Baba would brag to Second Brother, who had been taken on again in the sheng-yuan’s fields as an act of charity, that he was going to have the finest poppy-flower crop in the village, and Ma would cover her ears so she wouldn’t hear. Most years she put a smear of honey on the lips of their kitchen-god statue so in the New Year it would say sweet things about them when it flew to report to the Jade Emperor. Now she covered his whole head with clay so he could not see or hear what had become of her family.

“The four walls that we must escape in this life,” said Ma, who was more of a White Lotus than ever now that she could barely walk, “are liquor, lust, anger, and wealth.”

Baba and Second Brother laughed.

“We have escaped from wealth thus far,” said Baba. “Maybe this year we will let it catch us.”

Three months after the sowing, Mei’s plants began to blossom. The petals were crimson red, the color of happiness, and more beautiful than anything she had ever seen. But in only a few days they began to fall off the plants, carpeting the ground in red and leaving a little green ball on top of the stem.

The balls were growing fatter each day by the time Eldest Brother returned from fighting the Japanese. Everybody in the village knew that the Imperial Army had failed, had somehow been defeated by the Dwarf Bandits and their yang gweizi weapons, and so the family could not have a public celebration. Baba and Ma were excited though, even if Eldest Brother looked like a different person and was not at home in his body anymore, as if the Imperial officers or the Dwarf Bandits had stolen his spirit. He was going to be an escort, he said, a guard for the caravans passing from the mountains to the sea, but most days he only sat around drinking and gambling with the pu hao at Yip’s and people in the market said he was a salt smuggler. Then he joined a group called the Obedient Swords and on market days would appear with them to demonstrate how they could whip their swords at each other but always duck or leap over the blade and never be cut. Eldest Brother was the one who had to pass through the crowd with a rice bowl, asking for the audience to contribute money for their further training. He never came home to visit.

“The foreign devils have put a spell on Ma,” he told Second Brother when he saw him at the market. “They are making her rot while she is still breathing and it is unlucky to look at her.”

The plants were as high as Mei’s breasts and the green balls the size of hens’ eggs when it was time to harvest. Feng came to show them how to do this, bringing Mei a special slicer, a wooden handle with three slivers of glass stuck in it.

“Choose only the pods that are standing at attention, like this one,” he said, demonstrating. “Then make a cut, up and down, on three sides. Wait until the sun is three hands from the ground before you do this, or the nectar will dry too quickly and not flow out. In the morning you take this other blade and scrape off the gum, but be careful not to hurt the pod, because it can be milked many times.”

There was so much work to be done that even Baba had to help every morning, scraping the pods that had been scored and then slicing the newly ripe ones in the late afternoon. Ma refused to help drying the gum they collected, so he had to tend to that as well, even boiling some down to a brown paste in the cooking pot and then drying it more. Ma only watched him with her cloudy eyes, sitting on the k’ang all day, unwilling to help him keep the fire going for his business and unable to cook because he always had opium boiling in the pot. Mei came in late from the field, sticky with poppy gum, and had to help Ma outside to relieve herself on the dungpile. Second Brother came to say he was moving to the barracks the sheng-yuan kept for his workers. At night it was only the three of them, Mei trying to rub the gum off her fingers and Ma sitting on the k’ang looking into the next world and Baba sitting on the floor under the window smoking opium in his pipe, his eyes as cloudy as Ma’s.

The pods were milked out in two weeks and then Mei had to cut them off and leave them in the sun to dry. The day she cut them open to take the seeds out was the day that Ma died.

The hut was ripe with the sweet smell of her. Mei came home just as the sun hid behind the earth and Baba was already on the floor with his cheeks wet with tears, smoking opium, Ma laying flat on the k’ang with a white cloth laid over her face.

Eldest Brother took charge then because Baba could barely breathe without weeping. He came home from the swordsmen and burned spirit money in front of the hut and poured a ring of sorghum wine around it. Feng sent word that the sheng-yuan would offer credit on the opium paste that was still drying, and a coffin was ordered and a new set of white clothing for Baba and Mei and her brothers and even for Ma. Mei was allowed to help prepare the body with Mrs. Hong, taking Ma’s old clothes off to burn and cleaning her and dressing her in the new white clothes and the beautiful beaded slippers from the day she was married. Mei had never seen her mother’s feet naked before, and they were not beautiful. Mrs. Hong held a cloth dipped in jasmine water over her nose because the smell was too powerful, and put the powder on Ma’s face and put her brass earrings on and covered her face with a yellow cloth and her little wasted body with a sky-blue one.

Eldest Brother lifted Ma into the coffin and put up an altar at the foot of it. Because Ma had a bad ending very few people came. Mei remembered only a paid monk chanting prayers and Ma’s older sister crawling into the hut on her knees. Eldest Brother broke Ma’s comb in two pieces, putting one half into the coffin and giving the other to Mei, and then Ma was gone from the earth.

Feng did not wait the forty-nine days of mourning, incense still burning at the altar, before he came to sit with Baba.

“A death in the family is a very hard thing,” he said, sitting cross-legged on the k’ang and drinking the tea Mei had served him. “Very expensive. The coffin, paying the monk, clothing — with all that the sheng-yuan has advanced to you, I can only pay twelve tiao for what you have harvested and what you have cooked.”

Baba only nodded. Twelve tiao was more than he had had in his palm for many years. The foreman sighed.

“But now you have no real woman to tend to this house,” he said, as if Mei was not squatting on the floor only a few feet away from him, “and no son to work in your field. It will be difficult. You will have to hire someone to do these things, and that costs money.”

“I have seed drying,” said Baba, picturing the twelve tiao disappearing into the hands of strangers. “And my Second Son will come back.”

Feng shook his head sadly. “He is contracted to the sheng-yuan, and owes him money for food and shelter. A contract is a sacred obligation. However, I know people in the South,” and here he glanced at Mei, “who are looking for girls to work for them. People willing to pay a good price.”

She wanted Baba to say he would not sell her, that she was too good a worker, wanted at least to hear him say her name out loud, but he only nodded and said, “This flower-growing is not so easy as it looks.”

Later he filled his pipe with opium and sat on the k’ang and smoked, silent as always, staring at Ma’s altar while Mei tended the fire. It was beginning to be winter, wind moaning outside their hut, and Mei thought she heard barking and wondered, as she never had before, if dogs might have spirits and if Ling-Ling might come back to haunt her.

One day all the opium paste was gone and Baba came home drunk like he used to, singing to himself and jingling coins in a sack. Mei did not speak to him, did not even look at him. When he fell asleep he lay on top of the sack and Mei had to stay awake watching him, her breath showing in the cold hut as she waited. It was almost light when he stirred and rolled over and she eased the sack away and emptied it on the floor and counted the coins. She was worth less than thirty tiao.

My feet will save me again, Mei thought as she pulled all her clothes on, layer after layer, and started out into the village. Nobody was on the road. Nobody was awake in Yip’s hut, but the door was unbarred, and she stepped over the bodies of the sleeping pu hao until she found Eldest Brother in the arms of a wicked woman. He was not pleased to see her.

“Why would you want to stay with Baba when he treats you like a dog?” he said without sitting up. The wicked girl lying with him was named Ai and was only a year older than Mei, a third daughter who had been sold to Yip when no husband could be found for her. “Go with Feng — the people in the South aren’t so bad.”

As she left, Yip woke up and cursed her for leaving the door open.

Mei began to run as she passed their hut again, worried that Baba might wake and find his coins melting in the fire. The workers were just coming into Zhou’s fields as she passed, cutting the last of the giaoliang, which was twice as tall as Mei. She asked for Second Brother, who she had not seen since the burial, and when she found him he was on his knees chopping the stalks with his knife. He turned and smiled when she called his name and she saw that his teeth were blackened like the other workers’, blackened from chewing opium paste.

“Is something wrong with Baba?” he asked.

“I have only come to say goodbye.”

She ran down the road then, away from the village, away from the sheng-yuan’s fields, vowing that she would not stop until she was in a place she had never seen before, running even faster as she passed through the market. It was not market day but there was a caravan, the porters pulling down the tents where they had spent the night. Feng was with them.

“Ah,” he smiled when he saw Mei and caught hold of her arm, squeezing tight. “We were just coming for you.”

Niles says he is there to visit Private Burns and is waved through.

“He’s in isolation,” says the orderly, lowering his voice meaningfully. “Doesn’t look like he’ll see tomorrow.”

Burns and a half-dozen others from the company are in with the typhoid, no surprise in this pesthole, and the flux is ubiquitous within the volunteers, not to mention the growing number sidelined by the wages of sin. The life of a soldier. Niles checks to be sure the orderly is not watching after him and then cuts left toward the dispensary. The air is laced with ammonia and carbolic acid, stinging his eyes and the back of his throat. No telling in what manner the Spaniards, never the most hygienic of races, operated the hospital, but the Medical Corps have obviously given it a thorough scouring. Niles pauses at the doorway of one of the ambulatory wards, men chatting in groups or with playing cards laid out on the beds between them, the legs of the beds standing in small pans of liquid, kerosene most likely, to keep the marauding squadrons of biting ants from climbing up onto the patients as they sleep. Plain water had been used for this purpose in Cuba until it was found to breed mosquitoes, which proceeded to torment and re-infect the quarantined unfortunates. One of the ambulatories looks his way.

It is the hard-rock miner, late of Skaguay, dressed in Army-issue pajamas and slippers.

“Enjoying yourself, Private?”

The miner, who was Brackenridge and then McGinty and now something else, is not happy to see him.

“The chuck’s no better in here,” he says with an insolent tone, “but I prefer the company.”

He is a chronic kicker, this one, not so much in words as with his attitude — the way he looks at you and moves his body a challenge to every order. Harboring some grudge, perhaps, or just incorrigible. Niles looks beyond him into the wardroom. “So this is where they house the slackers.”

“Venereals,” says the private, turning to walk away from him. “Watch out you don’t catch something.”

Supply Sergeant Slocum is in the solarium, talking with a mopey-looking artilleryman who slumps in a rattan-backed rocker. Slocum sees Niles, nods almost imperceptibly. The sergeant is something of a wizard with figures, and like many similarly afflicted, believes this increases his ability to fill an inside straight. A fantasist, doomed to be mulcted even without Niles’s dexterous mastery of pasteboard royals.

“In the morgue,” the man mutters as he brushes past. “Give me five minutes.”

Slocum’s camera, an old Turner Bull’s-Eye forfeited in the same poker game, hangs from a strap around Niles’s shoulder. There is a handsome slant of sun coming into the high-ceilinged room from the east windows — he pulls the device out and kodaks the long row of convalescents in their rockers, hoping the light will be sufficient. A Chinaman he’s found in Binondo makes prints most reasonably, and the Judge has written that he is eager for views of “the Pearl of the Orient” and the American boys who have liberated it. Harry was always the photo bug, even learning to develop his own snaps, but never goes anywhere interesting enough to record.

Corporal Grissom, who shilled for Niles in the game, was rewarded with Slocum’s pocket watch.

The morgue is at the rear of the building, cool and windowless, with its own peculiar smell. There is a body on a draining table, rigid beneath a rubber sheet.

“Passed this morning,” says Sergeant Slocum when Niles arrives, his voice echoing under the vaulted ceiling. “Infection. He was shot through the lungs the day we took the city.”

“War is hell,” Niles intones. To be killed in a mock battle engineered to salvage the honor of some peacock Dago general — a dismal hand to be dealt. Slocum lays a heavy wooden box on the table next to the dead soldier, snaps open the brass fastenings and lifts the lid.

“They accidentally shipped a double order,” he says, fixing Niles with a look. “Which I have not made record of.”

The box is segmented into dozens of compartments, each containing a vial cushioned with cotton wadding. Niles pulls several bottles out to examine them. Mostly quinine, with some tincture of chloroform, laudanum, ipecac syrup, and a quantity of strychnine.

“No medical supplies besides ours have entered the city since the Filipinos began their siege months ago,” says Slocum. “This might as well be gold.”

He is eyeing the camera. If he had been a gracious loser, a gentleman, Niles might entertain the idea of returning it as part of the present transaction. But no, the man is a boor. An egotist, a yankee, and a boor.

“You should be able to sell these for far more than the amount I owe you,” he continues. “The anti-malarial alone—”

“But I shall be the one incurring the risk,” says Niles, and closes the case.

Slocum hands Niles a form in three pages, white copy duplicated in yellow and pink.

“In that case you are transporting these to Brigade in Cavite,” he says. “In the event anybody inquires.”

The supply sergeant opens a somewhat battered leather satchel, carefully places the wooden box into it.

“The luggage belonged to a missionary gentleman from Nebraska, a Presbyterian, I believe. Sampled a bit too much of the local water.” He closes and fastens the satchel, placing it at Niles’s feet. “Gentle with this,” he says. “And give me the whole five minutes this time.”

Slocum leaves Niles in the morgue. They’ve only had a few fatalities in the regiment so far, and unless the natives learn to shoot, disease will be the greatest enemy. If Burns succumbs Niles will be forced to write his first letter of condolence. He lifts the rubber sheet to view the dead soldier’s face. His skin is blue-gray, and they have tied a bandage from the top of his head under his chin to hold his jaw closed. Niles does not recognize the boy, not from his outfit, and wonders if his mates have begun the collection to send the body home. He has visited Paco, the most celebrated of the local mausoleums, viewed the circular wall of cement with niches for the deceased one atop the other, rentable for five-year residencies. Cracked skulls and jumbled bones of the evicted lay heaped in one area, while domesticated turkeys and a small, bristly pig patrolled the grounds. The dead rest here, but only if they can make the rent.

Niles does not plan on dying in the Philippines.

In Hongkong Mei lived in a house on the steep hill behind the Victoria Barracks. Madame Qing was in charge of the house and the first thing she did, before learning their names or giving them new clothes, was to have each new girl demonstrate how to use the water closet. The house was made of wood, with wooden floors and stairs leading to a second set of rooms with windows that looked over past the Victoria Barracks to the harbor. Mei had not eaten much on the road and was sick on the steamboat ride, so it was a long time sitting on the hole in one of the three water closets before she could shout to Madame Qing and show her what she had done.

“Pull the chain,” said Madame Qing, and they both watched. It seemed like a waste of both dung and water. “Now pull your pants down.”

Mei was afraid because Ma had always done everything in the household while she had worked in the field and soon they would discover how useless she was. She turned and pulled her pants down.

“What did I tell you the paper was for?”

There was white paper rolled up beside the hole, softer, but the same width as the paper on which she had written the characters Second Brother showed her, the paper she had hung as a banner outside their hut when Ma died.

“You are a stupid, dirty girl,” said Madame Qing. “Now show me how you clean yourself with the paper.”

Mei reached into the hole for water to wet herself and Madame Qing slapped her and said she had to do it only with the paper and then wash her hands in the basin with the slippery cake.

“You girls from the North are not worth the trouble,” said Madame Qing.

There were girls in the house who weren’t new, mostly Southerners, and three Dwarf Bandit girls, who woke up late in the day to look over Mei and the other arrivals. Mei couldn’t understand most of what they said but a lot of them pointed at her feet and laughed and that was more shameful than Madame Qing watching her clean herself.

When it began to get dark each of the new girls was given a ball of rice and then locked in a room with mattresses laid on the floor. Mei thought the rice was very sweet compared to millet and it made her feel a little sick. After the candles were put out they lay and listened to the music on the other side of the door, and to the laughing and men’s voices braying in another language Mei could not understand.

“These are wicked women who live here,” said one of the girls from the boat, who was from near Jinan. “They lie with yang gweizi, and we are going to be their servants.”

They were there nearly a week, Madame Qing teaching them more about cleaning themselves and not eating with their hands, until late one afternoon they were ordered to take all their clothes off and pile them in the middle of the room. A servant woman — all the servants in the house were older men and women — gathered the pile and carried it away and it was too late when Mei remembered that her half of Ma’s comb was still in her pants. Basins filled with a sharp-smelling liquid were brought in and they were told to wash their hair in it and then sit while the servants picked the bugs from their scalps. Their hair was dried after that, servants rubbing it with towels, and then the wicked girls came in with a trunkful of beautiful clothes and began to dress them up like dolls, chattering and laughing the whole time. The silk felt slippery against Mei’s skin and when the old girls began to powder and paint her face she understood, finally, that it didn’t matter if she could not cook or sew. It took a long time for the Southern girls to find a pair of slippers that would fit her feet.

The old girls went out then and Madame Qing came in to explain that Mr. Wu, who owned the house, was coming tonight to entertain some of his friends and that they were to do whatever they were told or they would certainly be beaten and possibly thrown into the harbor for the sharks to eat. The girl from near Jinan began to cry then and Madame Qing slapped her for making ugly tracks in the powder on her face.

“If they ask your name,” said Madame Qing, “you must tell them something beautiful.”

“I will be Jade Lily,” said one of the girls, quickly.

“I will be Morning Dew,” said another.

Mei thought of Poppy Blossom, but it only brought pictures of Baba smoking his pipe and Ma dying on the k’ang.

Mr. Wu was an older man with eyes that watched everything, and his friends were all very rough men from the South. The new girls were supposed to serve them rice wine and then sit with them and answer questions if they were asked. The man next to Mei, who had drawings inked into the skin on the backs of his hands, kept shouting the same words at her till she decided he was asking for her name and she said Ling-Ling.

The men stayed for three days. They made her drink wine and they used her and the other new girls whenever they wanted, sometimes taking them into another room and sometimes using them in front of all the others, who laughed and shouted things. Mei hurt everywhere they touched her but was not ashamed. They were doing these things to Ling-Ling, and that was only a dog after all.

When Mr. Wu and his friends finally left the old girls came back.

“Now you are our sisters,” they said. “We can teach you what we know.”

Some of the new girls were bleeding and some were still trembling and the girl from near Jinan, who had decided to call herself Silk Whisper, tried to drown herself in one of the water closets but there wasn’t enough water.

None of them were ever let out of the house. In the daytime, if they wanted, they could go out onto the balconies from the rooms on the second floor and look down past the barracks to Hongkong and the harbor. Even from that distance Ling-Ling could see that there were more people in Hongkong than she had imagined there were in the world. Mr. Wu’s friends had only been there to “break the soil” said the old girls, Ling-Ling’s new sisters, and most of the time the house was for entertaining yang gweizi, “officers and gentlemen” as Madame Qing called them. They had to learn to smile and be gracious and please the English men, and even learn some of their words.

Ling-Ling decided that it was not knowing that made her the most afraid. Not knowing what the Southern girls were saying, not knowing what Madame Qing was planning to do to them next, not knowing what was in the minds of the English foreign devils.

“Sister,” she said to one of the old girls who was called Radiant Star and had originally come from the North like herself, “I want you to teach me everything.”

Radiant Star taught her how to put a vinegar sponge up inside herself so she would not make half-human babies with the yang gweizi, taught her to sing some of the dirty songs the men liked and how to talk like South China people.

“You are like Fan-tail,” she told Ling-Ling when Ling-Ling would try her South China talk out. Fan-tail was Madame Qing’s parrot, who repeated phrases from all the languages spoken in the house. “Everything you hear you say it the same.”

She also began to learn English from one of the yang gweizi, a young man who was not an officer, not a soldier at all but some other kind of official sent to work in Hongkong. Nights that he came, two or three times a week, were easy for Ling-Ling because he always asked for her and paid extra to stay the whole night and wore a rubber bag on his penis so she did not need the sponge, which sometimes got lost inside her. He would use her in one of the usual ways and then sit with her in the bed or out on the balcony if it was hot and want to talk. He already knew how to talk Southern, would joke with the sisters in that language, but wanted to learn to speak like North China people too. Ling-Ling was his “sleeping dictionary,” he said, and insisted that she learn how to say his name, which was Roderick Hardacre.

As good as Ling-Ling was with South China talk, this was almost impossible to do, her tongue unable to imitate the sounds. Fan-tail was much better at it, mastering “Well I’ll be buggered” after only a few visits from Roderick Hardacre. He would have her say his name again and again, correcting her patiently, and then ask her questions in South China talk while she answered in what he called Mandarin. After a while he would get tired of that and try to teach her things in English that weren’t his name.

This is how she discovered that the yang gweizi know nothing about the sky. They would stand on the balcony and Roderick Hardacre would point to the stars and make her try to see shapes of animals or people and tell her long stories about their adventures. When Ling-Ling began to understand the words she discovered that he was not talking about the Three Enclosures or the Azure Dragon or the White Tiger of the West or the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl but something completely different, either something he was inventing to mock her or strange beliefs of the yang gweizi. If it was overcast or too cold to step out he would teach her poems, having her repeat them line by line and then explain what they meant.

Roderick Hardacre was very red on his face and hands, almost crimson, and very white everywhere else when he took his clothes off.

“I am so relieved about your feet,” he said once. “The other girls, the mere thought of it — it puts one off.”

All the sisters were allowed to sleep till noon and their meals were prepared for them. The three Japanese girls were called karayuki-san, which they said meant “Miss Gone-to-China” and were the most obedient, never complaining if they were awakened to entertain an early visitor, never sticking their tongues out at Madame Qing when her back was turned. It was being inside all the time that bothered Ling-Ling the most, always a dog that loved the fields.

Some of the sisters smoked opium when Madame Qing allowed it on slow days and some drank too much when there were parties with men and some embroidered and Silk Whisper got into the kitchen even though it was supposed to be locked and cut her own throat and bled to death.

At New Year they celebrated inside the house and there was lots of food and they dressed in their best clothes and went out onto the balconies to watch the dragon come up the hill and waved to the young men hurling firecrackers. For an hour or two Ling-Ling was as happy as a dog can be, happy to be warm and well-fed and with her many sisters. That night Roderick Hardacre came with a friend, another young Englishman who was not a soldier, and had her stand before him.

“This is my linguist,” said Roderick Hardacre. “My Ling-linguist.”

“I fancy a bit of tongue,” said the friend, who was already drunk.

Ling-Ling was afraid they were both going to use her at the same time, which had happened with Mr. Wu’s friends.

“He thinks I’ve been telling tales,” said Roderick Hardacre. “You’re going to make a believer out of him.”

Other of the English men gathered around her then, Ling-Ling smelling the starch in their uniforms, the tobacco on their breath, and it made her face burn.

“You know what I’m after,” said Roderick Hardacre. “You know the one I want.”

Ling-Ling took a deep breath and said it to them, trying to make the sounds exactly the way Roderick Hardacre did when he taught it to her, not using his own voice but a different one, rougher—

Ship me somewheres east of Suez—

— she said—

Where the best is like the worst

Where there aint no Ten Commandments

An a man can raise a thirst

For the temple bells are callin’

An it’s there that I would be—

By the Old Moulmen Pagoda

Looking lazy at the sea

On the road to Mandalay

Where the Old Flotilla lay

With our sick beneath the awnings

When we went to Mandalay!

On the road to Mandalay

Where the flyin’ fishes play

An’ the dawn comes up like thunder

Outer China ’crost the Bay!

The yang gweizi smacked their hands together and cheered and the sisters in the room laughed and Fan-tail said that he would be buggered. Later Roderick Hardacre’s friend passed out from the wine and Roderick Hardacre took her upstairs to one of the rooms and used her like he always did but looked at her with his strange blue cat’s eyes the whole time. After that they wrapped themselves in blankets and stepped onto the balcony to see the fireworks explode over the harbor. At one point he watched her face for a long time and then shook his head.

“Life is bloody strange,” he said. “Bloody strange.”

Niles summons a carromata outside of the hospital, satchel held tight between his knees on the two-wheeled buggy while the little horse — a pony, really — navigates the streets of the Walled City. It is a low, somewhat somber metropolis, squarish stone edifices set in a grid between the ancient, moss-covered walls, everything low and heavily buttressed in deference to the frequent earthquakes, the barracks, post office, treasury, ayuntamiento, and customs dwarfed by the larger and grander church buildings, a fair representation of the relative stature accorded by the citizens to the still-present Archbishop and the erstwhile Governor General.

The Minnesotas are on provost today, showing no interest as he is trotted past, their orders to detain suspicious natives or the disarmed, loitering Spanish soldiers who seem to infest the city looking for a handout. Niles passes the Church of San Ignacio with its breathtaking woodwork inside and a covered walkway connecting it to the Jesuit-run Ateneo, the minions of Loyola within no doubt up to their habitual scheming. The private houses in the shadow of the cannon-bedecked parapets and bastions are impressive, two-story affairs with space for a carriage below, living quarters on the second floor, with balconies rimmed by elaborate wrought-iron hanging over the sidewalks and the red-painted galvanized-tin roofs that have mostly replaced the tile which becomes so hazardous when blown asunder by their incessant typhoon winds. The driver pauses to let an overloaded, pony-drawn tram pass, people crammed not only inside the car but hanging on to the front and rear platforms, the standees all smoking while one determined hausfrau plucks feathers from a live and understandably distressed chicken that she holds upside-down by its feet, tossing the feathers in the wake of the conveyance. When they have passed, the driver turns onto the broad Avenue Real. They pick up speed, weaving around elegant landaus and barouches and tottering calesas, past Chinamen waving switches to drive oxen hitched to wood-wheeled carts filled with furniture, avoiding the occasional bicycle enthusiast, the wheeling mania having arrived only recently on this island. A sentry snaps him a salute as they roll under the ornately decorated portico of the Parian Gate. The moat that lies beyond the thick earth-and-stone wall is a cold, scum-covered porridge, rampant with weeds and piled with refuse, from which there exudes an unholy stench. When the googoos cut off water to the Intramuros during the siege the Spaniards’ sanitary response was to collect their excrescence and hurl it over the parapets. No great wonder that the more well-to-do residents are offering fortunes for medicine.

They turn right and cross the Bridge of Spain, rafts of cocoanuts and slender bancas laden with fodder being poled upriver beneath them, the driver flipping a centavo to the tollkeeper and being rewarded with a box of matches in lieu of a return stub. Every Filipino man, woman, and child Niles has laid eyes on in the capital has the smoking habit, and the boys in his company have stocked up, buying packages of thirty cigarettes for a pair of coppers. Niles prefers a cigar, and these are manufactured in the area as well, the Montecristos comparing not unfavorably with their Cuban counterparts. There is excellent rum available for those with valuables to trade, and a passable local moonshine the men call beeno. If only the females were more attractive.

Several classes of them are on display as Niles descends from the buggy at the base of the Escolta. It is a full hour before siesta, the mercantile street clogged with all the mongrel races produced here, freight vans bumping over the cobblestones while a mix of near-naked coolies, Spanish Peninsulars, and white-suited Filipino dandies compete for space. The Spanish ladies are in white muslin, carrying white parasols to match, pointed in their refusal to meet an American’s eye, while the wealthier Filipinas either ape this Western garb or sport pineapple-fiber gowns with exaggerated butterfly sleeves, their ebony hair slick with cocoanut oil and held in place with ivory combs, their upper bodies held elegantly straight as they shuffle along in the little heelless slippers they call chinelas. None of these ladies walk alone, of course, while the less fortunate native women often appear so, selling trifles or begging with filthy palms extended, barefoot women in long red skirts and white waists, often with their equally scruffy pickaninnies in tow. Niles steps around a trio of wizened crones squatting on the walk operating foot-pump Singer machines, gabbling with each other and expectorating without regard to passersby, their teeth dyed red from the concoction they chew. He takes a firm grip on the satchel, then plunges into the morass of humanity, reminding himself that he is a uniformed lieutenant of the victorious army.

The shops here are mostly operated by Spaniards, with the occasional Frenchman or Hindoo, shelves bursting with European goods arranged behind the only glass windows Niles has seen on the island or spilling out onto the walk in front of the stores, laid on the ground or displayed on mahogany tables and desks looted after the fall of the Dons, awnings overhead affording some shade on the east side of the street. A pair of native lotharios, resplendent in white and deep in conversation, approach in the opposite direction, each with a carved walking-stick in hand and straw boater tipped on the head. The recent hostilities seem not to have affected this strata of the local gentry, Niles resentfully aware of their lack of either gratitude or deference. He looks through them and strides down the center of the walk, the gesticulating niggers acknowledging his presence only in time to veer awkwardly to each side, the one stumbling off the curb into an unfortunate encounter with a hustling rickshaw artist that sends the dandy ass over teakettle onto the cobbles. Niles takes a few more steps, then very deliberately halts to unsheathe his camera and photograph a gang of bare-chested coolies transporting a medium-sized piano perched upon a pair of thick wooden poles.

The pistol he has his eye on is in a curio shop — telescopes, old sailing charts, stuffed lizards and fruit bats, carved bookends of various exotic materials, forbidden etchings shown on special request. The proprietor, a Señor Ocampo, claims that it has only recently come into his hands from a Spanish officer of exalted lineage with a particularly avaricious mistress in Santa Mesa. It is a gleaming “Chinese” Webley, displayed in a velvet-lined box that Ocampo, forbidden now by the Occupation Authority to sell firearms of any sort, pulls from behind the counter.

“A pity,” Niles muses as he turns the revolver over in his hands. “They’ll probably confiscate this now that your indios have gone on the warpath again.”

Ocampo moves, as always, to put his body between the customer handling the merchandise and the door to the bustling Escolta. “Is yes a pity. You wan to buy him now?”

“We would be in violation of the decree.”

“This is true.”

“But if purchase is out of the question,” says Niles, sighting the.45 at a panther crouched to spring off its pedestal, “perhaps an exchange of gifts might be arranged.”

“Gifs?”

“Tokens of friendship. There are many things which we in the military have in abundance, which, due to the vagaries of the present conflict, the average citizen lives in want of.”

The proprietor is mute with calculation for a moment, staring at the pistol and trying to gauge its equivalent in various commodities.

“This might happen, yes.”

If his company were assigned the provost it would be simple. A search for contraband up and down the street, Ocampo eagerly giving up the Webley to avoid too thorough a going-over of his premises. As it is, a crate of tinned beef, to be delivered within the week, is equal to the task. Niles slips the pistol into his empty holster, stuffs the proffered ammunition into his pockets, and bids the Spaniard a good day.

He steps out into the fetid press of the Escolta at noon.

It wasn’t long after New Year that Madame Qing said some of them were going to be sent to Manila. The karayuki-san, who had been there, said this was a city on an island across the sea, full of yang gweizi with black hair and dark eyes and little brown Monkey People, and only one section where all the China people were crowded together. When Ling-Ling was picked among those to go Radiant Star hugged her with tears in her eyes.

“Don’t worry, sister,” she said. “Soon you will know the poems of the Monkey People.”

But once she was out of the house, riding down past the Victoria Barracks among the real people, she couldn’t be Ling-Ling anymore, only Lan Mei, who was a disgrace to her poor dead mother and to all the Lans who had gone before, a wicked woman who could be sold or traded like a sack of salt.

Mei and the other ones being sent to Manila were brought up onto the steamship after all the coolie-brokers had loaded their men into the hold, the sisters herded into a cabin by two of Mr. Wu’s friends. There were other people on the deck, China people and yang gweizi, and one man dressed all in white who didn’t seem to be in mourning and held the hand of a little girl with beautiful hair and a lacy white dress. When the little girl saw Mei’s face watching her from the round window of the cabin she smiled and waved.

In the morning the sun was out and Mr. Wu’s friends brought the sisters onto the promenade deck, one standing guard at each side of the little group, and they watched the flying fishes from Roderick Hardacre’s poem. Mei had thought he’d made them up, like the jabberwocky in one of his other verses. These were creatures that could not decide whether they were birds or fish, but were in a hurry to get somewhere, speeding in a pack parallel to the big ship, skipping from swell to swell with their wings held wide.

The swells began to rise then with the wind, and the sun was swallowed in black clouds. The sisters and everyone else on the promenade were herded back below as the deckhands scurried around tying things down on the wildly tilting deck and then breaking waves began to heave over the sides of the ship and slam against their cabin, only Mei standing at the round window still, holding tight to a side rail and then she knew that the steamship was not so big when tossed on an angry sea, that it was a paper toy, it was nothing, and her tiny life inside of it was less than nothing.

Even Mr. Wu’s rough friends, one of them the man with the pictures inked on the backs of his hands, were crying when the ship listed to one side and did not right itself and a man from the crew wrestled the cabin door open to shout that the ship was going down, that their only hope was to get into the lifeboats.

Mei tried to remember one of the sutras that Ma used to chant but the words would not come, so she only repeated My life is nothing, my life is nothing, my life is nothing as they held a rope and moved along the storm-battered deck, two of her sisters knocked off their tiny lotus feet and swept over the rail into the sea.

My life is nothing.

There were rope ladders to climb down onto the lifeboats, which were being smashed against the hull of the sinking ship and some people were falling and some were jumping and Mei had the quick thought that she saw none of the coolies and wondered if they had been locked in the hold. Hands grabbed her and yanked her into a boat and she saw the little girl a ways down in it but without her father. The men in the long boat pulled their oars to row away from the ship then, the ship that was about to roll on its side, that disappeared from sight whenever they slid into the trough of a swell. The men rowing shouted and cursed at each other, disagreeing on which way the nose of the boat should face and then they were swamped from the side and Mei saw the little girl go over and because her life was nothing Mei rolled into the sea to find her.

Mei did not know how to swim and her clothing dragged at her but she thrashed with her arms and legs and her head stayed up enough to gasp a breath of the air that was full of whipping water and then a wave smashed the little girl against her, Mei ducking under so the girl could ride her back, arms around her neck almost choking her, Mei thrashing with her arms and legs with no thought of salvation only that this little girl should not die alone, nobody should die alone, and then they were smashed against a boat, Mei clawing for it and catching hold of a trailing rope that she pulled on hand over hand, a strong girl, almost a man from wrestling crops out of the stingy ground, and got her shoulders lifted out of the water, the wind roaring full of rain and no sense to keep shouting when she couldn’t even hear herself, and when she felt the little girl’s arms weaken around her neck Mei clamped her teeth around the little wrist and held on that way, like Ling-Ling used to do when they would play in the ditch beside the sheng-yuan’s fields.

The sea was still furious, though, and tried to wrench her away from the boat and smashed her against its side and covered her head with water again and again, but Mei held on, held on with her two hands and her teeth because her life was not nothing, she was the raft this little girl was going to ride to safety.

Then the sea began to tire of its anger and the black clouds skulked away and left the sky purple and gray and ashamed at what it had done. People on the boat saw Mei then and strong arms began to pull at her, but she didn’t unclamp her teeth from the little girl’s arm till she was lying face-down across the laps of the men on the boat.

The little girl was not alive. She had drowned maybe or had her neck broken, they said, and thought Mei was her mother.

“I am so dreadfully sorry,” said an English man.

They spent the night huddled together in the boat, a dozen people with the body of the little girl wrapped in canvas, wet, freezing, the men bailing water out with their hands. When the sun came out of the water again there was another steamship in the distance and the men stood and peeled their shirts off and waved them in the air, shouting.

The people from the lifeboats that did not go under were gathered together in a warehouse on the dock in what they said was Manila, sitting on benches, wrapped in blankets. The officials, yang gweizi with black hair and moustaches and a few Monkey People, had not yet reached Mei when Mr. Wu strode in with two men in uniform beside him and walked along the benches looking into the faces of the women who had survived.

“This one is mine,” he said when he came to Mei.

Two of the port officials came over then and one of them tried several languages she didn’t know till he asked her in very poor South China talk, “Do you know this man?”

“My life is nothing,” she answered.

Niles stops at a bakery for a buñuelo and a cup of the hot liquid mud they sell as chocolate, watching the last of the chaperoned young ladies hurry to shelter themselves from the blaze of noon. They are flat-nosed, like a lot of the darky gals back home, and rather meager in the hindquarters. The cream of the city’s courtesans will become available, he suspects, when the last of the Dons are packed off, but by that time he may be relegated to the hinterlands with nothing but barefooted, betel-chewing peasant maidens for comfort. As he leaves the bakery a funeral procession rolls past, the brass band in the van playing a dirge-like version of The Star-Spangled Banner that they have no doubt picked up from the nightly military concerts on the Luneta, the driver of the wagon bearing the coffin dignified in top hat and bare feet, the pair of scrawny Filipino equines supplying the motive power barely coming above his hip. Niles uncovers and stands watching with hat over heart as the mourners’ carriages rattle by, trying not to smirk.

Many of the Celestials do without a siesta. Niles passes through the Plaza Moraga and onto the narrower confines of Rosario Street, John China-man’s bailiwick, and they are out in abundance, hawking, hustling, shouting at each other in their harsh singsong, a teeming yellow horde fairly crawling over each other in their frantic quest for sustenance. Shriveled roots that resemble mummified animals are offered at one stall, whether for food or medicine he does not dare wonder, while another vendor presides over arm-thick live pythons wrapped around poles, their heads bound to the bamboo with wire, and a third sends lung-splitting cries into the air as he waves a pair of flapping chickens like a signal corpsman wig-wagging his flags on a ship’s bow. Niles takes a deep breath and attempts to hold it all the way to An’s.

A sullen-faced Chinaman slouches with arms folded inside his sleeves next to the door, seeing all and reacting to none, a caution to any highbinders contemplating pillage within. The interior reeks of sandalwood and incense, walls laden with silken tapestries, the narrow space a forest of intricately worked statues and figurines in porcelain and rare stone, banners with Chinese characters in thick black strokes hanging from the ceiling. A small boy wearing only a shirt that barely covers his shame squats near the door, pulling the cord to operate a punkah fan overhead, and An, with his cold abacus eyes and billygoat wisp of chin hair, sits back on a carved throne of zitan wood he claims once cradled the posterior of the Ming Emperor.

“The handsome lieutenant,” he observes, his accent that of a British tea merchant. “To what do we owe the honor?”

Niles lifts the satchel to his chest. “Western medicine.”

An smiles and rises from the throne, crossing to a beaded curtain, where he barks a few instructions in his native tongue. Niles caught a glimpse through the curtain on his first visit — Oriental gentlemen and at least one well-dressed Spaniard recumbent on divans, languidly sucking at hoses attached to smoke-filled globes. A scene he’d love to capture with a snap, but woefully under-illuminated.

An pulls a lacquered miniature pagoda off a table to make room and Niles lays the satchel on it. The Chinaman is silent as he lifts each of the vials to the light bouncing in from the street, reading the etiquette with a jeweler’s loupe.

“These might only be bottles filled with water,” he says.

Niles picks up a golden, ruby-encrusted scabbard. “And this may be nothing but paint and paste.”

“You distrust me?”

Niles bows slightly, lays the scabbard down. “I think you are a master of your trade. It amounts to the same thing.”

An smiles and carefully replaces the last vial. He writes a figure on a slip of paper, hands it to Niles.

“Twice this,” says Niles after a glance. “At the least.”

An looks over the medicines in their compartments, methodically clacking a pair of ivory mahjong tiles together in his hand. “I believe we can come to terms,” he announces finally, “but gold—”

“I can’t accept coins,” Niles avers. “And neither can my client.”

Paper money is distrusted, quite properly, at the moment, and nobody carries more than a few of the heavy Mexican cartwheels in their pockets, preferring to do business with letters of intent, coolies crisscrossing the streets with sacks of gold coins in wheelbarrows to settle the account at the end of each month, pistol-wielding guards trotting alongside them. Niles looks around the shop.

“Surely you have something of equal value but lesser magnitude?”

An strolls past a few of his display cases, clacking the tiles, before selecting an ornately carved dragon about the size of a ferret and holding it up for Niles’s inspection. It has a pleasing weight, a deep, translucent emerald color with reddish-orange highlights on its dorsal spines.

“Kingfisher jade from Burma,” says the trader proudly. “From the time of Han — when your Jesus Christ was alive.”

Niles bristles inwardly at the heathen’s mention of the Savior, but allows it to pass. He scratches at the dragon’s scales with a fingernail. “This will very likely do,” he says.

The ama of the house in Sampaloc was Señora Divinaflores and she did not ask Ling-Ling to demonstrate the use of the water closet. She was a moody woman even when she wasn’t drinking, and had a lover who was in the guardia civil who did not treat her well. There were only five other girls in the house — Eulalia, Dionisia, Carmen, Ynés, and Keiko, who was a karayuki-san. The Filipina girls all came from different villages far from the city and spoke at least three different languages as well as some Spanish, which Señora Divinaflores insisted they talk with the visitors, who were mostly from the army and the government, “oficiales y caballeros,” as she described them. These were more likely to sing than the English, and spent more time in front of the mirrors in the rooms, but they were only men. Ling-Ling opened herself up to their words, love words, some of them, and joder words, and to the words of their songs and poems and stories. There was one young man who was a junior officer of the fusileros named Rodrigo Valenzuela who always asked for Ling-Ling and came twice or three times a week, staying the night if the other visitors weren’t too noisy. He made Ling-Ling say his name over and over until she could pronounce it, but was not interested in learning the North China talk. The sisters were allowed outside at this house, a house like many others on the street, and if she woke early Ling-Ling would sit on the sill of the front window, underneath the huge red-and-yellow Spanish flag hung on the outside wall, and watch the coolie gangs hurry by on the Calzada with their loads. They looked like South China men, stripped to the waist, running with knees bent and poles that supported large and heavy objects in their hands or on their shoulders. She sat watching them pass for hours sometimes, but they never seemed to notice her, as intent on their next step as the oxen pulling carts they sometimes drove, whipping their massive flanks, running to their great meaty heads to splash water on them. She wondered if there was a South China girl for every one of them, waiting for her man’s contract to be up and for him to brave the ocean crossing with the gold he had won in his hands. To work like beasts and have no one to dream of, no one to suffer your labor for — she did not want to imagine it.

Señora Divinaflores had lost a girl to infection who was using sponges and beat Dionisia with a strap when she discovered the girl was pushing half of a cut lemon inside herself before each visitante. Instead, each week she made them all drink a tea made with hierbas prepared by her ancient friend Doña Hermanegilda, who even shy Keiko agreed was a witch. It tasted almost as bad as China medicine, which tastes like the ugly disease you are trying to kill, and Señora Divinaflores watched them swallow every drop.

“We are here to entertain the caballeros,” she said, “not to produce their bastards.”

In the slow afternoons the Filipina girls liked to play cards together and Keiko embroidered handkerchiefs with flying sparrows, always sparrows, and Ling-Ling would sit out on the sill of the window under the Spanish flag, watching the world pass by. Señora Divinaflores allowed this as long as Ling-Ling dressed up in her working silks and wore makeup and oiled her hair so people passing would know hers was a high-toned establishment. The Filipina girls taught Ling-Ling to comb the cocoanut oil through her hair and her favorite part of the day was early afternoon when they would sit and do it for each other. Only Ynés, who was mestiza and had curly hair that was almost red, was left out of this pleasure, but she was the one the caballeros asked for the most. There were yang gweizi women in Manila doing the same as them, said Eulalia, but they could afford to entertain alone in their own houses.

It wasn’t long after Ling-Ling arrived in Sampaloc that the Comisaria de Vigilencia man came along with Señora Divinaflores’s lover, who was called Sargento Robles, to tell them that they had to be registered and inspected. They were brought to the Office of Public Hygiene and their photographs were taken. When the oficial asked her name she said Ling-Ling, just Ling-Ling. She was given a card that had writing on it and her photograph in the corner, and the Comisaria kept an identical card. Ling-Ling had never had her photograph taken before and did not like to look at the girl in the picture. At least it was only from her shoulders up and did not show her feet.

Twice a week they were supposed to either go to the hospital or let Dr. Apostol look inside them when he came by on his rounds through Sampaloc. It cost a Mexican silver if you went to the hospital or two if you waited for Dr. Apostol, money taken out of your pay by Señora Divinaflores.

They were paid in this house in Sampaloc, though after their food and lodging and hierbas and clothing and now medical examinations were taken out very little was left. The Filipina girls bought themselves things, sweets, pretty things, things you could buy on the street or from vendors who came calling under your window and would send your purchase up in a basket. Keiko gave her coins to a Dwarf Bandit man who came by once a week and who, she said, was sending it home to her parents. Ling-Ling kept hers in a wooden jewel box Eulalia had given her and never counted them. Eulalia had given her some gold earrings, too, and an ivory comb and a small icon, carved out of black stone, of a naked man with his hands and feet nailed to crossed planks. Ma had had something like that but one night when Baba was drunk and angry at the yang gweizi he threw it deep into the fire and wouldn’t let her reach in to pull it out. Sometimes in the mornings when Ling-Ling was lonely and sad Eulalia would come into her bed and hold her. Eulalia always smelled of cinnamon and cocoanut oil and gave Ling-Ling sarsaparilla wine to drink.

“The hierba tea only protects you against babies,” she said. “This will keep you from being infected.”

But even though they always drank a small bottle of it to make their mouths forget the taste of Doña Hermanegilda’s brew, one week Dr. Apostol said they had to go with Carmen to the Hospital San Juan de Dios to be cured. They were marched there by Sargento Robles and one of his fellow guardia and locked in a ward full of infected girls from all over Manila.

They had to lie on their backs three times a day and pour a cup of something that stung into themselves, holding it in till they could hold it no more and were allowed to run to the bench full of holes and pee it out. There was not much else to do and sometimes there were fights between the girls.

“Stay away from that one,” warned Eulalia, pointing to a hard-faced mestiza across the ward. “I was in Bilibid with her once. She hides a razor in her hair.”

“Why were you in prison?”

Eulalia raised her shoulders. “I argued with the ama at the house I was in before I came to Señora Divinaflores and she had me arrested. And even before that, on Thursdays and Sundays they let visitors into the cells, so we would go and entertain the prisoners who had money but no wives.”

In the evening the Daughters of Charity came in with their white hats spread out like the wings of flying fish, to pray for them and remind them that they were wicked women. The only one Ling-Ling liked was Sor Merced, who was young and would sit by her with her hands folded inside her robe and ask in Spanish what life was like for North China people. The robe was bluish-gray, the exact color of the cloth that Ma had woven so skillfully when she was still able to work a loom. Sometimes Sor Merced would tell stories about the life of San Vicente and sometimes even stories about herself when she was a girl and had a different name that Ling-Ling never asked her to reveal.

“Your sickness,” Sor Merced said, “is God’s warning that you are in peril. If you wish to lead a different life, perhaps I can help you.”

The Daughters of Charity were supposed to help the Poor and the Sick, and Ling-Ling was both of those. “But Sister,” she said shyly, “I am a pagana.”

Sor Merced looked at her for a long moment. “That does not mean I won’t help you,” she said.

But they were only at San Juan de Dios for a week when the doctor said they had been cured and something was written on the registration card with her photograph on it, both on hers and the one they kept, and she and Eulalia and Carmen were sent back to Señora Divinaflores.

“I kept your beds for you,” the ama told them. “You are in debt to me.”

Then there was a war between the government and the insurrectos, who were all Filipinos from Cavite, said Eulalia, who was from Ilocos, but after the very beginning it didn’t come too close to their house in Sampaloc. On the night before they were to be sent to fight, Rodrigo Valenzuela and many of his fellow junior oficiales de fusileros came to drink and sing and be entertained. Before he went to the room with Ling-Ling he pulled her out in front of the others.

“We have a wager,” he said. “A wager between caballeros. They say there is no china capable of this, that I am only a braggart and a fabulist.”

Ling-Ling stood looking down at her clown-feet, never happy to be the focus of so many eyes.

“Go ahead, querida. You know which one.”

And then Ling-Ling raised her head and covered her heart with her right hand and recited, trying to say the words with exactly the tone and exactly the rhythm that Rodrigo Valenzuela had taught her.

A mi alma enamorada—

— she cooed—

Una reina oriental parecía

Que esperaba a su mante

Bajo el techo de su camarín—

— the caballeros standing with their mouths hung open like carp in a too-small bucket—

— O que, llevada en hombros

La profunda extensión recorría

Triumfante y luminosa

Recostada sobre un palanquín

The caballeros smacked their hands together and the girls squealed with laughter and even Señora Divinaflores gave a bitter smile before she swallowed another glass of jerez.

Later on, after he had used her and lay curled up with his hand on her stomach like a small boy, Rodrigo Valenzuela began to cry. “I’m going to die,” he said. “I’m going to die in this hoyo de mierda.”

The war was still being fought when Ling-Ling started to feel sick all the time, like she had on her first voyage at sea, and her body started to thicken.

“Drink this,” said Doña Hermanegilda when the ama called her in to consult. “There is still time.”

These hierbas made her sweat and have cramps and feel sick in a different way, but her bleeding had stopped and nothing else came out and then it came into Ling-Ling’s head that the being inside her was determined to live.

“She’s just getting fat and lazy,” Señora Divinaflores said to Lao, who came to collect money for Mr. Wu. “I think you should send her on to Singapore.”

Ling-Ling still had to entertain, so many new soldiers being sent to Manila from Spain to fight the insurrectos, and most did not even notice or care when her stomach began to push out. Dr. Apostol examined her for the disease and said she was at least a month away.

“Doña Hermanegilda is coming today,” said the ama the next morning. “She can make it come out sooner. The sooner it comes the sooner you will be able to go back to work to support it.”

The old lady came and began to lay out her needles and Ling-Ling saw Sargento Robles and one of his guardia very pointedly lounging out in front of the house in their lacquered hats, smoking cigarettes and telling jokes and looking as if they would be there till it was finished.

“Hermanegilda is an abortista, not a partera,” said Eulalia, so she and Dionisia and Keiko, who were already awake, made a rope of sheets that they wet and knotted and lowered Ling-Ling down on in the back, waving but not calling as they watched her hurry through the alley to Calle de Alejandro.

The man at the cigar factory next to the church in Binondo said that they did not hire chinas, pregnant or not. The mestizas who sold cloth from their narrow stalls said they needed no help and even the woman who hired for the lavandería by the barracks inside the Walled City said there was no work for her, that she should go back to her own neighborhood north of the river. Ling-Ling knew that if she tried to sell mangoes or milk or dulces on the street the guardia would soon arrest her, a vagamunda with her photograph on a card, not living at the house where she was registered. She spent the first night crouching under the Puente de España, not sleeping, and the next day was told they would not hire her at the fábricas in Tondo and Meisic, not hire her even to wash the long tables at night after the cigarreras went home. It was late afternoon when Ling-Ling passed through the Parian Gate and talked her way into the hospital, saying she had come for her examination this time to save a dollar. When they forgot her on the waiting bench she left and wandered the long hallways till she saw a sister wearing the cornette, and asked for Sor Merced.

“Soy puta y pagana, y eso es hijo de quién sabe,” she said to Sor Merced, touching her swollen belly, “pero pido su ayuda.”

“Every child is a child of God,” said the sister, and found her a bed to lie in.

It was mostly poor Filipinas in the ward, women who did not care to talk with a puta china, but Lan Mei did not mind. The doctor said there was something bad in her blood and that she would have to lie flat on the bed and not get out of it even to pee or make dung. She had never lain in bed so long with nothing to do, nobody to entertain, and relieving herself in the cold pan the nurse slipped under her was difficult at first. After about two weeks Eulalia found her. She had Ling-Ling’s money from the jewel box in a sack and the little idol, attached now to a thin golden chain.

“You have to wear this now,” she said, hanging the idol around Mei’s neck. “But the money — I’m afraid one of these sinverguenzas will steal it while you’re asleep.”

“Sor Merced will keep it for me.”

“As long as she doesn’t show it to any fucking friars.” Eulalia moved close to whisper to her. “They’re looking all over for you. The guardia and the people from Mr. Wu’s Society.”

“I am safe here, I think.”

Mei’s friend embraced her before she left.

“If it’s a girl,” she said, “think about naming her Eulalia.”

“Do you know why they did that to Him?” asked Sor Merced when she came to sit by Mei and saw the icon on the chain.

“He must have disobeyed the authorities,” said Mei.

“Yes, He did that,” smiled Sor Merced, who had a similar icon, carved in white stone. “And why do we wear this around our necks?”

Mei held her icon close to look at it, turning it this way and that, the man’s body twisted, spikes driven through the palms of his hands and both of his feet. “It is a very good warning,” she said.

When it was her time, the hurt was worse than anything she had ever felt before, and she thought then that women were given the icon to remind them that some men suffered almost as much as they did. Mei refused to cry out, though, holding on to Sor Merced’s plump arm as if it was a lifeline, as if she would drown if she let go. Her life was not nothing, it was the raft on which her child, whoever it was, would be borne above the waves. Sor Merced was shaking the whole time, praying and shaking and trying to keep her face averted from whatever the doctor was doing behind the curtain that hung over Mei’s swollen breasts.

It was a boy baby, and she told the oficial his name was Lan Bo, son of Lan Mei.

The Mother Superior arranged a job for Mei when she was well enough to walk, wearing rubber gloves and a mask and boiling the metal cups and bowls used to feed the patients infected with malaria or typhus or smallpox or cholera or tuberculosis or diseases the doctors had no names for. With this job came a little room behind the laundry, and, during Mei’s work shift, a niñera—a sweet-natured woman named Paz who had lost a leg to diabetes, and who stayed with Bo and the other babies of poor mothers who were recuperating.

The war was over for a while but there were still the Sick and the Poor for the sisters to care for, always the Sick and the Poor, and even if he had gorged himself on Paz during the day Bo would take some from Mei’s breasts when she came back to the little room, looking up at her with his hand resting on her throat. She slept with him on her chest at night, loving the weight of him, the warmth, and each morning she would bundle him up and carry him out through the gate of pariahs to greet the sun, its first tentative rays like gold thread on the surface of the Pasig.

The war started again after a year or so, thunder of cannons in the bay and then some very bad days inside the walls while they were under siege from the insurrectos and then the americanos too and suddenly there was no more water to boil the metal in or mop the floors with or to flush away the dung of the patients or even to make a bowl of tea.

“If this keeps up,” said Paz, who somehow remained fruitful through it all, “I’ll have half the city at my tetas.”

Mei could no longer bring Bo out through the Parian Gate because people were throwing their dung over the wall and into the moat beside it and because there were snipers outside and every evening she knelt with the Daughters of Charity to pray for Spain’s deliverance from this menace, to pray for the poor Filipinos whose souls would surely be lost along with the islands. On the last day, when there was thunder from the bay again and shooting over the walls, Mei helped the sisters with the wounded men who were carried in, blood staining the clothes that Sor Merced had given her, clothes that had belonged to a poor local woman who had joined the Order and was sent to Mindinao. Mei searched for Rodrigo Valenzuela but didn’t see him, only dozens of young soldiers who looked like him. It was dark when the first of the yanquis came into the hospital, candles lit because the electricity and the gas had both been cut, an officer with a yellow bush on his lip and four soldiers carrying rifles. None of the doctors and none of the Daughters of Charity spoke any English and the officer had not a word of Spanish or any of the Filipino tongues.

“Goddammit,” said the officer, “what’s their word for surrender?”

“Entregar,” said Mei, without thinking. The officer looked at her as if she was a sniper.

“In Chinese?”

“Espanish.”

“And who the hell are you?”

“We need water,” she said, indicating the wounded soldiers laid out on the cots and on the blood-slippery floors. “Or alla these people die.”

When the sisters were told to come back home to Spain their Mother Superior said they could not bring a china caída and her bastard child with them, so Sor Merced had the only Filipino doctor, who was staying, tell the Americans to give her a job. Most of the Poor and Sick were gone by then, and the infected girls from all the houses were being sent to San Lázaro with the lepers, and the beds were filled with young American soldiers who were sick with all the same diseases or torn by bullets.

“She is clean and she speaks English,” the doctor told them, “and she bears no malice toward your flag.”

There are always things to boil in a hospital.

When Hod gets back to the ward Runt is sitting on his bed, oversized pistol and billy club lying beside him.

“Jeez, I feel bad about this,” he says, looking Hod over.

“I didn’t get it from you.”

“But I steered you to those girls.”

“And three of them were just fine,” says Hod, sitting on the wicker chair beside him.

My Son, if a maiden deny thee

— Runt proclaims—

— And scufflingly bid thee give o’er

Yet lip meets with lip at the lastward—

Get out! She has been there before

At the end of the fight is a tombstone

— Blount chimes in from across the aisle—

With the name of the late deceased

And the epitaph drear, “A fool lies here,

Who tried to hustle the East.”

“What’s that?” asks Hod.

“What they’ll write over your grave if you go back to that parlor,” says Blount. “There’s not that many a rose that don’t have a thorn on it.”

“I brought some provisions,” says Runyon, pushing his glasses up on his nose and looking around for officers. He shakes a small cotton sack and there are metal sounds. “Sardines, crackers — real crackers, none of that wallboard they give us to march with — gingersnaps and a couple fruit I can’t remember what they call them. Fruit is supposed to be good for it, I think.”

Blount is staring at him. “They recruit in the grade schools in Minne-sota?”

“He’s from Pueblo.”

“No shit. You know Vern Kessler?”

“I worked for him.”

“Selling papers—”

“Writing for the Evening Press.”

“So did I,” Blount grins, “back when it had a little snap. Now I wouldn’t line a birdcage with it.”

“So where’d you get yours?” Runt nods toward the corporal’s crotch.

“A rather overdecorated establishment in Binondo.”

“Silk wallpaper with nymphs and satyrs?”

“You’ve been there.”

“We hit em all. Encourage the ladies to be examined, shut them down for a day or two — looking after the physical and spiritual welfare of our fighting men.”

“So you know where the best—”

“The best,” says Runyon, “is Nellie White’s on First Street, Pueblo Colo-rado.”

“The playground of my misspent youth,” smiles Blount. “But here?”

“I have ceased to be involved with the trade girls, having given my heart to Anastacia Bailerino.”

“A lady of some quality, no doubt.”

“Raven hair, skin like coffee and cream—”

“No itching or pain on urination yet?”

Runyon narrows his eyes at Corporal Blount. “If you weren’t a fellow newspaperman I’d demand satisfaction.”

Hod slips tins of sardines under his pillow. “What’s the news from the world, Alfie? When are we going home?”

Runt gives him an exasperated look. “You’re pulling my leg.”

“What—?”

“McKinley says we’re holding on to the joint.”

Hod feels a twinge in his testicles. If you let it go too far, the doc says, your testicles get inflamed. “Manila?”

“The whole shebang. They posted the Proclamation this morning. The googoos aren’t too thrilled.”

“How can he do that?”

Runt grins. “God told him to. ‘Benevolent Assimilation,’ he calls it. He says he got down on his knees and petitioned the Lord for guidance—”

“It would be easier,” Blount interrupts, “for a camel to pass through my urinary meatus than for a Republican to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“A Bryan man.”

“Me too,” says Hod. “As far as voting goes. Free Silver!”

“Free Silver Nitrate!” echoes Blount. “Venereals of the world unite!”

“They got the volunteers putting out brushfires all over the islands, chasing after Aguinaldo, challenging every amigo they meet on the road,” says Runyon. “The order is ‘shoot on suspicion.’ ”

“Suspicion of what?”

Runt shrugs. “Suspicion of not assimilating benevolently.” He stands to pose with his hand over his heart—

Ride with an idle whip, ride with an unused heel

— he recites—

— But once in a way there will come a day

When the colt must be made to feel

The lash that falls and the curb that galls

And the sting of the rowelled steel!

An orderly comes around then with the rolling table and Hod and Blount drink their hourly glass of water.

“Sometimes they put a little sandalwood oil in it,” Hod tells his visitor. “Improve the taste.”

“Manila water, Christ,” says Runt. “They trying to kill you people?”

The convento is just a bit farther east along the Pasig, attached to one of the less ostentatious of the Catholic churches Niles has seen here. A barefoot boy leads Niles past the sacristy and up the polished wood stairs to the living quarters. Brother León is playing billiards.

“A superior pastime for developing the mind,” says the Franciscan, laying his stick on the table. He is tall, with a narrow, hawklike face, only a trace of the Spaniard in his diction. “It requires steadiness, concentration, and the ability to foresee the consequences of one’s actions.”

“I prefer cards.” Niles lifts the satchel onto a table that has tiny wells to hold gaming chips at each station. The friar steps over to watch as he opens it. On closer inspection, the cloth of his brown robe is not so rough as Niles imagined. Brother León’s face registers disappointment as he sees the medicines in the wooden box.

“I cannot do anything with these,” he says.

“Merely to acquaint you with my end of the transaction,” says Niles. “You are familiar with An Chao’s emporium?”

“Of course.”

“He has a dragon. Emerald green with red-tipped scales—”

“I know it.” The Franciscan’s eyes narrow shrewdly. “If I have learned one thing in this dark corner of Our Lord’s domain,” he says, “it is the unwavering value of precious stones.”

Niles wonders which of the three knots on the friar’s rope belt designates poverty. “And you would accept it as recompense for a sizable parcel of your land?” he inquires.

Brother León places the lid back on the wooden box. “You have me at a great disadvantage.”

The religious corporations have petitioned the military authority to return the lands and privileges usurped by the native filibusters, but no promises have been made, and given the average American’s distrust of papists, none are likely to be forthcoming. All over the city Spaniards are offering for a song that which they cannot carry with them, and the holy men are no exception.

“We adjust to circumstances,” says Niles, smiling politely. There is a portrait of the order’s namesake in his rough garb hung on the wall, a sparrow perched on one shoulder, a wolf curled peacefully at his feet, a lamb, unafraid of the predator, tranquil under his open hand. “Where exactly—?”

“Pampanga. North of here, not far from the rail.” Brother León crosses to a rolltop desk and extracts a folio of papers. “Your troops have yet to occupy this area, but given your superior force and the volatility of the situation, it is inevitable.” He lays the folio on the billiard table in front of Niles.

“And if Mr. McKinley loses heart and chooses to leave these fair isles to their natives?”

The friar smiles now, hawklike. “We adjust to circumstances.” He hands Niles a pair of deeds. “Much of the land still belongs to the order, of course, but the properties described here are in my brother’s name.”

“Your brother—”

“Who does not exist.” León wiggles his fingers. “His signature is amazingly similar to my own.”

Niles has already considered using Harry’s name for some of his acquisitions. “Pampanga is mountains, if I’m not mistaken.”

“With a broad plain at their base. Hemp, sugar cane, rice, mangoes—”

“My people were in tobacco before the War,” says Niles. The first deed is for 150 acres situated near the city of San Fernando. “We understand how to operate a plantation.”

An underdeveloped land, a soon-to-be advantageous labor situation — a man could do quite well for himself.

“I’ll need to have these gone over,” he informs the friar.

“Naturally.”

The art of commerce, he muses, lies in recognizing desires and seizing opportunities. There are countless citizens who need medicine and have been denied their usual access. There are the suddenly deposed, such as Brother León, who wish to recover some value from what they will be forced to leave behind. There are those like An Chao and Niles, who assure that the flow of goods and services continues despite the uncertainties of the present situation.

And suddenly, there is a Filipino in the room.

Well-dressed, nose in the air, nervously tapping his walking stick against the floor as he glares at Brother León. A mestizo, the term they apply to their half-breeds, from the look of him.

“Ah, Ramiro—”

The young man says something in Spanish to the friar. Niles closes the satchel and lifts it off the table. If he hurries his lawyer friend at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank will be able to verify the deeds during his tiffin and set the affair into motion.

“This is Ramiro, my sacristán,” says Brother León. “I have known him since I arrived from Gibraltar, since the day of his First Communion.”

Niles recognizes the young man, who is glaring at him now with undisguised resentment, as one of the sepia dandies he forced off the sidewalk on the Escolta.

“He is also, when we come to that moment, our notary.”

Niles offers the sullen googoo an ironic bow. “How very convenient.”

When Mei comes down from the wards at night Bo is waiting, squirming to be out of Paz’s arms and into hers, and if the sky is clear she takes him out away from the walls and she points to the stars and tells him stories about them. At first she wondered if they should be Chinese stories about the Three Enclosures or the yang gweizi stories about hunters and flying horses that Roderick Hardacre told her, but decided that nobody knows what takes place in the heavens, or how the world works, that even the most powerful are only guessing at how one thing is connected to another, pointing at dots in the distant sky and making up stories about them.

“Do you see those over there?” says Mei, pointing, talking the talk of the North China people to her little boy who starts to shake with happiness whenever he sees her, who calls her Ma and hugs his arms around her neck so tight it almost chokes her. “See those ones that make the head, and then those three, that are the tail? That is called Ling-Ling, the Brave Dog, who once saved a little girl from a wolf, and tried to save another from drowning—”

ADVANCE OF THE KANSAS VOLUNTEERS

All yesterday they were at it with shovels, the boys digging and Jubal hauling it off in a wagon. He ask why don’t they just pile it up in front like the real soldiers do but Mr. Charles who is Mr. Harry’s boss says it would get in the way of the volunteers and spoil the shot. So they dig it deeper and carry the dirt away, and Jubal can just see over the top when he stands tall.

The volunteers, which is really New Jersey National Guards, are having a time over in the pines, laughing and calling out how maybe they put real bullets in their rifles. The one being Colonel Funston is up on his ride, a big bay Morgan horse that got its ears up for what happen next. The white boys can play the fool cause the camera pointed elsewhere, looking right down the line of all the colored being Filipinos. Jubal has put himself as far away from it as he can get, worried lest he mess up somehow and get Mr. Harry in trouble. There is no snow left on the ground but it is cold, colder than it ever get in Wilmington and he bets the Philippines either. They only got on white pants and white shirts but just now Mr. Charles tell them to take their hats off and leave them out of sight. Royal is headed over there right now, where the real Filipinos stay, and if this is what they look like, just colored men without hats, it’s good they all in white and he’ll be wearing blue.

“Remember it’s two shots and then we scatter,” says Zeke, who has been a Filipino before and act like he’s the sergeant here. The National Guard who is being Colonel Funston has run them through the drill over and over — how to load and shoot, load and shoot, not to point at anybody too close. He show them how it’s only paper inside the cartridges and won’t hurt you at a distance. Jubal has it all in his head and wishes they would start and get it over. Got him so riled up waiting in the ditch for them to charge and it’s only for the camera, you wonder how can Royal abide the real thing. He hears Hooker nickering, tied back by the camera wagon and wondering where Jubal is. She maybe fuss some when the shooting starts, but her making noise don’t matter none.

Mr. Harry come out in front of the ditch and lean on his stick to talk to them.

“The key principle to keep in mind,” he says, “is not to look at the camera. There is the enemy before you—” he points with his stick, “—and there is your route of escape. Remember that you have been instructed by your officers to hold this position at all costs and should not abandon it lightly. And — if you have been selected to die — please do so before the volunteers enter the trench.”

Zeke raises his arm. Zeke got himself closest to the camera, nothing be-tween him and it.

“Suh?”

“Yes, Zeke.”

“Them of us that got to run, how far we spose to go?”

Mr. Harry points past them with his stick. “You see the chestnut back there? Run behind that and then take up your firing position again.” He smiles. “Consider those trees your second line of defense.”

He tells them to check one more time they got a round in the chamber and one in their back pocket, then limps out of the way. Mr. Harry takes care of the camera but doesn’t turn the handle.

Jubal looks over at the volunteers again, searching out which one he will aim at. If he really do it like he got to kill the man before the man kill him maybe it will take some of the nerves away. The one that carry the flag is the easiest to spot, but that don’t seem right, shooting the flag, so he picks out the man next to him. You dead, Mister Volunteer. Mr. Charles calls are they ready and it gets real quiet, Colonel Funston’s ride side-stepping some like it be nervous too, and then Jubal hears the camera winding and Mr. Charles calls “Charge! Fire!”

The white men come ahead, hooping and hollering as they run and Jubal gets a good one off, dead center on the man but then there is so much smoke from their rifles shooting you can’t see a thing. He digs the second round out, trying to stay calm, and loads it up. He is looking for a body through the smoke when Ernest and Tip fall beside him and he remembers he’s been tapped to die. He fires high into the smoke and tosses the rifle clear before dropping straight down holding his chest like he always done when Royal pretend to shoot him when they were boys playing blues and grays. The volunteers, not so many as there are Filipinos, stumble down the front of the ditch and each fires once at the men running away before they chase after. The smoke hangs over and then there is Colonel Funston on the Morgan prancing along the front of the ditch and then down into it, coming way too close and before he can think Jubal has jumped up and dove away from the hooves.

If he was dead his eyes should have been closed and he just get trompled, but it is too late now, the camera has seen him and remembered it. So now maybe he is a Filipino been wounded a little or faking and when Funston trots back at him with his pistol drawn he hops up and lights out for the trees. He runs a few feet and there is the pistol shot but he is not hit and he keeps running till he comes to where everybody has stopped around the chestnut tree and one of the volunteers points a rifle at him.

“Hands up, boy,” says the volunteer. “You been nabbed by Uncle Sam.”

They all laugh, the volunteers and the Filipinos, and then Mr. James shouts for them to come back. He is smiling and Mr. Harry is pulling the roll out of the camera, so maybe he didn’t mess up too bad.

“Excellent, gentlemen. Just excellent,” says Mr. James. “Stirring. And you,” he points to Jubal, “the terrified insurrectionist — that was inspired.”

This must mean good because Mr. Harry is taking the camera off the sticks and the one who does the cranking is writing something on a pad of paper, both of them smiling too.

“Now if our Filipinos will don their hats and reclaim their rifles, we will move on to the Capture of Trenches at Candaba.” He points up to the one playing Funston. “Captain Ditmar, be advised that in this film you will be required to fall from your mount. Quickly, gentlemen!”

Jubal climbs into the ditch to find his rifle. His heart is still racing. This time, if he is wounded, maybe he’ll remember to drag a leg.

OBSTETRICS

He hopes it was only the stairs. Jessie breaking her water halfway to the fourth and calling in a panic until he and Yolanda could carry her up, and now writhing on the bed with a blood-tinged mucous plug on the floor. Placenta previa is the worst of the catalysts he can think of, the hemorrhaging so likely to carry the mother away during or after the delivery, but there is also eclampsia and endometritis and hydramnios—so many possibilities for preterm induction, and obstetrics never his strongest suit, if only for the lack of opportunity to practice. Only the wealthiest of colored women in Wilmington choose to engage a physician rather than one of the city’s half-dozen midwives, even in emergency situations.

The idea of attending his own daughter’s first parturition has never, until this moment, occurred to him.

Dr. Lunceford forces himself to concentrate on his preparations. Yolanda is trembling, cold as always, her own harrowing experiences no doubt weighing on her thoughts. And Jessie, his little Jessie, lies back on the pillows breathing deeply and studying his face for clues.

“It’s coming, isn’t it? It’s coming now.”

The arithmetic is not difficult. The one incident she confessed to, on the night of Junior’s final visit, then counting forward — it is twenty-eight weeks.

“We shall see,” he says to his daughter. “The vital thing is for you to remain as calm as possible while I see what we have here.”

“What can I do?” Yolanda asks, standing as far back as the room allows, terrified. She has never observed him in practice, Yolanda, has demurred even when close friends have asked her to be present at their own birthings.

“I need you to clean the stove, as thoroughly as possible.”

“The stove?”

“Just the warming compartment, the larger one.” He looks deeply into her eyes. “Please.”

It is an unlikely possibility, but he needs to spare her the sight of what may come next. Yolanda crosses quickly to Jessie, bends to embrace her and kiss her on both cheeks.

“You’re all right now, baby,” she says. “Your father knows what to do.” And then hurries into the kitchen.

It is near freezing in the room, Dr. Lunceford in his overcoat and Jessie with her top half weighed down under all of their blankets, little puffs of condensation from her mouth as she breathes irregularly now, the landlord untraceable whenever the radiators fail in the building. Jessie’s eyes are bulging slightly as she watches him. Blood pressure elevated. In Wilmington, even with the home births, there would be a curtain or a kind of tent structure blocking the woman’s view of his actions and his view of her face. Better to concentrate on the organs involved in the procedure and nothing else. But there is no time for that now, and he seats himself at the bottom of the bed to stare into the vagina of his only daughter, who he has not seen naked since she was four years old.

It helps that there is no footboard. Jessie is frightened, perspiring, the pains having come twice, some five minutes apart. She is barely dilated.

That was the problem for Yolanda the second time, with Jessie and what would have been her sister. Dr. Tinsley reaching for the dilator, eyes apologetic as he glanced to Dr. Lunceford, allowed in the room as a professional courtesy. Many physicians preferred to perform their accouchements forcés digitally, but at the Freedman’s Hospital they had the latest of instruments. It was shiny, polished steel, he remembers, four blades with a screw mechanism at the top. He remembers the tearing, remembers his wife’s screams, the chloroform ineffective in the dosage they regarded as safe, remembers the sister, never named, coming out first and then Jessie, identical except for her color, her faintest bloom of life.

“I want to hold them both,” Yolanda said, coming up from the morphine when her condition was stable, when the bleeding had finally been halted. “I must hold them.”

“The one has been buried,” he had to tell her. “Two days ago.”

There are so many things that can go wrong. A girl in her teens, first delivery, preterm — he tries not to imagine any of them. Let it present itself, he thinks, and I will choose whatever remedy is available.

“It hurts, Daddy,” Jessie says, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It hurts so much.”

She hasn’t called him Daddy for years. It is what common girls, white and colored, call their fathers, and Jessie has not been raised to be a common girl.

“I can’t give you anything yet, Jessie. It would interfere with what you’ve got to do.”

There is ether in hospitals, and even without his license he could obtain chloroform tablets and an inhaler, but he is convinced that as commonly employed such anesthetics are unsafe for both mother and fetus. The Twilight Sleep advocates to the contrary, a comatose mother is unlikely to experience normal contractions.

Jessie arches her body, clenching her fists and crying out. Yolanda appears in the doorway.

“Go,” says Dr. Lunceford, and she returns to her scouring.

He shifts the oil lamp closer and pushes the labia apart with his fingers. He has only an ancient Sims speculum in his bag that at the moment seems a device of torture rather than diagnostics. She is beginning to open.

“I want you to breathe somewhat rapidly in between the cramps,” he tells Jessie. “Rapidly but not deeply. If you start to get dizzy, slow your breathing down.”

“It’s coming, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t want to get her hopes up, not at her age, not when it is this early. His first delivery, the one that soured him on obstetrics, was a girl about Jessie’s age. She was long overdue, her mother said, but had had no contractions and now was sick with a fever.

The baby was very large and beginning to decompose. He insisted on the curtain that time, insisted that the mother and the aunt and the girl’s best friend stay on the other side of it to comfort her while he worked. There was enough swelling that neither the blunthook nor the cephalotribe were of any use, no way to insert them without further damaging the vagina. He was forced to use the trephine perforator, asking the women to sing a hymn to distract from the sound of it, and then hook in and yank the tiny body out with a crochet. At least it came out in one piece.

So many possibilities, so many pitfalls.

“You’re going to have to help me,” Dr. Lunceford says to his daughter. “Do you think you can do that? You have to be very brave.”

“I’m only a girl,” says Jessie in a very small voice.

“You have been married, you have been widowed, you have been exiled.” It is the first time he has ever said the word aloud. “You only have to do what all women do.”

“I’m not ready.”

“I’m sorry. It won’t wait.”

They speak very little these days. Yolanda pleads with him to forgive Jessie and he maintains that their acceptance of her, living with her and what they all know to be true of her condition, is forgiveness enough.

This time she cries out louder, and Dr. Lunceford has a momentary twinge of concern for their neighbors on the fifth floor. Their neighbors who engage in screaming matches twice a week.

A tiny knob of skull is pushing through now.

“Aaron?” calls Yolanda from the kitchen.

“Is it clean?”

“As clean as I can make it.”

“Take some of my handwash, the antiseptic,” he calls, “and wipe the inside with it.”

Jessie is huffing now, balling handfuls of the bedsheet in her fists, pushing down hard enough with her feet that her buttocks raise off the bed from time to time.

“It shouldn’t be coming now, should it?” she says to him when she can catch her breath. “I’m not ready.”

“We won’t know anything till it reveals itself,” he says. It is not true. He knows it will be undersized, discolored, the digestive tract not finished, the lungs prone to atelectasis, susceptible to infection — if it is viable at all. “You just have to concentrate on helping it come out. When the next cramp happens I want you to try to breathe in and make your chest and stomach rise up. You’ve been clamping down.”

“It hurts so much.”

“The pain will be there no matter what you do, Jessie. But if you lift up with your stomach it will allow the baby to come out.”

He is careful to call it a baby and not a fetus. Dr. Osler once presented a lecture that concerned nothing but Terminology and the Patient — when the lay terms should be employed, when a bit of scientific Latin was not amiss to either obscure a harsh reality or impress a skeptic. But in his mind this is no baby.

The membrane on the cervix is appropriately thin, and it has opened to nearly five centimeters. Dr. Lunceford’s pitiful collection of instruments, just sterilized, is laid out beside him on a clean towel. He will have to cut and sew, there is no way to avoid it, with the attendant risk of sepsis. He wonders what the midwives do, women with their herbs and potions and folklore. That so many of their charges, mother and child, survive, is either a testament to their common sense or to the inherent hardiness of the species. That something so vital to our existence should require the ministration of others—

“Ah, ah, ah, ah!” cries Jessie.

“Lift your stomach—”

“Do something! Give me something!” she shouts at him, red-faced, furious in her agony.

Dr. Lunceford flushes as he stifles his first response. This is the consequence, he thinks, of her own actions. And then anger, at his own arrogance, at Nature itself for contriving to allow his sweet little girl to hurt like this.

“When we get it out,” he says to her soothingly. “We just need to get it out and then I can give you something.”

The veins on Jessie’s temples stand out as she strains, crying out each time she exhales, but he sees that she is trying, chest and stomach pushed up spastically with each convulsion.

“That’s my girl,” he says. “That’s my Jessie.”

“Aaron?” calls Yolanda from the kitchen. Her voice wavers, he can hear that she is crying.

“Feed the firebox,” he says. “But keep the door to the warming compartment open.”

She had nightmares, Yolanda, for years after the birth, waking in a sweat and then insisting on going into the children’s rooms to be sure they were both still breathing.

“Daddy!” Jessie calls. “I feel it moving!”

Another contraction grips her, her little face contorted with pain, Dr. Lunceford holding tightly to her ankles to keep her on the bed and it is fully crowned now, purplish with fluid-slimed hair on top of it. Not breech, thinks Dr. Lunceford thankfully. Not transverse.

Jessie slumps back into the mattress, wheezing for breath, and he quickly injects cocaine solution into the perineum. This late in the procedure there is little chance of it passing into the fetus. He lifts the scalpel, stretching the cervix away from the cranium with his other hand, counting. He wants to give the drug time to dull the nerves, but to cut before the next contraction. Just a little nick, enough so it won’t tear.

“We’re halfway there, Jessie. A little sting now—”

He slices, less than an inch, and immediately she spasms and there is blood and amniotic fluid and the nose and mouth are pushed out, a vertex presentation, and he reaches under and quickly clears its tiny mouth with his little finger.

“A couple more, Jessie,” he urges. “Push from your diaphragm. Remem-ber your singing lessons.”

He misses her playing. He never thought too much of it in Wilmington, something the women liked to occupy themselves with and Jessie apparently a prodigy, but here, in these dingy rented rooms, he feels its absence. He hears Yolanda in the doorway again.

“The shoebox,” he says.

“That I keep my jewelry in?”

“Empty it out and line it with cotton batting. There’s some in my bag.”

He hears her move away. His eye falls on the forceps lying beside the bloodied scalpel. No, he thinks. We’re past that. Jessie starts to growl, the growl raising in pitch till she is shouting, one long agonized howl and she is pushing from her diaphragm as he asked and more of it is revealed and he is able to hook his index finger in and get a purchase on something, perhaps beneath an arm, and when Jessie goes slack this time she is weeping, her shoulders shaking and her head rolling from side to side on the pillows.

“I can’t, Daddy. I can’t anymore.”

“You would be surprised,” he says, “at how strong, at how willful my daughter Jessie is. Come on now — one more big push when it comes—”

Her scream this time is not the noise a girl makes. She strains and contorts her face and mucous blows out of her nose and Dr. Lunceford pulls gently and it is free, tiny thing and fluid and blood and black meconium and the cord exactly where you want it to be, the cord purple and red and blue and with the faintest of vibrations, a pulse, when he squeezes it with his fingers.

“Yolanda!” he calls. “I need you now!”

She is beside him, holding the shoebox, as he turns the tiny, wrinkled thing in his hand to rub its arms and legs. The color begins to change and it makes something like a hiccup.

“Oh my,” says Yolanda. “Oh my.”

“It’s still in me, Daddy,” says Jessie, her hot breath turning to steam in the freezing room. “I can feel it.”

“That’s the placenta,” he tells her. “Just push with the cramp and it will come out.”

He holds his rubber-gloved hand out toward Yolanda. “Alcohol.”

She splashes the alcohol over his fingers and when they are relatively clean of effluvia he pulls down on the lower eyelids, black bead of a pupil swimming, and squeezes a drop of silver-nitrate solution into each. More than a precaution, considering the father.

“Can I take it?” Yolanda asks.

“Not yet. You see those pieces of string?”

“Yes.”

“Clean your hands with the alcohol. The length of your finger from the body — tie the cord off there. Don’t pull tight. Then another knot an inch farther.”

Jessie’s cry is exhausted as she stiffens and pushes again. The placenta presents itself in a drooling of fluid.

“Jessie, I’m here, baby,” Yolanda calls, concentrating on her tying. “Every-thing is just fine.”

“Is it alive?”

Yolanda flicks her eyes up to his. “We’re going to do our best,” he says. “It’s so early—”

“It’s a girlchild,” says Yolanda. “I think.”

The body is limp in his hand, veins showing through in the places where its skin is unwrinkled, its abdomen extended, extremities a purplish blue, its respiration shallow. The few little sounds he can induce from it are low and weak. There is the tiniest spark of life glowing within.

“What do we need to create and maintain a fire?” Dr. Osler used to say. “Heat, oxygen, and fuel. An infant is no different.”

Dr. Lunceford waits for the pulse to end, then slices the umbilical between the two knots his wife has tied. “Tear the short side of the box down so it’s open at the end — that’s it—” He folds a gauze pad over the cord end and fixes it with a clamp. “Now let’s put it in the cotton—”

“I want to hold her,” calls Jessie.

“You can’t, baby, not yet.” Yolanda cradles the creature in her two hands and holds it close. “But look—”

Jessie looks horrified at first, then tears pour from her eyes and steam on her cheeks. “It isn’t finished.”

“It’s just little, that’s all. We’ll have to take special care.”

Jessie stiffens involuntarily, the rest of the placenta sliding to where Dr. Lunceford can pull it out. “Get it in the cotton,” he says, impatient, “and into that warming compartment.”

Yolanda lays the creature gently into the shoebox, pushing the cotton tight around its tiny listless body, and hurries from the room. The Sloane Maternity Hospital has at least one Tarnier couveuse, and if there is room will place infants from the charity ward inside. But transporting it in this cold—

“You can relax now,” he says to Jessie. “Close your eyes, breathe slowly and deeply.”

He drops the placenta onto the newspaper spread on the floor, quickly sponges her as clean as possible with the alcohol and then begins to suture the perineum, the cocaine obviously fully in effect as Jessie seems not to notice. She is looking over his shoulder to the kitchen.

“I’m going to call her Minnie.”

Dr. Lunceford sighs. It is hard to make the stitches close enough with only the meager lamplight to see by. “Minnie is a nickname, not a name,” he says. Her own is Jessamyne Root Lunceford, Root being his mother’s maternal surname, but Junior never called her anything but Jessie.

“Minerva,” she says, shifting her eyes to him. “Minerva is Minnie.”

It is the name of the most popular midwife in Wilmington. The name of the woman who, if by some miracle the creature in the oven survives, will be its other grandmother. He refuses to be provoked.

“Plenty of time to think about names. Try putting your legs down.”

It costs her some pain, and he steps to the head of the bed to help pull her into a more comfortable position. She takes hold of his hand.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she says.

“We don’t have to continue to—”

“I mean sorry that you had to do this.”

Her eyes look clear, her color good. He pulls the blankets back up over her shoulders. “I consider it a privilege.”

She gives him a little smile then and asks that he send her mother in. It means she wants to be alone with her. He steps carefully over the mess on the floor. It looks like there has been a slaughter.

“The bread won’t rise if you keep the door open,” Yolanda says. “It keeps bothering me.”

“In an hour, if — in an hour, we’ll heat some mineral oil and then clean it off. I’ll put a cup of water in there, keep the air moist. And I’ll have to buy a breast pump—” as he says it he is not certain he has enough money, “—and see what Jessie can provide. Until then we’ll see if it will take some sugar water from the eye dropper—”

Yolanda stands up abruptly. “She’s not going to die,” she states, and goes to sit with Jessie.

He can see his own breath by the light of the oil lamp. The wind is howling outside, a storm, and he imagines it has been going on for some time without him noticing. His wife’s jewelry has been dumped out on the peeling kitchen table, a jumble of the rings and necklaces the pawnshop owner would not accept. We are not helpless, he thinks, sitting alone in the kitchen. With Yolanda’s will and his experience, his training — we are destitute, but not helpless. Dr. Lunceford scoots the chair closer to the coal stove and brings his face close to look into the warming compartment at it, at her, wrinkled barely breathing handful of a creature out where she has no business being yet, and he is suddenly filled with a rush of something that is neither rage nor relief nor despair.

It is defiance. They have taken everything else, money, home, pride, but they will not take her. They will not take her.

Little Minnie.

WHITE HOUSE

He sits on a wooden chair in a hallway lined with other petitioners on wooden chairs, backs to the wall, hats in their laps, all turning to look whenever somebody comes out from the room. Directed by the secretary, Mr. Cortelyou, he has made his way from the central hall past the stairway landing to the east sitting hall, shifting from chair to chair closer to the desired audience, warmed now by the mid-morning sunlight spilling through the enormous fanlight window at the end of the corridor, sitting directly across from the President’s study. He is still discomfited by the aspect of the residence — not shabby, exactly, but worn in a rather neglectful way. The building, beyond the magnificent Tiffany-glass doors of the vestibule, suggests a once-resplendent hotel long past its glory days more than the symbolic centerpiece of a nation’s government. There are cracks in the ceiling, carpets faded past respectable use, a curious smell. The bottom floor is crowded with tourists and curiosity seekers, the stairs lively with clerks and household retainers carrying the implements of their station. He expected something more august, more Olympian.

The interview has been difficult enough to obtain. George White, now the last of his race in the House, imposing on a number of his prominently placed sympathizers, keeping the particulars vague enough to escape alarm, hinting at political capital to be earned in the South. It is a surprise to be here at all.

“I have chosen not to run again,” White explained to him, “because I value my own neck, and because I value the safety of my constituents. Even great armies retreat when the vagaries of the day presage a disaster.”

“But we outnumber them in your district.”

White smiled then. “The Black Second is that in name only. Our vote was our only weapon, our only tool. It has been taken from our hands.”

A trio of men, beefy and laughing, step out from the study. Mr. Cortelyou appears at his side, pushing his spectacles back onto the bridge of his nose and speaking softly in his courteous manner.

“He’ll see you now.”

He is led, surprisingly, not to the study but to the office beside it.

“Mr. Lincoln used this room as his office,” says Cortelyou, opening the door. “The Cabinet have their meetings here now.”

The room is empty. The secretary indicates a chair at the end of a long table of polished dark wood. “If you’ll have a seat, he’ll be right in.”

To his right there is a huge globe mounted on a heavy metal floor stand, a glass-fronted case, a cherrywood rolltop desk. The walls hold a dozen smallish portraits in oil, many of them presidents. There is a brass chandelier overhead that has been converted to hold electric lights. The long table is divided by a dozen leather-bound books propped in a row in the middle. A large bouquet of fresh flowers sits just in front of his seat. He looks at the other chairs, imagining them occupied by the Secretaries of Navy and War, by Hay, Alger, Long, Griggs, and the feeling again percolates through him that he should not be here, followed by the smallest twinge of hope, of exhilaration that the quest for justice has penetrated so close to its duly elected guardians.

He nearly jumps to his feet as the President enters from the door to his study.

McKinley is shorter than he had imagined, though he is a fleshy, sturdy-looking man, clean-shaven, with the large head and noble profile of the newspaper illustrations. He holds out his hand.

“A pleasure to meet you.”

They shake hands. “Thank you for seeing me.”

The President sits in a wooden swivel armchair at the far end of the long table, surrounded by inkstand and pens, a wooden stationery holder, wearing a vague smile on his face.

“And how may I help you, Mr. Manly?”

He has rehearsed this over and over, Carrie serving as coach and audience, searching for the proper balance between his respect for the personage and his outrage over the offense.

“I imagine you have been informed of the events in Wilmington over the past election—”

The vague smile does not change. The President’s eyes, expressionless, seem empty of thought, of emotion—

“—voters intimidated, killings and expulsions, my own press burned—”

“You are a newspaper man.”

If he has in fact heard of the riot, the President is an excellent actor.

“I was, until my property was destroyed and my life threatened.”

“This sounds like an obvious legal complaint.”

“A futile one, I’m afraid, Mr. President, in the courts of North Carolina.”

“North Carolina.”

The President says the words as if they are the key to a room he does not wish to enter.

“I believe the outrages fall under the purview of the federal government. Constitutional rights have been violated, property illegally seized—”

“This was on Election Day?”

“On the following day. An armed mob, led by members of the political faction that has since gained power, fired indiscriminately into several neighborhoods, killing an untold number of citizens. Men were rounded up and forced to leave their homes and families without legal proceedings or even complaints, women and children forced to cower in the woods overnight during a rainstorm—”

A small frown creases the President’s forehead. The interview has veered into territory he has not been prepared for. “You saw these things with your own eyes?”

“Not personally, no—”

“Ah—”

“I was forced to flee just before the—”

“I see—” Losing him, fleshy hands on the arms of his swivel chair now, ready to rise, to bequeath him to the appropriate supernumerary—

“I only escaped because my skin is so light.”

Confusion on the President’s face.

“But I have the testimony of dozens of eye-witnesses, many who have suffered more than I. This was mob rule, highly organized and specifically targeted at bringing the Democrats, despite their numerical disadvantage on the voter rolls, back into power in Wilmington. As my people have been among your greatest supporters in the past, they naturally hope that you, as a last resort, could offer some sort of just response to this—”

“You’re a negro?”

He asked no subterfuge of Congressman White in setting up the audience, and assumed none had been necessary.

“Of course.”

The President flushes a deep pink, like a gulf shrimp suddenly boiled. His fingers tighten on the arms of the swivel chair.

“You’ll have to leave.”

He is angry, and what is worse, what is more disappointing, he is afraid. This white man at the far end of the long, polished table, is visibly shaking.

“I am an American citizen,” says Alex Manly, “a registered Republican, and, until recently, the editor of a—”

“You must leave this room!”

The voice much louder now, though not firm. On the other side of the door, leaning against the wall reading newspapers, were a pair of men who Manly had taken for Pinkertons, involved somehow with the President’s security. He stands slowly, hands spread slightly in a placating gesture.

“Thank you for seeing me.”

The President does not answer.

Mr. Cortelyou frowns at him as he steps out, and one of the security men flicks his eyes over the newspaper, suspicious. The floor beams seem to shift under his feet, he feels unsteady. The petitioners, nearly in unison, move up a seat. He passes an older colored man mopping the stairway on the way down.

“We will now enter the Public Audience Room, often referred to as the Banquet Room or East Room,” says the young man leading a dozen visitors along the Cross Hall past the foot of the stairs. “Mourners gathered here to view President Lincoln’s body after his assassination, and it has provided the setting for many a gala affair. This room, more than any other in the residence, belongs to you.”

Manly exits through the North Portico, perspiring now under his suit as he hurries past soldiers rigid on either side of the doorway, their eyes fixed on an invisible locus. He does not look back.

DREAM BOOK

NOTICE

TO RESIDENTS OF ILLINOIS ONLY

If you live in any other State

you do not have to send the “Sample Letter.”

It seems Illinois is worried about minors buying firearms through the mail. But if you write the catalogue people a letter saying you are twenty-one or older, they will send whatever you order. It makes the Assassin wonder. Is there some way they can check to be sure? Do they bother? His name is on lists, he has had to change it more than once.

But outside of this one state, they make it so easy—

REVOLVERS

The following quotations do not include cartridges.

42033

Eclipse vest pocket single-shot pistol, Nickel-plated, wood stock, 2½ inch Barrel; weight 5 ounces; for BB and conical caps and.22 caliber short cartridge, safe and reliable, barrel swings to the right to load.

Each… $0.50

By mail, extra… .05

So easy to conceal, but only that one shot. You have to be close, close enough to put it to the temple. To look the man in the eye.

BIG BARGAINS,

AMERICAN BULL DOG REVOLVERS

This line of revolvers are strictly first-class in every respect. The quality of workmanship and material is best; all have rifled barrels and are good shooters. All 5 shot. These are not toys but good big guns. We can sell them at these prices because we buy them 5,000 at a time.

American Bull Dogs, all double-action, self-cocking, all have rubber stocks, all beautifully nickel-plated, all have saw handles, all have fluted cylinders, all have octagon barrels—

There are so many to choose from. Forehand and Wadsworth, Harrington and Richardson, Hopkins and Allen, Colt, Smith and Wesson — it is hard to know. The higher calibers will do more damage, of course, but the pistols that deliver them tend to be bigger, longer, harder to hide—

HANDSOME REVOLVERS

ACCURATE RELIABLE

47146

Colt’s New Navy

This revolver has been adopted by the U.S. Navy and every one has to pass a rigorous inspection.

Double-action, self-cocking, shell-ejecting revolver, nickel-plated or blued finish, rubber stock, beautifully finished, finest material; length about 12½ in., 6 shot, weight 2 lbs., 4½ or 6 in. barrel, 38 caliber using 47981 cartridges.

Each… $12.00

By mail, extra… .35

The Assassin is a metalworker but not a gun person. He looks at his hand, tries to imagine it holding something with a six-inch barrel. Military men shoot to kill all the time, they are trained for it, but the military belongs to them, it is the whip hand of the State. In all the strikes the military and the police have had the guns, have had the power—

52338

Iver Johnson “Safety Automatic”

“A Sure Shot”

Small-frame double-action top break revolver; nickel-plated, hand-checkered wood grip, exposed hammer, 3 in. barrel. 6 shot, chambered for S&W.32 cartridge.

Each… $3.10

By mail, extra… .17

It is no bigger than the palm of his hand. The Assassin has seen them for sale in hardware stores, short and heavy-looking. He has even lifted one in his hand, pretending to consider buying it. Even without the cartridges loaded he felt a different man. A man who could make some difference in the world.

A man of destiny.

HOW TO ORDER—

A DEATH IN CABANATUAN

Diosdado carries his uniform in a sack, easy to toss away if they encounter the Americans. No point in drawing more fire than you need to. The men, remnants of four companies, walk on ahead and behind him through the head-high cane, ducking away from the razor-sharp leaves, rifles slung over their shoulders, silent, listening to the terrain in front of them. A pair of hawks wheel slowly overhead, hoping the troop will flush something edible into the open. With dead, wounded, and deserted it is only twenty-five of them left plus the boy, Fulanito, who appeared one day carrying a Spanish Mauser nearly as tall as he is.

They pause at the end of the cane, Sargento Bayani crossing the road first as always, moving unguardedly into the rice paddy with a bolo resting on his shoulder. The enemy is too confident to bother with ambush, impatient to fire at anything that moves, and Bayani insists he is an irresistible target. He walks for a full minute, then turns to wave them ahead.

There is no telling what the reception will be in Cabanatuan. General Luna has ordered every telegraph line in the province cut and by the time runners have traveled back and forth the situation may have changed completely. General del Pilar, busy gathering his own men for a forced march to Bayambang, only nodded when Diosdado informed him that the men had voted to stay together rather than be split up and reabsorbed into other units.

“Go to headquarters,” he said. “They’ll find something to do with you.”

Diosdado’s troop is a mix of Zambals, Ilocanos, Pampangans, and Tagalos, bound now by blood and suffering. The rumors — that the ilustrados are selling the country to the Americans, that General Luna is secretly forming his own army, that the Jesuits are behind it all — do not seem to concern them. They talk about food and women and gamecocks, they make fun of each other, play liampo, gripe about the rebuilt shells jamming in their rifles and the true provenance of dried beef. They are good Catholics, kneeling for a quick Jesus, Maria, y José even in the roofless shell-blasted churches, and believe deeply in the miraculous power of the saints. Kalaw who writes an oración on a circle of paper and puts it in his mouth before a battle, careful not to swallow the hosta redentora till the danger has ended, Rafi who wears a vest with a red-eyed, sword-wielding angel embroidered on the back, the Pampangano brothers who empty their pockets of all metal when the shooting starts and say that Dr. Rizal is not really dead, that he will be resurrected on the day the americanos are driven from Luzon.

The boy, Fulanito, carries messages and brings water and spies on the yanquis but does not speak. It is not clear whether he ever could.

The cane fields give way to a series of hills, Diosdado keeping the troop off the main road as they begin to climb. It is morning still, but the men are careful when shifting their rifles on their backs not to touch sun-heated gunmetal with bare skin. He wonders if his boots will give him away as an officer if they are captured by Americans. Goyo del Pilar looked immaculate as they left San Isidro, a warrior in white astride his steed, breaking hearts in every barangay he rides through. Diosdado can’t imagine Goyo hiking through the mountain passes in rags and a straw hat, no matter what the danger.

Sargento Bayani drops back beside him, using the bolo now and then as a walking stick as he climbs. He has taken to carrying it instead of a rifle as an example for the men, saying that this is their future, that before long they will have nothing left to fight the Americans with but their bolos, and on that day they will be true Filipino patriots.

“Maybe they’ll send us to General Tinio in Ilocos,” he says. “Somewhere they know how to fight.”

Tinio is younger than Goyo del Pilar, only Diosdado’s age, but already making a name for himself around Vigan.

“Why would they send us away from the front?”

Bayani shrugs. “Because we’re not Tagalo and they don’t trust us.”

They climb silently for a while. Diosdado had been thinking the same thing, but resists seconding his sargento’s cynicism. An officer must appear to be above politics—

“Maybe to Zambales, di ba?” Bayani smiles. “It would be nice to see San Epifanio again before they kill us.”

Diosdado shoots his subaltern a look. “How do you know my baryo?”

“Because I’m from the same place.”

Diosdado feels a chill. He studies the man’s face as they climb, sees no one from his past. “There was no Bayani in—”

“A name I took after I left. My mother was Amor Pandoc.”

The sargento says it lightly, eyes on the faint trail through the rocks, waving his bolo at his side like he is on a stroll in the country. Diosdado can think only of a day riding back from Iba with his father, passing a tiny patch of ground about to be swallowed by the jungle, a woman with dark skin and fierce eyes rising up from her sweet potatoes to stare, and a sullen boy some years older than him on his knees in the mud next to her. Don Nicasio kept his eyes forward and did not speak for the rest of the ride home. Diosdado had seen the woman in town for holy days and at the misa de gallo while he yawned through his duties as an altar boy, always a hushed tone in the churchwomen’s voices when she was spoken of, some scandal that, like the countless others in San Epifanio, was never revealed to him. His first year back from Manila he heard that this woman, this Amor Pandoc who never had a husband mentioned with her name, had died of tuberculosis and that her son had run away to join the tulisanes in the mountains.

“I remember there was a celebration when you left for school,” says Bayani, deadpan. “A feast for all of Don Nicasio’s laborers, with fireworks and everything.”

“You were there?”

Bayani looks away. “I heard about it. People were very proud.”

Diosdado scowls. “Rich men send their sons to university because they’re not fit for anything else.”

“But you learned.”

“Nothing of use here.” He indicates the rocky path, the line of straw-hatted soldiers ahead of them.

“You have languages,” says Bayani.

“So have you.”

“I have the languages of ignorant people. You have proper Spanish—”

“Which my father spoke in our house. English is from our trips to Hongkong. At university I learned only Latin—”

“You know sciences.”

“The theories only. Nothing practical, like how to make gunpowder—”

“You know history.”

“So do you.”

Bayani snorts. “I know stories—”

“History is only stories written down.”

Bayani looks disappointed. “Then how do the young ilustrados occupy their time in Manila?”

Diosdado sighs. “Some drink and gamble. Some put on their frac coats and bowler hats and spend their nights attending the theater and courting young ladies. My friends and I spent most of our time trying to impress the padres with our intelligence and our cultivation,” he says, “and the rest of it plotting their destruction.”

“You wanted them to like you?”

“We wanted them to love us like their perfect children. We wanted them to respect us. But no matter how we parroted their language, no matter how much we learned from their books, we were never more than indios to them.”

“They insulted you.”

Indios sucios. It is what his father had called the majority of the people who lived in San Epifanio, people who cut his cane and processed his hemp and picked his mangoes in the orchard, indios descalzados, indios tontos, indios sinverguenzas, and Diosdado had spent his young life striving not to be anything like them. But even with Padre Peregrino, whose pet he had been at university, he was never more than a curiosity, an indio who won honors in Latin, a talking monkey.

“We were so full of hope,” he says to the sargento, “so full of energy and patriotismo. We would not become rich and corrupt like our fathers, we would fight and fight and never sell ourselves, we would never—”

“Take money from the Spaniards and run to Hongkong.” Bayani looks up the hill to the summit, speaking casually.

“That was a strategy, carefully thought out by General Aguinaldo. A chance to heal and to plan—”

Bayani turns to look him in the eye. “If the americanos had not come, you would still be there.”

They have stopped moving, as have the men behind them. Joselito runs down to them from the top of the hill.

“Yanquis ahead of us, Teniente. On the other side.”

Diosdado gestures and little Fulanito rushes forward with his binoculars. The boy loves to carry them, the strap around his scrawny neck, bumping in their leather case against his knees. The men ahead are already sitting, eyes following Diosdado as he hurries up past them with Sargento Bayani.

The uniform shirts are a beautiful bright blue against the brilliant green of the rice paddy on the plain below. Two full companies, most resting on the side of the plantation road, a dozen standing stretched in a firing line. Diosdado twists the focus ring on the field glasses until the others come clear.

PATROL

There are ten of them, in the simple white cotton with blue stripes, straw hats scattered on the ground behind them. Their arms are tied behind their backs, their bare toes curled over the stone of the low dike they stand upon, facing a shallow trench they have just finished digging. The Americans raise their weapons in unison and there is a dotted line of smoke puffs. The Filipinos have toppled out of sight into the ditch before the rifle report echoes up from the plain.

Diosdado puts the binoculars down. Sargento Bayani lies on his belly beside him, his face impassive.

“If we cut around the hill to the north we should be able to miss them. Unless you want to try an ambush.”

“General del Pilar told us to report to headquarters, nothing more.”

The sargento fixes him with a look. “A sus órdenes, mi teniente.”

They crawl away from the top, then stand to head back to the men. “We swing to the north,” says Diosdado. “General Aguinaldo should be informed of how close they are.”

It is a hot, airless, dusty march around the hills, past noon when they reach the outskirts of Cabanatuan to be greeted by dogs in an ugly mood. There are dozens of them, scabby, ribs showing, shifting around the troop in a loose pack that seems to have no leader, snarling with their ears laid back. The men throw stones but the dogs only scamper away a few feet and then regroup. Diosdado halts the makeshift company by the first decent-looking dwelling they come to, and asks the betel-chewing old woman in front if he can go inside to change clothes.

The tunic is not so white now, hanging loose on him, buttons unpolished. His friends at the Ateneo called him flaco sometimes, and he hadn’t thought he had any weight to lose.

“Por favor, mi teniente,” jokes Kalaw when Diosdado steps out of the hut dressed to report to Aguinaldo. “Ask the General if we can have a week’s leave in Manila. They say the americanos have the lights working again.”

Bayani walks with him into the town. There are more dogs, growling low as they pass, and dozens of the Presidential Guards lingering in the plaza, eyeing them suspiciously.

“Something bad happening here, hermano,” says Bayani.

Sometimes it annoys Diosdado when the sargento calls him brother, and sometimes it seems like a compliment.

“They’ve probably heard the Americans are close.”

Bayani shakes his head. “We’ve seen these Caviteños before. This is the bunch that Luna disarmed after we burned Tondo.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You can wash their faces and stick them in red pants,” says Bayani, “but they’re the same putos tagalos. You better be careful.”

“Go see if you can find the men something to eat.” Diosdado wishes there had been a mirror in the woman’s hut to comb his hair. He wonders if General Aguinaldo will remember him from Hongkong.

Scipio Castillero, wearing a spotless white suit and polished leather shoes, is lounging by the entrance to the casa parroquial next to a pair of sentries. He grins when he sees Diosdado.

“It’s Brother Argus, all dressed up like a soldier.”

Diosdado is too tired to smile. “Look who’s visiting the war.”

“I’m here with Don Felipe,” says Scipio, pointing upstairs. Don Felipe Buencamino is Secretary of War, one of the old guard who are said to be autonomistas, willing to trade Spanish domination for that of the yanquis. “How about you?”

“Reporting to General Aguinaldo.”

“Miong isn’t here.”

“We were told he was.”

Scipio shrugs. “This may not be a good day for you to be here, compa. Something in the air.”

Scipio has always been the one with the inside information, the one at school to steal the answers to the history examination, the first one in their class to start spying for the junta. He wears the smile of a man who knows what you don’t.

“I have to take care of my company.”

“The best thing you can do,” says Scipio, not smiling anymore, “is march them far away from Cabanatuan until things settle down.”

Diosdado steps past him into the building. “Politics must agree with you,” he says. “You’re getting fat.”

It is hotter, if possible, inside the casa parroquial than in the plaza, and there are flies everywhere, crawling on the walls and windows, buzzing lazily in the air, dead flies littering the tile floor. The encargado behind the desk, a nervous-looking sargento, also tells him that General Aguinaldo has left Cabanatuan, and does not know when he will return.

Diosdado sits on a bench by the wall to wait. The next superior officer who comes in can give them orders. He sits with his back straight and concentrates on keeping his eyes open, occasionally wiping at the sweat rolling down his face with the back of his hand. His stomach is making noises, low rumbling under the drone of the flies and the squeaking of the lopsided fan that turns overhead, barely managing to stir the air. Better that the supremo doesn’t see him in this state. He has developed, if not patience, the talent for waiting that is vital to a military career. He counts flies, living and dead. A Presidential Guard teniente sticks his head in the door, glares at Diosdado, then disappears. Diosdado hears some pacing upstairs. He guesses it is near three o’clock when there is a chorus of barking from the plaza, then angry shouting just outside and a slap and then General Antonio Luna stomps into the room. Diosdado jumps up and snaps to attention, but the encargado, surprised halfway to his desk with a wastebasket in hand, can only freeze with his mouth hanging open.

The general is in his usual fury. “Have none of you people been taught how to greet an officer?”

The sargento drops his trashcan and salutes. Colonel Román and Capitán Rusca step in behind Luna, looking around the room. Paco Román nods to Diosdado.

“I have come to see the President,” Luna announces.

“He is not here, mi general,” says the encargado.

Luna yanks a folded paper from inside his jacket, waves it in the air.

“Then why has he summoned me, in his own hand, to report to him at this place and time?”

“I don’t know, mi general. I only know that he is not here. He has gone — away.”

Luna, seething, suddenly turns to fix his glare on Diosdado.

“I was told the same,” says Diosdado. It does not seem the moment to ask if the general will give his bastard company an assignment.

Luna snorts, then steps up close to the sargento. “This is the seat of our government. The headquarters of the army of our nation. This paper says I am to head a new Cabinet. Is there anyone here who can offer me an explanation?”

“Only Señor Buencamino is upstairs, sir.”

The general’s face turns a deeper red, almost purple, as he turns to Román and Rusca. “We are engaged in desperate battle,” he says in a barely controlled voice, “and they leave a traitor in charge of headquarters.” He pushes past the sargento and bangs up the stairs. Paco Román rolls his eyes toward Diosdado before he and Capitán Rusca follow.

There has been more bad blood and trouble. Another officer refusing, at Bagbag, to honor Luna’s authority, the general pulling two companies off the line to confront him and his troops, and Bagbag falling rapidly to the yanquis.

“He was almost killed at Kalumpit,” whispers the sargento as Diosdado sits, uneasy, back on the bench. “Shot off his horse with the yanquis all around him. The say he was like this when the colonel saved him.” The encargado points an imaginary pistol to his skull. He seems disappointed by the outcome.

There is shouting from upstairs then, two voices. Luna’s is the louder, cursing. Diosdado hears the word traitor more than once. Buencamino has no place here, shouts the general, no authority. A capitán of the Presidential Guard strides into the room with a half-dozen of his men, ignoring Diosdado to look up the stairs with a tight face. Diosdado’s stomach drops as he realizes that the capitán is Janolino, whose brains were very nearly blown out by General Luna after the burning of Tondo. “Be prepared,” says the capitán to his men, “but do nothing without my order.”

The men bring up their rifles and bam! one discharges, the bullet shattering the glass of a framed photograph on the encargado’s desk.

The yelling upstairs stops abruptly.

“Mierda,” hisses Capitán Janolino.

The flies stop buzzing.

General Luna charges down the stairs, livid, the summons to report clutched in one hand and the other on the butt of his pistol.

“Who fired that shot?”

Before there is an answer his eyes fall on Janolino, also gripping his sidearm.

“You. What are you doing here?”

“I am commander of the Presidential Guard—”

Just as Colonel Román appears at the head of the stairs a pair of the soldiers leap forward swinging their bolos, metal hacking into bone before the general pushes clear of them, blood spurting from the side of his head, yanking his pistol out to fire wildly, chips of stone from the wall stinging Diosdado’s face, Luna staggering out the door and down the front steps with Janolino’s men rushing after. Román and Capitán Rusca run down the stairs and out past Diosdado and then there is a ragged volley of rifle fire. Diosdado trades a look with the terrified encargado, then rises and goes to the door.

Paco Román lies splayed at the bottom of the stairs and the plaza dogs howl as at least a full company of the Caviteño guardia surround the stricken general, firing indiscriminately now, Luna still on his feet with eyes blinded by his own blood shrieking “Cobardes! Traidores!” and firing his pistol till it is empty and he falls to his knees and immediately the bolomen are in hacking, hacking, as the dogs bark and snarl and nip at the backs of their legs in a frenzy of excitement. Diosdado feels a hand on his shoulder.

It is Scipio, somehow inside the room now. “A very bad day for you to be here, compa. Out the back door.”

Diosdado takes a last look, Capitán Janolino yanking the bloodied summons from the dead general’s fist, then turns to hurry past the weeping encargado and out through the rear of the casa parroquial.

Sargento Bayani, running, finds him halfway back to the men.

“What is it?”

“They killed Luna.”

“Carajo.”

“They killed Luna and Paco Román is dead and Rusca I don’t know—”

“General Aguinaldo—”

“Was not there.”

Dogs are scampering past them toward the plaza. Diosdado has never seen so many dogs in one town before.

“Luna lost his temper, as he always does, but this—”

Diosdado knows he is an officer in the Filipino Army and should not be shaking. He should be calm and clear-headed and decisive. The side of his jaw is wet and there is blood on his fingers after he touches it. He feels dizzy.

“I don’t know what to do.”

Bayani puts a hand on his shoulder. “Tranquílate, hermano. The men are all ready to march.”

“But where are we marching?”

“Home to Zambales,” says the son of Amor Pandoc, as if this has been their plan all along.

WATER CURE

Hod is happy to sit, even if it is on the suspect’s arm. Neely arranges himself on the other arm and Big Ten across the man’s skinny legs, holding the ankles and facing himself away from the whole business. Hod is just back on the line and wants to puke from the heat and the recon march and the battle to take the high ground this morning when they hacked Major Moses’s arm near off his body. The suspect isn’t even trying to move now, just lying there with the whump of the shells they’re dropping onto Las Piñas from offshore coursing up through his pinioned body and if Hod could manage to spit he knows it would sizzle in the air and burn off before it hit the dust. The platoon is down to twenty with the injured carried back to Manila by coolies this morning, and others falling out on the side of the road and Lieutenant Manly Goat saying if we pass this way again and they’re still alive maybe we’ll pick them up. He is waving his damn cane around and acting like every fucking shitheel boss Hod has ever hated, the Lieutenant, every company gun thug with a mean streak, like a dog gone bad that somebody ought to put down and Hod would gladly volunteer only he is too jaded with the heat to raise his hand.

“Pry it open,” says Niles, pacing and pulling out his fancy new British pistol. “Let’s put this show on the road.”

Sergeant LaDuke, who even without the heat is no great thinker, tries to ram the sun-heated barrel of his Krag down the suspect’s throat, busting a couple of teeth in, which the man proceeds to swallow and then choke on.

“Jesus Hiram Christ,” sighs Manigault. “Flip him over.”

Hod and the others roll off and Sergeant LaDuke and Corporal Grissom yank the man onto his belly and dig their heels into his back till he coughs out the teeth in a gout of blood. It is the Monadnock doing the shelling, Hod able to recognize the pitch of its ordnance whistling in from the sea, and they struggle to get the suspect pinned again, just some poor googoo in a field who waved and called out “Amigo” and Lieutenant Manigault said The hell with this amigo business, grab the yellow son of a bitch. Vásquez, who interprets from Spanish for the Macabebe scout, just stares down the road, and the Macabebe, looking disgusted with them all, kneels beside the man’s head and works the tip of the buffalo horn he carries into his blood-smeared mouth.

“Let it pour,” says Manigault, and Corporal Grissom carefully tips the kerosene can, filled with muddy water at the creek they just crossed, into the wide end of the horn. The suspect’s arm begins to jerk underneath Hod, the man making strangling noises and arching his back, and Hod looks away trying to concentrate either on his plans for Mei when they get back to Manila or how to shoot Manigault the first chance he gets, anything but thinking about the heat that cooks off all the air before you can breathe it, that is like a hot poker down your nose and into your throat, that the Spanish and the natives are smart enough to hide out from and only volunteer lieutenants and the half-wits above them would expect you to march or fight in. They said in the clap shack how if you have the pox and let it go you might look almost normal as you get older but your head will never be right, which goes a long way to explain the folks running this army.

A good deal of the five gallons gurgle out before Sergeant LaDuke says stop and has the Macabebe pull out the horn so he can stomp hard on the googoo’s distended belly. Hod lets the arm go so the suspect can half roll and puke up water, pink with blood, mostly onto Neely.

“What the hell you doing?” asks Neely, offended.

“He’s got to get it out or he’ll drown.”

“Well he don’t have to get it out all over me.”

“You pin this suspect down, Private,” the Lieutenant growls to Hod. “And keep him down.”

Manigault has always been shit, a card-cheat and an errand boy and a faker, and he knows that Hod has him pegged, all the way back to Skaguay. But there is a different look in his eye today, wild and fry-brained, and there is that pistol—

The Macabebe says something to Vásquez, who turns to the Lieutenant.

“What do you wish to ask this man?”

“Ask him?”

Vásquez sighs. He seems like an educated man who, for whatever reason, is not so welcome back home. “The suspected one. You wish to ask him something. That is the reason for this—” he indicates the writhing, choking googoo.

Manigault stares at the Spaniard for a long moment, having clearly forgotten what he wanted to know, if in fact he ever had anything in mind.

“Ask him if they got as many pin-head officers in their outfit as we do in ours,” says Big Ten.

Manigault glares at the Indian, then makes sure the suspect is back to his senses before sticking the barrel of his pistol to the man’s forehead.

“Ask him how many troops they have waiting for us in Las Piñas,” he says.

Vásquez says this to the Macabebe in Spanish and the Macabebe repeats it in whatever lingo he thinks the suspect talks and the suspect manages to croak out a few words before the scout slaps him and barks something to Vásquez.

“This man asks who would still be in Las Piñas,” Vásquez reports to Lieutenant Manigault, “when your navy has been shelling it for six hours?”

Blam! Manigault fires the pistol into the baked dirt just to the side of the suspect’s ear, causing him to urinate in his trousers and startling Neely so bad he rolls onto his side and covers his head.

“Jesus, Lieutenant,” he complains, rolling back onto the man’s arm. “How bout a little warning?”

“Ask him something else,” says the Lieutenant.

“If they are going to make a stand,” the Spaniard explains, “it will be at the Zapote Bridge. We fought them there many times before you arrived.”

“Ask him about that, then.”

“But if we know this already—”

Manigault points the pistol at Vásquez. “Ask him!”

Vásquez does not take his eyes off the shrill-voiced Lieutenant as he speaks to the Macabebe scout. The scout shouts into the ear of the suspect, who sobs something back. Hod doesn’t want to look in the suspect’s face. The Macabebe says something to Vásquez in Spanish.

“He says he has not been across the Zapote Bridge for many days.”

“Well — that is very unfortunate for Mr. Nig.” Manigault nods to the Macabebe scout. “Give him another drink.”

The scout pinches the suspect’s nose shut till he opens his mouth to breathe and then pushes the tip of the buffalo horn back in. The Macabebes don’t look so much like the other natives here, the rumor going that they’re Mexican Indians brought long ago by the Spaniards to work the crops, and of course the fellas expect Big Ten to be able to palaver with them.

“C’mon, Chief,” they say. “You’re holdin out on us.”

“You know how many Indin languages they got back home I can’t say a word of?” he tells them. “I barely remember any Ojibwe after a year with you people.”

Corporal Grissom yanks the suspect’s head to the side so he sees, then pisses loudly into the mouth of the kerosene can while Sergeant LaDuke giggles. After I shoot Manly Goat, Hod thinks, these two will have to be next. And maybe the Macabebe too, though this is his country after all and he is entitled to play his cards the way he wants. Corporal Grissom, who has been on the warpath since his monkey disappeared, convinced that the Chinese porters ate it, rebuttons his fly and begins to dump the liquid into the buffalo horn, splashing far too much of it onto Hod.

Shoot him in the belly, thinks Hod, wiping sweat from his eyes, and leave him in a ditch.

The suspect makes more strangling noises and tries to jerk himself out from under them and the barrage continues to the south, whump! whump! whump! and when the can is empty Sergeant LaDuke drops with both knees on the googoo’s belly and what comes up smells like bile. There is a series of words between Vásquez and the Macabebe and the half-dead suspect, with Manigault pacing back and forth, back and forth.

“Let’s hear it.”

Vásquez turns to him. “He will admit to anything you wish.”

“Very prudent of him.”

“But you must first say what it is. He confesses that he can no longer reason.”

“I don’t understand.”

The Spaniard speaks slowly, softly, as if to a small and not very clever child. “If you wish there to be an ambuscade waiting at the Zapote Bridge, he will confess to it and we may return with this information.”

“So they are waiting—”

“And if you accuse him of being a general of the insurrectos, he will not deny it.”

Again it takes a long moment for the meaning to penetrate the Lieu-tenant’s overheated skull.

“You’re saying the man is lying.”

“I am saying nothing,” Vásquez replies. “I am merely translating his words, as passed on by this indio, to the best of my ability.”

And I am merely sitting on some unlucky fuck’s arm, thinks Hod, while my comrades in arms, the kind of people who tried to smash my head in with clubs back in Montana, torture him to death for no fucking purpose.

“We’re wasting time on this amigo,” says the Lieutenant, kicking the suspect hard in the ribs and eliciting another heave of blood-tinted water from him. “Everybody up!”

The moaning is general as the rest of the platoon drag themselves to their feet, faces stupid with the heat, the suspect’s torture being the only rest they’ve had all day. Big Ten crawls to his Krag and climbs up it to his knees, then stands, wobbly and soaked through with his own sweat. He wears the straw hat shaped like a pith helmet that many of the volunteers have adopted, their campaign hats worn out, and has lost a good deal of his bulk to the shits.

“We get to this bridge,” he says, “there damn well better be a river underneath it.”

As Hod reaches for his own weapon the Lieutenant appears in his face. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says, loud enough for the others to hear. “If I catch you skulking behind me, I’ll have you shot.”

The lead dog can never relax. He can never, once they’re all out of the traces, let the others slink behind him. Niles has seen it more than once here in the Yukon, the other curs waiting, watching, hatred building with every shock of leather cracking on their hides, with every deep, freezing snow they have to struggle through or die, with every scrap of fish jerky the lead dog chases them off of, till the moment the scales tip — the lead dog coming up lame or finally too old or too weakened from the trek or just not savage enough to dominate the three or four who jump him and get him on his back and eviscerate him before fighting among themselves to be the new leader. Men with guns are ever more devious, the courage to pull a trigger available to the weakest if you pour a half bottle of whiskey down his craw or place a subversive thought in his hate-crazed mind. It is such men, drunkards, cowards, who cut Soapy down in Skaguay, Don’t go, don’t go I said and Doc and Rev Bowers and Old Man Triplett all said Don’t go but him hot-eyed with pride saying that nobody, nobody tells Jeff Smith where he may go and what he may do in this or any other town, marching to the pier with his Winchester in hand, ready to discipline the pack as he’s done so many times before, keep them in line, all of us from the Parlor following to the base of the pier saying Wait, Jeff, at least wait till sunup when they have to look you in the eye but Jeff striding, striding tall and proud as he’d been on his mount in the 4th parade till out steps Frank Reid who thinks because you’ve drawn a map of a town you ought to own it and knowing he has Si Tanner and a dozen other guns ready behind him grabs the barrel of the Winchester and tugs it down and draws his Colt on Jeff. “For God’s sake don’t shoot!” cries Jeff, knowing a standoff when he sees one and they fire into each other so close each can smell the whiskey on the other’s breath and then the rest of the dogs pile on and Jeff Smith, who’d be Emperor of Manila by now, Army command or no, is on his back and the rest of us are running out of Skaguay like greenhorns before an avalanche.

The Macabebe catches up with Niles, walking silent and fast, not even a footcrunch on the snow, not even nodding as he passes to join the platoon ahead, and one assumes he has dealt with the suspect in the appropriate manner. The lead dog should barely have to growl. They are skirting wide around Las Piñas, no reason to give the boys on the Monadnock a chance to misfire and tear them apart, smoke rising from where he expects the native village to be, and he half hopes there will be an ambush ahead to dispose of the worst of this band of assassins he has been placed in charge of.

It is cold, killer cold, a cold that makes the thoughts freeze and snap off before you can form them in your mind, and the only remedy is to keep moving, keep pacing, keep the blood flowing in your extremities while the dullards all around you flop in the snow and let the cold creep into their bodies.

They have stopped ahead, crouching in a drift. Niles draws the Webley from its holster, cold metal stinging his hand. Bare the teeth and raise the hackles, he thinks as he steps forward, and don’t let them out of your sight.

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.

“What I’m saying is,” Royal continues, turning to scowl at the plaza, “this here must have come to a sorry state if they bringing us in.”

“You don’t like the duty,” says Pickney quietly, “you shouldn’t of signed up for it.”

Junior gives Roy a look. Junior has been coaching him all the way from San Francisco on how you have to apply yourself to the task and be an example everybody can be proud of. Only there’s nobody here, Royal thinks, who I give a damn what they think of me. If we get into a scrap, sure, you got to fill out your end of the bargain, do what you have to for the sake of the others, but none of it, not even Cuba which everybody wants to write a song about them for, makes any sense to him now.

“It aint just we’re a new color they’re seeing,” he says. “This is their country and they don’t want us here.”

“Man been on shore twenty minutes and he got the whole deal figured out,” says Cooper.

“What it is,” says Too Tall, “is that folks here been dealing with these volunteer outfits, can’t find their dingus in their own trousers without a Manual of Instruction and a drill sergeant to turn the pages for em. We can’t expect no parade from people been puttin up with them jokers.”

“Runty little bastids,” says Willie Mills, watching a trio of Filipino men pass by. “Aint gonna make much of a target, once we get into it with em.”

“They learn fast, though,” says Coop, pointing.

The red-faced Chinese is in front of his shop again, pasting a sign that says WHITE ONLY, in fresh ink, onto his show window.

“Aint that nice? Make us feel right to home.”

And then the sky opens and they are soaked in an instant.

NEWS FROM THE FRONT

Father—

My sincere apologies for the tardiness of this missive, but writing paper has been in short supply again and prone, in this wet and unconscionable heat, to dissolve in one’s hand. We arrived with Company E under Lieutenant Caldwell somewhat in advance of the rest of the 25th, and were immediately put to work guarding the reservoir to the northeast of Manila. This is a vital position, of course, and the rebels’ former control of it a key to the eagerness of the Spanish garrison within the “Walled City” to surrender to our volunteers. Though there was little glory to be had in this transaction, one cannot but laud the relative paucity of casualties resultant on both sides. The volunteers, mostly units that never set foot in Cuba, are overly impressed with themselves for this and subsequent engagements that would have been “business as usual” for our fellows, and are in general quite insufferable. Most are from the Western states, with the predictable lack of discipline and prejudice against our race. There have been times when we profess to miss the “crackers” we camped with in Chickamauga and Tampa, who at least share a long and contentious history with us.

Junior on the groundcloth in the airless little tent, paper laid flat on the top of an empty wooden ammo crate, pen hot in his fingers. The boys not on leave are throwing dice outside on a poncho thrown over the mud, argument between them almost constant as to which way the die is leaning against its folds and wrinkles. He is stripped to his underclothing, his uniform draped over the top of the tent to dry. The mosquitoes that seem to come every time the rain lets up for a day have discovered him, and he keeps his hat by his side to wave them off.

The duty at El Deposito, where the waterworks are located, was mostly uneventful, the rebels there nocturnal creatures satisfied with the odd sniping “potshot” that does more to disturb the sleep than to penetrate the epidermis. The only scrape with destiny came when Royal Scott and I, on a rare afternoon without assignment, endeavored to take advantage of some rock tanks nearby for a bath. Personal hygiene is a constant struggle in this heat and filth and wet, and I never pass up an opportunity for ablution, a habit which has earned me the sobriquet of “Waterboy” among my cohorts. There were a number of Chinese, who we and the other units employ as bearers when on the march and general factotums when in camp, engaged in cleaning cookware at the other end of the man-made pond, so Pvt. Scott and I resolved to keep an eye on the clothing we had just shed (the Chinese being notorious filchers) and entered the water. We had only just begun to employ the abrasive bricks of what the Army issues as “soap” when we spied a serpent of at least four yards’ length (this is not an exaggeration) undulating rapidly across the surface in our direction. Needless to say, Pvt. Scott and I quit the water with extreme haste, then, dismayed to discover that the creature’s mate (more than its equal in size) had curled up to nap upon our uniforms, we continued at a gallop to the encampment. There was a good deal of merriment provoked by our naked condition, as well as skepticism voiced as to its cause until a pair of the Chinese appeared, clutching, head and tail, one of the writhing snakes and recommending that it would make excellent “chow.” Luckily a third coolie followed with our clothing and dignity was restored. Our boys left the feasting to the bearers, all but Pvt. Cooper, who claims to have partaken of a good deal of “rattler” in his former life and declared this Philippine delicacy its equal.

Junior has not dared to mention his disappointment with Father’s handling of the affair between Royal and his sister, has in fact barely alluded to that “unfortunate business,” but is not going to pretend his friend is no longer with the company. For his own part, Royal still feigns an annoyed disinterest in Jessie’s whereabouts and welfare, often walking away in a funk halfway through a sentence when read the news from the great metropolis that Junior strives now to think of as “home,” and speculations as to paternity are clearly unwelcome.

He has remained in a state of abstracted distemper, Royal, since his reenlistment at Fort Bliss, and the others tend to steer a wide passage around him. “Only one thing more useless than a cripple-leg pony,” says Too Tall Coleman, “and that is a moody nigger.”

The food here is superior to that available either in Cuba or at our Southwestern postings, Army fare supplemented with rice (a godsend for the Carolinians in uniform) and the occasional stray chicken that runs afoul (a fowl?) of our bayonets. This latter is a great sport among the fellows, one of the few pastimes than can rouse them from heat-induced torpor, and the order to “propaganda” with the natives is obeyed after a fashion. After a bird is successfully skewered the nearest Filipino man, woman, or child has a handful of centavos pressed upon them, whether they are the owner of the recently deceased or not. None has ever refused the compensation.

They are a peculiar race, the Filipinos, mixed to a high degree, though this is more apparent in the larger towns than in the “boondocks” where we have been relegated. Relations being dodgy as they are, I have not been able to pick up more than a few words from their frustratingly large repertoire of dialects, and thus can be no judge of the level of their intelligence. They are, however, amazing mimics, and with only brief exposure begin to parrot the more colorful of Army expressions and sing our songs with uncanny accuracy and brio. I witnessed a touching scene in the “Luneta,” a kind of city park by the sea, when the better class of natives gathered there for a concert our regimental band presented stood and doffed their hats upon the playing of the ubiquitous “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” believing it to be our national anthem!

We were, of course, a great novelty to them at first, the children maneuvering to touch our exposed skin and see if the color rubbed off, but with time they have become quite accustomed to the “yanquis negros” and seem, though I cannot swear this as a fact, to prefer us to our paler compatriots.

This is not to say that we hold a warm place in the hearts of the insurgents. At the beginning of August, as the typhoons began to blow, we were sent to join Companies B, F, I, K, L, and M, just arrived under Colonel Burt, to form a defensive line stretching from the town of Caloocan (site of much fighting and the heroics of the 1st Kansas) to Blockhouse #5 at La Loma, some four miles to the east. This at the time constituted the front line in the North, and there were daily patrols in the vicinity to ascertain the presence and strength of the enemy. These resulted in quite a few damp outings for our squad and a series of inconclusive encounters, shots fired from cover and returned with our characteristic dispatch, the rebels often fleeing before we were able to catch a glimpse of them. We are quite a phenomenon in the field, Father, and I wish that there was some manner to transport you here for one day to witness it. A body of men of color (albeit still under white officers) who function with a discipline and spirit under fire that is a sterling example to regular soldiers and volunteers alike. I am reminded during our “smokers” with the enemy that despite the privations of Army life and the absence from those I love that this has been the proper decision, and that any self-respecting colored man needs be envious of my good fortune to play a role in this great venture.

Our mascot, a spaniel with white body and black ears who answers to the name Snaps, is the only member of the regiment consistently “dogging” it — laid absolutely low by the heat and outnumbered by inhospitable packs of native curs, he spends his days seeking a parcel of shade and dreaming of the snowy vistas of Fort Missoula.

Yesterday we were put to the first serious test of our tenure here. Just past noon the rebels made a desperate attack all along our line. They seemed to materialize in number and the action was exceedingly “hot” for the greater part of two hours. I must say that our fellows remained cool and professional, and though it was certainly no turkey shoot I doubt the enemy will again consider such a frontal assault on the 25th. I was at an especially isolated section of our position when the attack began, and as our artificer, Bryce, had just been overwhelmed with intestinal cramps (a not infrequent occurrence here) and required two soldiers to carry him to the rear, and a good number of others were away on leave, we were somewhat undermanned. Our sergeant was engaged in a matter of resupply some distance down the line of defense, so when the onslaught erupted we were without leadership. Realizing that the rebels had crept up undetected and held us in something of a crossfire, I suggested a quick dash to overrun their position on our left, and subsequently found myself leading the men in this tactic. The Filipinos, surprised and I must say outmaneuvered, fled instantly, and our new position gave us superior ground from which to trade fire with the remainder of their party. When they finally broke off the fight they left several dozen killed and wounded along the line, while the regiment’s only fatality was Pvt. Parnell, a musician with Company E who succumbed to a heart failure during the engagement. He was young and fit, and his demise must be due either to a congenital weakness or to the combined effect of overexcitement and murderous heat. You cannot imagine the thirst experienced during such an extended battle, or the impression that the sun is working harder to undo you than your opponents.

Sergeant Jacks squats by the opening of the tent to look in.

“Patrol in twenty,” he says. “Two squads. They want us to check out the track to the north.”

The rebels infiltrate to cut the telegraph wire along the Dagupan line every few days, or pull some iron hoping to derail a troop train.

“They just attacked in force—”

“And had their tails whipped. Two squads. You pick the men.”

“Me?”

“You, Corporal. It comes with the chevron.”

Jacks stands and walks away across the hardening mud. Junior can hear Too Tall, talking to his dice.

“Be good to your Daddy,” intones the private, “and show me a seven.”

Please do not share this with the ladies—

Junior holding his arm out to let it drip sweat and then writing again—

— but I killed my first man in the engagement. Perhaps I have done so before in Cuba, but at El Caney I fired my weapon no more than twice and that hurriedly, intent on not being left behind as we clambered up the slope under fire. I looked into this man’s eyes as I shot him, bravely holding his ground or merely rooted to the spot in terror as we overran their ditch, and I must have pulled the trigger automatically as I have no recollection of doing so. He fell backward without a cry, but when I drove my bayonet through him, as we have been endlessly trained to do, there issued from him a sound I shall never forget. War is not a business for children. This man I am certain was fighting for his flag, for his dignity, no less than I, and I can only trust that Providence holds the answer to why we were fated to meet in such a way. The men don’t speak of the whys and wherefores of our presence here, but I sense an uneasiness that was not in evidence when we were outside Santiago. We must, as always, trust our leaders and our faith in God, but I have seen and done things here I fear will haunt me forever.

He was as small as a boy, hard to determine his age, and wore a gold cross (as many do here) hung around his neck. I insisted this not be taken from his body before it was laid in the common grave and covered over.

Junior takes a moment to allow a half-dozen mosquitoes, one by one, to settle on his body and then swats them dead. They cannot help themselves, he thinks, though their only chance of escaping with your blood is to attack while you sleep, to do their business and fly away. There is speculation now, maybe even solid evidence from what his father writes him, that the mosquitoes play a part in the spreading of both malaria and the yellow fever. He wonders if the natives, insurgent or not, are immunes, or if they, out there crouching in wait to kill him, are just as queasy and feverish as their American tormentors. He watches one of the insects on his arm, carefully spreading its feet to drill, then crushes it with his palm. A common enemy, like the Spanish, that should draw the opposing sides together.

I am understandably distressed to hear of your present situation in the North. There are no New Yorkers in our company, though from your description of conditions there it is a wonder more of our people have not fled it for the military life. There is overcrowding in sections of Manila, and terrible poverty, but nothing of the magnitude that you report. We have been for the most part kept from that municipality, and the suspicion is that the powers that be believe our presence, in numbers, might offend the wealthier, more educated class of Filipino who are in the assimilationist camp. These people, labeled Americanistas in the local press (and no doubt as traitors by their Tagalo brethren still in arms against us), with their innate tendency to ape the manners of their conquerors, have been quickly taught that they should despise the colored man.

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—Corpral?” 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—

Ashes from the smokestack

— he thinks, and can hear someone, maybe himself, singing along—

Cloudin up my brain

Can’t believe my woman

Leavin on that train

Blow your whistle, captain

All my dreams in vain

— and then he dives, Cooperhawk, into the black water.

When he wakes his mouth is full of ashes and he is looking into the bottomless black holes in the eyes of the old man on the shelf across from him. The old man is the color of what they pulled out of Coop’s ears, with long twigs for arms and legs, body withered like a persimmon been left on the ground so long even the bugs don’t want it and with a look on his face that is no more solid, no more really here, than smoke.

“You and me, brother,” Coop says softly to the old Chinese man. “We been there, aint we?”

The old man stares toward him but not really at him, his eyes all black pupil, his mouth only inches from the pipe gripped feebly in his bony hand. Coop smiles at him. Coop loves him.

“Only difference is,” he says, “you aint comin back.”

OUR MAN IN PAMPANGA

It is not, at this juncture, the sort of conflict the Correspondent cares to report on. The indigenous forces remain maddeningly elusive, assembling in number as if to make a counterattack, then melting away so rapidly that the engagement is barely worth giving a name to. Diligent as his fellows in the ink trade have been to inflate the skirmishes at San this or Santa that into something newsworthy, the countryside north and south of the capital remains infested with communities never to be immortalized in military history. And then the deuced luck of his diminutive, hastily purchased mare perishing beneath him on the way to the Zapote Bridge. Even Creelman of the Journal, recovered from his blooding at El Caney and screwed to Colonel Funston’s hip all these months, was there for the festivities, the signalmen obliging him by steadily unrolling their spools of wire behind the heat-addled column so he might telegraph his despatch immediately upon the taking of Bacoor. And Creelman is not the most insufferable of the lot. The Correspondent had hopes that with Crane hors de combat and Dick Davis chasing the Boers there would be a clearer field in this pestilent backwater in which to distinguish oneself, but his competitors, toiling for periodicals of greater circulation than his own, are free to spend money like fresh air to corrupt the cablemen and thus beat him onto the wire even when his report is on their desks hours earlier.

Not that they refuse what little gratuity he offers them.

Manila, though the climate is beastly in the dry season and unspeakable in the wet, is all right in a Spanish-gone-tropical sort of way, offering livelier diversions than the worthy Davis can be enjoying in Ladysmith or Pretoria. The local seegars are cheap, plentiful, and surprisingly smokable, while the chief industry seems to be making a racket and selling rides in their unstable two-wheeled outfits (the Spaniards having taxed vehicles per axle) from one side of the pitiful excuse for a river to the other. The horse races are colorful and pleasant, the wealthier caste of Filipinos no less sporting than their Celestial cousins, and there is no end to religious pageantry despite their purported disaffection with the Roman Church and its representatives. But the inequality of the two protagonists has left this conflict nearly devoid of heroic feats and consequently uninspiring, if not undeserving of heroic prose.

Not that an adept such as the Correspondent cannot cobble something together.

Serving as he is for a northern publication hungry for “American color,” the Tarheel Lieutenant has been a find. Gifted with the charming accent and fecund locutions of his section, Manigault also boasts an ancestry steeped in military tradition and dedicated to the Great Lost Cause, having no compunctions, as the rare Southerner displaced in Colorado’s volunteer contribution to the effort, to find fault with superiors both immediate and of greater stripe.

“General Otis would be better employed anchoring a deck chair on the verandah of an establishment catering to the elderly,” remarks the Lieutenant as they clickety-clack north past the earthquake-baroque church and much celebrated ruins of Caloocan, “than put in charge of a body of fighting men. My old Granny, rest her soul, was of a more decisive nature than he. When one encounters an inferior and hysteria-prone foe such as our present antagonist, one does not retreat, one does not pause, one does not rest until he is vanquished. They are the hare and we the hound, but we have been kept on a damnably short leash.”

“You believe that if MacArthur—”

“If either General MacArthur or General Lawton were given free reign, Mr. Nig would have received his much-deserved thrashing, contritely cast away his arms, and we’d all be home by now, amazing our loved ones with the ease of it all.”

“There would no doubt be holdouts—”

“Driven to the farthest and most forsaken outposts of these isles to live as mere banditti, as was done to the worthy Geronimo and his cutthroat band. But in lieu of that, we, and I use the term in the national sense of course, shall remain here, exposed to the diseases rampant in these latitudes, for at least another year. Not to mention the followers of Mohamet—”

“In the southern islands—”

“They have a custom in which their men who are hopelessly mired in debt appear before a wily imam, shaving their eyebrows and swearing an oath to the Mighty One that they will proceed to murder as many Christians as possible until they are themselves destroyed. These juramentados, these pledged assassins, then go about their bloody work assured that not only will all that they owe be forgotten but that upon their ending they will sit at the right hand of the Prophet, with a gaggle of black-eyed houris to attend them. How do you fight people for whom death is an improvement on their condition?”

“But your volunteers have finished their service.”

“So the General Staff informs us. The Regular Army is more than welcome to the travesty of a war we leave behind.”

They met in the hospital ward in Manila, both recovering from an overexposure to the sun on the day of the Zapote affair, the Lieutenant spouting his theories, many quite fantastic, and the Correspondent overcoming a vicious migraine to get it all down on paper.

“And your mission—”

“Has been fulfilled with honor and alacrity,” chuffs the Tarheel Lieu-tenant. “The Colorados, despite a handful of incorrigibles I have had to deal with sharply, have the blood of frontiersmen in their veins — it is their nature to contest the savage on his own ground, and to conquer him.”

The train slows, passing through an orchard that has been cleared back only far enough to give the troops on board the flatcars a clear field of fire at any snipers. The rains have stopped but the vegetation is still very green. He has tried hellish green and bilious green, only to settle on interminable green, although at this time of year it is often interrupted by splashes of death’s bed yellow. He tried jaundiced countryside during the first dry season but Cheltingham in New York has let him know his double entendre was blue-inked every time he wired it. Crane has a patent on red, of course, any journalist employing it suggestively (the bloodshot eye of the Tropics) mocked brutally by his cohorts. The Correspondent’s own strength is not in description, literal or baroquely impressionistic, but in his snippets of “overheard” dialogue, some of it actually transposed from interviews with the warriors themselves. That and a knack for the comical pidgin-speak of the natives, developed in his days as a cub enduring the exotic odors and sullen yellow glares of Pell Street.

He scribbles sullen yellow glare into his notebook.

“This land is a veritable cornucopia,” announces the Lieutenant, gazing moonily out at the fruit trees. It is gloomy inside the passenger car, the windows taped over with cardboard to discourage target practice by the locals, each mile of the railway bought with American lives and still vulnerable to sabotage, but Manigault has peeled one of these blinders away so they can admire the countryside. The two privates he has impressed to accompany them sit glumly in the seat behind, terribly dull souls who seem as resentful of each other as they are toward their officer.

Manigault is a bounder, of course, but except for the redoubtable and ever loquacious Funston, remains the most inexhaustible fount of material the Correspondent has discovered in the Philippines. And though the Lieutenant’s outbursts and observations retain a tinge of hysteria, he was pronounced fully recovered by the worthy médicos at San Juan de Dios and put on the street.

“Once we have opened it up for white men of boldness and industry—”

“But that pestilence you mentioned—” the Correspondent interjects in his not-for-the-record voice.

“The Anglo-Saxon brings many blessings on his march to glory,” winks Manigault. “Paramount of these is the concept of hygiene.”

“But the very soil seems to breed these scourges.”

The orchard gives way to a miasma of murky standing water and rotting plant life, the roots of the stunted trees writhing up from the ground as if in a desperate attempt to escape it before being wrenched under again.

“The soil responds to its master. Before the War, my people were in tobacco,” proclaims the Lieutenant for the hundredth time, and the Correspondent can only picture these ante-bellum Manigaults lying in a warehouse, dried and rolled in enormous leaves of white burley. “They could expectorate on an anthill and raise a cash crop from the result.”

The Lieutenant waits for him to finish writing, the mark of a born newspaper source.

“Unless my presence is urgently required back in Wilmington,” he says, staring unimpressed at the festering swamp without, “I shall embellish my new properties with that tradition.”

The Correspondent attempts not to snort. “Have you seen any of it?”

“As of yet, only in description. But this,” and here he waggles a much-folded survey map in his hand, “though only recently liberated, should prove the most developed of my holdings.”

Cheltingham has been cabling that the subscribers are not so much bored with the conflict as confused, “Why are we there?” rapidly deteriorating into “I don’t care to read about it.” It was no problem after the treacherous attack in February, the Tagalos begging for chastisement, but as the fury of battle has dissipated into the grinding trudge of skirmish and evasion, a chess game where the opponent has only pawns and hides them under the table, the purpose of the adventure falls further into question. The Indians had at least their Fetterman massacre, their Little Big Horn, ambushes of a scale and barbarity to rouse the public’s sporting blood, but this—

Not that he is wishing slaughter on American patriots.

He arrived in Havana rather too previous for the fireworks, a terrible case of the sprue forcing him to return to New York and sit out the siege of Santiago in an isolation ward on Long Island. American shooting wars, and the opportunities for rapid advancement they afford men of print, are in short supply. The Otis angle has been fruitful, the Correspondent using the Tarheel Lieutenant’s pungent observations to hint, nay, to declare that swifter progress (and greater pyrotechnics) should be had if the general were replaced by a younger, bolder commander. And perhaps this plea to the American spirit of adventure and commerce, plus the suggestion that the next Klondike is festooned with palm trees, will reawaken their interest.

A paradise, he writes, waiting for Anglo-Saxon angels to reap its bounty.

The train slows, stops, and they disembark at what the freshly painted sign announces as San Fernando, taken two weeks ago by Hall’s flying column. The sun makes its sudden and cruel assault on the Correspondent’s epidermis and spirit, seeming to drill through the woven palm of his Panama to blister his cranium. They walk through the artillery-blasted stone buildings, the morose privates dragging behind them, to the stick-and-mud village beyond, the dwellings comparing unfavorably with his boyhood treehouse, the requisite coterie of louse-ridden canines harrying their steps (the poorer the man, the more dogs he is bound to own) as Manigault smartly salutes the garrison sentries. Filthy children abound, a few clothed only in Nature’s costume, and he witnesses one old woman entering the rubble-strewn, roofless shell of what was once a small church and pausing, even in the absence of holy water (or the basin that once held it) to sign her wrinkled forehead.

“Ninety percent of war is character,” says the Lieutenant, apropos of nothing. “Character and will. The googoo shoots badly because he is untrained, yes, but he remains so because training would be wasted on him. Your mongrel races do not possess the mental stamina, the powers of self-abnegation to apply themselves to any endeavor requiring concentrated effort and understanding. When faced with an enemy greater not only in stature but also in force of will and character, he senses the futility of direct resistance and either flees in panic or resorts to a more skulking, treacherous type of aggression.”

“So you do not esteem the insurrecto as an opponent?”

“Our chief opponents here are ignorance, superstition, and savagery. Where the lower races have polluted each other to the degree we have encountered here, their effect is legion. But we shall prevail.”

“ ‘Their silent, sullen peoples shall thank your God and you.’ ”

Manigault gives him a wry smile. “As your Mr. Roosevelt has observed, indifferent verse, but noble sentiment.”

The Correspondent smiles, never having thought of the bucktoothed Rough Rider as his before, and noting again that to a son of the South all yankees are as one.

It is early afternoon when they leave San Fernando, walking eastward toward solitary Mount Arayat, Manigault holding his survey map at arms’ length and turning it this way and that as he strides down a dried-mud thoroughfare much pitted by buffalo hooves, occasionally checking the unrelievedly flat horizon for some reference point while one of the privates, embarrassed, lets the woven basket holding their supper slap against his leg every other step. They cross a tiny stream, a trio of young women with the surly aspect of the Malay flogging wet clothing on the rocks while their offspring, barely old enough to walk, gambol in the listlessly flowing water, then rediscover the sorry excuse for a road. They pass vast grayish squares of harvested rice interrupted by desultory stands of banana trees or indigo, then one irrigated field in which a lone water buffalo, one of the ubiquitous carabao glistening like polished steel from its recent wallow, treads snuffling for edibles with an equally solitary white egret following after, feasting on the crawly things brought to the surface in the great beast’s footprints. That is me trailing the Tarheel Lieutenant, thinks the Correspondent, with the crawfish and cutworms replaced by quotables. The soggy patch gives way to desiccated plain, some sort of ground crop with a scraggle of green leaves planted on both sides of them. The few rustics they pass, out chopping at weeds in the vicious sun, studiously avoid taking notice of their procession. Thus it was for the conquering Roman, the Correspondent writes as he walks, perspiration burning his eyes, in all venues the focus of a dull hatred cloaked with indifference.

“Where you grew up,” he asks the Tarheel Lieutenant, “were there still Union soldiers in uniform?”

Manigault stops and gives him the frankest gaze he has ever received from the man, as if he were just pondering that very image.

“There were indeed,” he answers softly, “but my father instructed us to pay them no heed.”

They continue in silence, the burden of the heat robbing his limbs of their vitality, and he begins to feel sorry for the poor, obdurate devils sentenced to be born and die in this crucible. He does not wonder that the Spanish who ruled it slid so quickly into a mean-spirited decadence. As Mrs. Jefferson Davis and Senator Tillman of the anti-Imperialists so eloquently state it, the worry is not what shall we do with the Filipino, but what shall our association with him do to us. He writes the word decay into his notebook, underlining thrice, and then the Lieutenant halts again and spreads his arms.

“I believe this is it.”

There is no signpost, no marker, not one stone laid upon another to indicate a boundary, only the same fields extending on both sides of the road broken here and there by outcroppings of thorn-brandishing greenery.

“You’re certain?”

Manigault points across the planted rows to a structure at least a half mile away. “The house comes with it.”

They set off diagonally across the field then, the new proprietor fairly leaping over the shabbily cultivated rows, the Correspondent quite done in by now and staggering in the rear. The boots he purchased in San Francisco make a bully impression in photographs but are not equal to the terrain, and the white suit built in Hongkong is stuck to him like a second, repulsively slimy skin. His collar is a rag. There will be nothing cool in the basket when it is opened, no rum cock-tail with ice waiting at the hacienda. He has partaken only sparingly of the native cuisine since arriving, the spices overstated and the indiscriminate mixing of fleshes so favored by the Spanish — beef, fowl, and fish more than likely to cohabit the same dish — seems less than wise given the extremities of the weather. As for what is fed to the column on the march, the less said in print the better, the charges leveled at the much-maligned war secretary Root after the sickness that followed victory in Cuba still a sore point with Army censors. Home again, carving a slab of prime at Rector’s or enjoying the delectable ice cream at Louis Sherry’s establishment, he may confess to having eaten canned bacon, but at the moment the mere thought of that delicacy causes his insides to somersault.

The hacienda house is much larger than it appeared to him from a distance, a few outbuildings half-hidden behind it. It seems a rather stately pile to belong to the purebred Malays who Manigault has so colorfully described as being no distant removal from the “missing link.” Four massive posts support the tile roof over the two stories, the lower floor of bullet-scarred adobe masonry and the upper of wood. The façade of the lower is dominated by a huge door arched high enough to admit carriage and passengers, with a normal-sized rectangular door cut into it for pedestrian traffic. Vertical iron grilles cover the tall windows that flank the carriage gate, some sort of flowering creeper vine half-covering them.

A kind of gallery runs around the front and sides of the upper floor, repeating sets of wooden louvers opening to reveal sliding panels of hand-sized capiz-shell “windows” of the sort seen in the Walled City. Beneath the bottom sill of these runs what the Correspondent has been told is a ventanilla, perhaps a foot high, fronted with wooden balustrades, to allow the air to flow even when the larger openings are shut fast. Another opening just beneath the eaves serves the same purpose. If it were a boat, thinks the Correspondent, it would sink in an instant.

The hacienda compound is deserted when they arrive, not even one of the scabrous fowl that seem everywhere underfoot in this country gracing the yard. Manigault calls up to the living quarters, but there is no response. The pedestrian door, however, is unsecured, and they venture into the zaguan.

There are no partitions in this lower level. The space the family carroza would normally occupy is empty, as are bins that appear to once have been filled with grain, set upon large square slabs of stone flooring. Nearly half the room is piled with furniture, some broken, some appearing to be perfectly serviceable. An ornate stairway invites them to ascend.

“I imagine they’ve sacked the place,” says the new dueño, starting up, “but we’ll have a look anyway.”

The drawing room that greets them is remarkably intact, chairs and tables haphazardly placed but still present, a lovely design painted on the ceiling of stamped tin, and only a few of the somewhat garishly colored chromolithographs these people seem addicted to hanging on the walls. Large double doors draped with damask curtains open to the sala mayor, which seems to have hosted a dance party immediately before the departure of the former owners, the numerous rattan chairs all pushed against the walls. The floor is of a highly polished native wood held together with pegs, as these materials are generally impervious to nails. A frieze of intricately carved molave, reminiscent of the stunning altar of the Jesuits’ San Ignacio church in the Intramuros, crowns the walls, which are painted with gilt trimming and designs markedly Chinese in character. A massive upright piano dominates the near end of the room, Shubert’s A-minor Sonata still propped on the music shelf. The west wall sports two large oil portraits of the erstwhile hacienderos, a man and woman, in their late fifties perhaps, each in semi-profile facing toward the other. Though the features of the couple are what the Correspondent characterizes in print as thoroughly “Asiatic,” the effect of their bearing and European finery and the artist’s chiaro oscuro is of a Spanish grandee and his señora, a kind of Tagalo nobility.

“Most of my lands were purchased from the friars,” says Manigault, strolling around the room, careful to avoid the scattered leavings of some bird that has found its way into the house. “But Mr. Impoc here was evidently as afraid of the insurrectos as he was of our own forces, and decided, through my intermediaries, to take the most prudent course of action.”

“You bought this palace on a lieutenant’s pay?”

Manigault remains unfazed, smiling enigmatically and continuing farther into the dwelling, trailed by the Correspondent and the unhappy troopers.

The avian intruder has been even more destructive in the dining room, his presence recorded not only on the floor but on the long table and ornately detailed sideboards of red narra. The china and silver have been removed, of course, but the impressive cut-glass chandelier, though slightly atilt to the Correspondent’s eye, remains overhead. The privates slump onto chairs and begin to lay out the items from the picnic basket. The Correspondent wishes nothing more than to throw himself prone on an unsullied patch of floor while someone gets the punkahs turning. But his interlocutor is moving ahead to explore, and he, duty bound, must follow.

The kitchen seems also to serve as a laundry, a pair of flatirons left on the chopping block. There is an earthen oven shaped something like a beehive and a wooden rack hung from the tiled wall that must be employed for drying dishes. The Correspondent pushes a shutter back and a breeze suddenly whispers through the vertical bars in the minaret-shaped window that looks down on the azotea below, an aromatic, lushly planted hanging garden with stone benches and a pathway bordered by a split-bamboo rail that leads to an even greater collection of exotic flora.

Manigault finds the bird, a large, glossy-black crow, dead on the floor. He lifts it up by the tip of one wing.

“I’m afraid the intelligence of these creatures has been overrated,” he jibes. “This fellow managed to find a way in, but evidently forgot where it was.”

The back of the Correspondent’s neck begins to prickle, usually a presentiment of unfortunate events, and he turns to find the room filled with intruders, barefoot insurrectos with bolos in hand.

The Correspondent reels, dizzy, while Manigault’s free hand drops to the butt of his holstered Webley but freezes there as the one man wearing boots jams the barrel of his antiquated rifle against the lieutenant’s chest and begins to scream in one of their many confusing lingos.

The demon with the rifle gestures to the floor. Manigault gently lays the unfortunate bird on the painted clay tile before prostrating himself. The Correspondent keeps his eyes fixed on the blade of the nearest insurgent as he kneels, relieved to see no blood staining its edge. The voices of the men above as they argue with each other are high and nervous, like parrots screeching. He smells urine. The tile is cool against his sunburned cheek.

Dead or alive, he thinks as his heart gallops, unharnessed and wild in his chest, they’ll give me four columns at least.

BILIBID

They send a captain he’s never seen before. Big Ten has been in Bilibid since the dust-up at the bridge, sharing a bullpen with a dozen goldbricks, thieves, and deserters in a building reserved for Americans. The poop is they’ve got Hod somewhere in isolation, the long rectangular cellblocks spreading out from the central hub of tower and chapel, more than half of them filled with locals. On the far side of the wall that splits the prison is the presidio where they keep another five hundred and you get to walk around a little more. The guards haul him out just after reveille and march him across to the office building by the warden’s quarters. In the room there is nothing but a plain wooden desk with the captain he doesn’t know planted behind it and Corporal Schreiber beside him ready to go with pen and ink.

He stands at attention.

“McGinty.”

“Sir.”

Corporal Schreiber starts scratching on his paper.

“You were in Company G on the tenth of June.”

“Yes sir.”

“I’d like to hear your version of what took place on that day.”

“The scrap in the morning or what happened later?”

“Start at the beginning.”

He thought there was supposed to be a judge and a jury, lawyers. How dumb, he wonders, does this fella think I am?

“It was hot,” he says.

The captain is dripping sweat. There is a ceiling fan turning lazily above them but Big Ten, standing with his head right under it, feels no stirring in the air.

“We’re in the Philippines, Private. It’s always hot.”

“Not like that day it isn’t. We mustered up in the morning and you couldn’t breathe, it was already so hot. Men started falling out right away, marching to Parañaque, and then there’s the shoot-out, charging up the hill at their trenches, and they get Major Moses—”

“And you and Private Atkins—”

“We’re in the thick of it. Sometimes the googoos just shoot over your head and run, it’s a joke, but these ones were holding high ground in the woods and knew what they were up to.”

“Lieutenant Manigault took part as well?”

“Oh sure. Don’t anybody have a problem with the Lieutenant when there’s lead flying.”

“No contretemps between the Lieutenant and Private Atkins?”

He figures that means something bad.

“No, nothin between them. We been in a lot of these smokers, sir. The fellas pretty much go to it, orders or no.”

“And then later in the day—”

“They sent what’s left of our company ahead to scout, marching wide around Las Piñas while they shelled it, and it’s even hotter and more men start to fall out, which puts the Lieutenant in a mood. He’s feeling the heat too, I suppose, like anybody would, and then there’s this googoo fella out in a field — why he don’t have the sense to go lie down in the shade I don’t know — but he waves and grins and calls out that he’s muy amigo the way they do, and like I said it’s hotter than hell and Lieutenant Manigault takes offense at this and—”

The captain cuts him off. “That’s not the incident I’m interested in.”

“Oh.”

The thing about the Army is when an officer asks your opinion that means he don’t want to hear it.

“When you reached the Zapote Bridge—”

“Well, sir, we was operating as a recon patrol by that time, so we never got right up to it—”

“Lieutenant Manigault issued an order—”

“He issued a good number of them, all day long—”

“He issued an order to Private Atkins.”

“Atkins was still there, I do remember that. We’d had all kinds of fellas fell out on the way, left a trail of em behind us, but Atkins kept up till the bridge. It was around then that the sun got to the Lieutenant—”

“Got to him.”

“Yes sir. He went down like a sack of spuds.”

“But before that, was the Lieutenant acting erratically?”

Big Ten has been staring at a brown lizard twitching in a crack in the stone wall behind the others. He looks down into the captain’s eyes.

“I’m just a private soldier,” he says. “It aint up to me to judge whether an officer is bughouse or not, is it?”

The captain meets his gaze for a long moment.

“Did Private Atkins refuse an order from the Lieutenant?”

Big Ten ponders it. “There was some debate on tactics.”

“Lieutenant Manigault gave an order and the private refused to carry it out.”

The way the captain says it Big Ten realizes it is an offering. One day here is worse than a month in the Leadville box and there is no telling how much time they can throw at him. All he has to do is say yes and his part in the deal will be over. He’ll walk out of Bilibid and leave this shithole island with the rest of the outfit. As for Hod—

“The way I remember it,” he says, carefully, “and none of us was thinking too clear on account of the heat, the Lieutenant said something that didn’t make no sense and then Atkins asked if that’s what he really meant and the Lieutenant he jumped to conclusions. Such as that his own men, starting with me and Atkins, were fixing to do him in.”

“And were you?”

He shakes his head. “Who’d believe a thing like that, Captain?”

The officer considers for a moment and then grabs the paper Corporal Schreiber has been writing on and crumples it.

“You lose two months’ pay,” he says to Big Ten, “and when you go back to your company you keep your lip buttoned.”

Big Ten feels a little dizzy. The chuck in Bilibid is about what you’d expect it to be and his stomach hasn’t been right from the second day inside.

“I don’t know, Sir — what with Lieutenant Manigault thinking I’m out to—”

“Lieutenant Manigault,” interrupts the captain, “is no longer with us.”

Big Ten comes upon Hod out in front of the prison, looking pale and skinny and staring up at the Teatro Zorilla, which is presenting something called Bodabil.

“Look who else bust out of the hoosegow today.”

Hod sees him and grins. “What you tell him?”

Big Ten shrugs. “All a big misunderstanding. Plus Manlygoat’s gone and they don’t know if he’s coming back.”

“Yeah. I guess it’s been LaDuke trying to put the screws to us.” They walk toward Calle Iris.

“Lose your pay?”

Hod nods.

“So we’re back to where we started in Denver, aint we?”

“I spose so.”

Hod turns, walking backward to watch some coolies putting up wood and bamboo bleachers for a parade. There has been a parade near every day they’ve been in Bilibid, music drifting over the walls, the goldbricks and thieves and deserters singing along to the ones that have words. Hod turns back to him and grins again.

“As I remember it, back in Denver, we were set to have a fight.”

No woman who wasn’t a whore, any color, has ever asked Hod in before. Mei seems nervous, looking around corners to see if anybody is watching, and then waving him up to join her. He is excited in his stomach, his eyes still smarting from the bright light after the months of prison gloom. They go past the ventilators of the hospital laundry and then there is a little shed that probably once had supplies in it. Waiting outside is a very round Filipina gal holding a little boy who the minute he sees Mei spreads his arms wide and smiles and starts hollering “Ma! Ma! Ma!”

Something she never told him.

The Filipina gal says some things in Spanish and hands the boy over and then Mei gives her a few centavos and she makes herself scarce, giving Hod a quick once-over as she leaves.

“Bo,” says Mei to Hod as she bends to open up the shed.

“Hey, Bo,” says Hod, trying to hide his surprise as the little boy shyly stares at him over his mother’s shoulder. “How’s it going?”

Inside there is a cot for a bed and a single wooden chair and a washbasin and not much more. He wonders how she cooks. Mei points to the chair.

“You sit.”

Mei sits across from him on the edge of the cot and the little boy, Bo, who is half crawling and half walking when he can get a hold on something, moves around the floor making noises, sneaking a look at Hod now and then and with each pass coming a little closer to him. He doesn’t look all Chinese.

“How old is he?”

“Almost two year.”

“And his father—?”

“Bo never gonna know his father,” says Mei flatly.

The boy definitely doesn’t look all Chinese, black hair that sticks straight up on his head but big round brown eyes and a coloring that is lighter than Mei, who is the color of Kansas soil after a drought. He’s never seen why they call them yellow. In this country there are all kinds of mixes and all kinds of shades, like the House of All Nations in Leadville, and you’ve got to look more at the clothes and how people carry themselves than their skin color to know who is a big cheese and who is not.

“They give you this place with your job?”

“Spanish people give it to me. I think the American forget.”

“Yeah,” he says, looking around. “It is kind of forgettable.”

There is a crucifix on a gold chain hung from a nail over her bed and one of the little fat gods they sell in the Binondo shops, big smile and all belly, sitting on the ledge of her only window. Bo gets close enough to stand by climbing up Hod’s leg and then yells something over and over, pointing at his face.

“He want something?”

“He points at your nose. He never see one like that.”

“Well — spose you need a closer look.”

He picks the little boy up under his arms and sets him standing in his lap and right away Bo latches on to his nose, squeezing it on the sides with a little frown on his face.

“I bust it a couple of times in the ring,” Hod says to Mei, as if she is the one who wants an explanation. “Fighting.”

“You a boxer?”

“More like a punching bag.” If he and Big Ten can pull it off there will be enough money for a start. He had a speech all planned out, practicing over and over in the cell, sure that Mei could not resist if he put the idea right. But this, this Bo all of a sudden, is a whole other deal. It wants some thought before he sticks his neck out.

The little boy butts him in the chest with the top of his head then, over and over, till Hod turns him around and sits him down in his lap and hugs him tight with his arms.

“He never have a man hold him,” says Mei, watching him carefully. “He like to wrestle.”

“Sure,” says Hod. “All boys like to wrestle.”

He decides not to ask her more about the father. There are hundreds of boys Bo’s age and size out on the streets in Manila and in the villages, cute little monkeys with dirty faces and bare feet and their naked keisters showing under the rags that have been thrown over them, eye-to-eye with the pigs and chickens and turkeys that run free here. Some have bellies like the god on the window ledge, but theirs sticking out from hunger, and some have sores on their heads or flies crawling on their faces or legs and arms that aren’t straight and the ones a little older chase after you calling “Hey you Joe!” or “Yankee soja looka me!” hoping you’ll flip them a centavo or a cigarette and maybe in a few years they’ll have a gun or an old rifle in hand and be out running with the insurrectos.

“This is a lucky kid,” he says to Mei.

“Kid is a baby goat.”

“It’s what we call little ones. Children. Kids.”

Mei smiles. If he can make her smile once Hod figures it has been a successful visit. “Lucky kid,” she says.

She stands then and crosses to the window ledge where next to the fat god there are two banana leaves folded in packets. Inside are small loaves of rice with meat and vegetables mixed into it.

“You sit over here now,” she says.

Go or stay, he thinks, I need some money.

He sits with Bo still in his lap and Mei puts the food in front of them on an empty fruit crate turned over and brings out the sticks they use, Hod making his into a kind of shovel and Mei deftly snatching up little bits of the food to put in Bo’s mouth or her own or even once or twice into Hod’s. The food is terrific, still hot and not strange-tasting at all but after a couple months of bread and water and the years of boardinghouse grub and Army chow and mulligan stew on the bum he has a hard time swallowing it, thinking about what she has risked to ask him in here, to show herself like this, close to tearing up from how it feels that instead of being court-martialed and thrown back into the hole it is the three of them here, sitting close together on the cot. No woman, whore or not, has ever asked Hod Brackenridge to eat dinner with her family.

LAS CIEGAS

The soldiers sit on a load of track ballast in the gondola, rolling past cane fields where men crouch with curved knives flashing and past rice fields with barefoot women walking up on the dikes carrying parasols to shield them from the brutal sun and tiny clusters of huts where the people wander out to stare at them but nobody shoots. There are mountains ahead in the distance, a long jagged-top wall of them off to the left, the west, and a big one sticking up all alone ahead to the right. There is one passenger car that the officers ride in, and boxcars full of horses and mules and Chinese and supplies for the Pampanga outposts. Royal fingers a heavy, round ballast stone, angry, but the land is so flat there is nothing to throw it at.

“Got us up here on this rockpile,” he mutters to nobody in particular. “Just a load of freight.”

“Wasn’t no rocks, we couldn’t see over the sides.”

“They put on some Pullmans, we could ride in style,” calls Hardaway.

“Aint gonna let you in no Pullman without a red cap on, nigger,” smiles Cooper. “What you think this is?”

They have patrolled along the Dagupan line before but never been this far north. It is almost November but it is still hot. The ballast rocks are hot where there is no soldier to cover them. The smoke from the stack on the little toy-looking engine blows straight back over them and Royal watches the hats of the others turning gray with a layer of ash.

“Treat the damn mules better than us.”

Achille points out to a trio of smallish men hacking at a stand of cane. “You want to trade places with them?”

Royal just squeezes the rock.

“Ever chop cane, Roy?”

“No.”

“That sugar will eat a man up.” Achille frowns out at the field as they pass, their smoke spreading behind them, drifting downward. “Harvest season one year when I was only un ti boug, my maman say go find your père cause it was nearly dark and he not home. I walk out by the field and there I see him, lay out on his face in the red dirt of the road and I know from how he looks he is dead. Not move a thing. But when I come close he is breathing. Just so weary he can’t make it home without he lie down and sleep some, right there in the road.”

Royal turns to watch the cane-cutters disappear behind the rear of the train.

“So I sit by him and maybe one hour, two hour, he wake up and see me, don’t say a word, just stand and start out for home. Let me carry his long knife.”

“Them boys not really cuttin sugar,” says Cooper. “They just practicin. Sneak up on Corporal Junior here some night and whack! whack!” He makes a chopping gesture to Junior’s neck.

“Only if you fall asleep on sentry duty,” says Junior.

They pass a shacky-looking mill, a single water buffalo plodding in a circle to turn spiked, hardwood rollers while one man jams stalks of green cane in between them, snapping and cracking, the juice running down a bamboo trough the carabao carefully steps over into a huge iron pot smoking over a furnace sunk in a pit, another Filipino pulling the crushed cane out to be spread in the field while a third, a sinewy, sweat-pouring man in nothing but a loincloth, feeds the furnace from a stack of dried stalks, all of them looking like they’ve been doing this since the beginning of time. The smoke from the pot, smelling of burned sugar, drifts across the track as the soldiers roll by.

“Them people change place with any of us up on these rocks in a minute,” says Achille, shaking his head. “Workin that sugar eat a man right up.”

San Fernando is a big town or a small city and the train station is the grandest they’ve seen outside of Manila. The church and the casa municipal and some of the nicer houses have been knocked apart by American artillery or burned down by the rebels before they left but life is going on here, market day, women walking with big wide baskets of fruit balanced on their heads, no hands, women plucking chickens to sell while they’re still flapping, a band with an accordion and a fiddle and a boy drumming on some kerosene cans on the platform and the people about their business, putting up with the soldiers from different units walking among them like they put up with the typhoons that sweep through or the daily rain showers or the stifling heat, just another unchangeable thing in the world. The soldiers pass their rifles down and jump off the gondola and are lined up in twos with Company F and marched double time through the streets.

“I gots to wee-wee, Sarge,” calls Hardaway.

“You can do that when we get where we’re going,” says Jacks without turning around.

“Where that is?”

“They’ll tell us when we get there.”

They are marched double time through San Fernando, sweat-sticky and covered with ash, and head away on a wagon road to the northeast. A pack of little boys follow for a while, laughing and pointing excitedly at the smoked yankees, the boldest working up the nerve to dart forward and touch Royal on the back of his hand.

In Cuba after the Dons surrendered, the little boys, skinny and hungry as they were, would lug your rifle for you on a long march, three, four, five miles hoping maybe you’d stop to eat and they get a scrap of hardtack out of it. Raggedy-ass, smiling, every color you could imagine. Here the word has come down that you don’t even let them near, any googoo over ten year old as like to cut your throat as look at you.

“Look like we the first colored been up this far,” says Too Tall. “Folks don’t know what we about.”

“Then it’s up to me to spread the news,” says Coop.

Clouds hang low in the broad sky. Companies H and F in dusty blue march down the red dirt road between deep green rice paddies dotted white with cattle egrets, one hundred twenty men with rifles on their shoulders and two dozen coolies staggering after them under packs and cases. It is rice-harvest time, women in broad hats bending to sickle handfuls of the stalks close to the ground, then binding them into bundles hung on tentlike wooden racks to dry. The Filipinas are careful to keep their faces turned away, but a huge carabao steps forward to get a closer look, chewing, snot running from its nose, a cloud of flies lifting and following, then resettling on its glistening black hide when it stops at the edge of the dirt road.

“Lookit that, Too Tall mama come out to greet us.”

“She that good-lookin, Too Tall, how come you so ugly?”

“And what that big ole thing hanging twixt her legs?”

“Googoos come after you sorry-ass niggers,” says Too Tall, who is dark-skinned and used to this, expects it, even, “don’t count on no help from me.”

“Somethin wrong,” says Corporal Pickney suddenly, looking up into the sky.

“What that?”

“It aint rainin.”

“Got to wait till they not one tree left we can stand under,” says Gamble, “then she gonna dump on us. I see one way over there.”

“My people had come to these islands, see what the weather is like, they would of kept on sailin.”

“Sailin, shit. Didn’t nobody in your family ever get let up on the deck to look at no islands, man.”

“I’m talkin way back. Story is they sailed in boats, knew how to swim—”

“If they was ever in the water it was with a rope around their ankle, some white man trolling for alligators.”

“Couldn’t use you for bait. Scare them gators away.”

“This enemy territory, less you all forgot,” calls Sergeant Jacks. “Might want to keep that noise down.”

“We aint sneaking up on nobody, Sarge,” Cooper calls back. “Hell, they can see for clear twenty miles across these fields.”

“Yeah, right about now they gone to wake General Aggy up from his nap, tell him the 25th is coming to grab his little googoo ass.”

“Can’t catch nobody you can’t find.”

“Hey, if we was to catch him—”

“Aguinaldo, shit,” says Coop. “Aggy aint but just one damn general. These people got more generals runnin around in these boondocks — hell, you own a pair of shoes they gone make you a Captain at least.”

“What’s this?”

Junior steps out of formation and pulls off a square of paper tacked to a telegraph pole.

“Junior mama left him a grocery list.”

There is a drawing of a black man at the top of the paper, hanging dead from a tree, his head cocked at an unnatural angle.

“To the Colored American Soldier—” reads Junior.

“That be us,” says Hardaway.

“Why do you make war on us, freedom-loving men of the same hue, when at home the whites lynch your brothers in Georgia and Alabama—”

“And Mississippi and Florida and Texas—”

“It is without honor that you shed your precious blood. Your masters have thrown you in the most iniquitous fight with double purpose — to make you the instrument of their ambition. Your hard work will make extinction of your race—it’s very well written,” says Junior, scanning down the page.

“—and Kansas and Missouri and Indiana—”

“The googoos think we gonna join up with them?”

“Hell yeah. Lookit all they got to offer—” Gamble sweeps his free arm at the rice fields around them. “Give us forty acres and one of these water buffalos that look like Too Tall mama.”

“Maybe if they throw in one of these little long-hair gals—”

“This not our country,” says Royal.

Too Tall laughs. “That’s what old Geronimo used to say bout that sorry pile of rocks where we built Huachuca. But now it is.”

“That’s what old King Cannibal say when the white mens come to take your grandaddy out from Africa. And they took him just the same.”

“But what they’re saying—”

“What they’re saying don’t mount to muleshit,” says Corporal Pickney. “ ‘Freedom-loving men of the same hue—’ that’s a laugh. Aint none of these people my color.”

“White folks calls em niggers just like they do us,” says Hardaway.

“A wolf and a dog may both be referred to as canines,” says Junior, folding the paper and slipping it inside his shirt. “But there is no confusing the two.”

“Junior — I’m sorry—Corporal Junior — have got that right on the money,” says Coop. “Even if he is a iniquitous sumbitch. But in this story we the wolves.” He jerks his head at a pair of the Filipinas across the field, shaking grains loose from dried bundles of rice straw. “And these people just shit out of luck.”

They come on the village of Las Ciegas in the late afternoon, the usual cluster of nipa huts scattered around the plaza in front of a tiny stucco church, Jacks sending a squad around to the rear of it to catch anyone trying to sneak away and the rest of them rushing in with bayonets fixed and voices barking.

“Front and center!” they shout. “All you googoos come on out! Fuera, fuera!” Two men rushing up each of the little ladders and onto the platforms of the huts and chasing people out, mostly old or women with children but a handful of younger men who scurry out with their hands on top of their heads crying “Amigo, yo soy muy amigo!,” herding them all into a mass in front of the church and telling them “Bajo, bajo!” to sit on the ground and some crying while the search is made, bayonets poked and probed and stashes of supplies dragged out and chickens and turkeys flapping and dogs hysterical at their boots and a bristly black hog tied to a tree with a knotted rope through its ear squealing in panic, squealing and trying to bolt, like to tear that ear right off till Coop puts one between its eyes to shut it up and impress the googoos and Royal biting his cheeks the whole while, hating them for this, pushing a man twice his age who is the size of a middling boy, all bone and gristle, pushing hard enough that the man falls over on his face.

“Get up! Arriba, goddammit, don’t make me be draggin your sorry ass over there! Up!”

One squad surrounding the villagers while the rest stab their bayonets into walls and floors and bedding, Coop and Too Tall digging with theirs under the hut platforms hoping for buried gold.

And then Captain Coughlin singles out one or another of them, jerked up and slapped onto a beautifully carved wooden chair in the middle of the plaza to face him and the turncoat interpreter whose name is Dayrit but the men call Stubby. Royal is the one supposed to pull them out, stepping over the cowering, crying mess to stand over the one he thinks they’re pointing to and saying “This one? You want this one?” and then grabbing hold of skinny arms to yank them up and drag the suspect stumbling over the others, gabbling and crying, to be interrogated.

I am death, he thinks. I am their angel of death.

One musket, useless to fire, is found in Las Ciegas, and a store of rice maybe too big for one family, and, under the mayor’s big hut that sits behind a little staked fence, a stack of Mexican silvers buried in a bamboo safe.

“I knew it!” cries Coop when he pries the lid off the bamboo section and pours the coins out on the dirt. “They just pretendin to be so raggedy-ass. Got their whole deal hid away somewhere.”

And the story from the ones set in the chair is always the same. This is a poor village. Some of the young men were killed by the Spanish, some have been kidnapped by the insurgentes or by gangs of bandits. If you take our food we will starve. We are amigos, friends of the Americans, and know nothing about fighting. And then, when it is clear that the soldados negros are not moving on, that they are going to garrison this town, they point out the mayor who is the only one with shoes on and can explain how the Spanish used to do it.

There is one young woman who does not cry and sits a little apart from the others. When Royal stands over her she gets to her feet before he has to grab her. He can smell cocoanut oil in her hair.

“She say her husband is died,” Stubby tells the captain when she is planted in the chair. “She say the kastilas kill him in Manila.” He puts his hands around his fat neck and makes a choking gesture. “Some time ago.”

“They all say their husbands were killed,” growls Captain Coughlin. “There’s nothing but widows in this country.”

Stubby grins and nods. “Widows, yes. We have many of these.”

“Tell her I don’t believe her. Ask her where he is.”

Royal watches the woman as she answers the shouted questions. She looks like she is maybe his same age. She looks like she is past hurting.

“She say he is en la tumba,” says Stubby. “He was called Fecundo Maga-puna.”

Captain Coughlin bends to put his face very close to hers, but her eyes are unwavering.

“Get her away from me,” he says and Royal moves but she is already on her feet. He follows her back to where she was sitting, cocoanut oil the sweetest thing he’s smelled in weeks, and when she turns to look into his eyes he mutters to her.

“Perdóname,” he says.

He is not sure if that’s right, if it’s only what you say if you bump a lady on a crowded trolley, if it doesn’t count unless you take your hat off first, but she does not glare back at him, only keeps looking, and for the rest of the questioning he can feel her eyes on him.

Nilda, he heard her say when Stubby asked her name. Nilda Magapuna.

They are bigger than the Spanish, much bigger. And dark, some of them, some as dark as the negritos up north and some closer to her color, but the ones in charge are all white men. So it works the same with them. They are men with rifles and do what is always done. At home in Zambales when she was a girl the Spanish did the same, and took everything there was to eat, but these men seem to be staying. If they stay long she will leave, after they relax their vigilance, leave and try to go back to Zambales. There is nobody here in Las Ciegas for her anymore, Fecundo buried and his mother gone to the coast so now they can talk about him openly, how he left owing money to so many, a gambler and a layabout and where did he find that girl?

When she looked into the eyes of the one it surprised her at first. They are just men. Just men with rifles like the Spanish are men or the ones fighting still to the north are men and if she doesn’t leave, soon, that will be trouble.

Hilario, the capitán de barangay, is pointing her out now.

She really is a widow, he says. She lives in the house of her dead husband’s mother who has left for the coast and that house is a good place to put some of your soldiers. If you pay her she can cook and wash your clothes. Hilario’s wife is glaring at Nilda because the wife knows Hilario has been after her since the day she arrived from Mariquina. The dark soldiers are all under the houses now, stabbing the ground with the blades on their rifles, looking for treasure. She hopes if they find any more they don’t start to fight over it. Some of them are looking at her, too, and the other young women. We are treasure, Nilda thinks, but only for a moment.

WARRIORS

Call it sentiment, but a guy will naturally back a slugger of his own complexion. Of course, if the scrap is a mismatch and his own pile of cocoanuts is on the line it is a different proposition. Which is why I, Private Runyon of the Minnesota Volunteers, give no odds when the mess-hall donnybrook between the Chief and the rock-knocker becomes a public event.

Previous to the incident they go for pals, these two, as much as any pair of one-stripers in the vols — the Chief being as talkative a representative of the feather-and-warpaint outfit as you are likely to bump up against and the rock-knocker, a hard-luck case out of Montana, an area where such individuals are in oversupply, always happy to give him an ear. Before their dust-up you could figure that whither goest one of them the other is never far behind, to the point where when the rock-knocker lands his tail in the jug for nixing his looey in the line of battle, in goes the noble savage as well. Fortunately for them, said officer is snatched by the googoos whilst on an excursion of dubious intent out of town, and charges against the two evaporate.

The exact cause leading to their sudden exchange of knuckle bouquets is difficult to nail down, though the dope which circulates after suggests that Atkins, which is the handle the rock-knocker chooses to be known by, commits the error of revealing a Kodak of his innocent sister back in Bozeman or whichever such burg he hails from, and the Indian, who states that his moniker is McGinty though everyone addresses him as Chief, makes a comment inappropriate to his stripe and hue. What with the mercury popping high and the general boredom served our hitch here in the Pearl of the Orient it is not unusual for rank-and-filers to altercate with each other based on one does not care for the manner in which the other peeps at him over their morning java, and when skirts are involved, no matter what color hide they are wearing, the stakes are likely to double.

Whatever the kick-off, here comes Atkins flung over from where the Colorados are laying on the feedbag, smack down onto our table with tin cups of java flying this way and tin plates of mutton stew flying that way and the Chief right after on top of him like Strangler Lewis attempting to twist his hat-holder off. Threats and remonstrations are traded — dirty savage this and red nigger that and I will kill you you paleface son of a bitch and things of this sort while all of us Minnesotas step back and provide them room to settle their disagreement — Atkins using the opportunity to test a rattan-mesh sitter on the Indian’s skull and the Chief lifting the rock-knocker by his shirt several times and throwing him against the floor to see if he will bounce until Captain Sturdevant arrives to spoil the entertainment.

Now this Sturdevant I know from the cow town of Pueblo, Col., a feedlot operator and promoter of contests of skill and science who owns half interest in a sporting club and has parlayed his status in that burg into a position of military importance. As a captain he has his detractors, consisting principally of those of a rank either higher or lower than his own, though I am told he is well regarded by his peers, the fellow captains of Companies A through H. I myself do not personally care for the gent, as he is the one who seconded a certain lieutenant’s pegging me as a runt not worthy to risk his hide next to the other stalwart sons of the Centennial State, forcing me to cast my lot in with the Minnesota delegation, who upon arrival in Googooland were made, of all the undignified possibilities, military coppers in charge of the deportment of both American fighting men and slant-eyed denizens of our newly acquired Walled City and its surroundings.

The captain suggests very forcefully that we separate the combatants, and it takes three of our huskier squarehead volunteers to drag the Chief back onto the reservation. I decline to participate, judging that after being blackballed from one outfit and wangling my way into the other I have done my share of volunteering and no more is necessary, as they can always find something to keep you busy whether it needs doing or not.

The aggrieved parties stand drilling holes into each other with their glimmers while Captain Sturdevant struts back and forth in between them, which is his specialty. I personally have never seen an officer could hold a candle to Sturdevant in the strutting department, slapping his little swagger stick against his leg and clearing his throat over and over which is the sign he is about to issue a pronouncement.

Since you two cannot comport yourselfs as soldiers, is how he says to them, perhaps you would prefer to settle it in the ring.

This comes as no surprise, knowing myself that the captain has been a steadfast voice to make prizefighting legal in our fair state, staging many of what are loosely termed exhibitions of the manly art in order to prepare our citizens for that happy day and give the sporting men among them practice in the art of the wager, from which he extracts a generous percentage. Plus he already prescribes the same remedy for a couple goldbricks from B Company who were carrying a grudge, on which occasion I am set to make a bundle only the bout is called when one of the stiffs begins to pour blood out of his beezer and the mental defectives in his corner cannot stop it. I myself have only seen so much of the red stuff one time when Private Gustavson and I interrupt a pair of googoo sports carving each other up on the Escolta.

If you do not feature a contest of skill and science, the captain adds, there is always lodgings available back in the Bilibid Prison.

The Dagoes who rule the roost here before our arrival built this accommodation, with little thought to the finer amenities, such as air circulation or plumbing. Atkins is the first to speak up.

I will fight this heathen bastard, is how he puts it, any time and any place.

This promotes a hearty cheer from both the Colorados and the Minnesotas, as we are retired from the googoo-hunting business now and there is not much to occupy our attention until a suitable bucket can be shanghaied to haul us back home.

The captain struts over to the Indian then, gives him a once-over, and asks if he is game for the proposition.

The Chief never lifts his glimmers off Atkins. If this bird should fail to step out of the ring alive, he informs the captain, let it be on your conscience.

Sturdevant’s kisser goes from cream to crimson in a second, either because the Chief did not tack a “sir” onto this statement or at the suggestion that a captain of volunteers possesses a conscience for something to weigh upon. He turns and shows both of them the back of his neck, calling out that all will be settled in the riding ring tomorrow night.

This promotes another round of approval from the ranks, the ones in charge of holding back the two opponents forgetting their mission, but Atkins and the Chief once unleashed only shoot a last skull-splitter look at each other and take a powder in opposite directions, Atkins wearing most of our supper on his back.

Runt! the boys are immediately shouting, Runt! for although in civilian life I go by Alfie this is the moniker they hang on me. Tell us Runt, they query, what is the tilt on this contest?

Now this Atkins has got arms like hawser cables, the kind of grabbers your hard-rock miners often carry, but this is one large Indian he is set to tangle with. The redskins I know from Pueblo, mostly characters from Little Raven’s aggregation, are middling-sized and, since they are frequenting the same type of establishments I am, likely to be overly fond of belting the barleycorn. But this Chief is no Arapaho, instead issuing from some tribe of titans in the north woods, and has never once been observed, at least by my searching peepers, to sample the local beeno. A sober Indian is difficult to factor in.

I will hold your wagers, I tell my fellow volunteers, because I am known as a reliable hand in matters concerning cards, dice, or creatures that race on four legs, and am expected to do something. But I cannot yet assess the odds.

There is not much time for the rumors to percolate, but I hear some ripe ones in the day that precedes the bout.

The Red Man in general is known for his thick skull, it is said by one expert, and for his weak chin. The Indian has not been born who can take a pop on the kisser without his knees go to water.

On the other hand, counters a different enthusiast, this redskin has caused the demise, through his superior marksmanship, of more rebel googoos than any one-striper in all the volunteer outfits. He is a natural man-killer.

And it is also common knowledge, adds another, that the rock-knocker calling himself Atkins is only just now bounced from solitary and before that the clap shack and has picked up a nail that cannot be pried loose, being presently on death’s front door and shot full of arsenic by the croakers.

But do not forget, confides another, from the same company as the combatants and therefore privy to superior dope, that this is the Atkins who goes toe-to-toe with Joe Choynski in the Yukon and lives to tell the tale before he causes the sudden demise of some Swede in a barroom with a single punch and is forced to don the khaki and blue to make his escape.

Rumors feed action, and there is soon a throng rattling their coins and waving their paper in my kisser. I refuse all markers, pointing out that as the smallest member of the regiment I am the last person able to strongarm a welsher. Cash only, I inform them, and scribe each wager in a notebook purloined from the company clerk as the cocoanuts pile up, the action on one slugger instantly covered by the action on the other, there being a balance between the believers in the White Man’s Destiny versus the believers in if you get hit by a guy as big as a shunt locomotive, no matter what color hide he wears, you will eat the canvas. I am of the second religion.

There is not much percentage in such a role when the odds are so close, so I extract a Mexican silver peso per transaction as banker, which keeps the pikers and small-change artists at bay, and inform the multitudes that wagering will continue during the contest at odds adjusted for the circumstances. This gives me what I judge will be less than three rounds to snag, before their champion is pounded into jelly, the last of those who profess their inability to bet against a fellow Anglo-Saxon. I am not an individual prone to take risks when hunches of a sporting nature are being wagered upon a contest, but am not opposed to it when the conclusion is of the forgone variety.

In business dealings of this sort one must be firm and fearless, but I am mildly ruffled when the rock-knocker comes to me the morning of the event and wishes to lay down a bundle the size of which will choke an Army mule.

On himself.

To win.

Save your cocoanuts, I say to him, and protect your chin.

Alfie, he comes back to me, calling me thus because we are acquaintances from before the Runt moniker is applied, Alfie, he says, I need to improve my financial standing in the world. While the rest of you are feeding the fish over the side of the bucket that takes you home, I may remain back here with other ones to fry.

Now most of the boys have been faithful visitors to the knock shops and sporting houses that we of the Provost are charged to regulate, and a few have lined up permanent Margaritas for themselves, fronting the scratch for improved lodgings or the latest rags and perfumes, but the brass give us the glare about it and it is greatly discouraged to get in any deeper with these dolls. A little jiggy-jiggy is one matter, shipping a googoo in a grass skirt with a gold link on her pointer back to Mom and Dad in Prairie Junction is another. And so it grieves me to see Atkins standing before me with a wad in his mitt, hinting he will throw it away for the sake of some yellow frail looking for a meal ticket.

Private Atkins, I say, calling him this because in business it is best to remain formal even with acquaintances who know your real handle, Private Atkins, I say, if that scalp-lifter hits you a clean punch he will not only kill you but do serious harm to your friends and relations in the far off hills of the Treasure State. You can knock a hole through the side of Admiral Dewey’s big white bucket sooner than you will put a dent in that redskin.

I understand, he says to me, and hangs his head a little like he is already reading his own obituaries. I understand, which is why I am hoping you can give me odds.

Here I am forced to confess to a certain amount of guilt, being the party who steers Atkins and some of the other boys to one of the knock shops we have recently regulated, and while I am laying about slightly poleaxed by a few glasses of the high-class Spanish beeno they keep on hand in such establishments, Atkins picks up the nail that sends him into the clap shack and the clutches of this china doll he is currently attempting to blow all his cocoanuts on.

Odds? I say. Nobody is getting odds.

As you suggest, he replies, all puppy-eyed and resigned to his fate, I do not hold the chance of a snowball in Hell in this contest, but if some miracle should happen could you cover me at two to one?

If you were the favorite, I commiserate, you could profit by a plunge into the tank. However, unless the Indian is willing to—

Do not mention the name of that heathen savage to me again, says Atkins. I mean to whip him on the fair and square.

Guilt, like the clap, is extremely difficult to shake loose of, so I accept his entire bundle and write it into the notebook at two to one. I judge that he is tossing his bankroll to the wind anyhow, so he may as well believe the payoff is worth the risk.

On the evening of the contest my sergeant, who is of the Swedish persuasion and is monikered the Blond Bear, comes to me with a further proposition.

Runyon you sorry sack of shit, he informs me, always one to forgo nicknames and use the proper address, Captain Sturdevant from the Colorados wants you in the riding ring. Put your worthless backside in motion.

It seems that somebody has fingered me to the captain as wise to the fight game, and he enlists me to help supervise the wrapping of the mitts, each man and his second peeping the process to make sure there is no plaster in the bandages or roll of Liberty Head dimes clutched in anyone’s pointers to better bash the skull of their opponent with. It all looks jake to me and I share this opinion with the captain, who is serving as referee and both judges for the scrap.

No need to keep track of points, says he. This one lasts till one of the sluggers does not return to his feet.

A platform is built in the middle of the old indoor riding ring where in earlier times the Dago cavalry prance their nags and the brass practice their swordwork, for all the good it does them when Uncle Sammy’s boys come strolling up the beach. There is canvas underfoot and real ropes and turnbuckles the captain ships over from Denver that I can tell have seen some action by the blood dried black on them, and wood bleachers are thrown up all around for everybody in the two outfits not on duty to park their keisters. The brass wander in last and plop down on rattan sitters in the front and one of the regimental bands bangs out Marching Through Georgia and there is a considerable racket when the sluggers step out between the bleachers and climb up on potato crates to duck under the ropes and take their corners. The band stops then and the racket dips into the kind of mumble you only hear after fatal house fires and lynchings, as none of the assembled throng besides myself and the other characters in the dressing room has seen the Indian’s naked torso before. He does not resemble the cigar-store variety so much as something along the Greek model, chiseled in stone, Hercules or Atlas or some such personality with shoulders you could hitch a wheat thrasher to and legs like pillars of oak. They do not feature any follicles on the chest, your noble savage, which adds to the Chief’s sculptured appearance, and his neck is just as wide as his hat-holder, a phenomenon seen in large bears and squarehead sergeants. I am surrounded by volunteers wishing to hedge their bets.

That will be an American eagle per wager, I say to them, doubling the ante, and the tilt is no longer even. Just to cover the play I start at three to two for the Indian, and by the time the crowd thins I am up at five to one with only the most diehard of Anglo-Saxons still taking the miner without a hedge.

The boys begin to stomp their feet for action, quieting only when Captain Sturdevant struts to the middle of the squared circle, looking raw without his swagger stick, and raises his mitts for silence.

It goes dead quiet, only Atkins’s boxing brogans, also shipped from Denver by the captain and a size too big for the rock-knocker’s feet, shuffling nervous on the canvas while he throws little jabs and rolls his shoulders in preparation of having his block knocked off of them, molesting the silence. The Chief stands with his knuckles dragging on the floor, still as a mountain and nearly as big.

This fight, announces the captain without raising his voice, will continue until one man is unable to answer the bell. Throws will be allowed, but gouging, biting, low blows, obnoxious use of hands and elbows, and lollygagging in the ring will be punished — and here he pauses to gander meaningfully at each of the sluggers — will be punished by time in the stockade. I want a show from both of you fellows — come out fighting and may the best man win.

The bit about the throws is a raw deal and I stifle the urge to give it the hoot. Throws have not been allowed since Pegasus was a two-year-old, and it dawns on me that maybe the brass have their own pool going, with the captain down heavy favoring the Chief. I have seen a referee tackle a slugger in Idaho Springs once because he was in the satchel and concerned about his percentage, but tonight I am covered, I am in fact sitting pretty with a pile of Mexican silvers and American eagles already bagged and nothing riding on the outcome.

The bonger is tapped and the melee commences. Atkins steps out sharp, throwing leather in flurries and putting lots of mustard on it, with relish on top, but the Indian covers with his big slabs of arm and the assault does not amount to much. The volunteers are on their feet and shouting in the way of all suckers, thrilled to witness a contest of skill and science and probable slaughter. Atkins wears himself out by the end of the round and just before the bonger sounds again the big redskin decides he is crowding too close and lifts him up under the arms and tosses him halfway across the ring. The rock-knocker lands on his keister and the boys all give this the hoot while the Chief circles around the ropes hollering a war whoop strictly from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Extravaganza. This gets a rise out of the more fervent of the Anglo-Saxons in the crowd and between rounds a few of them come to me and double their bets, which more than covers the five-to-one play on the Chief.

Corporal Grissom is the Chief’s second, assigned to the duty by Captain Sturdevant, and he is absent without leave, leaning with his back to the ropes and jawing with a pal up in the cheap seats while his fighter plops on the stool.

Private Neely is busy in the other corner spitting water in Atkins’s kisser and then greasing it with lard and yapping strategy at him, though the only strategy available is the one adopted by El Supremo Aguinaldo and his outfit and this Atkins cannot implement because the captain will plug him before he gets halfway to the door. What Private Neely knows about boxing I know about flower arrangement, if you do not count what wreath to choose when a fellow sporting man is planted, and Atkins is not paying mind to him, only peeping across the ring at the Chief like a spring hen peeps a butcher with a meat cleaver in his mitt.

The second and third go pretty much like the first, the lead miner throwing and the redskin catching where it does not sting, only there is no mustard left on Atkins’s punches now, arm-weary already or maybe the croakers really did pump some poison into him which they say is the only way to kill the French ache if the quicksilver does not kill you first. In the fourth the Indian goes finally on the warpath, swinging haymakers left and right, sidearm jobs that no matter how Atkins tries to block with his elbows still nearly knock him crabwise off his feet, the boys up and hollering for blood and they will see some only the Chief needs to raise his artillery a notch, happy to bat his former pal around the ring till Atkins ducks when he should not duck and catches one on the side of his noggin that puts him on one knee. The Chief seems confused and backs off, looking around at all the volunteers who have cocoanuts riding on him screaming to finish the job, even the captain waving him in for the kill, but he only frowns like he suddenly does not savvy the white man’s tongue and then Atkins is saved, or perhaps doomed, by the bell.

A dozen chalk-eaters crowd me then, desiring to hedge their previous indiscretions and get on the Indian at five to one, but I inform them that the bank is closed. The fifth begins with the rock-knocker looking like his pins are not completely beneath the rest of his corpus and suddenly there is Private Neely pulling at my coat with his mitts full of scratch and wearing a face that will make a hangman weep.

He makes me promise, says Private Neely. He wants to blow the rest of this at whatever the tilt is.

On himself? I query, judging that the whack on the noggin has relieved the miner of what little sense he possesses to begin with. Let us remember that this is an individual who tumbles for a doll he meets in the clap shack.

He makes me promise, explains the second, on my mother’s grave.

Inform him that your mother is still living.

Please, he counters, waving the rock-knocker’s boodle under my nose. Now this is paper money, the green variety that Uncle Sammy puts the ink on, the variety that is accepted in the sort of San Francisco sporting houses I shall soon be a patron of, the kind that spends plenty but does not wear a hole in your pockets the way a pile of golden eagles will. The miner has been a stalwart companion to me as far back as Denver and I am as sentimental as the next character, crying at weddings of dolls I have a yen for, the christening of screaming infants and the planting of dear friends who die owing me cocoanuts — but this waving green I cannot resist.

It is five to one, I announce, snatching the cabbage.

Could you crank that up to six? queries the second. My slugger is on his last legs out there.

This is not an exaggeration, as I have not removed my peepers from the ring, where Atkins is being pounded like a boardinghouse steak, the Indian unloading with both paws into his barely protected middle, the rock-knocker staggering backward without throwing a counter, the boys hollering their lungs raw and Sturdevant, hands folded behind his back, strolling around them with a little smile on his kisser like he is admiring the roses. I will sit through an evening of Manila googoo chicken fights before I stay put for a mismatch, but I am holding the bank and have my own pile of cocoanuts riding on it now, so I cover the play six to one in the notebook and hold my water.

Private Neely hurries back to the corner and I see Atkins look over to him after he dives into a clinch with the big Indian hoisting him clear off his toes and squeezing the wind out of him, and the second gives Atkins the thumbs up as if to give him heart. As if heart can help a cornered coon against a grizzly bear.

The Chief tries to throw Atkins clear out of the ring and nearly makes the point, the miner snatching the ropes to keep himself out of the laps of the Company D Minnesotas and then sprawling onto the canvas. While he crawls back onto his pins the Chief goes into his war dance again, whooping and chopping one hand down like it is the hatchet he will bury in Atkins’s skull. It does not appear to be a good night for Anglo-Saxon progress.

Atkins gets himself steady and when the redskin turns they exchange a look I have seen before on the front range between a timber wolf and a very old fleabag of a buffalo, a look that says This is the curtain, buster, and the miner even nods slightly, as if saying I understand, thus reads the rule of claw and fang, and then the Indian lumbers in.

He lumbers in cocking his sleepmaker behind him but the little worn-out rock-knocker quicksteps forward and whips an overhand right like a base-ball hurler flush on the redskin’s beezer, crowding to follow it with an uppercut he starts from the toes, planting it square on his opponent’s chin, and then staggers back as if that is all he has.

The Chief’s peepers roll up in his head and he totters this way and that and then somebody from the Colorados hollers “Timberrrrrrr!” and he goes down on his face like a hundred-year-old redwood. It is quiet for a moment, all of us as stunned as a catfish on an ice wagon, and then the bell rings and the true-blue Anglo-Saxons start to whoop and holler and stomp on the boards, celebrating the ineffable march of the white man and calculating their haul. Mostly I am hearing the clink of all those silvers and golds I collected rattling down the shitter, the sound of greenbacks flapping out of my pocket, and the Indian does not stir.

He does not stir as a detail of the boys carry his carcass into the back where Major Ruckheimer, our company croaker, slaps his kisser and dumps a bucket of water on him and jams a stick in his jaws so he should not swallow his tongue, does not stir until after the mittens have been untied and yanked off and Atkins has been helped in, looking beat to hell but relieved he is not dead and has earned so many hundreds of cocoanuts to blow on his china doll.

Where am I, ask the redskin then, and Who shut the lights off and things of this nature as he sits up and plops his hat-holder into his big, bandage-wrapped mitts. There is resin on his kisser where it hit the canvas, his beezer scraped a little, but he looks pretty chipper for a guy who has just been coldcocked in the ring.

Who won? asks the Indian and Captain Sturdevant and the other brass crowding around get a laugh out of that but I do not.

I do not laugh when I settle accounts with all the boys, nor when I hand over a sack of my own hard-won cocoanuts to the rock-knocker, as it should be known that the Runt, if that is how you choose to address me, is no welsher. Atkins is bruised and battered but still in possession of all his choppers.

Private Neely informs me you take my play at six to one, he says to me, laying a swollen-knuckled hand onto my shoulder. That is extremely white of you.

I do not laugh either when later, being of a suspicious nature, I sneak back and shake the lumps of sponge from their boxing gloves, the last substance one would expect sworn enemies should be stuffing into their mittens, nor when I see them together in the mess a few days after, chumming around like there is no hard feeling betwixt fellow ring warriors. I judge from his haymakers that the Chief has not previously taken part in a contest of skill and science, but somewhere, perhaps in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Extravaganza, he learns to take one hell of a dive.

And as for sentiment — unless you have got both fighters in the satchel you can forget about it.

SQUAW MAN

“Arizona,” he lies.

It has gotten to be a habit, like calling himself Tommy Atkins. If the railroad man has noticed Hod’s cheek swollen from the fight he’s at least not staring at it.

“Arizona and New Mexico, mostly. Little outfits digging for gold and silver, though the ore isn’t as rich there as they hoped.”

The recruiter eyes his uniform. “And when exactly do you become a free man?”

“Ship leaves Friday.”

“And if I was to check with your lieutenant—”

“Googoos got him about a month back. But any of the other officers — you know—‘Service honest and faithful.’ ” If they bother to check he is sunk, but this is not the minefields and they are pretty hard up for white men.

“We won’t be digging tunnels right away. How the line is set up now, it’s just maintenance—”

“Hell, I helped build the White Pass Railroad in the dead of winter,” he lies again. “Back in the Klondike. And I spent a good deal of time on the Northern Pacific and the Denver and Rio Grande.”

The recruiter, who says he is from Idaho, narrows his eyes. “You been all over the damn map, haven’t you?”

Hod gives him a smile and speaks softly, thinking how Jeff Smith would play it. “Yes, sir, and I think I finally found a spot that suits me.”

The recruiter has an electric fan pointed straight at the back of his head, making his little bit of hair stick up, and does not appear happy to be in the Philippines.

“Your work gangs will be mostly coolies. You speakee any of that?”

“No, sir, but we had em to carry our supplies on the march. You just sing the right tune in American and they’ll hop to it pretty good.”

Mei has taught him a few words, useful to tell a shopkeeper he is a thief and a liar and you might pay half of what he says but not a penny more.

“Foreman’s wage is fifteen a month, which is plenty when you think how cheap it is to live here.”

“Bout what I get now,” Hod nods, as if agreeing on the salary. “Course nobody sposed to shoot at a section boss. How far up the line you think I’ll be?”

It is always good to talk like you already got the job. Make their mind up for them.

“From here to Dagupan, wherever we need a road crew. Till we start to expand.”

“And that would be—?”

“Whenever they get the damn bandits under control. You people,” and here he points at the single stripe on Hod’s uniform sleeve, “been taking your sweet time about it.”

“Yes, sir, I spose we have.”

Hod pictures the recruiter sweating it out, surrounded by a bunch of insurrectos with their bolos in hand. Hearing that guff from the regulars is one thing, but from a civilian—

“And you know we don’t give any pay in advance.”

“I’ll draw a full month when I muster out. That should tide me over.”

The recruiter looks like he still isn’t sure. “You a temperate man?”

There has been more shooting in Manila lately than any time since the first days of the war, men bored and drunk and dreading the confinement of the long ship ride home. A provost guard got killed the other night by an Oregon crazy on beeno, some of the men still preferring jungle juice to anything with a label on it.

“I haven’t taken the Oath,” Hod smiles, “but liquor don’t set right with me in the heat.”

The recruiter nods. The front of his face is running sweat. “And you understand the deal with your citizenship?”

General Otis has decreed that volunteers may not remain in Manila to engage in business, forced either to be shipped home or re-enlist for immediate service.

“I think so—”

“Mr. Higgens prefers you go for a British passport, since they own the road. He can help at their embassy—”

Hod grins. It is a big step, he knows, giving up on America, but so far he’s surprised at how little the idea bothers him. “Long as they don’t send me off to fight them Dutchmen.”

The recruiter doesn’t think this is funny. “Africa,” he says, writing Hod’s made-up name onto a list, “can’t be any worse than this.”

Hod walks out through the switching yard, a boxcar being loaded with crates full of tinned peaches. There are all kinds of fruits hanging off the branches here, pineapples busting out of the ground, but he’s never seen a peach tree. That would be an angle if he knew how to farm, growing things that Americans want and don’t have here yet. Manila is a boom town, he thinks as he cuts south on Abad Santos, no less than Cripple Creek or Creede or Skaguay or Leadville in its day, filling up now with sharp-eyed Americans dressed in new Hongkong suits looking for the main chance and paying double for whatever they hanker for from home. Jeff Smith would be a millionaire in a year. A man with a lemonade stand—

There are a half-dozen Filipino boys, the littlest only in a dirty shirt that comes down to his knees, trying to play base ball out in front of the laundry. The batter has a wooden bed slat that he holds cross-handed, and the pitcher windmills forward then backward before underhanding a scabby-looking rubber ball toward the paint-can lid that serves as home plate. The end of the bed slat splits as the batter makes contact, the ball thunking off the side of a passing carabao drawing a cart and bouncing unevenly down the street, small boys dodging through hooves and wheels till one catches up with it, runs back and thunks the advancing runner between the shoulder blades with a vicious throw. There have been inter-regiment games on the Luneta, well attended by both Americans and locals, and the boys seem to have picked up the basics.

“You’re out!” calls Hod, jerking his thumb up, and steps into Lavandería Hung.

The front counter of the laundry has no wall behind to block it off from the works, though on one side the finished orders, wrapped in brown paper with black Chinese characters scrawled on them, are piled several feet high. Three Chinese men, stripped to the waist, stand over huge steaming vats, stirring a heavy porridge of clothing with thick paddles, their queues dripping water, their skin flushed red with the heat, while another younger one hustles about with sticks in hand tending the fire under each vat. One of the stirrers hoists a steaming mass of clothing with his paddle, swinging it dripping behind him to slap down into a cooling trough. Yet another Chinese lifts one garment at a time from the long trough and cranks it through an iron mangle to squeeze out most of the water. Behind him are two more men lifting heavy irons from the top of a woodstove to smooth out the wrinkled clothing on a plank, while another wrestles a huge skillet-like affair with glowing coals on top of it, using it to press pants flat. Darting between them, a pair of Chinese women run the clothes out through the back door to hang-dry. It is hard to see how anyone can keep the orders separate. An older man, maybe Hung himself, appears out of the steam to stand behind the counter.

“You got tickee?”

Hod shakes his head. “Just come in to look your operation over.”

“No tickee,” says the older man, “you go scram.”

The boys are still playing ball when he steps back onto the street and heads for the Walled City. He feels the grouch bag stuffed with his winnings from the show with Big Ten snug against his belly. Just a little set-up at first, he thinks. Hire a couple coolies, maybe right off the road crew or bring them over on contracts, pay them a little better so they want to keep the job. What he’s won and his muster pay and a couple months’ work on the railroad should cover the equipment, and then you just need to be near a good supply of water.

If she’ll have him.

Working the Dagupan line he’ll be able to scout the right location, wherever the Americans plan to dig in and send out east — west rails. Mei would only be up front, with a wall behind her to keep the steam off, running the whole deal with her good English and her head for numbers. Never seen a woman could juggle sums like her — the once he took her to buy some clothes she jawboned the fella down way below what Hod was willing to pay and told him all their business sliding beads around the rack was just for show, that she had the figure in her head way before they got to clicking and clacking.

If he can only lay the deal out right, be sure not to spook her.

He turns down Azcarraga Street. There are more and more shop signs in English, mostly the ones run by Spaniards and Chinese. Only the Filipinos don’t seem to have got the message yet, and they’ll be the ones left in the dust. Like back home where the only Indians selling anything are carved out of wood and got a handful of cigars.

Big Ten is sitting on his favorite chair by the trolley terminal in Plaza Santa Cruz, having his boots polished.

“How’d it go?”

Hod shrugs his shoulders. “I’ll find something. If they gonna bring this country up to snuff, they be needin some experienced hands. And then when I get my own operation runnin—”

“Hell, you’ll make out fine.”

“If you was interested — I mean, you go back and it aint any better than it was, I could use a partner—” Hod has no idea if the British will take an Indian for a citizen or not.

Big Ten smiles. “Naw — I can’t take the heat.”

Hod sighs. “Well then.”

“I got no worries,” says Big Ten. “I’m a Ward of the State.”

The soldier is sitting on the wall outside the hospital, waiting for her. There are a lot of karayuki-san selling themselves in Manila now, and she watches as three of these stop to offer themselves to him and then walk on. He has come to tell her he is leaving.

All the sick and wounded ones of the Colorado, and of the Oregon and of the Minnesota and of the Dakota are being prepared to leave on a hospital ship, their time of bondage to the Army over, and they say the healthy ones are going as well. They make jokes about taking her with them.

“If I could fit you in my rucksack,” they say, “we’d go do San Francisco together.”

He is the nicest one, Hod, a soldier who takes his hat off when he talks with her and bought her shoes and a silk dress she has only worn once so he could see her in it and brings her food sometimes, American food in metal cans that she has kept hidden in her room because she has no way to open them and is afraid the Americans who run the hospital now will find them and think she is stealing. He has even brought presents for Bo, toys that he bought on the street. Radiant Star in Hongkong was taken once and kept for a year by a very rich trader who fed her and dressed her like a rich woman till he was tired of her and found a younger girl. When she came back she told Mei and the others what it was like, how easy, such a crystal life, and they all tried to imagine this. She didn’t talk about what words he used when he told her he had a new girl.

Mei steps out to the soldier, to Hod, and breathes hard through her nose so she won’t cry. Her only worry now, really, is that with all the soldiers going home they may change the hospital or close it and to take care of Bo she will have to be Ling-Ling again out walking with the Japanese girls.

He stands and takes his hat off when he sees her, smiles. His cheek on one side is swollen, as if he’s been in a fight. She thought he was funny-looking at first, like they all are, but now she likes to see his face. The one time he touched her with her clothes off, in a rented room after she wore the dress for him, his hands were very rough from working and he said he was sorry about that. But her own hands are rough too, a farmer’s hands, boiled now in the water every day, and if she has to walk with the Japanese girls maybe she will wear gloves and keep them on till the deal is struck.

He kisses her on the cheek like he does, as if she is a little girl.

“Let’s walk.”

It is the part that is the strangest for her, this walking in front of everybody’s eyes. In the Walled City the other soldiers smile and wink at him and the Spanish and Filipino ladies who walk in twos and carry parasols make faces and turn their heads away and in Binondo the Chinese merchants hiss terrible words at her, acting like she is still Ling-Ling and not just a woman who works in the American hospital, almost a Daughter of Charity.

They walk down Legaspi together, a couple feet apart from each other.

“There are some things I got to say to you,” he says, still holding his hat in his hands. She breathes in hard through her nose. She will not cry now, she will wait till she is back in her room at the hospital, till she takes her new shoes off and puts them under the bed with the metal cans of American food.

“You are leaving.”

He looks at her. She feels stronger, saying it before he does.

“Well, that kind of depends. What I was thinking, see—” and he sighs like it is hard for him to tell her. Perhaps it is.

“They got a boat for the regiment now, yeah—”

Some soldiers at the corner look at them as they pass and laugh, not a kind laugh, and it makes her angry. She moves closer as they walk, shoulders almost touching.

“So when everybody goes — see, boiling clothes aint so different than boiling anything else. And you got your Chinese and the local lingo and half the time your English sounds better than mine, so it’s a shoo-in we could open a shop somewheres up the railroad line.”

Sometimes her English is not so good. “Shop?”

“Not a big one at first, just get our feet wet, see how it goes. Or hell, you hate the laundry idea, it could be a lunch counter. Chop suey or whatever. You wouldn’t have to cook, just run the business.”

He has stopped walking now, looking at her, worried.

“Of course first we got to find one of these Jesus-peddlers showing up here every day who can say the words without choking on em. Or whatever you folks do for it, some Chinese deal, that’s fine with me. Anybody don’t like it, that’s just their lookout.”

Mei feels dizzy, her vision blurring, like she is being tossed in a storm at sea and cannot tell which is sky and which is water.

“Bo,” she says.

The soldier lifts his shoulders. “Too bad he got to learn his English from someone like me.”

Mei thinks of the card with her photograph on it, the one she tore up and burned and the one the Comisaria de Vigilencia still has, with all the things about her written on it.

“I am only a no-good China girl,” she says.

“I aint much of a bargain either.”

He holds his arm out then, bent at the elbow for her to walk with him the way the Spanish men walk with their ladies on the Luneta at sunset.

“So what do you think?”

The breathing hard through her nose doesn’t work. Lan Mei takes the soldier’s arm and holds on to it with both hands. Holds on to it for her life.

SINGING WIRE

The women cross themselves when they see Diosdado sitting on the dike. They adjust the bundles on their heads and fix their eyes on the road ahead as they hurry past, muttering incantations in Pampangano. Diosdado and his band have become phantoms, haunting the balete forests between Guimba and Malolos, creatures whose existence is understood but whose presence is feared. They are the shadow government, collecting taxes for the fugitive Republic. They are the unwritten law, whispering decrees and punishing collaborators. They are, he hopes, the fabric of American nightmares, the thing the yanquis fear most when daylight drains from the sky. It is an intermittent, skulking war that they wage, waiting in ambush for forces they never outnumber, shooting and running with no time to assess the damage inflicted, firing at night-lights and noises in the occupied baryos, stealing sleep from the enemy.

And every day the cutting of the wire.

Half the men still believe it is magic, a metal string that goes on for miles and miles and sings its secrets to the yanqui invaders. Pressing their ears against the wooden lances to listen the high-pitched keening of the wire, or holding a cut length in their hands, turning it this way and that, trying to divine its power, keeping a few silenced yards to hang their wet clothes from in camp.

“The wire is their mark, their claim on our land,” Diosdado tells his men. “Wherever we let it stand belongs to them.”

If there is time they pull the lances out of the ground, one every fifty-five paces, then chop the insulators off, cut the wire in several places, and scatter it all in the woods. Closer to the garrisons or in an area with regular American patrols they only stand a nervous guard while little Fulanito shinnies up and uses the cutters Orestes Pulao stole from the signalmen’s shed before he ran from San Fernando. The taut wire zings in protest as it whips apart, the flow of coded orders and reports broken off, telegraph bugs up and down the line gone mute. Fulanito backs down quickly, bare toes gripping the wood, and they all fade back into rumor.

Diosdado and his band are phantoms in the minds of the kasamas, haunting the orchards and fields between San Idelfonso and Mabalacat, materializing when it is least convenient to demand part of their meager harvests, any contact forbidden by the martial law of the occupiers. And phantoms can never rest — west from Cabanatuan after the murder of Luna but never quite reaching Zambales, ordered to slip below enemy lines in Tarlac, sniping, stealing, scurrying from one jungle hideout to the next, counting their bullets and losing track of their days. They joined General Tinio’s Ilocanos for a spell in late November, helping to cover Aguinaldo’s flight to the north, then were sent back to Bamban after the Tirad Pass fight, harrying the mule trains hauling supplies to the American outposts. In January it was up to Pangasinan, responsible for the villages along the Agno River, encouraging informants, threatening fraternizers. In March they were part of the larger campaign to tie up the American troops protecting Concepción, Sargento Bayani’s monkey-chanting night raids so effective that all the Chinese coolies working for the yanquis deserted in terror. In August it was the foothills of Mount Arayat, coming down to ambush the parties of fevered bluecoat soldiers unlucky enough to be patrolling in the heavy rains. And now working their way west again, skirting above Macabebe to Guagua, cutting wire as they go.

The villages were open to them at first, Americans passing through so fast in their chase that food could be hidden, the invaders’ dust barely settled before Diosdado’s men were there to collect the rice-tithe. Then the yanquis began to garrison — ten soldiers for a medium-sized baryo, a company or more for the stone-church towns. And now the barbed wire, the concentration camps, the railroad-tie corrals for men caught without safe-passage documents between villages. In many areas the Americans have shot all the carabao, have torched the rice fields and forced people to eat the same tinned meat and crackers their troopers live on.

Diosdado has eaten lizard, gratefully, and made a belt of hemp to hold his uniform pants up when his leather one rotted to pieces in the damp jungle camps. His men are a hollow-cheeked, spindly-limbed band, as phantoms must be, and the droning camp conversation always reverts to meals once eaten. Kalaw is the master of this, his descriptions of his mother’s saint’s day feasts so detailed they make hard men weep with longing.

And every day they cut the wire.

“The wire is the voice of the oppressor,” Diosdado tells his men. “The wire is his eyes and his ears. If we let the wire stand he will never be gone from us.”

The best tactic is to cut the line halfway between one garrison and the next, to wait in ambush for the Signal Corpsmen and their escorts, far enough away that the sound of gunfire won’t summon reinforcement. The yanquis have implemented mounted patrols, though, on the roads that permit it, whooping troopers too big for their skinny Filipino ponies, dashing along with pistols drawn to shoot anything that moves. They’ve begun to set their own ambushes as well, Diosdado losing a fighter from La Union and three good rifles when they were surprised on the footpath to the Candaba — Santa Ana road.

At the beginning of October a messenger came all the way from wherever General Aguinaldo was hiding out that week, telling them to hold fast and not despair, telling them that the Americans were about to hold elections and that the challenger for president, a great orator named Bryan, pledged to pull their army from the Philippines if he won. The messenger waited while Diosdado explained this to the men, explained just what an election was and that Bryan was a great anti-Imperialist who refused to be nailed to a cross of gold and that no, he wasn’t a Catholic, but a fervent believer in the Almighty nonetheless.

“General Aguinaldo says if we can keep them fighting till November,” said the messenger, “if we can keep them sick and sleepless and longing to go home, then victory may be within our grasp.”

Only Sargento Bayani was not filled with hope by this.

“Whenever the Spanish sent us a governor who considered reform,” he said, “the friars would have him recalled. Friars or not, the Americans must have someone who will destroy this great man of words.”

Then the messenger told them they were to stay in Pampanga, to haunt the countryside around San Isidro and Las Ciegas, to remind the people that they were still free Filipinos and that if they betrayed the Republic they would be executed.

Diosdado gets up from the dike and crosses the road to the telegraph line. He is hungry and tired and unshaven, a phantom in the remnants of a lieutenant’s uniform with a rope belt and boots that have given up the cause. He presses his ear against the telegraph pole, feels a tiny buzz against his skin, hears the singing of the naked wire above. The Americans are talking to each other with electricity. He hopes they’re talking about Bryan.

CELEBRITY

They hide Teethadore in the library. Once he is alone he runs his fingers along the spines of the leather-bound Shakespeares, many, no doubt, once pored over by the Prince of Players himself. He is too nervous to read, though, and paces the long rectangle as he waits, employing the character’s distinctive strut rather than his own gait. He was unable to stifle a giddy laugh earlier as he stepped between the gas lamps and in through the front entrance. How many times has he strolled around the private, padlocked greenery of Gramercy Park with one eye fixed upon the brownstone façade with its columns and balconies, hoping to spy some adept of the Craft or other notable entering or leaving? And often rewarded — Augustus Saint-Gaudens, his profile chiseled from New England granite, banker Morgan with his angry turnip of a nose, burly, ginger-haired Stanford White who designed the interior of the club, rascally Samuel Clemens with an evil-looking cigar in his mouth, and once, on his very first visit to the great city, Edwin Booth himself passing on the walk. After the shock of recognition, the strange realization that they shared the same diminutive stature, there were the eyes — sad and shy, begging not to be hailed or complimented. He let the great man, appearing old beyond his years, pass unlauded.

Teethadore is well aware that performers of his caste are not ordinarily welcome at The Players. His own father was a lowly Tommer, traipsing the tank towns as Arthur Shelby, the old darky’s first owner, a thankless role if there ever existed one. But it was at least a play, not, as he derisively snorted when his son debuted as a joke-spouting juggler, “a carnival attraction.”

He certainly felt the freak last night at Proctor’s 23rd, with election returns projected on a white sheet lowered over the olio curtain between each act, his turn as TR greeted with cheers and jeers by the house, packed to the rafters with partisans celebrating their affiliations at the top of their lungs. Spectacles off, a van Dyke slapped on with spirit gum, he was able to push out of the theater without being spotted as a performer or misidentified as the bully little candidate. The crowd was just as dense outside, thronged all the way down from Longacre Square to Madison Square where the Times bulletin was hung four stories up on the side of their new building, a stereopticon flashing election returns as soon as they were telegraphed to the newspaper. Thousands cheering as the first Massachusetts returns favored Bryan, and thousands more when Queens and New York counties tallied for McKinley. For entertainment in between reports there was the searchlight hired by Croker and the Tammany crowd, mounted atop the Bartholdi Hotel and blazing advertisements for Bryan and several local Democrats, as well as for soap, whiskey, and a remedy for dyspepsia, upon the face of the rapidly deteriorating Dewey Arch at 24th.

Caught up in the good-natured spirit of it, he grabbed the trolley and rattled down to witness the even larger horde assembled around Newspaper Row, citizens jammed together from the bridge to the post office, filling City Hall Park all the way to Broadway. Over a hundred men in blue were needed to clear a path for the trolley to come to a stop, Teethadore nearly losing his feet several times in the crush. Each of the great papers had their own screen hung on the side of their massive buildings, stereopticons mixing hastily scrawled polling figures with photographs, illustrations, and burlesques of the candidates, a few augmenting these with moving kinetoscope views — marching soldiers, steaming battleships, and once, to great amusement and applause, his own shenanigans as TR chasing a bear cub up a tree. It seemed that a full half of the throng, from uptown swells in raglan overcoats and silk hats to entire families of East Side flockies, had purchased some sort of noisemaker — rattles, tin horns, buzzers, bells, and, for the vocally inclined, cardboard megaphones — from the scores of little street fakirs peddling them.

One of these, alarmingly yellow-tinged for one not of the Confucian persuasion, took pause from whirling his rattlers to accost Teethadore directly.

“You look just like him!”

“Like whom, may I ask?” All this shouted, of course, as the multitude demonstrated at great volume its approval, opprobrium, or boredom with the latest despatch.

“Like Teddy, who d’ya tink? I seen him once in person, Tanksgivin at the Newsboy’s Home. You shave that chin-warmer off, put on some specs, an yer the spittin image.”

“I’ve never heard that before.”

“Then yer deaf as a post or people aint payin attention. Rattler?”

By eight o’clock even Hearst’s Journal conceded that McKinley was the victor. One fellow, squeezed very close to him, primed with perhaps too much liquid enthusiasm, had tears in his eyes.

“Who I feel bad for is poor Adlai Stevenson,” he lamented for the former but not future Vice President. “Where is an old man like that going to find a new job?”

His companion, bulging coat laden with McKinley — Roosevelt buttons, who had obviously already enjoyed his “full dinner pail” and a couple pails of something with foam on it, was in brighter spirits.

“Mac’s the man for the new century,” he beamed. “Just you wait and see.”

The crowd was still in the thousands, a surprising number of them ladies, when Teethadore pushed through and headed north to his MacDougal Street garret. Hundreds of citizens were out with him for the entire walk, passing dozens of huge, crackling political-club bonfires, everybody full of energy and good spirit whatever their affiliation, this on not the balmiest of November nights, and he had occasion once again to be thrilled to be a New Yorker.

Mr. Oettel, Booth’s dresser in his later years and now chief functionary at the club, steps up into the library with John Drew. There are voices below, laughter.

“Mr. Brisbane?”

John Drew, the John Drew, is offering his hand. A manly handshake, a deep and hearty voice, the looks as striking in person as on stage. He stands back to look Teethadore over.

“My God, they were right about you! A breathtaking resemblance.”

Teethadore has the spectacles on, of course, and has ventured to buy, at considerable expense, something very like the suit the new Vice President has been wearing for his campaign appearances.

“I’m not sure what you—”

“A few characteristic remarks should do it. The fellows are down there lubricating themselves — we’ll see how long it takes them to smell a rat.”

The imagery stings a bit, but trusting him to improvise implies a certain professional respect. “My entrance?”

“I’ll go down now and herd them into the Grill Room, announcing that we’ll soon have a special surprise guest.” Drew smiles, shaking his head and looking him over anew.

“If I didn’t know it wasn’t you — him—”

“The theater is full of assumed identities.”

“Which wouldn’t fool the biggest hayseed in the rear of the third balcony, much less the characters in the play. But you — my word!”

They go down then and he can hear conversations moving away from the stairwell. He has never been much for nerves before a performance, the public so — so easily fooled, so willing to believe that what passes above the footlights is what is meant to be happening. But this is not his usual house, full of shop clerks and newsboys and free-lunch despoilers, is not even an audience of his peers, these are—

Mr. Oettel is back to tell him that it is time.

He follows down the stairs into the reading room. He has seen such places on the stage but never actually been in one. Leather chairs that could swallow a man, a handsome Persian on the floor, the smell of tobacco, and the great marble mantelpiece flanked by Sargent portraits, one of Booth and one of Joseph Jefferson in character as Peter Pangloss in The Heir-in-Law.

And then he is waved through the Great Hall, Drew’s much larger frame shielding him from the view of the luminaries in the Grill Room.

“Gentlemen!” booms the actor, and the room immediately quiets. “We have with us, in light of recent occurrence, an extremely distinguished and very surprising guest.”

He steps away and Teethadore is on, strutting through the doorway with choppers ablaze, every man not already upright jumping to his feet to applaud. It is a strange business, accepting another man’s kudos, the warmth sincere but unearned. He uses it, though, fills himself with it, puffing his barrel chest out a little further, clasping his hands and shaking them over his head like a victorious prize-fighter — the Little Champion. It is difficult not to linger on their faces as he turns to acknowledge them all. These are, if not gods, at least royalty — a Richard III here, a Prince Hal there, a Cardinal Richelieu looming in the rear. Only one bear of a man — is it not Frederick Remington? — smiles slyly and whispers to the fellow beside him.

“I thank you for that reception,” he enthuses as the applause finally dies. “And I thank you for your support in the recent contest, though I believe I recognize a few Bryan men skulking on the fringe — here, no doubt, to settle their wagers.”

Laughter then, these famous players and men of influence so flattered by his presence that they are blind to the deception.

“The Vice-Presidency,” he continues, “though a great honor, is merely an understudy role—” chuckles here, “—waiting in the wings and hoping never to be pressed into service. I imagine I will serve the President as I did during the campaign — as his rather more mobile, and considerably more vocal—” good laugh here, “—rooting section. And in that capacity I come with a charge for you gentlemen of the stage.”

They are buying it, rapt. If he asked them at this moment to march on Tammany and tear it from its foundation they would follow him en masse.

“Our quest is to be a great — a greater nation. A great nation must have a great, a committed theater!”

“Hear, hear!” says somebody in the gathering. He can see Belasco, the master of froth, begin to frown.

“Must our stage be only the purview of fools, the playground of children? Can it not deal honestly with the pressing issues of our day? Where are the works about labor unrest, about the crushing power of the trusts, the shows that address our desperate situation in the Philippine Islands — shows like the estimable Florodora—”

Stanford White’s booming laugh breaks the spell, and with that, the illusion.

“You’re a fraud!” cries William Faversham, who he so admired in the Wilde farce.

“A fraud?!” he cries back. “Does the public cry fraud when you don your tattered buskins and feign nobility? No, sir, they laud you to the heavens!”

Men are laughing now, though eyeing their compatriots to be certain it is allowable to be so fooled.

“If a near-sighted, less-than-statuesque politician can steam to Cuba and impersonate a military man—” a big, knowing laugh at this, “—why, then, may not an honest vaudevillian impersonate a politician, and to equal acclaim?”

Actual applause then, mixed with the laughter. He has touched a nerve.

“Yes, I am an imposter, a professional imposter, but if such illusion had no fascination with the public, think of how many of you gentlemen would not be here!”

“And if you’d been born looking like Eugene Debs,” calls James K. Hackett, “you wouldn’t be here either!”

That caps it, enormous laughter from all and Teethadore spreading his arms to accept the truth of the observation. Drew is the first to slap his back and pump his hand.

“Excellent work, my friend! Very well played!”

Others crowd around with more of the same. His head is buzzing from the energy of the performance and the idea that the leading man of the great Lyceum Company, whose lips have so often touched those of the divine Maude Adams, has complimented him upon his acting.

John Drew leads him to the bar and orders him a Scotch whisky. There is Faversham of course, of the curly locks and British comportment, and Hackett, another Lyceum standout, at least two of the powerful producing Frohman brothers, along with the playwright Bronson Howard, Maurice Barrymore with his boxer’s physique and flashing eyes, Otis Skinner, E. H. Sothern, like Hackett the son of a legend, young Tyrone Power who captured so many hearts in Becky Sharp a season ago, William Gillette, lean and keen, and, holding himself somewhat above the crowd despite his lack of physical stature, the incomparable Richard Mansfield.

“The Filipinos will surrender within days,” he hears Gillette opine. “Bryan was their last hope.”

“Perhaps.” It is Mayo Hazeltine, the voluminous reviewer from the Sun. “But our real concern should be what has been going on in China—”

It is all he can do not to join in — in character of course. He has taken to reading the more serious journals, to formulating opinions on weighty matters, to feeling as if he is on top of world affairs. He can name at least six of the contested islands.

White and Barrymore flank him at the bar then, and Teethadore finds himself a jockey among fullbacks. Both men appear to be well-oiled.

“So glad you mentioned Florodora,” says the thespian. “Stanny is something of an expert on it.”

The architect laughs. “Not the height of dramaturgy by any means, but it has its assets.”

“And those assets,” grins Barrymore, “have their assets.”

The gossip sheets spill gallons of ink each week chronicling the mating rituals of the six uniformly winsome Florodora Girls, wreaking havoc upon the affections and bank balances of stage-door Johnnies young and old. Each time one snags her millionaire and leaves the show the Winter Garden is overflowing with sports eager to judge the charms of her replacement. Heavyweight champions and Cabinet ministers come and go with less excitement.

White points a finger at Teethadore. “The last time I saw you, you were slated between Harrigan and Hart and Professor Pembert’s dogs.”

“You have quite a memory, sir. That was at the Folly, a good number of years ago.”

“I recall a barrel-jumper being injured—”

“Amazing! One of the Deonzo Brothers, on opening night.”

“Stanny is a first-nighter,” says Barrymore, “an every-nighter, and an all-nighter.”

Teethadore sees Mansfield passing near, and wonders would he prefer to be extolled for his Dick Dudgeon in the Shaw play or for the sensation he made with the first American Cyrano.

“Mansfield!” Barrymore calls out. “What do you think of our Teddy here?”

The man is, in fact, not a hair taller than Teethadore, stopping to appraise him with raised eyebrow.

“ ‘Honest vaudevillian’ is, I believe, an oxymoron. As for Roosevelt — inviting the original to visit has always struck me as questionable, and here we have a facsimile. What will be next, bicycling chimpanzees?”

With that he makes for the exit. Teethadore declines to call out that he has in fact appeared several times with bicycling chimpanzees, an act so popular that not a performer on the bill is willing to follow them.

“He’s rather more Mr. Hyde than Dr. Jekyll, our Dickie,” Barrymore apologizes.

“Arrogant little prick,” concurs the architect. “But a marvel on the boards.”

David Warfield approaches then, Warfield who he knew as a fixture at Weber and Fields’s Music Hall, with whom he has shared many an alleged “dressing room,” moving toward him with David Belasco in tow.

“Briz!” he smiles, employing Teethadore’s erstwhile nickname. “You fooled even me!”

They clasp hands. He resists the urge to ask the comedian how he snuck in the door.

“This is David Belasco.”

“Of course. An honor, sir.”

“Wonderfully done,” enthuses the Bishop of Broadway. “You had us all going.”

“Mr. Belasco is going to make an honest man of me.”

The producer smiles. “A small enough penance, as I shall never make an honest woman of anyone.”

Teethadore allows himself a smile. Belasco’s “casting couch” is notorious.

“There’s a play called The Auctioneer and I’m to be the lead in it,” beams Warfield.

“You’ll be a smash,” beams Teethadore. They make an odd pair, the writer-director-producer, dressed always in clerical black, some sort of a Spanish Jew, and the resolutely Christian comic noted for his portrayal of East Side shylocks, sporting a false nose even larger than Cyrano’s.

“I agree wholeheartedly,” says Belasco. “There is no reason David’s talents cannot shine in the legitimate theater.”

“As they have in the illegitimate.”

Both men laugh, but Teethadore regrets saying it. He is a guest in their club and understands that though distinctions are adhered to, they must not be mentioned.

“If you ever have a role that requires someone of my — of my abilities—” he adds, feeling suddenly very small among the giants of the theater, “I do hope you will think of me.”

“I will keep you in mind,” smiles Belasco, and they drift away. So many company managers, so many directors in New York are presently keeping him in mind it is a wonder he doesn’t burst into flame from the concentrated mental energy. But if it has happened to Warfield, who is a deserving fellow after all, perhaps—

He finds himself unattended for a moment and strolls through the luminaries with drink in hand. It is still difficult to accept that he has penetrated this sanctum. The Grill Room is another long enclosure, with pewter drinking mugs, those not presently employed by the members, hanging from hooks at his eye level all around the rectangle. Old playbills decorate the walls, deer antlers hang on the chandeliers and heads with horns are mounted over the mantels of the delft-tiled fireplaces set at either end of the room. It is against one of these that he is pinned by the illustrators.

He recognizes some by sight — Remington, of course, wider now than any three of his leathery cow-punchers, Gibson of the haughty, long-necked beauties and square-chinned swains, young Howard Christy, Gibson’s rival in defining feminine allure, whose rendering of TR at Siboney and the San Juan Hill were surely a factor in the feisty politician’s present success — and once introduced to the others, knows and admires their work. There is Reginald Birch, whose drawings for Little Lord Fauntleroy condemn small boys to velveteen torture, Howard Pyle, King of the Pirate Illustrators, and the cartoonists A. B. Frost and Fred Opper, all of them studying his face as if it is a first effort in a sculpture class.

“You must be rather pleased with the election results,” ventures Gibson, a gin-soaked pearl onion floating in his glass.

“Yes and no.” It is damned hard to keep still with them all peering at his physiognomy. “Though I would have been chagrined had my lookalike lost by a single vote.”

“You didn’t go for him?”

The irony of it did strike him in the booth, his career, so to speak, at a crossroad. But, son of a fervent Populist, he pulled the bar for the straight Democratic ticket and stepped out through the curtain feeling absolved of sin.

“Some men vote from their pocketbook,” he answers, “others from their heart.”

“A Bryan man,” laughs Gibson. “Astounding.”

“At this distance it’s still disturbing,” frowns Christy, angling his head to look behind Teethadore’s prop spectacles. “I mean I’ve drawn the man from life!”

“A good, solid likeness,” observes Fred Opper with the tiniest hint of a German accent. “But not obvious enough to be funny.”

“They flashed a good deal of your work up on the Journal building last night,” says Teethadore, feeling as if even the stuffed buck on the wall is staring at his face. “The crowd loved Teddy as an eager beaver.”

“The man is a walking caricature,” says Frost. “He’s more fun to draw than a mule kicking an aristocrat.”

“A shame to have him buried in the second spot,” muses Remington, who immortalized TR back in his Montana ranching days. “I imagine they’ll be keeping our boy on a very short leash.”

The illustrators restrain themselves from actually taking his flesh in hand and eventually the crowd in the Grill Room starts to thin. The event began at five, actors’ dinner hour, and no doubt many here have shows to perform or attend. Teethadore will not, he knows, be invited to become a member. Their class, despised by polite society though it may be, is nevertheless several stations above his own. This is but a fleeting glimpse, a visit to a mountaintop he shall never dwell upon. He is planning his exit when he takes note of the lanky older gentleman ensconced in a chair in the far corner.

It is Joseph Jefferson, no other. Jefferson who trod the boards with Junius Brutus Booth, whose adopted daughter was the great Edwin’s first beloved wife, who breathed life into Our American Cousin, associated more now with the Lincoln murder than with its phenomenal success, veteran of hundreds, perhaps thousands of performances of Rip van Winkle, a breathing reliquary of American theater history—

Teethadore gathers his nerve and sits beside the legend.

“Sir—”

“That was very entertaining, young fellow. You kept your head.”

“Why thank you, sir.”

“An interesting character. Rather exhausting to portray him for any length of time, I should imagine.”

“He keeps me on my toes.”

“If you weren’t on your toes,” says the old man, “the patrons in the rear would not be able to see you.”

Teethadore smiles his own, less dentally revealing smile. Jefferson’s admo-nition that “there are no small roles, only small actors” has been applied often to him, appended with further comments regarding his lack of altitude.

“My father took me to see you play the Dutchman when I was ten years old,” he says, attempting not to gush forth. “I thought that they’d hired a young actor and his grandfather to handle the transition.”

“You were a very suspicious young man.”

“Raised in a steamer trunk. My father toured with Mrs. Stowe’s melodrama.”

“Such a modest little lady,” muses Jefferson, “to cause such a big war.”

“I saw you do it again in my twenties. I was transfixed.”

“At the beginning they marveled at my ability to play the ancient Rip,” says Jefferson. “Now they are amazed that I can portray the young one.”

“Does it ever trouble you? Being so — so identified with one role?”

The old man looks at Teethadore, thinks for a moment. He points across the room to William Gillette.

“He may not know it yet, but that fellow will grow old playing his Sherlock Holmes. And the man he is speaking with—”

It is James O’Neill, waving his arms to tell a story—

“You mean the Count of Monte Cristo?”

“My point precisely. Mansfield has managed to transcend his Jekyll and Hyde, poor Edwin was a man of many faces, but for most of us, if we are fortunate, there is one defining role, a character the public cannot get enough of, who not only pays the rent but becomes something of an extension to our own less vibrant personalities. Mine, fortunately,” the old man winks, “affords me the opportunity to do some napping on stage.”

“But Rip van Winkle is fictional,” says Teethadore, hoping to get at the root of his misgiving. “He is finite, trapped within the strictures of the play. My fellow is still breathing, and, I must say, extremely unpredictable.”

The aged player’s face lights up. He places a hand on Teethadore’s shoulder.

“Then Fortune has provided you a spirited mount. Ride him, my good friend! Ride him to glory!”

GARRISON

It must be noon by now but they’ve taken all the clappers out of the church bells. The bells in the little baryos ring out every time a patrol is sighted nearby and the ones fighting have time to hide themselves, so the colonel always says “Cut their tongues out!” even here in Las Ciegas when they came back to garrison. Most of the day the googoo mamas are out hulling rice, pounding down with their clubs on the couple handfuls they’ve tossed into the hollow on top of the belly-high wood stumps that stand in front of each hut, hooking into a rhythm that Kid Mabley will sometimes try to play his horn to. But it must be noon now because even they are out of sight, unhusked rice waiting, spread out to dry on wide bedrolls of woven bamboo and the dogs lying flat on the dirt of the plaza, still as death, baked by the sun. There is only the woman, Nilda, hanging the soldiers’ wet clothing on a bamboo rack to dry and Coop at her elbow with a can of goldfish and a fistful of hardtack, pestering.

Nothing else moves.

“This here is good to eat, see?” he says. “Yum-yum. All you got to do is pop inside for a little bit, give Uncle Coop some jiggy-jiggy.”

It is none of Royal’s business, really, that is the unspoken agreement between all of them, but the sun is boiling the blood in the angry part of his brain and it vexes him. He slowly crosses the plaza, weaving around the prostrated dogs.

“This is hardtack — like crackers, see?” Coop has a tough time breaking off a piece. “See? Won’t go soft, even in the jungle. Like me.”

The woman, moving as if she can’t hear, lifts clothes from the huge woven-reed basket, shakes them out, and goes up on her toes to hang them so the ends don’t drag in the dirt.

“And inside this here is goldfish—”

“That stuff is poison,” says Royal, stepping over as casual-looking as he can manage. “Even the coolies won’t eat it.” There is a Chinese who sneaks up once a week to sell the men beeno, and canned salmon is the one thing he won’t take in trade.

“She get a taste of me, she won’t worry about no food.”

“She’s not interested in you.”

“Get your own damn squaw, Roy.” Coop, a bit taller, harder, turns back to the woman and wiggles the can inches from her face as if she needs to smell it. “You aint never had nothin like this, darlin.”

“If she needs food just give it to her.”

Coop turns to step back close to Royal. They are both in their undershirts, pouring sweat from the heat. When the clothes are washed and dried they feel good on your skin for a few minutes and then you are soaked through again.

“You triflin with me?”

“There’s plenty of jiggy-jiggy girls in Manila.”

“We aint in fuckin Manila.”

“Then you’re gonna have to try someone else.”

Coop smiles. “You know I can whup your ass.”

“Most likely.”

Coop half turns as if to say something to the woman, who still hasn’t looked at him, then pivots to smash Royal on the side of the head with the can, knocking him off his feet.

The woman freezes, bent over the clothes basket.

The nearest of the dogs gets up with some effort, watching the men warily as it slinks several feet farther away, then pancakes itself to the ground again. A few of the men peek groggily out of the huts they are billeted in. A few natives look out too, but see it might be a fight and duck back inside.

Royal gets halfway up, decides, and bullrushes Coop, catching him around the hips and driving him into the bamboo clothestree which collapses into the dust with them.

He has a chunk of Coop’s cheek in his fingers, trying to rip it off while Coop thumps him on the back and neck and ribs with the fist that isn’t pinned down. He wants some distance so he can really hit but Royal is strong and won’t let loose, their boots scraping the dirt for purchase, the two writhing crookedly across the plaza like a half-stomped cinch bug that just won’t die and the men come out now, the ones not on outpost or patrol, most just in their underclothes and barefoot forming a shifting ring around the pummeling men on the ground.

“What they scufflin about?”

“Don’t matter much, do it?”

“Got that woman’s wash all dirtied up again.”

“Too damn hot to fight.”

“Yeah — ought to just shoot each other and be done with it.”

Royal is underneath, his forearm wedged under Coop’s throat, trying to feel out a way to break his neck but if he moves anything Coop will be able to pound him again in the ribs where they feel broken. The thumb in his eye might be his own. There is a little bit of shade from the men closed in around them and then it is gone and a bucketful of warm water smacks down on them and it is Lieutenant Drum’s voice.

“You men get on your feet.”

The lieutenant has dressed himself in a hurry, the buttons on his tunic out of line with their holes. The bridge of his nose has been blistered by the sun. He seems more weary than furious.

“Since you obviously don’t appreciate your rest time,” says the white man, “we’ll have to find a way to make use of it.”

Royal can’t tell if he’s bleeding or not. The water cooking away on his skin and hair feels good, and he is glad that Sergeant Jacks is out on patrol. It has been all marching and guard duty and aimless patrols — Las Ciegas to Bamban, Bamban to Iba, Iba down to Subig to San Pedro and Botolan and Angeles and Castillejos and the place they never learned the name of and now stuck back here in Las Ciegas, their lives dragged out between bugle calls, sunup and sundown the same every day. Junior says it’s because they’re on the Equator. Royal stands at attention, eyes forward, as the lieutenant announces their punishment. Behind, the woman stoops to lift wet, dirt-dragged uniforms from the ground.

It is the outpost they hate the most, no shade, no cover, just perched on an outcropping of limestone rocks with a long view in three directions. Hardaway and Gamble and Corporal Pickney are out of sight but within shouting distance. There is a finger-sized lizard in a shaded crevice of rock a few yards from him, and except for the little orange bubble working in and out on the side of its neck it hasn’t twitched for hours. How many hours Royal doesn’t know because he doesn’t have a watch and they’ve taken all the clappers out of the bells, even in Las Ciegas, and today there will be no relief, not after two, not after four, just Sergeant Jacks coming by to be sure he is still awake and remind him whose ass he has also put in the sling and Coop is out on the other side of the village doing the same thing. The side of his head is swollen, pounding, and his ribs hurt with every breath. He saw the can of salmon lying on the ground as he left, a huge dent in it.

The lizard doesn’t move.

The lizard understands how to be in this country. Royal’s stomach isn’t right and he can’t sleep, troops of monkeys screaming all night in the forest just west of town and something, rats or maybe a snake, rustling around in the thatch of the hut. Royal tries to touch only the wooden parts of his rifle as he shifts it from shoulder to shoulder. If Jacks or any of the other officers catch him sitting or just not at attention like a damn tin soldier it will be more punishment under the sun.

She comes from behind over the rocks, so silent that if she was a rebel his throat would be cut. She offers him water in a stoppered length of bamboo and something folded in a banana leaf. When he pulls the leaf open there is a yellow-orange rice ball with bits of chicken and onion and peppers in it. It smells of cocoanut and is still warm from the pot. She sits on a rock near the lizard, which does not move, and watches him eat.

Royal points at her. “Nilda.”

She nods. She is short, sturdier than Jessie, her face maybe a little flat but with that good long hair and her eyes—

“Bringhe,” she says, pointing to the rice ball, then to herself. “Nilda.”

CORRESPONDENCE

They have a new hero. And, the Humorist supposes, he is fitting for the age. Not a Washington, stoic, patriarchal, erect upon a towering steed on a hilltop surveying the conflict; not a Lincoln, haunted by carnage, magnanimous, no, positively bereft in victory, understanding that too harsh a palliative may vanquish not only the disease but also its host; not even a Grant, steadfast, straightforward, implacable — it is a Funston.

A banty rooster that crows at the opening of a news scavenger’s notebook, a bully boy on the field of battle whose idea of sport is to take no prisoners, a Kansan Custer who leaves caution (and humility and compassion and, that antiquated notion, honor) to the wind, and whose biography, when inevitably published, can bear no title more apt that Pluck and Luck.

The subterfuge is nothing new. Homer is chock full of it, the wily Odysseus time after time proving to be more a confidence man than a warrior. Intercept the messenger, yes, decipher the code, forge documents — such intrigues are all accepted in the Great Game. Aguinaldo, in his jungle retreat, believes he is to be reinforced, General Lacuna writing to confirm he has sent a company of his men, along with five yankee prisoners. A bold plan, and admirable in that aspect, with an element of risk. Funston himself, with his chosen officers, dressed in rags of uniforms, marched through the hostile wilderness by loyal Macabebes disguised as Filipino insurrectionists. Ninety miles of pain and privation, through enemy territory, lost at times, hunger and thirst a constant, fearing discovery, or, perhaps worse, mutiny. Finally, exhausted and starving, unable to go farther.

“Only eight miles from the enemy stronghold,” he boasts, “and too weak to move.”

This is where the story diverges from the parable of the Trojan Horse.

Emissaries, Macabebe scouts able to pass as Tagalos, are sent ahead to beg for food. Sustenance is delivered to their camp, the ruse maintained. Nourished, their fighting spirit restored, the party marches triumphantly into Aguinaldo’s bailiwick, his much smaller compliment of soldiers turning out in parade dress to welcome them, and then—

The Humorist imagines himself a man at the prow of a lifeboat, peering over a restless sea. Perhaps it is in time of War. He spies a figure tossed on the waves, desperately swimming, survivor of some maritime calamity, each stroke more feeble than the last and about to go under. He bids the oarsman put his back to it, the lifeboat plowing through murderous swells, till he can lean forward and stretch his arm out to that solitary victim, reaching, reaching, and finally the exhausted wretch able to clasp his wrist with one hand — and plunge a dagger into his heart with the other.

Funston is the man with the dagger.

He is the toast of the Nation.

“Villia, shot in the shoulder,” Funston says of Aguinaldo’s chief of staff, “leapt out the window and into the river, but the Macabebes fished him out, and kicked him all the way up the bank, and asked him how he liked it.”

Not only intrepid and fearless, but a wag of the first order. This proud jokester is the new model, his name and deeds on every tongue, the paragon of Patriotism, the unbashful subject of glowing editorials and stentorian orations, the centerpiece of an overnight industry of hagiography and boy-admiration. Here is a man, say the politicians, say the churchmen and the public-school teachers, to be proud of. A man to emulate. He has captured Aguinaldo and thus ended the war (the war that was declared over a full year ago, that somehow continues to claim, despite the surrender of its putative instigator, hundreds of new victims each week).

The Humorist once proposed, as a jest, a statue of Adam, the First Man, only to have one civic booster take the idea literally and mount a campaign to construct the thing. Perhaps, with his wide celebrity, he can now arouse interest in a suitable monument to Funston — the doughty colonel on his knees, in tatters, raising a trembling hand in supplication to the diminutive but haughty Tagalo generalissimo—while craftily concealing the blade, gilt-edged for glory, behind his back.

Enough to stir the pride of the dullest American schoolboy.

But no, this might be misunderstood. He has discarded the grin of the funny man, chided the Times after his first mildly satiric writings on the Philippine disgrace, for the sour visage of the austere moralist. For what place do morals have in the National Business? His merest whisper, not of reproach, but of frank disillusionment with the feisty Funston’s exploit, has brought the Humorist a veritable flood-tide of correspondence from all corners of the Republic, impressive in its profusion, inspiring in the forthrightness of its sentiment, no finer example than the missive that now lies unsheathed on his desk.

Dear Traitor, it begins—

QUANDARY

There is no telling which one they’ll run until the Chief comes in. The Cartoonist pins them to the wall side-by-side. He prefers the first as a drawing, a contrite Aggy in short pants writing I Promise To Stop Fighting on the blackboard as his new teacher, Miss Liberty, confiscated slingshot in hand, looks on benignly. The other sepia-tinted ragamuffins — Hawaii, Guam, Porto Rico — sit obediently in their labeled chairs, hands folded on desktops, a tiny American flag propped in each inkwell. The focus of the drawing, however, is the lad’s mother, a jowly Hoar in a calico dress and straw bonnet, sympathetic tears pouring down his cheeks. The Cartoonist has lettered ANTI–IMPERIALIST LEAGUE on the hem of the frock, unsure if enough readers will recognize the Senator. He’s tried Carnegie, but the Scotsman never looks right unless seated on a pile of money bags or the stooped back of a beleaguered ironworker. By now he can draw Bryan with his eyes closed, but the Chief has kept a candle lit for the old warhorse despite his lackluster account in November, and Twain remains beyond the pale.

HIS FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL

—says the caption, condescending but not vindictive, a nod to the elation felt by most citizens at the daring capture of the little supremo.

The other sketch keeps the heat on McKinley and the jingoes. A runty, demented TR in his outsized Rough Rider togs and an equally diminutive Colonel Funston (whose mug has been plastered all over the dailies in the last week) shoulder a pole from which they’ve slung scrawny, bedraggled Aguinaldo like a slaughtered hind.

WE’VE BROUGHT YOU AN APPETIZER

—proclaim the boys as they rush toward the President and Mark Hannah, bibs tucked into their collars, knife and fork poised in hand, greedily surveying the map of the world laid out on their table. A sobering thought that transcends the moment’s euphoria, muses the Cartoonist, but not one likely to satisfy the man on the street.

The Chief, when he stampedes in from whatever theatrical event or soirée he has escorted his young ladies to this evening, will not ask the Cartoonist’s opinion. He will frown at the drawings, the frown turning to a scowl when he spies the hated Roosevelt, eventually grunt, and, hopefully, jab his finger into the center of one of them. “Print it,” he will say, a newsman’s newsman, charging uphill as heedlessly as the toothy Vice President during his “crowded hour” on San Juan Hill.

Or maybe he’ll ask the Cartoonist if plucky Funston couldn’t appear to be just a few inches taller than TR.

There are ten of them, with Junior, a buck sergeant now, in charge. The days have been getting cooler since the end of the year but they have been off the road for most of the patrol, up and over the rice-field dikes, working their way through prickerbush and scrub, chasing another rumor of a rebel build-up. The two collections of huts they’ve walked through, not big enough to be on the lieutenant’s map, were deserted, but that might only be for one of the endless religious marches, people here with more saints to celebrate than days to do it on, or else they’ve heard the rumor too and don’t want to be around for reprisals from the losers. Royal sees one man the whole morning, standing thigh-deep in the muck of a flooded rice field whipping a switch on the butt of a sweat-lathered carabao, itself mired to the chest, trying to get it to drag a wooden harrow through the mess and neither of them going anywhere. He feels more like the water buff than the man, hard to say if it is really trying to pull itself forward or just satisfied to sink deeper and ignore what’s happening to its hind end.

The men march on, walking in a loose rectangle through a banana plantation, Royal and Willie Mills in the van, carrying their rifles port-arms. The trees are strange, nearly twice as tall as Royal, with each trunk supporting a single massive bunch of fat green fingers, like a man in a bulky overcoat hung by his heels. And the rows of banana fingers all pointing up to the sky — it seems wrong, like a lot of the things that grow here, like something a little boy might draw. Royal keeps an eye out for the spiders he has seen crawling on the bunches. He doesn’t like spiders.

They walk, talk for a while, then lapse into silence. There are men among them who would make better sergeants, older men who deserve it, but Junior is the lightest of them and educated and Royal figures that is what the officers were thinking when they had to move somebody up. Junior has been tight since he got the stripe, knowing there is some resentment, and trying to be firm but not lean on his rank too heavy. It is usually Hardaway who starts the talking.

“You member Fagen?”

“Big ole Tampa boy with the 24th.”

“That’s the one. Word is he run out.”

“Run out to where?”

“Loaded up every sidearm he could carry and walked into the boondocks.”

“Where the googoos kilt him.”

“Naw, man — made him a captain.”

“Captain of the googoos is like King of the Niggers.”

“General is king in the Army.”

“Then captain is what? Duke? His Royalty, Duke Fagen.”

“Story is he been leadin ambushes, and they caught some of them volunteers from Ohio, left em alone with Fagen—”

Too Tall aims a pretend pistol downward.

“Told em to kneel and say their prayers, then pop! pop! pop! pop!”

They are quiet for a while, passing from the bananas into a stubbly cane field, considering Fagen.

“Ohio Vols,” says Coop.

“Yeah. White boys.”

“Well — as long as he don’t teach the googoos to aim.”

They laugh then, even Royal who can go a week without cracking a smile. Junior is heard at the rear.

“Treason is treason. When he’s captured they’ll hang him.”

“Not gonna capture that ole boy. He stepped out that far, he cut his own throat before they take him.”

They ponder this, the dead-end nerve of it. Royal can hear the river ahead, see the tops of the trees that line both banks. The patrol is meant to reach the river, work north along it for a few miles, then loop back to the garrison before dark.

“If all he wanted to do was kill crackers,” says Gamble, “he could have stayed in Tampa.”

The river is not so wide here, but swift-moving from the months of rain. They keep it on their right and march till they come to a sandy beach piled with driftwood in the crook of an elbow bend. There is none of the usual comment when Junior orders them to fall out.

The men have taken to carrying fruit or boiled eggs they’ve bargained for in Las Ciegas as well as their rations, and Sims gets a little driftwood fire going to cook coffee.

“How they do it,” says Coop, “is they just keeps movin. Them little shitholes we run through this morning? Full up with googoos five minutes after we leave, havin them a party.”

“They aint gonna win no war that way.”

“Long as they not where we are, they doin fine. Most alla them U.S. volunteers gone home by now, right? And how many ignant niggers like us you think they can fool into coming here?”

“Speak for yourself,” says Junior.

“I’m doin that. I been vaccinated twice already, bit by every kind of bug that crawls or flies, had googoos shoot at my head and knock a cocoanut off a tree and the sun done cook me to a whole new shade of dark, and yet I aint put nary a one of these little monkeys in the ground. They just playin with us, is all, cause they don’t want to fight no more.”

“They’ve switched to guerilla tactics,” says Junior. “Like the Boers in South Africa.”

“They’ve switched to hidin out and laughin at us poor donkeys runnin around in the heat,” says Coop. “Aint no tactics to it.”

Royal eats to get it over with, staring dully out at the river and the long wall of jagged mountains beyond it. Junior has been drilling him about the importance of a positive state of mind, and every new day he tries to will himself into one, but it never lasts much past Kid Mabley blowing Assembly. Mingo Sanders from B Company and some of the others from the Indian wars say get used to it, this is what regular soldiering is, living out your routines, working your details, keeping yourself razor-sharp so that when the redskins do attack you’re more than a match for them, ambushed or not. The fights, if they come, are flash floods in a life of drought.

“Two of you will post up and down the river,” says Junior suddenly, standing up from the sand, “while the rest of us bathe.”

“I’m staying out of there,” says Hardaway. “Might be snakes.”

“Man got snakes on the brain.”

“All right, Hardaway and Gamble set up as pickets—”

“Why me?”

Junior gives Gamble a long look.

“Because those are your orders. When someone comes out they can relieve you and you can come in.”

Coop is up and unhitching his ammunition belt. “I’m getting in that water before you niggers start takin them boots off.”

“River look cold.”

“Cold sound fine to me.”

Every other day the woman, Nilda, walks a mile from Las Ciegas with their clothes and scours them with pumice rock and lye soap in what is more a puddle than a spring, white cattle egrets stepping into the wet grass to search for snails and crayfish as she works. Royal sat to watch her there once, and helped her carry the water-heavy clothes basket back until just before the first outpost. She washes their clothes, but the men themselves stay dirty, dust and dried sweat staying on their skin for weeks. You don’t miss a chance to wash yourself.

The water is cold but the current isn’t much on this side of the bend, weak enough so you can even swim out a few strokes without worrying. The men shout and splash and duck each other under, most of them fully naked. Junior has his yellow soap and works his way upstream for a little privacy, his desperation to be clean an open joke within the company.

“Junior think if he scrub it hard enough,” Too Tall will say, “it might just come off.”

“He right too. That boy was born black as me, an lookit him now.”

The bottom is silted and easy to walk on. Royal steps out up to his armpits and can feel it change there, the backwater eddy giving way to the full current. He reaches over the surface and dips his fingers into the water as it rushes by. It will just take you.

He stands there, at the edge, for a long time and then turns back to see who’s got the soap.

There is still coffee hot when he comes out, skin tingling, and he drinks some from his cup and takes his time dressing, being sure to brush all the sand from between his toes before he pulls his socks on, to stretch the wrinkles out of his pants before he puts them on. The others dress beside him, calling out insults as Hardaway comes back and decides to go in alone.

“See why the man afraid of snakes. Think one is gonna catch a look at what he got hangin there and fall in love.”

“Don’t let them big ole catfish in there catch holt of it, now!”

Hardaway pays them no mind, bending to duck his head under the water and blowing loud bubbles.

“Where I come up,” says Willie Mills, “the catfish gets long as a tall man’s leg, and they hole up in the roots under the river bank. We used to go down there, reach in—”

He mimes the action, closing his eyes and probing with an arm—

“—and when you feel one you just stick your hand down his gullet, halfway up the elbow, and yank him out of there.”

“Big cat like that will bite on you.”

“Oh, you see some blood, but them big ones fry up nice, feed the whole family.”

“Dans le bayou,” says Achille, “we hunt the snapper turtle with our bare foot. Walk in the mud of the bank till you feel a shell, then reach in and pull him up.”

“Good way to lose some fingers.”

“On the snapper shell he has a ridge,” he explains. “You feel those ridge with your toe, you know which end is beak and which end is tail.”

“Feel em with what toes you got left.”

You had to go a ways up the river from Wilmington before the turpentine and creosote smell was gone, and Royal and Jubal would fish for bass using crickets they had caught, Jubal making up wild stories about what the Cape Fears and the Waccamaws were up to when they owned the river. Jubal never told the same story twice.

Hardaway screams and they turn to make jokes about snakes in the water but he is naked, scrambling out of the water and behind him there is another thing, light-skinned, floating slowly face-down in a rosy cloud.

It is a lazy kind of floating, peaceful, and it takes a moment to know what has happened.

The others are up with their rifles then and shouting, staying low as they spread and move up the bank, none of them fully dressed. Royal watches it float, turning a half-circle as it drifts away, then hurries out in all his clothes to grab an ankle before the current can take it. He turns and hauls it back through the running water, drags it onto the sand without looking. It is Junior, he knows. Junior is the only one of them that light. Royal is wet and shaking with the cold, still squatting by the body without looking at it when the others come back around, having found nothing upriver but the chunk of yellow soap placed carefully on a rock.

“Must have only been a few of them or we’d all be cooked.”

“Aw, damn, lookit what they done—”

“We got to carry him back. Here, spread his clothes out—”

“Got to wrap him careful or his arm’s gonna come off.”

“They be waiting out there to ambush.”

“We don’t go back the same way we come, stay in the open. Hell, let em show their damn faces—”

“That bolo cut right through a man, don’t it?”

There is a buzzing in Royal’s ears now, and the river louder than it should be, and the fact of Junior that can’t be real, can’t be real. Ponder, the corporal and in charge now, kneels beside Royal, hand on his shoulder.

“This aint no different than Cuba, Roy. Pick up your dead and keep moving.”

Royal nods.

“So you best get them boots on.”

They cover Junior as well as they can with his own clothes and work up a kind of stretcher from driftwood poles and men’s shirts tied to it that Gamble and Willie Mills carry, Junior’s hat, boots, and canteen sitting on top of the body. Royal insists on carrying the butchered man’s Krag and ammo belt as well as his own, able to bear the weight but only dimly aware of the ground they cover as he follows after Pickney and Coop in the lead.

Junior is why he is here, and now he is gone.

Royal sees himself, sees them all, from very high and very far, a tiny procession of nine dark men carrying a dead soldier across the sun-beaten flatlands of somebody else’s country.

Junior is why he is here. Junior is why he is anywhere besides breathing cotton chaff at Sprunt’s in Wilmington, Junior the doctor’s son who watched him in the stable and in the yard and one day invited him inside when Mrs. Lunceford was not home, who said he was smart and ought to stay in school some more and become one of the Talented Tenth. And here he is instead in the Colored 25th, somewhere between Bacolor and Las Ciegas without an idea why.

“They don’t know it, but it’s a war,” Junior used to say, even back when they were still throwing pinecones at trees pretending to be base-ball pitchers. “Only not a war where one side beats the other, but where one side figures out we should be right there marching next to them, that that’s where we should have always been.”

“I steer clear of white folks,” Royal would always remind him, “and hope they does likewise for me.”

“You mean you hide.”

“I’m right here.”

“You hide your talent.”

“I got no talent. Less it’s throwing a in-shoot. Watch this—”

Pinecones will do all kind of tricks and so will a baseball if you hold it right and throw it fast enough. Junior couldn’t throw much but was light-footed and could bunt the ball just where he wanted and beat it to first.

“It’s not an opportunity to do something for the race,” he would say, dead serious, “it is our duty.”

Junior got most of this from Dr. Lunceford probably, who was in tight with all the big colored men in town, who got a new-model carriage every couple years and spoke even better than a white man, even if it was only to Uncle Wicklow. Junior was going to be a man just like him, though not a doctor, and his sister Jessie was the most beautiful girl in Wilmington.

The extra belt of ammunition is digging into the side of his neck. They pass through a cornfield, the stalks up to his top button, Gamble and Mills hoisting the stretcher poles on their shoulders to get it over.

Junior was here to impress the white folks. I am here, Royal thinks, to impress Junior’s sister. Or that’s how it started. But Captain Parker, when they bring the body in, will not be impressed. And Jessie Lunceford is lost to him forever.

They hear the conversation of rifle fire, Krags and Mausers trading compliments, about three miles out. The sun is low in the sky, off to their right. Ponder holds the squad up. Royal tries not to look at the pile on the stretcher. He can hear the flies that have been worrying it all afternoon, following them.

“We gone have to leave Junior back,” says Ponder. “No tellin what we got on our hands up there.”

“There’s at least twenty with rifles,” says Coop, listening. “Mausers and Springfields. That usually mean two, three times more with bolos.”

“I’ll keep with him,” offers Royal.

“Can’t spare you, Roy. He be all right.”

They leave the body in a dry gulch parallel to the east-west road, covered with cornstalks, and Coop ties the laces of Junior’s boots together and tosses to snag them, first try, on a cleat high up on a telegraph pole so they have a marker. Not far down the road they find the wire cut, at the same spot they always do it, almost a courtesy by now. The men double-time in two rows, three paces apart. They don’t carry bayonets on patrol. When they can see black powder smoke on the horizon Ponder waves them off the road.

“Swing on around behind,” he says, “and come at em with the sun behind our backs like they done to the boys.”

There is nobody at the western outpost, dead or alive. They hide their canteens and the extra rifle in the rocks and share out Junior’s ammunition, pressing the rounds nose-down into their hatbands, then take the slings off their weapons, spreading out into a firing line. Royal realizes it is Junior’s Krag he has kept, no nick on the forestock.

“You know what to do,” says Ponder and they set off at a trot. When they get to the rice they take the irrigation ditches two at a stride, the Filipinos in sight now, little men, crouching behind the dike at the end of the field, firing into the village. The regulars run twice as close as Royal thinks they should before one of the bolomen sees and points and shouts and then they all flop on their bellies and begin to fire. The rebels can’t see how many they are because of the setting sun in their eyes and panic, the ones not hit in the first volley running along the dike but too high, exposed to the soldiers dug in in the village, and falling, falling, wet mud sounds and water splattering up into Royal’s face from the ditch in front of him, probably fire from the boys in Las Ciegas and then the rebels scatter in every direction like a startled flock of birds and Ponder yells to run them down.

Royal is up running after, the others whooping beside him and the first one he shoots is wounded already, kneeling, the round passing through his throat and spatting against the wet bank beyond and Royal running past, working the bolt as he goes, dropping one and then two from behind and seeing a third go down, just falling in the uneven paddy with his bolo flying away and Royal is over him before he can rise. The man, not young, clutches a cross hanging from a cord on his neck and says words, sides heaving from the run, and Royal waits till they meet eyes to thrust the barrel inches away and put one through his chest. He sits then on the wet ground then and listens to the man’s last wet gasping as the others splash past and the rest of the garrison steps out from the huts on the other side of the irrigation dike, cheering.

PAN AMERICAN

The Assassin begins at the Filipino Village. The tops of thatched huts are visible as he skirts along the fence, smoke rising from a breakfast cookfire inside. Roast-pork smell. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday noon. He turns right between the cyclorama dramatizing the Battle of Missionary Ridge, a limping old man in yankee blue shouting the names of dead generals to drum up interest, and the Cineograph exhibit, slowing to mingle with the crowd that flows in and out of the Pabst Pavillion. Nobody is watching him.

Nobody knows.

Across the Midway is an enormous, beautiful woman’s face, chin slightly lifted, her eyes closed in sweet reverie while people stroll through the wide entrance portal at the base of her neck. DREAMLAND say the letters on the rim of the corona set in her luscious, wind-blown hair. Only moments after the gates open there are thousands of spectators at the Exposition, sleep-walking, hazily grazing past amusement and advertisement to ponder which exotic world they will surrender the quarters clutched in their fists to.

Only I am awake, thinks the Assassin, and turns away to walk toward the thick brown Bavarian turrets of Alt Nurnberg.

A German brass band thumps away inside the courtyard, tuba grunting rhythmically, and a man outside in lederhosen and a feathered hat does a hopping, knee-slapping dance. The Assassin turns left at the biergarten, passing the Johnstown Flood exhibit and then the tall wood-pole fence that protects the festgoers from Darkest Africa. He hooks south along the Canal, turning his head away when a motor-gondola passes bearing two men, one cranking the lever of some kind of large camera. He turns again at the Mall, plunging into the crowd between the Electricity building and the Machinery and Transportation complex. If the monster is Capital, as the books and pamphlets have it, then this is its lair. He holds the site map, carefully marked and folded, under his arm. Mines, Railroads, Manufacturing, Agriculture and Government, Standard Oil, Quaker Oats, Aunt Jemima, Horlicks Malted Milk, and Baker’s Chocolate, all glorified in plaster and stone. There is no escaping the message-barkers and street bands hammering the air from every side, young girls in strange costumes passing out samples, concession signs boasting that their prices beat any at the Pan. The Assassin squirms through the press of bodies and emerges to face the sparkling blue-green of the Grand Basin, pausing to stare up for a moment at the massive Electric Tower that dominates the fairgrounds. It is an ivory tower with gold trimming and lustrous blue-green panels, a steadfast white sentinel over the riotous reds, yellows, and oranges of the South American buildings, with the gilded Goddess of Light herself sparkling four hundred feet above them.

I will bring this down.

The Assassin turns and walks past the Cascades, each towering plume of water a different color of the rainbow, then takes a seat on the wall of the Fountain of Abundance to wait.

The Kodak fiends are hiding them in their wicker baskets. Or shoeboxes, if less prepared. Word has gone out about the extra charge at the gate, a squad of sharp-eyed boys collecting fifty cents per camera, but with so many visitors blithely carrying their own food onto the grounds for bench picnics it only makes sense to smuggle your Brownie or Bull’s-Eye past them. Harry sees the devices everywhere, pulled out to snap the family grouping in front of one of the Exposition juggernauts or immortalize a comrade with his arm around some Midway exotic or a sweetheart precariously astride a dromedary’s back, then quickly nestled back into their hiding places. There is no hiding Mr. Edison’s apparatus of course, and immediately upon hauling it from the gondola Daddy Paley is surrounded by shutter bugs and small boys wanting to examine it. Ensconced in Luchow’s Nurnberg restaurant with the machine at his feet, a platter of steaming wursts and a nickel draught before him, he gives Harry leave to explore until the President comes at noon.

“Find us some good views,” he says, flicking excess foam off the beer with a finger. “But I don’t want to lug this thing up any stairs.”

The mirror maze at Dreamland is no good, of course, not enough light and the problem of seeing the camera itself in reflection. Sig Lubin’s Cineograph parlor is next door, peddling their copycat views and counterpart boxing dodges, a bold venture considering Lubin himself has fled Philadelphia for foreign climes, avoiding indictment for patent infringement. Or perhaps he is only hiding out in the Gypsy Camp or the Streets of Mexico or sweltering with the sled dogs in the Esquimaux Village. Their own Mutoscope parlor is doing lackluster business so far, what with a live Fatima undulating her torso only one door over in the Cairo Bazaar.

Even here, in the mildly salacious Midway, there are twice as many women as men. Young and old, rich and relatively modest of means, in pairs and groups, a few dowagers squired about on wicker-seated roller chairs, women with picture hats and rented parasols strolling, observing, judging. “The American Girl,” as the periodicals like to label her, is here in abundance, and Harry can’t help but think of the fun it would be for Brigid and her sisters to do the Pan. He casts a professional eye up at the Aero-Cycle, a kind of giant teeter-totter with a revolving wheel full of screaming enthusiasts at either end. Perhaps a view from a distance, then the dizzied, excited passengers dismounting — but to film on the ride itself seems pointless, too many axes of motion for a viewer to keep a handle on. Those roller chairs, though — remove the old biddy and replace her with a camera operator, the device rigged just above his lap somehow, with a trained man to push him, and they could approximate a long moving shot on land similar to what they just filmed on the Canal—

Something to consider. Harry hurries under the wildly swinging armature and pays fifty cents for a Trip to the Moon.

Several dozen spectators gather in the darkened Theater of the Planets, their guide, a basso-voiced gentleman with riding goggles perched on his forehead, lit dramatically from below while the screen behind him glows with the whorls of the Milky Way.

“We are about to embark on a journey,” he intones, “to a landscape on which no human foot has ever trod.”

At least not since the last twenty-minute tour, thinks Harry, as they are led into the Airship Luna by the crew members. It is a beautifully designed fantasy, with multiple wings and propellers and large open portholes to see out from.

“Please steady yourselves, ladies and gentlemen,” suggests the guide, wearing a fancifully adorned football helmet and with his goggles pulled down over his eyes now. “We have some inclement weather reported over the Buffalo area this evening.”

It is not evening outside, of course, but as the wings begin to flap madly and the body of the Airship tilts and shakes, rear propeller buzzing as it picks up speed, what they see below them outside the wind-blasted portholes is the Pan-American Exposition at night, lit up in all its electric glory, surrounded by the city of Buffalo and yes, that must be it—

“Those are the Niagara Falls down to your left, ladies and gentlemen,” announces their guide from his pilot’s seat. “One of the Great Wonders of our own dear Earth, to which we bid a fond adieu—” and here a sudden swift upwrenching that causes the ladies to gasp and grab out for their men, Harry with a sudden pang, missing her here, his Brigid, not so much on this Midway as anywhere on the grounds, pointing things out to her, listening to her beautiful laugh, sitting quietly, perhaps, in the Botanical Gardens, floating in a gondola with his hand in hers—

“We’re going to fall!” cries the matron sitting beside him, hugging her bag tightly to her chest. “We’re going to fall and smash to the ground!”

“Mind yourselves, fellow adventurers, we’re passing through a storm!”

And a storm it is, the wind moaning past, a cloud bank enveloping the Luna, lightning flashes and the boom of present thunder, even a few drops of precipitation whipping in through the portholes and then—

The passengers sigh as one. Through the front panel, beyond the guide at his controls, the full moon sits like a giant pearl in the suddenly clear night sky, sparkling stars beyond it.

“There she is, dead ahead,” calls out the guide. “Our destination, ladies and gentlemen. The Queen of the Heavens.”

It grows larger and larger as they approach, a wonderful illusion, thinks Harry, looking around at the delighted, awe-stricken faces of his fellow passengers. Méliès knew it from the beginning — the viewer will soon tire of what he can already see, with all its color and immediacy, in the world. Even our actualities with the original fighters instead of Lubin’s counterparts, our rushing trains and fire wagons, our scenes of exotic or everyday wonder, are illusions, are a series of still photographs, devoid of color, flashed rapidly on a screen to fool the human eye. But treat that eye to something that could never exist—

The light in front of them grows blindingly white as the moon’s surface fills the panel.

“Shield your eyes, earth beings, for the intensity of the Lunar Rays may damage them!”

The Airship makes a sudden sweeping turn and there is a thump and scrape as they toboggan along the rough terrain, the faintly lit, cratered surface rushing past the portholes. Some of it is electricity, Harry decides, powered by the Falls not so many miles away, driving the Airship along some sort of rail past sets that have been artfully created. Some is only lantern projections, a horizontal strip, perhaps, or a turret revolved to give the sense of motion. Whether the ship moves past the landscape or the landscape past the ship, it is, with the rocking and buffeting and blasting of air, enormously effective.

“The inhabitants of the realm we have intruded upon are known as the Selenites,” says the guide, turning to them and deepening his voice in sober warning. “They are thought to be friendly to visitors, but please, if we should encounter any members of the race, be careful not to provoke them.”

The crew members help the voyagers out of the Airship and onto the moon’s craggy surface then, Harry refusing the proffered hand. The ground feels spongy underfoot, and his walking stick leaves tiny dents in it as they head away from the craft.

Above their heads hangs a carpet of stars. They are led around the raised lip of a large crater, stepping carefully, till they reach a small hill with a large cavern opening at the base of it.

“This is the Grotto of the City of the Moon. I must plead that we be allowed egress.” The guide steps ahead and cups his hands around his mouth, calling into the dark abyss. “Hello! We hail from Buffalo, on the planet Earth! May we enter?”

A gasp of surprise then, as a large-headed, spiky-backed creature in a green and red outfit and sharply pointed slippers appears at the mouth of the grotto. Harry estimates that the fellow barely comes up to his hip. He looks the passengers and crew over for a long moment, then holds a tiny hand straight out to them in greeting.

“Hail, Erse-Dwellairs!” he calls in a strange, high-pitched voice. “I welcome you to ze City of ze Moon.”

If Harry is not mistaken the Selenite has a touch of a French accent.

There are more little Selenites inside as they descend into the twisting, turning grotto, weaving through eerily glowing stalactites and stalagmites on a green concrete floor, past towering columns carved with the faces of fierce and unearthly creatures, some of the little inhabitants toiling away with miniature picks and crowbars, revealing veins of glistening gold or jewels gleaming in unimaginable colors. Among them glide lovely Moon-Maids of more human stature, dark-haired beauties dressed in diaphanous robes who stare at the visitors shyly with their huge eyes. They are led into a large chamber, and suddenly there is music, the liquid rippling of a harp, a sweet mandolin, and voices now, as the tiny Selenites and ghostly Moon-Maids join in a melody—

My sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon

I’m going to marry him soon

T’would fill me with bliss just to give him one kiss

But I know that a dozen I never would miss!

Harry and the other visitors, slightly embarrassed, look to the dozen or so children in their party, the only ones still rapt in the illusion now that they have left the realms of Galactic Flight for that of Music Hall. There are adults, he knows, who will only visit the movie parlors if they bring their children with them, some lingering unease at giving themselves up to the gossamer images on the screen.

I’ll go up in a great big balloon

And see my sweetheart in the moon

Then behind some dark cloud, where no one’s allowed

I’ll make love to the Man in the Moon!

They lose Harry in the Palace. It is only a proscenium, however elaborately decorated, the giants seemingly bored, the tumbling dwarves no better than circus performers, the Moon Pageant replete with shifting scenery and flashing colored lights but without dramatic tension, the greenish gorgonzola offered by beaming Moon-Maids more than he can stomach this early in the day. Moving, projected views, he thinks, to replace the lantern slides. They can only be tinted, of course, till the color problem is solved, but think of the illusion, think of the impact, if while you are being moved forward in a vehicle all that you see from the front and side portals has been filmed in some foreign capital or natural vista! You could tour the streets of Mexico from any city in the States, and never step out of the carriage.

The show ends with a promise of friendship between peoples. “Just as the nations of North and South America have come together at this great Exposition,” says the Man in the Moon, “thus shall the citizens of my realm be ever bonded with those of your planet Earth.”

They exit through the shadowy gorge and jaws of a dragon-like creature called a Moon Calf onto the raucous, steaming Midway. Just one entrance down is the Old Plantation, a glimpse, as the brochure describes it, of the sunny South before the War. Sweat begins to run down Harry’s forehead from his hat brim. He wonders how they keep it so cool on the moon. Dozens of spectators, yankees, are flowing through the doorway of the “mansion” that fronts the exhibit. Harry checks his pocket watch, digs out a quarter, and follows them in.

Pretty, ringletted girls in stiff pastel dresses greet the visitors, all smiles and coquetry. Harry has been to gala occasions something like the one presented in the chandeliered ballroom they pass into, Sally’s coming out for one, though never with a colored band playing Dixie, and certainly never with so many colorful fans fluttering in ladies’ hands. There are unpainted slave quarters out back, along with log cabins claimed to have been occupied by Abraham Lincoln and Jeff Davis, and a swarm of negroes unlike any he’s ever encountered, even in South Carolina. Cotton-headed old uncles, pipe-smoking aunties doing wash and spinning yarn, clean but raggedy children running everywhere. Men and women stoop and pick cotton in several rows planted at the far end of the compound, several pale women with parasols watching intently. One knot of white visitors gathers around two little boys doing a frantic, barefoot buck-and-wing to the ministrations of a grinning banjo player, while others ring an old man sitting on a porch chuckling and giggling and slapping his knee with every response to their queries. Harry drifts over by a young fellow filling buckets of water from a hand pump.

“Good morning.”

“Mornin to you, Cap’m,” replies the young man, touching two fingers to his forehead in salute but continuing to pump.

“Where you folks from?”

“Oh,” he sighs, straightening to look around at his fellow Plantation dwellers, “mostly it’s Georgia, Alabama, M’ssippi. Me, I’m fum Valdosta.”

“You stay here at night?”

“Mostly, yassuh.”

Harry looks over toward the pickers. “That cotton,” he says, “what happens when it’s all been harvested?”

The hint of a smile tugs at the water boy’s mouth. “Well, Mr. Skip who run the Plantation, he bring in another patch by’an’by, but most mornins we gots to get up an stick them bolls back in the plants fore they open up the fair.”

“That seems like an awful lot of trouble.”

“Yessuh, an that’s why he got him some perfessional niggers like us. You see them what’s wanderin around the Midway, fum this yere Buffalo? That ain but amaters.”

“I see.” They both turn as the toothless old man on the porch emits a particularly high-pitched cackle, rocking back and forth in mirth as he entertains a growing crowd of yankees.

“That Laughin’ Ben. He ain right,” says the water boy, touching his temple with a finger. “But the white fokes sure love him.”

“I can see that.”

“You not fum up here neither, is you, Cap’n?”

“North Carolina.”

The boy nods. “Thas one of them in-between states. We run through it on the train.”

Harry bids him good day and manages to reach the exit just as the pickers and spinners and tale-tellers all drop what they’re doing to join the eleven o’clock cakewalk. His leg is hurting him, sharp pains running from ankle to hip, and he has perspired through to his vest.

At least, he thinks, pushing hard with his cane to make time through the crowded Mall, they haven’t included an Irish Pavillion.

He finds Paley still in the restaurant, comparing the apple and cherry pie selections.

“Anything good?”

“The Trip to the Moon—”

“It’s on my list,” says Daddy, extricating himself from the table. “But Skip Dundy wants a fortune to shoot it.”

“I had another idea. What if we were to stage a battle in the Filipino Vil-lage? They’ve got huts, palms trees, a lagoon with canoes, real Filipinos—”

“And who’s going to ask the Boss for the money to do that? There’s woods in Jersey, right near the shop.”

“If we’re going to stay competitive—”

“When Mr. Edison’s lawyers finish their business,” says the cameraman, helping arrange the apparatus and tripod on Harry’s shoulder, “we won’t have any competition.”

“But think of the excitement it would add, the verisimilitude.” Harry has pictured the view in his mind. A young captain, maybe even Niles himself, leading a desperate charge into the village as insurrectos leap from the huts to fire at them. And then a shot — the roller chair could be employed here — as if the viewer himself was running through the melee, native rebels firing directly at him—

“We’ve nabbed Aggy, my friend. That war’s over.” Paley stabs a last forkful of pie and snaps it down. “We’d better get over to the Esplanade.”

The Assassin watches him approach, preceded by marching bands and squadrons of cavalry, snug in his open victoria pulled by four glistening steeds, waving affably to the cheering citizens who line the Causeway. The Assassin leans on one of the piers till the carriage has passed, then joins the throng across the flag-draped Triumphal Bridge in pursuit.

Idolatry. The word has been pressed in his mind since his entrance this morning. The dreaming woman’s massive face, the Sphinx over the Beautiful Orient, Cleopatra, the Baker’s Chocolate maiden, the Goddess of Light perched on the Electric Tower, the kindly President in his silk top hat and frock coat — this is the Pantheon of false gods, and these poor, deluded sleepwalkers have come to worship them.

Applause as he climbs down from his carriage, is led onto the platform that has been set up in the Esplanade. The Assassin tries to move forward through the multitude as the Expostion head introduces the President. People are hot, ladies have their parasols open against the noonday sun, all are pressing forward to see closer, hear better. More applause as he rises, begins to speak. The words are unclear at this distance. The Assassin passes the men he saw in the gondola, now with their tripod mounted on what look like apple boxes to see over the crowd, the fat one with his eye pressed tight to it, cranking all the while. A man in a suit silently moving his lips on a platform decked with bunting that will be without color. Pointless idolatry. Men glare as the Assassin pushes between them. He can make out words now, but still they make no sense. He comes to a wall of policemen, standing face to the crowd, hands folded behind their backs, immobile. Expressionless. More statues. The grounds are full of statues, heroic statues, allegorical groupings, Indians in wax and wood, massive bear and buffalo and moose and elk, statues representing Labor and Capital and Motherhood and Bounty. The Shield of Despotism, this grouping could be called, or The Blue Wall of Tyranny.

The Assassin pushes up to look between their shoulders. If he is lucky it might work from here. But no, one of the statues is staring at him.

“Take a step back, Bud,” says the policeman. “Yer crowdin me.”

Rapturous applause as the President finishes his address, as hands are shaken on the platform, as bemedaled John Philip Sousa himself leads his band in The Stars and Stripes Forever. The President starts down from the platform and the crowd behind pushes the Assassin toward him. He reaches into his pocket, closing his hand around the little pistol. Maybe, maybe — but the Blue Wall holds fast, pushing back as McKinley is escorted away in a phalanx of security agents for his tour of the Exposition.

“Easy, folks,” calls the burly copper. “He’ll be back tomorrow to shake hands.”

The Assassin drifts away then, throwing looks back over his shoulder at the official party, counting bodyguards. A man seems to be watching him, following. A blue-eyed man with a moustache and a bowler tilted on his head, a gold-headed walking stick resting casually on his shoulder. The Assassin hurries through the dispersing crowd, pulling his watch out to look at it as if he is late for an appointment, bathed in sweat now, the rubbing bodies of the multitude, the noon sun, the fate of the future in his pocket. He struggles back down the Mall, past the little Acetylene Exhibit, a man shouting the praises of the Wonder Gas even as hundreds turn into the massive Electricity Building across the way, flicking a look back to see that the watcher is still there, closer now, feigning inattention but definitely following. How can they know? How can they know? And the Assassin cuts sharply left and trots into the welcoming coolness of the Infant Incubators.

It is mostly women in the building. The nurses, of course, in their white uniforms, and then a dozen female spectators of various ages, cooing and whispering over the babies in their steel and glass ovens.

“Poor, dear things,” says one in a dress of black crepelike material. “I can’t imagine they’ll be normal.”

“Our graduates do very well,” responds a nurse, transferring one of the tiny, monkey-face creatures from incubator to a basket in a dumbwaiter shaft. “Those that survive.”

“You’ve lost some, then?”

“A few. Less than one out of ten.”

“God wanted them.”

“God is in no hurry,” says the nurse. “They just died, and their mothers were distraught.” She presses a button and waits while the basket is drawn out of sight, then turns to the watching women. “Every two hours each child is changed and fed.”

The Assassin walks along the machines, peering in at the infants, mindful of the entrance door. The man has not followed him in.

“No matter what their weight, Dr. Couney believes that a warm, clean environment is the key to these babies’ survival. Until the hospitals in this country accept his findings,” the nurse spreads her arms to indicate the exhibit, “here we are.”

“I don’t think I could bear having my child in a side-show hatchery,” says a young woman making a pained face as she stares in through a porthole.

The nurse smiles politely. “Let’s hope you never have to, then. Please tell your friends who visit the Exposition about us,” she says brightly to the others in the room. “Your quarters make our efforts possible.”

America, thinks the Assassin, watching a discolored, pint-sized creature struggle for breath, translucent eyelids fluttering but never quite opening. Even the infants have to earn their keep.

Harry spends the afternoon touring the more educational exhibits. Graphic Arts, Ethnology, Machinery and Transportation, the state and foreign buildings. All very informative but nothing active enough for the camera lens. They’ll do the Indian Congress tomorrow, maybe get the President with Red Cloud or Geronimo, and film the mock battle with the cavalry in the Stadium. Evening brings more young couples to the Pan, strolling hand-in-hand to Venice in America and taking the boat ride, swaying together by the many bandstands listening to waltzes, sitting in the Plaza by the Sunken Garden. There is a casual anonymity here, an escape from judgment. Not that he is ever ashamed to be seen with Brigid, but—

As the sun sets most of those still strolling the grounds make their way back to the Esplanade. The speakers’ platform is now serving as a reviewing stand for the President and his entourage, gazing with thousands of his constituents across the Court of the Fountains toward the Electric Tower, waiting for the Illumination.

It begins at the very edge of dusk.

The doors of the Temple of Music have been thrown open and the Great Organ within, joined outside by Sousa’s band, begins to play The Star-Spangled Banner, slowly building power and volume. The lamps set low around the fountains dim, as do the streetlamps. Then, starting with the Electric Tower and the larger structures, lights begin to glow, faint and pink at first, just a few of them, then more, outlining the buildings, outlining the fountains, edging the heroic statues, growing in number and intensity as the crowd sighs as one, and then as the last blush of sun fades from the sky the whole Exposition blazes forth in golden effulgence as the organist strikes a mighty chord and the people are cheering and applauding and thrilled to be here for this wonder, light all around them, a city of light, and if the Airship could indeed make the voyage Harry has no doubt you would see this beautiful light from the moon.

It isn’t over, though, not tonight. As the organ’s last note echoes away there is another mass sigh — spitting, sparkling fires of green, red, blue, and gold flame up at the four corners of the fairgrounds, and then hundreds of balloons, somehow glowing from within, are released at once and float above the light-adorned buildings of the Pan, followed by a barrage of rockets, a hundred of them streaking and screaming up from all sides and then larger rockets exploding, shrieking horizontal to the ground with silver and gold comet tails streaming after and BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! rainbow starbursts in the air and Harry almost breathless with it, the crowd gasping and oohing and aahing like a great enraptured creature and he aches to have her with him at this moment, Brigid beside him, longs to see her face lit by these colors, to feel her pulse quicken, the radiance of her unstudied delight. Fireworks are exploding now to form the colorful flags of the South American nations taking part in the Exposition and he wonders what the Judge would think, can feel the tone of Niles’s dismissive banter like a twinge down his spine and BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! each bombardment more spectacular than the last, shells bursting into flowering patterns and beginning to fade just as BOOM! BOOM! the next barrage begins, raining parachutes now that swing down slowly toward the earth with ruby globes sizzling beneath them, pouring multi-hued lightning over the Rainbow City from the black sky and he vows to himself, Harry Manigault vows that he will come back to this place with her, that they will see the Falls as man and wife like so many of these beaming, cheering Americans around him have done before and a band begins to play, Sousa’s band again and BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! the ground trembles as four mighty bombs explode, one forming an outline of the United States, one forming the outline of Cuba, one of Porto Rico, and the last spattering into smaller shells that pop into a myriad of Philippine islands. We should have the camera here, thinks Harry, something of this would register on the nitrate. KABOOM! a last, earth-shaking explosion, directly above the Tower, and then a gunfire crackling as a thousand tiny balls ignite while they hang in the air to make a portrait of their beloved leader, the one who has brought them to prosperity, to victory, to this glorious new century, and Harry wonders if they are watching in the Filipino Village and the Indian Congress and in the red-dirt courtyard of the Old Plantation, wonders what those dusky, vanquished peoples feel as they gaze upon this majesty—

WELCOME, PRESIDENT McKINLEY

— announce the sparkling silver letters below the portrait—

CHIEF OF OUR NATION AND OUR EMPIRE!

The Assassin sits drinking beer in Pascek’s saloon on Broadway, thinking about the stacking game. There are amusements of the cheaper sort just outside the Exposition grounds and he lingered at one after leaving today, watching to see if he was being followed. The sharper had built an elaborate house of tiles on his little table, balancing one upon the other till the structure was almost up to his chin. A spectator bet him a quarter against a five-dollar bill that he couldn’t place another without the toppling the whole edifice, and this he did. The next bet had to be fifty cents — only fair, as it was now an even more impossible feat — and then seventy-five cents and then a silver dollar to see another tile balanced, the structure beginning to wobble slightly even when he wasn’t touching it. The circle of spectators grew as the amount of the wagers rose, till one gent in a checked suit stepped forward and plunked down two dollars and fifty cents to beat the master architect. The sharper put on a long face, then, holding a tile with the very tips of the fingers of his two hands, lowered it gingerly toward the top of his mansion.

This is my bullet, thought the Assassin, this is my gift to the world.

And yes, that was the last straw, the tile that brought it all crashing down, spectators yowling with a mix of disappointment and glee depending on the direction of their side bets. It was a sign. Yes, the system had not fallen after the Habsburg Empress was eliminated, or the French President or even King Umberto. But the weight of each killing upset the balance of the edifice, undermined its foundations. One more, the right one, and there will be blessed release. If not, he will have done his duty, bringing the inevitable day that much closer.

The working men at the end of the bar begin to curse each other in Polish. “You filthy pig,” shouts one, “you filthy lying pig!” Stools are toppled. Only a moment ago they were quietly drinking themselves unconscious. “I’ll kill you!” cries the other man, the shorter one. The Assassin stands and backs away from the working men. The shorter one draws a knife and suddenly he is stabbing the other, again and again in the head and neck, shrieking all the while “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!” The bartender leaps over the counter and tries to pull him away, the taller man sliding silently to the floor, blood spurting from him like an obscene fountain.

“Get help!” yells the bartender to the Assassin in English. “Go get help!”

The Assassin runs out onto Broadway, turning to hurry back to his hotel. Two beefy patrolmen sprint past him, heading for Pascek’s. He slips his hand into his pocket to make sure the pistol doesn’t swing as he picks up his pace. It will be quick and clean, not like the hapless Berkman’s botched attentat on Henry Clay Frick, no, quick and clean and irreversible. The Assassin hears fireworks above, but keeps his gaze fixed straight ahead.

LADY IN THE FOREST

Nobody can drink that much vino and not have to urinate. Crouching hidden on the slope above the town, Diosdado has watched the fiesta of Ina Poon Bato, watched the headmen celebrating noisily afterward at the table set up in the plaza, banners of Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viaje still hanging overhead. It was not hard to follow the movements of the alcalde, the best-dressed of all in his barong with the crimson embroidery, the one with the braying laugh and the surprisingly beautiful tenor voice when they sang. He is a fanfarrón, this mayor, Ignacio Yambao by name, bragging of his good amigos the yanquis and all they have offered for his cooperation, bragging of his disregard for whatever deluded bandits may still be hiding in the mountains. Which is why Colonel San Miguel has ordered Diosdado to cause his disappearance.

Other men have staggered out of their houses, a few only pausing to irrigate from the rear platforms, most making the trip to the letrina on the other side of the bamboo stockade. One fellow veered far enough off the path that he was unable to find the gate and decided to orinar through the fence slats into a cassava patch. But so far no Ignacio Yambao, who, though alcalde of Taugtod, surely has no modern receptacle within his house of nipa and bamboo. It will be light soon, cocks already voicing their impatience with the night, and Diosdado has to wiggle his bare toes to keep his feet from falling asleep. He is dressed in the simple, soiled cotton of the kasama, his story if discovered that he has fled his mountain town because a band of insurrectos have taken it over. The yanquis are easier to fool than Zambal villagers, of course, having no local knowledge, and more than one of his boys when spotted has strolled grinningly up to the foreigners, rifle held useless at arm’s length, and thanked el Dios en el Cielo that the Americans are finally here to accept his surrender. Most have returned within the month, with many a story to tell and occasionally a better weapon than the one they turned in.

“The yanquis recognize only two kinds of Filipinos,” Bayani is fond of saying. “The living and the dead.”

Bayani offered to do tonight’s business, naturally, insisted on it, but Diosdado is the teniente still, despite having left his uniform under a rock on a hillside near Bacolor, and it is not something he will order another man to bloody his hands with.

“Who have you ever killed?” demanded the sargento.

“I shoot when the rest shoot,” Diosdado answered. “Sometimes an enemy falls.”

“But close, close enough so you can look into his eyes?”

Diosdado did not ask if Bayani had killed men in this way.

“If I don’t come back in two days,” he told the sargento, “move the band to the escondite north of Iba.”

He has always been suspicious that it was the friars who made up the story of the Ina Poon Bato. A negrito man, years before the arrival of the first Spaniard, meets a beautiful, glowing lady in the forest. “Take me home with you,” she says. He protests that he already has a wife, and a jealous one at that, so she gives him a carved image of herself, a small wooden statue. As he walks back to his village he hears her voice, over and over, saying “You must take me home with you.” When he arrives his wife is immediately suspicious of the statue, and when he is not looking she hurls it into the fire. Their entire hut is immediately engulfed in flames, the couple barely escaping. But when they sift through the ashes later, the one thing that has not even been charred is that wooden statue, now stone, the Ina Poon Bato. It becomes a sacred object of their tribe, carried from place to place as they migrate through the mountains, bringing them peace and good fortune in their travels. But somehow the statue is lost, and food grows scarce, diseases strike their children, their enemies grow in power. The story of the lost statue remains in their minds, though, and so when the men with beards wearing long robes arrive from across the sea carrying their statue of the same beautiful lady, their Virgin Mary, it is cause for celebration, for the renewal of hope.

A fabricated legend maybe, but an enormously popular one in these mountains, and Diosdado has tried to use it to explain the war to the Zambals. “This fight will cause great destruction,” he tells them, “but at the end when we sift through the ashes, something will remain untouched, something pure and miraculous and as permanent as stone — a Filipino Republic.”

It is perhaps too distant a metaphor. In Nacolcol the consensus was that the problems all sprang from that ancient negrito’s wife, who should have known better than to throw enchanted statues into a fire.

There is a dog, rat-tailed and underfed, making its way up the slope with its nose up, alert, and Diosdado notes that the air has shifted, a cold wind rolling down off the monte behind him. The dog slows a few meters away and sniffs at the edge of the copita bushes, stepping cautiously now, till it sees him. The cur’s head goes down, ears back, and a warning growl vibrates its scrawny chest. Diosdado tightens his grip on the bolo but does not move. The dog investigates, body stiff, bumping its wet muzzle twice against Diosdado’s face before stepping aside to lift its leg on a macaranda and trot back down to the village.

Only the alcalde has not yet taken a piss.

He lost a few men, deserters, when the news came that the silver-voiced Bryan had not won his election, that the Americans would be staying. And then they caught the supremo on the day before his birthday. Funston of Kansas and a handful of his junior officers marched as prisoners through the wilderness by Macabebes disguised as rebels, stumbling half-dead into Aguinaldo’s mountain retreat, and after being revived by the food and water and the respect due to captured warriors, able to pounce on the General in an unguarded moment. And the General, delivered back aboard the great ship of the White Admiral like a penitent schoolboy, called immediately for his followers to join him in compliance. Now even people like Scipio Castellano have become americanistas, declaring that anyone still in the field is no more than a bandit.

“This is not an insurrection,” Diosdado lectured his men, “it is not a revolution. It is all of us, patriotas humildes de las Filipinas, defending our homelands, our families. If the General is in their hands, so be it. Until the last man lays down his rifle, our cause is alive.”

It has been nearly three years since he took the head of Colón off with a blacksmith’s hammer. “Columbus” as the yanquis call him, the first European to claim their continent, another mercenary for the Spanish crown. When the Assimilation decree was posted, before the shooting war began, Diosdado was the one chosen to go to Cavite and wait until night and desecrate the Americans’ favorite statue. He felt more like a student on a prank than the avenging arm of the revolution.

The ground and the buildings have begun to take on color by the time Ignacio Yambao steps down the ladder from the platform of his house, walking in a surprisingly steady line toward the path to the letrina. He is singing very softly to himself, a kundiman from the party, in his beautiful tenor. Diosdado rises slowly from his crouch, legs burning with the sudden rush of blood, and angles down the slope with the bolo swinging loose from the thong around his wrist. If the alcalde turns to see him he will smile and keep coming and tell his story.

But no story comes to Diosdado as his bare feet, still tender, suffer over the jagged ground. Señor mio, Padre y Redento, he thinks, me pesa de todo corazón haberte ofendido porque me puedes castigarme con las penas del Infierno—

The Act of Contrition must come after the sin. The alcalde, Ignacio Yambao, is squatting with his pants around his ankles when Diosdado steps up behind him. The smell is awful.

He has practiced the stroke on the way to the village, a chopping backhand through green saplings and thick poles of bamboo, careful to resharpen the blade with his whetstone afterward, and knows he needs to use both hands. I studied anatomy with the Jesuits he thinks as he fixes on the back of the squatting man’s neck and raises the heavy itak to strike.

There is light now, enough to see details of the slaughter, but it will be a full hour before the sun peeks over the tip of the monte. Diosdado strides away from the trench, first carefully wiping the bolo clean on the man’s barong, leaving a dark stain behind.

Halfway up he comes upon a negrito man, naked but for a loincloth of pounded bark and a curved knife stuck in the drawstring, walking down. They always make him nervous, even the ones when he was a boy who lived in the rancherías and obeyed the priest. The man’s eyes are yellowish, as if he may be suffering from one of their mountain diseases, and he has patterns scarred onto his arms and chest. Un cortacabeza verdadero, as his father used to say, a real headhunter.

The men nod silently to each other, and go their separate ways.

They are moving again, marching out from Las Ciegas as part of a flying column, the sky behind them filled with smoke. Royal is sick, sick like at the end of Cuba, a little less fever in the hot spells and a little less bone-aching chill in the cold. The doctor in Long Island had said it might catch up with him, that there might be rough spells, and the men reporting queasy or fevered this morning have been told they have to march with the rest, that there will be no treatment or conveyance back to Manila till they reach Subig.

Right now he is burning, walking at the rear of the company with everything too bright and loud and even with the others warned not to talk there is the sound of them creaking, jiggling, breathing, the stampede of their footsteps on the hard-baked road, the sloshing of water in the canteens. Nobody noticed till it was too late, they said, but all the villagers, all the muy, muy amigos, disappeared from Las Ciegas just before the attack. Not a word, not a warning, just gone. They have not returned, and orders were to burn the village and move out to garrison another area the rebels are supposed to be operating in. At first he thought it was the flames making him burn but then the chills started in the middle of it, Royal in a cold sweat torching the off-kilter little hut where Nilda had been staying, where she must have gotten word and left with the others without warning them. Before starting the blaze the lieutenant had them round up what animals were left, the pigs herded screaming into the thorn-branch corral and butchered. The pigs were out on the Filipino dead the night after the attack and Royal wanted to shoot them then but the lieutenant said no more firing.

They walk up and down a series of hills through a forest of hemp, the towering plants seeming to provide no shade. The white fiber is hung out on long lines to dry, making a kind of fence, and if there are any workers meant to be out here they have all gone and hid.

The land flattens out then and Royal keeps his eyes fixed on Corporal Ponder’s back and puts one foot in front of the other, all of them wary of straggling now after Junior. It feels like his head is cooking under his hat but he knows he can’t take it off. The worst was last night with the fever dreams again and Jessie in them, calling to him from across a swift river too loud in its rushing to hear her voice. It feels like he couldn’t lift his arms if his life depended on it, that marching is possible only if he leans enough to fall forward and then manages to keep his feet in front of him. Hardaway alongside has something wrong with his stomach and is the wrong color. Sergeant Jacks drops back every now and again to look over the sick men and Gamble, who was hit in the arm in the attack, and tell them with his eyes that they need to keep up.

Maybe they were in with the rebels, some of them, the people in Las Ciegas, or maybe they weren’t. Just got wind of it and they didn’t want to be there when whatever happened started up.

“Make yourself scarce,” they always said at home, like when he was little and a colored man had cut a white man down on Dock Street. Make yourself scarce tonight, cause anyone colored and out on the street was an insult, was temptation for the rope and the torch, and even the tough sports at the Manhattan Dance Hall kept the lights low and didn’t play their music. You almost didn’t need words, just get a feel on the street and hurry to get behind a door somewhere. This is their country, the Filipinos, and they have that kind of feeling for it. They know where to go and wait till it is safe to come back again.

The lieutenant said to leave the church alone. No sense in being disrespectful.

They veer off the road and march through a section of what they called chaparral at Huachuca, Gamble moaning a bit now and holding his shattered arm tight to his side. Royal has Junior’s Krag still, the artificer having taken his own to use it for parts. With the marching orders there was no way to send the body back, but the boys pitched in and dug a good deep hole and borrowed a cross from the church. There is no chaplain with either H or L, so they stood uncovered around the hole and the lieutenant said some words and told Royal he would write to the Luncefords in New York and then they filled it in. Royal would write, too, only they might blame him for it. It doesn’t seem possible that anything, much less one little piece of paper, could start from this hot island in the middle of the sea and find its way to some colored people lost in a great city in the north of America.

Royal moves ahead with the column, all his joints aching now with the fever, flushed with a liquid heat that seems to flow up across the back of his neck to his cheeks and to his temples and everything so bright it is hard to tell what is near and what is far as they reach the river, the same one, he thinks, but a different spot, and the column bends alongside it for nearly a mile before the lieutenant says it is a place they can ford.

The banks look high here but when it is Royal’s turn he sees there is a section that has caved in and the head of the column has already reached the far side, men holding their rifles over their heads and wading up to their chests, moving slowly on what looks like slippery footing, the double line bent in the middle by the current. The water is cold and feels good on his legs, tugging. It is all a jumble of rocks below and the Krag seems to weigh as much as a man when he lifts it overhead, Hardaway making little noises in front of him, afraid of his snakes like always in the water and the current is even stronger than it looks, making you brace yourself and push one leg forward and get a foothold before you dare swing ahead. There are no shoals but the sound of the water rushing between the soldiers is insistent, deafening, and it is Too Tall just next to him upstream who falls and knocks him loose, off his feet in the water and swept away and the bottom is gone, can’t find it, his head under once, hat gone, men’s shouting voices growing distant so quickly and he thrashes his free hand and his feet searching for something, anything and then finally thinks let it go and lets Junior’s Krag slip from his hands so he can try to swim. But the banks are so high here, the river deeper, swifter, and his arms are so weary, the fever taking all the starch out of him and Royal gulps air and puts his head in the cold water and just lets it take him away. Away. Make himself scarce. He is getting scarcer and scarcer, the cold passing into him, and it is an annoyance that he has to raise his head to take a breath.

There is a tree downed partway across the river ahead and if he had the strength he might paddle around it and let the river keep him. A branch cuts his cheek as he is driven into it by the current and his legs are swept under and then he is struggling with the tree, wrestling branches and ducking under and then there are rocks, some of them sharp on his hands, and he pulls himself half out of the water like a mudpuppy, legs still tugged by the current behind, and lies on his face with nothing left to spend. He doesn’t think they’ll bother to send anybody after him.

The heat is gone out of him and the chills come, running up the backs of his legs and out his arms like ripples before a fast wind. The rushing river sounds hollow and far away, all sound dull till the snap of the rifle bolt above.

Royal manages to roll onto his side. A boy stands on the thick trunk of the upended tree, bare toes dug into the bark, his skinny arms leveling a battle-scarred Model 93 Mauser at Royal’s head. He looks scared or excited or both. He says something and jerks the barrel of the rifle up and down.

Royal closes his eyes and lays an arm over his face.

Kalaw whistles the warning and Diosdado slows, raises his arms over his head so they can see that it is him. The sentry waves him on gravely, no question as to whether his mission in Taugtod was successful or not. When he approaches the camp he sees them all gathered around somebody, men barely glancing at him as he steps to the center to find out what has happened.

It is little Fulanito with a big, black American. The American looks more exhausted than scared. Bayani comes up the hill then and tells them to break camp, that one yanqui in the river means more are near, then goes to explain to the refugees who have joined them what may happen next.

“Sit down here,” Diosdado says to the American, who he can see is surprised to be addressed in his own language. The man, who is big but not so big as some of them, has to support himself with one arm to stay upright, even sitting.

“You are of the 25th Infantry.”

The man nods.

“And you have burned Las Ciegas.”

When Colonel San Miguel ordered the attack on the garrison, Diosdado told Bayani to stall enough getting there that they were not part of it. Since Aguinaldo’s capture the Republic has ceased to exist as such, only groups of independent raiders left, striking when they have the advantage. Why attack the enemy where he is dug in with an ample supply of ammunition?

“The people are all gone there,” says the American.

“Yes. Some have come to us.” He points to the dozen they have met on the way, sitting anxiously with the things they have carried piled around them. “And where is your column going?”

The man hesitates. “They don’t tell us the names till after we took it over.”

Subig will be next. The column must have crossed some distance upriver. Nothing to be done, and he needs to get his people to San Marcelino before the yanquis arrive.

“What is your name?”

“Royal Scott,” says the americano negro. “Private.”

Diosdado looks the man in the eye and sees only someone waiting, resigned, for what happens next. This close, their faces are only human, not like the stories from Manila or the cartoons in the newspapers. But he finds himself speaking very slowly, as if to a child.

“I must tell you, Private Scott, that you have only two courses open. Either you will come with us in silence as a prisoner and a cargador—a carrier of things — or we must shoot you now.”

Fulanito stands with his rifle aimed, unwavering, waiting for the Amer-ican’s response.

The rebels hang their heaviest supplies on a pole they lift onto the American’s shoulders. Most of the Pampanganos want to return to the burned village and rebuild, but Nilda lifts her own burden and begins to walk. The American, Roy, gives her only a quick glance and does not smile at her. The rebels are going north to Zambales, they say, and that is where she wants to be. He looks like he is wounded or sick, Roy, staggering under the load, struggling to keep up with the swiftly moving band. She walks behind, and once when he seems about to topple she puts a hand to his back and gently pushes forward. She asks the Virgin, in the familiar but respectful way that Padre Praxides taught her in Candelaria, to intercede.

Mother of God, she prays, do not let them shoot this man.

TEMPLE OF MUSIC

The Temple of Music belongs on the head of a Byzantine despot. Its sides, anchored by statues of bards and Bacchae, are a deep Chinese red with trimmings in gold and yellow, the panels of its massive dome an aquatic blue-green, facing its slightly less gaudy sister, the Ethnology Building, across the Esplanade. Today it is even hotter inside the Temple than out, many of the patient citizens dabbing the sweat from their faces with handkerchiefs as they wait to greet the President. The line begins outside, where a pretty girl strolls along it selling samples of cool Lithia Water from a tray, then hooks into the southeast entrance. Inside there are soldiers and Exposition police forming a chute between their human chain and the curving row of seats, to guide the well-wishers in single file toward their destination. A soloist is playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on the immense organ that takes up much of the eastern wall of the structure. There is a slight blue-green cast to everything touched by the afternoon sun slanting through the dome panels. The President is flanked by his secretary, Cortelyou, and the Exposition director, who introduces any prominent Buffalonians as the line comes from the left. A pair of Secret Service men stand across from them, watching the crowd.

The Assassin has his handkerchief wrapped around his right hand, as if it has been injured, the pistol wet and hot in his palm beneath it. There is a very large colored man behind him. He realizes he should have eaten, but the stabbing he witnessed the night before has driven all thoughts of food from his mind. “Keep moving,” says a policeman, though it is clear everybody in the line is eager to get to the President.

He is a bland pudge of a man, thinks the Assassin on seeing him so closely, a willing tool of the Monopolists and money-riggers, a smug prattler of Christian bromides. The President smiles and shakes hands in the line ahead. “A pleasure to meet you,” the Assassin hears him say. A bland pudge of a man with a massive, self-satisfied belly who scratches a pen on paper and men lose their farms or are thrown out of work or sent to foreign jungles to kill and die. I will do this thing, thinks the Assassin — there is no turning back. Easy as standing in front of a train. Two more people.

“I spent a long, sleepless night,” he hears the President explain to the man who lingers in front of him, “but in the morning I found that the Lord had spoken. We could not abandon the Philippines to paganism and anarchy.”

The Assassin is the pebble under the iron heel of the Rulers. He is the Voice drowned out by their machinery. He is invisible. He sees the eyes of the bodyguard shift from him, uninterested, to the negro giant next in line. The Assassin is No Man. In ’93 when they cut wages at the rolling mill he went out with the others, walked the picket line, was fired and put on their blacklist. Nieman, he said after the strike had failed and they were rehiring and the new foreman asked his name, Fred Nieman. No Man. The foreman did not speak German, did not see the smirks of the other workers as banished Leon Czolgosz strolled back onto the factory floor. He had been cool-headed on that day, had waited in line for his interview, had done what was necessary. He steps past the Exposition man. The President holds his hand out. The Assassin pushes it away.

The soloist pauses then, or perhaps the piece is over, the last great organ note echoing in the Temple.

The Assassin stares into the great, self-satisfied belly of the man and squeezes the trigger.

Harry is helping to set up for the Parade when the shots and the shouting begin. The Temple is behind them. He helps Paley reposition the apparatus, helps him up onto the apple boxes they have nailed together to make a shooting platform. They asked to be inside but the Exposition organizers said no, even the still photographer would have to step out before the greeting process began. The word of the deed crackles around them like static electricity, the line of well-wishers dissolving into an ever-growing mob. The President has been shot, that much is for certain, and the assailant has been made captive. Exposition police have rushed out of the Temple and from other parts of the fair to guard the four entrances, enraged citizens pushing at them, men who have come to stroll the grounds with their loved ones now red-faced and hysterical.

“Lynch him! Lynch him!” they shout.

“Bring the son of a bitch out here and burn him!”

Harry takes his hat off and mops his brow with his handkerchief.

“That’s just talk, kid,” Daddy Paley calls down to him. “We don’t usually go for the rope up here.”

“What should we do?”

“Shoot,” says the cameraman, trying to crank steadily despite his excitement. “Shoot till we run out of film.”

“It’s just a crowd. The backs of people’s heads.”

“The backs of people’s heads trying to get into the building where their President has just been shot. And we’re the only camera outfit on the grounds.” With that he begins to slowly pan the apparatus left to right on the swivel-joint Harry has been trying to perfect.

Harry turns as an electric ambulance pushes its way through the mass of people, siren wailing. Beyond it he sees the denizens of the Midway approaching, cautious, looking stunned and awkward outside of their native habitats. Arabs, Turks, and Armenians, Egyptian dancing girls, Mexican vaqueros, Filipinos of various shades and sizes, Esquimaux, Hawaiians, feathered Indians from the Congress, Japanese in their colorful robes, the Baker’s Chocolate Dutch girl in her wooden shoes, tiny Selenite Moon-Men, tribal chieftans from Darkest Africa and cotton pickers from the Old Plantation. They hang back a ways from the throng of Americans angrily surrounding the Temple of Music, not sure of their place here but knowing something important has occurred.

If there was a way, thinks Harry, to begin with the whole motley gathering of them, wide enough to hold the camel’s head in the frame, then slowly lose all the others so only one face fills the shot, the buckskinned beauty from the Five Nations gift shop perhaps, twisting her braids and crying. And then, turning back as the police raise their clubs to quell a murderous rush on the main entrance, he prays that the assassin is at the least a white man.

TELEGRAPH

They all want to be put wise and expect Shoe to come up with the dope. The rumpus out front has barely settled down when the six o’clock from Syracuse pulls through, factory whistles screaming and the bell gonging at the tractor works. Shoe rolls off his rack, feeling the cold concrete through his socks, steps to the basin and splashes his face with the tiny bit of water left standing, no light yet but everything in the cell within the arm’s reach of an amputee. He wrestles into his pants, shirt, vest and jacket, then jams his feet into the prison-issue gunboats and laces them up. By the time the lights are switched on in the tier, his own bare bulb flickering overhead, he is dressed and combed, ready to peel another day off his sentence. Shoe hooks the rack up flush to the wall, rolls the thin mattress, folds the blanket and lays the sorry excuse for a pillow on top. He does his morning set-up routine, facing the door and pressing hard against the concrete on either side with his arms, straining as if to push the walls apart, then reaching up to touch the ceiling, followed by a dozen squats, knees popping each time he bends them.

“Give him to us!” they shouted. “Hand the filthy bastard over!” That size crowd in the dead of night, police whistles shrilling and every one of the night bulls clomping out to the front gate, it must be some holy terror they’ve brought in, some spitting, unrepentant menace to society hustled past the warden’s desk and flung directly into a punishment cell. Wife-killer maybe, local enough to draw a mob, or maybe a chickenhawk caught with his beak where it shouldn’t be. Whatever the beef, it’s the first flash of novelty at Warden Mead’s hotel for months, and the boys will want to know the particulars.

Time for bolts and bars now, as Grogan, with his heavy tread, clangs up the stairs with Pete Driscoll gimping behind him. The long bar is sprung and Shoe stands with his hands on the grated iron, the levers clunking as the Captain and the trustee approach from the right— chunk! chank! and when his door is free Shoe pushes hard to swing it open, then grabs his shitbucket by the handle and steps out onto the wooden gallery walk. He stands at attention, face forward, shooting his eyes to Pete. But the trustee only raises his eyebrows, in the know but unable to pass it on, and follows Grogan unlatching the cells. The faintest light sneaks through the barred windows of the outside wall across from him now as the company forms up con by con, each with bucket in left hand and wearing their joint faces, indifferent to the day, waiting for permission to breathe. Grogan reaches the end of the tier, every man accounted for, and raps his metal-tipped stick once on the floor. The men half-turn left. Grogan raps twice and they begin to still-march in rhythm with each other, till he raps a third time and they short-step forward, single file along the gallery walk, right hand laid flat on the guardrail where it can be seen, and down the narrow iron stairs to the bottom, crossing the stone floor till the lead man reaches the wing door where they stop and wait in silence till all the tiers are in formation and then Grogan double-raps again and they head out past Captain Flynn counting at the door and into the damp, cold shock of the yard.

The line short-steps out from the north wing building then bends sharp to the right at the center walk, forming up double file now and waiting for Grogan, who lets them cool a moment, the breath of two hundred men visible in the yard, leaves just beginning to turn on the birches along the walk, a yellow-tinted canopy for the line of gray men with black stripes. They stand with eyes front, swindlers and pete-men, gashouse pugs and forgers, sneaks and stalls, smash-and-grab artists, pennyweights, till-tappers, boardinghouse thieves and moll-buzzers, each one willing himself invisible, hoping to be passed over by Grogan’s bloodshot eyes. The Captain, satisfied for the moment, raps twice against the stone of the walk and the double line moves, full-stepping the length of the great rectangle back to the brick shithouse.

It is still the Rule of Silence in line and at meals, though they nixed the Lockstep just last year. No more chugging along with your right on the shoulder and your left on the hip of the con in front, no more tripping on the new fish, no more easy slipping of kites into your front man’s waistband. It took Shoe three weeks to remember how to swing his arms.

It is cold in the yard as they march down the center walk, crows flapping down into the birches, the first frost of the season sitting pale on the grass, and cold in the shithouse as each line enters a door, Shoe flipping the bucket lid up, dumping last night’s business into a large stone hopper, scooping water into it at the next basin, shaking it to rinse before dumping it into the final basin and the Owasco River beyond on the way out, then adding it to the pile at the disinfecting station before forming up again. This will be the only exercise most of the cons get all day. Captain Grogan raps and they full-step back, past the punishment cells and the new brick shock shop on the south wing to the mess. Sergeant Kelso, looking more exhausted than usual, stands at the door counting as they enter in single file, shooting a look to Shoe as he passes. Shoe slaps his right hand to his left breast in salute as he marches by the Principal Keeper, the PK peeping each con with equal disinterest till they have filed down into their rows and stand, row after row after row after row, all facing the same direction, waiting at the long chow shelves. The PK turns, ganders that all is in order, raps his skull-cracker on the floor and a thousand men pull their stools from under the shelf, then step back to attention. He raps again and they sit as one, food already laid out in front of them, oatmeal sludge, two slabs of punk and a cup of lukewarm bullpiss which Shoe puts away mechanically, shying one of the bread slices back into the basket when the mess con passes, no food wasted at Auburn, no, anything you leave on the table you finish in the cooler. They are given only minutes to stoke up, though how many is not clear as there are no clocks or watches in the joint, at least none that a con can get a rubber at. The screws own not only your time, good and bad, easy and hard, but Time itself. The PK raps twice and they stand and exit by rows, spoon held out in the left hand and dropped into the washbin as they short-step out, Sergeant Kelso counting and giving Shoe another look, widening his eyes to indicate it is big news.

Daylight then, slanting through the bars of the high windows as Grogan’s company enters the north wing again, and the crows, more crows than cons in the yard some mornings, ganging in the trees outside mocking the Rule of Silence. The men stand in formation till the Captain raps and they climb the iron stairs to their tiers, Shoe facing the cell at attention till the double rap and then stepping into his stone coffin, turning and pulling the grated door just short of closed. He waits till the footsteps come near and then gives the door a shake to prove the hinges are still good, and steps back. Chank! Chunk! the levers go down and he is double locked, standing with a checkerboard of light coming through the iron lattice and onto his body, waiting till whump! the long-bar falls into its brackets and seals the whole row before turning to check the mail. There is a kite, folded smaller than a dime and left between his pillow and blanket, written in haste with the char of a used matchhead, scrawled by Pete Driscoll and left by the other gallery boy, the Jew kid with the harelip. It is one short, shaky word and only that.

MACK, it says.

There is time for a coffin nail before First Work, and Shoe lights one from his boodle and stands blowing the smoke out through the grated iron. They say how Sitting Bull’s outfit and the rest of the horse Indians can write a telegram with a woodfire and a wet blanket, and Shoe wishes he could do the same when Grogan’s footsteps have faded and the tapping starts up. Tin cups on iron grating, nothing subtle, and all of them want to know the same thing. He uses his stool against the door to answer, thump, thump, thump, yeah, yeah, yeah to let them know he’ll find out what the rumpus was, what it meant, is there going to be a party in the shock shop, and then the bullpen door screeks open and it is Grogan back below them calling up.

“If I have to climb those feckin stairs an extra time,” he warns, “one of yez will pay for sure.”

And then even the crows are quiet.

There is Mack Crawford on the south wing and Mack something or other who works in the basket shop and any number of Irish and Scots cons, MacThis and MacThat, and there is Sergeant McCurran on the graveyard shift and Captain McManus who supervises the laundry. Pete’s message is like most prison dope, one-third bullshit and two-thirds speculation.

Shoe stabs out the cig and saves the butt in his boodle, never know when hard times will hit, and then the screws clomp up into the tiers again to make their music on the metal and it is First Work. Shoe jams his cap on this time and short-steps with the others to the iron stairs and down and out into the yard where the details are separated and marched away to their shops. Sergeant Kelso fingers him.

“Shoemaker.”

“Sir.”

“With me. Carpentry.”

Shoe falls out from his line and begins to full-step, slowly, toward the woodshop. Kelso strolls two steps behind him, waiting till none of the other bulls can see their faces before speaking.

“Opening day.”

It is Saturday, Shoe remembers, and the college boys will be knocking heads.

“They’re not giving anything on Princeton till they reach twenty-four fecking points. Can ye imagine that?”

Kelso smuggles Shoe the sporting pages from the Rochester rag and pumps him for advice on his wagers.

“Against Villanova?” says Shoe, eyes forward as he walks. “Take it.”

“Their first game of the season?”

“First game for Villanova too. They don’t belong on the same grass with the Tigers.”

“Same odds with Pennsylvania and Lehigh.”

“Take it. These are just warmup games for the big squads.”

“Harvard and Williams?”

Shoe considers for a moment. “Harvard takes their time on the field—”

“But Harry Graydon is fullback again.”

“I say they win by two, maybe three touchdowns. Be careful there.”

They pass the punishment cells and Shoe is aching to ask but that’s not how you play it with Kelso.

“I’ve got Cornell over Colgate—”

Kelso is a hopeless gambler, a pigeon born to be plucked. Shoe can only try to steer him away from his worst hunches.

“By a few maybe,” he cautions. “Starbuck is on the sidelines this year.”

“Then Yale, my God, they’ve only got three men coming back—”

“But their scrubs last year could lick most of the teams in the country, and this Chadwicke is the real article. Who’s the victim?”

“Trinity.”

“Trinity, right — they go down by at least three scores.”

They reach the carpentry building and wait at the door for the work detail to pass inside.

“I’ve got Army over Georgetown by four,” says Kelso when the gang has cleared.

“I’d steer clear of that. Georgetown is turning out a real eleven this year.”

“But Army—”

“—can’t bring their artillery onto the field.”

“Yer wrong about that, laddy.”

Shoe shrugs. “It’s your funeral, Sergeant. Personally, I’d run away like it was on fire.”

Lachman, the contractor, has the shop already banging away when they step in, cons at their benches sawing and staining, hammering together crates and coffins. Shoe worked here for a year, after they’d run him through the baskets and the horse collars, and he always loved the smell and having something to pound. Nose DiNucci is waiting by the chair on the keeper’s platform, his metal basin on a stool and his tools in a box on the floor. Kelso eyes the basin as he steps up.

“Is that water hot?”

“Hot as I can get it, Sergeant,” says the Dago, dipping a thin towel into the basin.

Kelso sits and leans back in the chair, sighing with pleasure as DiNucci wraps the hot, wet cloth around his beezer. Shoe stands on the floor next to the platform, by Kelso’s right hand, waiting. Runner duty is the beans — no heavy lifting, a chance to roam around the joint and poke your sniffer into things — but a lot of standing and waiting goes with it. Kelso starts to talk with the towel over his face while DiNucci makes with the brush and cup, working up a lather.

“I’m already under the blankets with the Missus,” he sighs, “when the fecking telephone rings. We’ve got the service now, the Warden insists on it — and they tell me there’s a passenger car been put on the night run from Buffalo and we’ll be getting a special delivery around three o’clock. ‘It’s the middle of the cold dark night,’ says I. ‘What could you possibly need me there for?’ Unawares as I was of the tragic events at the Pan.”

Shoe has been following stories of the great Exposition in the scraps of rag he’s been able to glom on to. Every watchpocket cannon and con artist not wearing stripes must be in Buffalo, working the herd.

“I don’t read the evening editions,” Kelso confides to the Dago as he carefully peels the towel off, “as I don’t find it conducive to sleep. A stroll around the block after your meal, says I, a friendly hand of pinochle with the neighbors, but nothing to tax the mind.”

“So — big news at the Exposition,” Shoe offers casually. The keeper’s train of thought is prone to frequent derailment, and Shoe has learned to steer him back on track.

“A terrible business. A national shame.”

DiNucci, who is bending down with razor in hand to scrutinize the Sergeant’s lathered neck, looks to Shoe, who nods for him to get busy.

“ ‘Just get yourself down here on the double,’ says the PK, and an order is an order, so I climb into the uniform and I says to Margaret, says I, ‘This will be a great deal of effort about nothing when it comes out in the wash.’ ”

The Sergeant points his chin toward the ceiling to help DiNucci with his scraping.

“And so you can imagine my bestonishment when I arrive to find several hundred extremely agitated citizens, many of them strangers to our town, camped across the street at the station.” Kelso raises his voice to be heard over the whine of an electric table saw. “ ‘Michael,’ I says to myself, ‘this is not the new policy of the New York Central Railway, these are not passengers awaiting transport in the wee hours, but an unlawful assembly determined to obstruct the orderly machinations of our judicial system.’ ”

“All these years on the job,” muses Shoe, “have sharpened your powers of deduction.”

Kelso raises an eyebrow at Shoe.

“And who, might I ask, is the one of us with STATE PRISON stamped on all his buttons?”

“You got me there, Sergeant. So — there was a crowd—”

“A mob, it was, with the bloodlust in their eye, refusing our instructions to peacefully disperse themselves. Captain Singleton was in the process of reading them the Riot Act—”

“That’s a real thing?” interrupts the barber. “The Riot Act?”

“Real as rain. There’s a copy in Warden Mead’s office.”

DiNucci shakes his head. “Live and learn.”

“So this mob—” prompts Shoe.

“Disrespectful is the least of it. Halfway through the Captain’s declamation the train pulls in and all hell breaks loose. The boys in Buffalo have been all over this Goulash fella, you can see that the minute they drag him off the car, he’s been through the wringer backwards and forwards, and he takes one look at his reception committee and his knees give way, the detectives on either side holdin him up by the bracelets, and then the crowd rushes forward — careful of that bit there, it can be tricky—”

Nose carefully shaves the cleft in Kelso’s chin.

“Goulash,” says Shoe.

“Some sort of Hunkie appellation,” frowns the Sergeant. “I heard him say it in the Warden’s office when we took his information, but it’s Goulash to me. Oh, the mob went after that lad hammer and tong they did, and they had him on the ground more than once before we could drag him up the steps and into Administration. I split a few heads with my stick, I can tell you, and there was others got a rifle butt in the chops for their trouble. Twas like one of your lynching events in Old Dixie, only instead of a blackie on the rope it’s an alien assassin that’s insinuated himself onto our fair shores to strike a blow at liberty.”

“It sounded like a hell of a donnybrook out there.”

“I tell you, Shoe, if it hadn’t been for the bravery of our boys in blue they’d have cheated the State for sure.”

“An assassin.” Shoe muses. If you show too much interest they start to think it’s dope you shouldn’t be in on.

“A sniveling little hop o’ me thumb that’s laid a great man low.”

And sometimes you just have to pop the query. “Who did he kill?” asks Shoe.

The Sergeant turns his head to glare. “And where in God’s name have you been?”

“Cell 43,” says Shoe. “Third tier, north wing.”

Kelso raises a brow. “Not so easy to follow the game when you’re incarcerated, is it? That’ll teach you a lesson.” He closes his eyes and settles back, as if the subject is closed.

DiNucci begins on the Sergeant’s cheeks, stretching the skin with his thumb and shaving with long, careful strokes. Shoes gives him the nod to pitch in.

“Sergeant,” asks the Dago, idly curious, “have you ever seen a moving picture?”

It isn’t what Shoe had in mind. DiNucci is in for thirty, having settled his unfaithful wife, as it happens, with a razor, and when asked why by the judge was reported to answer “Cause I didn’t own a gun.”

“Indeed I have,” answers the keeper.

“And what is it, exactly?”

“Just what the words say. A picture that moves. Say you had one of their cameras pointed at us right here. Once the fillum was developed, an audience in New York or Buffalo would be able to see every flick of your blade, every snip of the scissors.”

DiNucci frowns. “Why would they want to see that?”

“It’s the novelty, isn’t it? Seeing it projected on a wall rather than in actual life.”

“There’s plenty things I’d rather see than a shave and a haircut.”

“As would we all. But could you get the camera apparatus close enough to photograph them?”

The Dago ponders this, wiping foam from his blade onto his apron.

“This Goulash character,” says Shoe, casually stepping in to the lull, “did you run him through the usual reception?”

Kelso shifts in the chair. “Nothing usual about it. The Buffalo dicks drag the boy up the stairs like a rag doll and unlock the bracelets and throw him down onto the floor in the Warden’s office, where he begins to froth at the mouth and cry out like a banshee. ‘You’re going to kill me!’ says he. ‘I know you’re going to kill me!’ ”

“And where would he get that idea?”

Kelso opens one eye to search Shoe’s face for irony.

“If you had shot the President,” he says, “you might expect a bit of rough treatment.”

DiNucci gasps. “The President of the United States?”

“No — the President of the Skaneatles Culinary and Debating Society. You think if he’d shot any simple fecking rubberneck at the fair he’d rate a hemp brigade the like of what we saw here last night?”

“So he’s foaming at the mouth,” Shoe prompts, “this Goulash—”

“Doctor Gerin is there and he slaps the lad and yells, straight into his face, ‘Drop the theatricals,’ says he, ‘we know yer faking it!’ ” Kelso shakes his head. “Can you imagine that, making a show that he’s insane when he’s only a fecking little anarchist.”

Shoe rubs elbows with murderers on a daily basis, men who have killed for money or passion or survival, and most of them seem pretty well organized upstairs. To kill somebody for a hinky-dink idea of how the world ought to work, and to do it in broad daylight in front of ten thousand witnesses — this, he thinks, would qualify you as a serious candidate for the bughouse.

“That what he copped to?” he asks. “Being an anarchist?”

“Words to that effect,” the screw answers nasally as DiNucci pinches and lifts his honker to get at his upper lip. “Anarchist, anti-Christ, something along those lines. He knew what he was about and said as much between all his blubbering. So we just pulled his clothes off and yanked a cooler suit onto him and chucked the murdering little bastard into isolation.”

“They had me down there in the nut-hatch for a couple years,” says DiNucci, a troubled look on his face. “Right after the trial.”

“Matteawan.”

“I had to beg them to send me here. That place’ll drive you crazy.”

Crazy. Unless, thinks Shoe, Goulash was only following orders, was the worst kind of sap, buying into some load of malarkey he heard in a speech. Like these ginks who can’t wait to climb into Uncle’s uniform, think they’re fighting for Old Glory and instead get sent to some monkey patch in the Pacific to snatch the goods for the ones who got the whole game rigged, the ones who’d sic the bulls on a sorefoot private soldier if he dared to call at their back door for a drop of water.

“So they’ll burn this character for sure,” says Shoe.

Kelso shakes his head. “The President has only been wounded, and he is a solid, fleshy man. Girth is Nature’s strategy for protecting the vital organs. No, Mac will come through like a champion. And our little friend in the punishment corridor,” he nods toward the south wing, “will be with us indefinitely.”

Shoe tries to wrap his mind around it. “Shooting the President.”

“Some are born to greatness,” declaims the Sergeant as DiNucci gently pats astringent on his face, “and some seek notoriety through its destruction. Now go get me the paper, and be quick about it.”

Shoe leaves the noisy woodshop and full-steps down the center path, crows solemn above him, filling the birches, as he heads for the administration building. There are bulls strolling the tops of the walls, bulls on the parapets, peeping him all the way across the yard. He sees Lester Gorcey on all fours with the rest of the grounds detail, frowning at the grass as if daring it to grow. Shoe slows, then stops a few yards away and kneels to pretend to deal with his laces. At least one of the bulls up top, probably that wildass Thompson, must have him in the sights by now.

“New guest on the Row,” he says softly, keeping his eyes fixed on his gunboats. “Shot the President in Buffalo.”

Gorcey reaches out to clip a single blade that has dared to rise above its neighbors. Stick your head up in Auburn and they’ll cut it off. “Cleveland is dead?”

Not so easy at all, thinks Shoe, to keep track of the game in here.

“McKinley,” he hisses. “Hanging by a thread.”

He stands and continues down the path. Gorcey will share it with the grounds detail and they’ll clue in the whole south wing. Shoe slows as he passes the punishment cells and the shock shop, and though there is nothing to see but brick, can’t help running his eyes over it.

He’d been young when they transferred him up from Blackwell’s on his first jolt, young and stupid. Pilsbury wasn’t running the Island then and it had been a free-for-all, hard to tell the cons from the poverty cases from the derelicts they passed off as prison guards. You could buy a tumble with a whore for a half-dozen cigarettes. Pick up a nail too, since it was the diseased ones they sent to die there. He’d been out and about there, running with a gang, and then all of a sudden transferred to Auburn and forced to walk in lockstep like a fucking caterpillar’s ass and not a word past your gizzard from lights on to lights out and he kicked, told a keeper where he could put his stick but instead the screw put it hard over his head, more than once, and he woke up in the dark in a metal box on the Row.

First there was the sound, the steady deep thrumming of the prison dynamo through the wall, and then the sting of the rivets sticking up from the metal floor into his flesh. He was wearing a filthy uniform a size too large and shoes made of felt. He crawled to the nearest wall, rivets digging into his knees, and used it to pull himself shakily to his feet. His head was throbbing and there was dried blood on his face. The walls were all sheet metal, a little farther apart than in the cells upstairs. He felt his way around to a narrow, barred slit, head-high in a solid iron door, dizzy, grabbing the bars to steady himself, his mouth like dusty carpet as he began to shout.

“What happened? Where the fuck am I?”

“Where the fuck you think you are?” called a voice from over to the left. “And you don’t have to shout.”

It was true, everything they said echoing in whatever space lay beyond the iron door.

“What time is it?”

The laughter came from both sides, echoing. “You gotta be kiddin me.”

“How many of you down here?”

“Eight cells, half of em full now that you come. The fella in Number Three don’t talk.”

“Then how you know he’s there?”

“How you know I’m here?”

“I can hear you.”

“I might just be your imagination. You could be buried in a coffin somewhere, havin a dream.”

“Stiffs don’t dream.”

“How do you know?”

Whoever it was in the cell to the left, he didn’t like him.

“Relax, kid,” said a different voice from the right. “Whatever they got in mind for you, aint nothin you can do about it.”

“Who’s that?”

“That’s Number Eight.”

“He don’t have a name?”

“My name is Kemmler,” said the voice from the right.

Shoe knew that Kemmler was the gink they were going to hook up to their new electrical contraption at the end of the week.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It don’t matter now.”

“Number Eight,” says the first voice, “is three steps from the door to the chamber. So’s the Long Walk won’t be so long.”

Shoe gripped the bars harder, little sense of what was up or down in the total blackness. “I need to see a doctor.”

“Yeah, and I need a steak and some spuds and a jug of Scotch.”

“How bout water?”

More laughter then, echoing.

“When do they come?”

“They come when they want to and don’t when they don’t. You’ll get used to it.”

“For how long?”

“Depends on what you done.”

“Mouthed off to a keeper.”

“Which one?”

“Freidlander.”

There was no response but the grinding of the dynamo.

“Hey! You still there? Jesus, don’t leave me in the dark—”

“Don’t worry, son,” said Kemmler then. “We aint goin nowheres.”

He went back down on the floor then, scuffing along on his keister till he found the papier-mâché bucket, no lid, to throw up in. His head hurt like hell, and was still hurting like hell when there was a scrape and a clang and then light, enough light for him to see the four walls, nothing but sheet metal and rivets and the stinking bucket on the floor and some torn strips of newspaper left to wipe himself with and the little barred slit in the iron door that he rose and stumbled over to. On the other side of the door was a vaulted stone dungeon, maybe fifty feet long, and a screw he’d never seen before walking toward his cell, footsteps echoing in the cavern, holding a bullseye lantern hung from the ceiling by a very long chain.

“You,” said the screw when he shined the bullseye in through the window slit, “step back from there and get your cup.”

Shoe took two steps back, then located a tin cup on the floor by the door. The narrow spout of an oil can was poked through the bars, waggled.

“Come get it.”

Shoe brought the cup under the spout and the screw tilted the can for a moment before pulling it out, leaving less than a finger’s thickness of water in the cup.

“What’s this?”

“What’s it look like?”

“That’s all I get?”

“One gill,” said the screw, “twice a day.”

“Can’t nobody live on that.”

“Do your best,” said the screw, and moved on to the next cell.

The water barely wet his mouth, not enough to work up a full swallow. He pressed his face against the window bars, just able to see the screw shining the bullseye lamp into the last cell in the dungeon corridor, then turning to head back his way.

“How long I got to be here?” he asked, trying to push the desperation from his voice.

“Keep count of your water,” said the keeper as he opened the door to the south wing, then extinguished the lantern and let it swing back into the dungeon. “One gill twice a day, you keep count. When we let you back into the population you can figure the time.”

The door to the wing slammed shut, the key grinding in the lock, then darkness again and the rumble of the dynamo and Shoe smelling his own puke in the tiny cell. He threw his cup hard and listened to it ping off the wall and rattle on the metal floor and then he lay down, rivets digging into his hide, stripping his filthy jacket off to roll into a cushion for his head. He lay for some time, probably awake cause who could dream such a monotonous hell and then there was a new voice, deep and echoing, singing in what he thought might be Yiddish.

“Who the fuck is that?” he called out from the floor.

“Number Three,” answered the con in the cell to his left.

“I thought he didn’t talk.”

“Singin aint talkin.”

The song was strange and mournful, full of quick risings and fallings and things that sounded more like moans than words.

“How long does he go at it?”

“No saying.” The echo from the vaulted chamber made it sound like the singer was everywhere, like the cell was Shoe’s head and the con was inside of it, wailing. “But when he stops you kind of miss it.”

Shoe was there long enough to learn to sleep through the singing, or to work it into his constant nightmare, was there when Number Two got pulled out and sent back to the tiers, a little gimpy con he later got to know was Pete Driscoll, was still in stir the day they came for Kemmler and made history with their electric death chair. A regular crowd come into the vault that day, four screws for an escort and a holy joe mumbling from his Bible, Shoe only getting a glimpse of the condemned man’s back as they led him out through the other door, the one that led to the shock shop.

It was the last he ever pulled cooler time. If he could con college-educated pigeons out of their pocket stuffing he could convince a bunch of dimwit screws he was a square egg, a new man. It was still your life, zebra suit or no, and you had to make the best of it.

The crows are restless in the afternoon, shifting from tree to tree, scolding each other, bending the branches with their weight. Shoe reaches the administration building and halts in front of Riordan.

“Shoemaker, sir. On an errand for Sergeant Kelso. Second floor.”

The keeper nods and he enters, climbs the stairs. There are no more than a half dozen runners assigned on First Work, and the day-shift turnkeys are used to seeing him loose. He knocks before entering and then stands just inside the bullpen door, waiting, with eyes locked on nothing, for them to cop to his presence. Dortmunder has his jacket unbuttoned, straddling the bench by his locker, his huge belly resting on the pine.

“It took us some time to perfect the procedure,” he says, “but now they come from all over the country, all over the world to observe it. You’ll get a go at it soon enough.”

Flanagan is there, and Gratz who the cons call Der Captain after the guy with the walrus moustache in the comic panels and a new one nobody has a nickname for yet.

“When we did our first it hadn’t been used on anything bigger than a dog.”

“There was that trolley worker in Rochester,” offers Flanagan.

“Oh, there was no doubt the juice would do for the job, no doubt at all. But the trolley fella was an accident, left smoking on the cobblestones with his hair stuck out like a scalded cat. A stray bolt from a thundercloud would have done the same to him. But an execution is a solemn business, a state function, and we had no idea if the contraption they’d rigged together down there was capable of completing the task in a dignified manner.”

“Ax-murderer, as I recall,” says Gratz.

“A brute of a man. You were here then, weren’t you, Shoe?” Flanagan somehow knowing he is there without turning to look.

“Two cells down from him on the Row.”

Dortmunder squints his eyes. “You? In the punishment block?”

Shoe shows them a wistful smile. “Before I got wise to how the joint operates.”

“It was just at sunrise,” Flanagan recalls. “ ‘Take your time, boys,’ says he, ‘and do it right.’ He even asked us to snug up the electrode on his head.”

“This is before we knew to stuff a bit of wet sponge in there,” says Dort-munder to the rookie screw. “To improve your connectivity.”

“Then we dropped a hood over his face, so as not to upset the witnesses present—”

“A full house that morning, two dozen at least. Novelty will always pack them in.”

“And as soon as we had him squared away they yanked the lever for the first jolt.”

“It took more than one?” asks the new man.

Dortmunder sighs. “We didn’t have our own dynamo then, and a belt came loose on the one they’d borrowed. Kemmler only got a prick of the devil’s tail and it stopped.”

“He must have been scared.”

“One might suppose so,” says Gratz. “But we stuck a scrap of shoe leather between his teeth before the hood went on, and he was unable to share his observations.”

“So they fixed the generator—”

“In a flash. And the second helping — well, there were members of the press observing and the effectiveness of the device to be established—”

“It must have been at least four minutes.”

“Full power?”

“Oh, he yanked the lever all the way down, all right.”

“Just to be certain. It was ‘Molly, ye’ve burnt the roast’ in there.”

“The whole body stiffens,” says Gratz, tensing his muscles and arching his head and shoulders backward, “and if it wasn’t for the straps fastened tight it would fly clear across the room.”

“And the smoke—”

“That’s your resistance,” says Dortmunder. “I’ve discussed it at length with the electrician fella—”

“Davis.”

“Him. And he explained to me that different bodies present different resistance to the electrical current. For instance, electricity will pass through copper wire—”

“Like shit through a tin horn.”

“So to speak—”

“What I don’t understand,” says Flanagan, squeezing his brow into a frown, “is why a tin horn would have shit in it in the first place?”

“We’re getting off the subject here, gentlemen.” Dortmunder heaves a thick leg over the bench and pulls himself to his feet. “The greater the resistance the electricity has to pass through, the greater the heat generated. So if a great deal of electrical current—voltage is the word for it — attempts to pass through a body of great resistance — an ax-murderer, let us say — you can imagine the heat that might result.”

“So a stouter man—”

“—will burn hotter than a little wisp like this Goulash fella, should it come to that. It’s scientific fact.”

“Is McKinley on his way out?”

They all turn then and look at Shoe.

“And to what do we owe your presence here, Shoemaker?”

Shoe straightens slightly. “Sergeant Kelso requests that I bring him the newspaper, sir.”

Dortmunder jerks his head toward the jumble of early edition lying on the end of the bench. “And when did Kelso learn to read?”

Shoe steps forward to gather up the entire pile. “Thank you, sir.”

“Now, green corn through a goose, I understand,” says Flanagan, brow still knitted. “It paints a lively picture. But shit in a horn, or any other musical instrument for that matter—”

Dortmunder rolls his eyes to Shoe and jerks his head toward Flanagan. “And you cons complain about the Rule of Silence.”

In the anteroom Shoe nicks a stub of a pencil, slipping it through the string dangling by the roster sheet on the wall. He stops on the stairway landing halfway down, out of sight but able to hear any movement from the bulls, and makes his kites, scribbling on scraps torn from the newspaper and folding them a dozen ways before slipping them into his jacket pocket. He sees that there is both the Auburn paper and the Buffalo News and quickly separates the local rag and stuffs it under his shirt.

He drops one of the kites, without breaking stride, only inches from Lester Gorcey’s grass snippers as he passes.

“I sent you for the newspaper,” Kelso complains when Shoe steps back into the shop, “not for an Easter egg hunt.”

“Your brothers in blue were shooting the breeze.” He hands Kelso the News. “It took a while to get their attention.”

“Like a bunch of old hens.” The keeper disappears behind the unfolded sporting pages. “It’s a wonder the lot of yez don’t scarper over the wall some day while they’re up in the bullpen floggin their gums.”

DiNucci is finished with his work, putting his equipment away. He raises his chin to Shoe, who flicks a kite into the Dago’s box. Nose will be cutting at the broom shop next and can whisper the news to the boys there. Shoe takes a quick peek at the News headlines about the assassination attempt.

“Jeffries versus Ruhlin,” muses Sergeant Kelso from behind his wall of paper. “What d’ye make of it, Shoe?”

First Work ends and Shoe heads up Kelso’s company, full-stepping to the shithouse to retrieve their cleaned buckets and full-stepping back to the north wing to be counted and single file up the iron stairs to the tier and waiting, counted again, till they step into their cells and are locked down. There is a half-hour before dinner and Shoe carefully works the stub of pencil into the lining of his cap just behind the bill where it won’t show and reads through the Auburn paper he’s smuggled. He’ll need to lay that off during Second Work. They search the cells while you’re out, picking one or two at random and going over them with a jeweler’s loupe, even his own. There is no trust in trustee anymore, not enough confidence left in the world to work a paying dodge.

The bulls on the outside, in the old days, understood the game. Oh, they’d give you a whack on the noggin if they caught you below the Dead-line south of Fulton without a pass from the Chief, or if you were late with your contribution, but they understood that if the marks were on the square there was no way to beat them. Green goods, the glimmer drop, gold bricks — if they got no larceny in their hearts they’ll walk straight away from you. And if you trimmed the wrong bird, somebody connected, the word came down and an envelope appeared on the desk of the local Tammany chief, every cent accounted for, the offended party reimbursed, minus handling, and then it was back to business. Byrnes ran the detectives then, and was as square as you could ask for, insisting on solid evidence before he beat a confession out of you. But once the Lexow Report come out and they put that little four-eyes Roosevelt in charge it was every man for himself. No order left in the game, no sense of proportion. Like the play that bought him this bit.

The high hat from Philly and his midget sidekick are practically begging to be taken, three rows ahead in the swells’ box and piping Shoe and Al’s conversation, till finally the high hat turns and hoists an eyebrow at them. “I gather that you gentlemen are searching for an investor?”

Al Garvin playing sore and thumping Shoe on the chest. “I told you to keep your voice down, you mutt.”

And Shoe, feigning sly and stupid at the same time. “Look, Mister, it’d be better if you didn’t hear nothin, see?”

The high-rollers all gathered for the Stakes at Saratoga and every dip and swindler on the East Coast gathered to take a swipe at them. Fred Taral was favored riding Archduke but the suckers were leaning toward Willie Sims up on Ben Brush — the little goat could fly on a dry track — and him and Al discussing a proposition about buying the race, just loud enough to be overheard by Mr. Silk Drawers and the one who keeps braying that he’s the Gold King of the Yukon.

“What he said, Mister,” echoes Al. “Forget you heard it.”

“I didn’t hear an amount mentioned,” says the sidekick.

You set the hook right and they practically choke trying to swallow it.

He and Al trade another look, like now that they been caught at it there’s no use lying.

“Too rich for our blood,” says Al.

“Perhaps we could be of service,” the high hat says, winking to show it’s only a lark, a trick that naughty boys might play. “But of course we’d need to be assured of the outcome.”

“We can’t guarantee you Ben Brush wins,” Shoe cuts in. “Only that Arch-duke don’t.”

“It’s four grand,” says Al. They have moved up a couple rows and lean on the divider behind the swells now. “But we only got three-fifty, maybe four hundred between us.”

If you can get them adding and subtracting, working percentages, you’re more than halfway home.

“And if we were to make up the deficit—?”

“Then the Archduke gets assassinated in the backstretch.”

The tall one and the runt trade a look.

“We’ll need to witness the transaction,” says the swell.

Garvin stands then, swiveling around like he’s peeping the stands for Pinkertons. “I’ll go square it with Taral. Catch up with me in ten.”

Shoe is left to hold the pigeon’s wings.

“Woman troubles,” he explains. “Alla these jockeys they’re crazy for women. Get used to all that power between their legs, if you know what I mean.”

The sawed-off character, who has informed them and everybody within shouting distance that he is Flapjack Fredericks and that he made a pile in the gold fields, winks then, digging an elbow into the high hat. “Women can be an expensive hobby.”

“You’re telling me,” Shoe returns, and then the fourth race ends, Taral picking his nag up by the tail and dragging it into third.

“Money problems or no,” muses Shoe, “he’s a hell of a horse-pilot.”

Shoe takes them on the fox hunt then, in and out of doors, under the stands for a while, lots of nosing out to peep both ways and then wave them ahead. Give the ginks a thrill. They come out by the far end of the paddocks and there is Garvin with little Sammy Chase dressed like Fred Taral — the green silks from the last race splattered with turf, whip resting over his shoulder — deep in conversation. Shoe whistles low and Al pricks his ears up and hustles over, mopping sweat off his dome with a rag. Nobody could sweat on cue like Al Garvin.

“The guy is impossible,” he sighs. “He wants another two beans.”

Shoe is steamed at Al for upping the ante without squaring it beforehand. He’d done it once before, playing the nag-doctor who’d lost his license and was willing to dope the favorite for a modest sum, and almost queered the grift.

“From each of youse,” adds Al.

“Greedy little midget,” hisses Shoe.

“I don’t think that should pose any difficulty,” says the high hat, holding up a hand. If there was anything else quicker than a glacier in the race it would be a tough sell, but everybody agrees it’s strictly Ben Brush and Archduke, with the rest of the tailbangers left back at the gate.

“Also he worries you might be a pair of plainclothes bulls,” says Al. “So he don’t want to meet you.”

The high hat pulls out a card, presents it. “This should allay his fears.” Like a Pinkerton couldn’t print up a phony greeter.

Shoe is able to peep that it says YARDLEY ENTWHISTLE JR. with a Philly location and then something about legal services. Shysters make good pigeons cause they think they know all the angles.

“I don’t carry a card,” Fredericks admits, not to the manor born. “But where sporting men gather to match their greenbacks, I am legendary.”

Al nearly chokes on this one, but keeps up his game. “I’ll see what I can do,” he says, “but I’d bet my mother he don’t act so suspicious if we let him sniff the kale up close.”

Garvin can turn on the color if that’s what they’re looking for, give them a story to tell back at the club.

So Yardley surrenders a thin stack of hundreds that look like they been ironed and the Gold King peels off his green from a wad that could choke an alderman and Al scampers back with that and the calling card. There’s a little back and forth and then Sammy snatches the bills, looks over, and raises his whip. A nice touch, the jockey salute to seal the deal.

“The thing is,” confides Shoe as he leads the swells, lighter by several grand, back to the stands, “we don’t any of us want to lay our action with the same book. They get wise and the odds are gonna tumble.”

“I have a personal wager in mind,” winks the high hat, in very high spirits. “A gentleman of my acquaintance who merits a good fleecing.”

Shoe seconds the high hat’s grin. “I’d like to see his face when Taral puts the collar on that oat-burner in the stretch,” he says. “That boy can make a horse run backwards.”

Shoe shakes hands then and thanks them for being so white about the whole deal. He and Garvin and Sammy Chase are at the station waiting for the westbound by the time the post horn blows for the Stakes.

There is always the chance with the Lovesick Jockey that the pigeon will make out, that whatever gluepot he’s put his cheese on will have its best day ever and outrun the favorite to the wire. Ben Brush was small and ugly but nobody’s dog, all heart and flying hooves, and with the Dueling Dinge up on his back he had a shot. As it happened, though, Archduke not only took him but took him from behind in the stretch, Fred Taral driving him through a crowd with the whip and the Duke kicking turf in everybody’s faces by the finish. The Gold King just laughs it off, says We been skinned, buddy, but Mr. Yardley Entwhistle Jr. is honor-bound to fork over another grand or two to the gink he’d planned on trimming. A man without humor, he calls a judge he happened to go to a high-toned diploma mill with and makes noise about heading up a commission to probe and castigate and the judge tells his pals in Albany who get a healthy rake-off from Saratoga and immediately passes on not only a verbal description of the three of them but a drawing — seems Yardley is a wizard with the pen and ink — all so quick that no word goes out, no warning, no Send back the take and we’re square, just they all get pinched stepping out of a Pullman in Poughkeepsie and run before that very same judge.

Not so bad, fixable even, only Al Garvin tends to unwind with a couple shots of the hard stuff after a good score, nerve tonic he calls it, and is so tight he don’t remember Yardley Entwhistle Jr.’s card still sitting in his coat pocket.

“Three years for this?” Shoe complained when Tammany had thrown their hands up and the mouthpieces had said Cop a plea and scarpered with their pay and the judge, Yardley Jr.’s old classmate, settled his hash.

“One year for this,” said the judge, “and the other two for all the things you’ve done we never caught you at.”

Which, strange as it might seem, is some consolation.

Footsteps on the stairway again and the long bar clunking, the litany of cell doors opened till it is his own and Shoe steps out. Dinner is mutton stew today, one of his favorites. Monday is bean soup, ham, and potatoes, Tuesday pork and beans, beef stew on Wednesday, Thursday hash and cornbread, Friday chicken and gravy, Saturday mutton and Sunday just the oatmeal porridge in the morning, chapel, and the long day alone in your cell to think about how hungry you are. Captain Grogan leaves them standing for a long count. Goulash will be getting his two ounces of bread about now, and the gill of water to tease his gullet with. Grogan taps and Shoe half-turns with the others. Double tap and the cons short-step down the gallery.

The mutton is hard to swallow today, tougher than usual. Shoe has grown to hate the back of the head of the second-tier con who sits at the shelf in front of him. Keepers stroll up and down the rows, making sure you keep your jaws working and your glimmers fixed on nothing. They could march you straight from First Work to dinner if they wanted, and save everybody a lot of routine. But routine is the point, to make you feel like a cog in the world’s slowest gristmill, grinding, always grinding, instead of a person with enough left upstairs to have an idea of your own.

He scored an apple last week, first of the fall, traded for a word in Grogan’s ear about who should fill Wiley Wilson’s spot on the bottom row. Wiley had been in since two days before Lincoln was shot. “Or else,” he liked to say, “they would of pinned that on me too.” Wiley locked up in the next cell during Shoe’s first jolt here, and he’d been at Auburn through the yoke and the paddles and the shower-bath torture and finally been made gallery boy on the bottom so he wouldn’t have to deal with stairs anymore. On Wednesday he didn’t step out with the rest in the morning and when Captain Lenahan went in to rap him on the shins with the stick he didn’t twitch. Shoe was on the detail, holding a corner of the blanket they carried him out in, the old man dried out and weighing next to nothing. He’d lived past all his kin, so a couple of the mokes from the south-wing coal gang dug him a hole in the little prison patch and they dropped the body into it.

Pete Driscoll had left the apple in the fold of Shoe’s mattress. Shoe took most of the evening to finish it.

Second Work he is running for Dudley in clerical, who likes to keep you hopping. Get me some water, get me some chewing gum, pull down the shade, pull it back up, run this note here, run that note there, run down to the kitchen and get me some java.

“More when I know it,” Shoe whispers as he doles the kites out in the shops, cons hissing questions at him when their supervisor isn’t looking.

“Shoal-gosh,” says Stan Zabriski in the ironworks. “That’s how you say it.”

“The Hunkie.”

“He’s Polish. You say the c-z like a s-h.”

“You people expect to get ahead in this country,” Shoe tells him, “you better straighten that out.”

He is less than surprised, proud even, that the scrap of newspaper he left at the broom shop has beat him to the ironworks.

“Telling jokes, he is,” says Sergeant Kelso when he stops by clerical to check on his pay slip. “Sitting up with his hand firm on the tiller of the ship of state. That’s our Mac.”

“You’ve heard more?”

“The wop who drives the breadwagon got it straight from the special edition. They’ve dug out all but one of the bullets and he’s as right as rain.”

“Thank God,” says Dudley, scribbling in his ledger. “If that damn cowboy gets in we’re all cooked.”

Kelso sits on the edge of the desk. “Oh, Teddy’s all right. A bit impetuous is all. The boys on Capitol Hill will cure him of that soon enough.”

Shoe stands by the blackboard memorizing the shift assignments for the next month. Never know what you might earn with that sort of dope to pass out. “So they left a slug in him?”

“Let sleeping dogs lie, says I. If Mac’s not squawking it’s best to leave it sit there.”

“Sit where?”

“If they knew,” says the keeper, giving Shoe an exasperated look, “d’ye think they wouldn’t have yanked it out of him by now?”

As you come in from Second Work there is a bin full of bread and Shoe grabs two slices to take up to his cell, thinking of Shoal-gosh down there sitting on the rivets, pondering his future with an empty stomach. His future that sits only three steps away, on the other side of the barred oaken door. Shoe pulls his rack down and lays out the mattress and blankets and sits on the edge of it, slowly eating the bread and draining the tin cup of warm coffee left on his shelf. They come through twice a night down in the punishment cells, shining the bullseye lantern in on your face and calling your name and if you don’t repeat it right away they come in and kick you where it hurts. What surprised him was how there could be bedbugs when there was no bed, by the third day a lively nest of crotch crickets in his pants. Scratching their bites and finding and killing them became his only entertainment. The Yiddish singer fell apart a week after they fried Kemmler, screaming how his brains were leaking out through his ears and pressing his shit through the narrow slit in his door till the bulls got arm-weary from slugging him and wrote him a ticket to Matteawan.

“What have you got to say for yourself?” Grogan asked Shoe when he finally wobbled back out into the yard, pale and squinting, his teeth loose with scurvy.

“You win.”

“We always do,” smiled the keeper.

There are worse things, he muses, than doing a three-spot in Auburn. It could be your home, like old Wiley, in the slammer so long that everybody outside forgets you. Or you could be stuck on the Row like this Shoal-gosh, listening to the dynamo grind.

A little before lights-out Pete Driscoll gimps down the gallery, pausing by Shoe’s door.

“Garvin says he’ll give you three-to-two the President lives.”

They’ve planted Al in the south wing, but he and Shoe manage to keep a few wagers running — Al lost a bundle to him on Bryan in the last election, everything he’d won on the Gans — McGovern scrap. It helps to pass the time.

“He’s betting on Mac?”

“Says he’ll serve his full jolt in the White House and waltz on back to Canton.”

According to the papers every two-bit croaker in Buffalo stuck their fingers in the guy, searching for the missing slug. Shoe’s own father walked out of the hospital with a clean bill of health from the docs, only to be kayoed by an infection a week later.

“Tell him I’ll take it for fifty.”

Pete limps away, going down the iron steps one at a time. The bulb hanging overhead flickers, then goes out with the light in the rest of the wing as the seven o’clock from Syracuse rattles past outside. Shoe lies on his back in his prison-issue union suit and listens to the prison telegraph. Tapping from above, tapping from below, tapping from all sides, the bars singing with questions. They all want to know, but Shoe has no answer.

He dreams of crows.

LAZARUS

The men don’t want to leave the caves. It is cool inside during the day and there is water running, cold water, in one of them. The American is fevered, mumbling, and sleeps through the first day inside. Fulanito is strutting, proud of his capture, for even if the American is a negro he might be worth somebody in a trade. There was trading in the early days of the campaign, when they were still an army, a half-dozen insurgentes descalzos equal to one American captain. Orestes comes back to report the American column has in fact marched on over the mountains toward Subig and there seem to be no more behind them. The woman from Las Ciegas brings the American water twice without being told to.

The fever of the negro breaks on the afternoon of the second day. Diosdado goes to sit by him.

“Do you understand your situation?” he asks, speaking slowly.

“I got to carry or you gone shoot me.”

Diosdado smiles. “We do not wish to do this. We should be fighting on the same side, you and I.”

“We’re not.”

The man is not stupid. Diosdado asks the woman from Las Ciegas, who speaks Zambal and Tagalog, to bring some of the broiled kamote left from the morning meal, then watches him eat.

“Do you like these?”

“Like eatin em more than carryin em,” says the American. “You a general?”

“Teniente. A lieutenant — in name only. As we have disbanded the army, rank is no longer so formal.”

“Where you learn to talk?”

“In Hongkong. From the British.”

He resembles the mountain negritos in the nap of his hair and the shade of his skin, but his features are what Diosdado guesses is a combination of the African and the European. The man cocks his head as he looks back, calculating.

“How you mix?”

“In Zambales many of us are partly Chinese. And I have a Spanish grandfather on my mother’s side of the family,” he explains. “You, on the other hand, are a Royal Scot.”

The man almost smiles. “They call me Roy in the company.”

“And why do you fight for them?”

It is what he has been wanting to ask, what truly puzzles him, but suddenly out loud it sounds rude.

Royal Scott considers, shrugs slightly. “S’what I signed up to do.”

“But why?”

“Best job they offerin.”

“A job killing people you know nothing about.”

“All I got to know is they shoot at me and I shoot back.” The man softens his voice. “I’m a p’fessional soldier, Regular Army,” he says, face growing blank with belief. “You fight who they say to fight.”

“A mercenary.”

“Pay aint bad, when it comes.”

“Did you ever think,” asks Diosdado, trying to make it sound offhand, “of doing what we have done? Defying your oppressors?”

“You mean the white folks?”

“Of course.”

“Quick way to get yourself hung.”

“But your comrades here, men of color, are trained soldiers, they have arms—”

“Back home they got eight, nine white folks for every one of us. Got more guns than anybody can count, got a navy, got cannons. You seen em, seen what they can do—”

“Somebody is fighting back. They shot your president.”

The American’s face reveals very little, the information seeming to confuse more than to shock or upset him.

“Colored man do it?”

“No.”

“That’s good, then. Colored man shoot the President, there be hell to pay.”

“If you join with us,” says Diosdado, “fight with us, you would be a free man.”

“Free to go home?”

Diosdado can think of nothing to counter this. No, the man is not stupid.

He looks at his soldiers, most of them sitting at the mouth of the cave, moving as little as possible, making grim jokes with each other in soft voices. He is not certain that a one of them could articulate a vision of the future they are fighting for, but each, he knows, would risk his life unthinkingly for any of the others.

“Mule don’t care which side is loadin weight on his back, and a mule don’t kill nobody,” says the American. “Just think bout me like I’m a mule.”

SCRUBWOMEN

The townhouse is almost bigger than the Eden Musee, and nothing here is faked in wax. They are working their way down through the stories under the supervision of Mrs. Coldcroft, who becomes distant and red-cheeked by the late afternoon.

“She’s been rearranging that liquor cabinet again,” Molly will say after the housemistress has made her way, chin elevated but gripping the balustrade tightly, down the grand staircase. “No dust on them bottles.”

It is Brigid and Molly and the colored girl with a week’s labor in the palace, dusting and scrubbing and scraping and polishing and scrubbing some more. Molly talks as much as she scrubs, maybe more, and the colored girl seems unsure of the work, as if she has never done a great deal of it.

“It’s criminal, if ye ask me,” says Molly from her knees on the massive parquet floor of the ballroom. “One family with all of this. Ye could shelter half of Kilkenny in here.”

“Thank Jaysus that’s not who we’re cleaning up after,” says Brigid.

“Greedy people,” says Molly, looking around disapprovingly at the huge room, dozens of chairs pushed together in one corner, a balcony large enough for a small orchestra over her head.

“Fortunate,” Brigid corrects, head down, digging into where the baseboard meets the floor with her rag. “They’re fortunate people.”

“Fortune — yer right, that’s what it is. Fortune has smiled upon them. Fortune has emptied its bloody pockets into their laps, is what it’s done. Railroad money, if I’m not mistaken.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Molly sniffs the air. “To me it smells like railroad money.”

“And to me,” says Brigid, wringing the cloth into the bucket, “it smells like Sapolio and vinegar.”

The colored girl works steadily, silently, by the heavy velvet drapes, now and then stealing a glance at Brigid to take note of how she is doing it. Not that there’s any mystery.

“Hot water, brown soap, and elbow grease,” her Ma used to say. “And plenty of the latter.”

The family has left “for the season” as Mrs. Coldcroft put it, though what that season might be Brigid has no idea. She wonders if Harry comes from a house like this down in the South, with its gas lighting in every room, its entrance hall and staircases, its beautiful stained-glass windows in the parlor and delicate gilded tea tables in the salon, canopied bed in the lady’s room and wallpaper with huntsmen on it in the gentleman’s, with a dining room that will seat a hundred, four chandeliers required to light them all, its marble floors and skylights and domed ceilings and fireplaces and dark-wood library that smells like the inside of a humidor. Did he grow up with servants, colored girls perhaps more robust than their working partner, to see to his every whim? When Brigid asks about it he tries to divert her to another subject, revealing only that his father is a judge of some sort.

“Darlin, ye’ve got to put some muscle into it,” Molly calls to the colored girl, who shyly told them her name was Jessie. “Just pushin the soap around won’t get it clean. Have ye never washed a floor before?”

“Why don’t ye demonstrate it for her?” says Brigid, lightly. “Bein an expert at the trade.”

Molly gives her a narrow look but does go back to her scrubbing. The only way to deal with it is to concentrate on what is within your arm’s reach and not think about the vast areas yet to come. The best bedroom was more detail work — putting camphor gum in the linen chests, replacing the sachets in the emptied drawers of the vanity, polishing the beautifully carved rosewood posts and headboard of the bed with beeswax, hauling the Oriental rugs out back to be beaten and aired. Mrs. Coldcroft was there all the while, of course, to be sure none of them pocketed a souvenir or curled up for a nap on the plump, inviting mattress, but the light, filtered through damask curtains, was lovely in the morning and the smell of the room was like a spring garden. It is the hallways and the stairs, carpets pulled up for their ministrations, and this football pitch of a ballroom where it took an hour just to wipe the dust off the top of the dado rail all around, that are apt to break your spirit.

Brigid finds it all so beautiful, and wonders if the lady, whoever she is, does not merely move from room to room during the day, looking upon each finely crafted detail with awe and admiration. Or is the society life so engaging that you barely have time to notice your surroundings? She doesn’t worry much about how the family came by their fortune, only that such a place exists, exists on a block of similar houses in the very same city that she herself resides in, a palace that puts the one moldy-stone Irish castle she’s seen to shame. If only it were available for everyone to enjoy, like the Musee—

“It’s about time to change, wouldn’t ye say?” calls Molly, looking into her bucket.

Mrs. Coldcroft insists that they get their water in the scullery, which is three floors down.

Brigid sighs. “So yer hungry.”

Molly is a strapping Kilkenny girl with an appetite to match her size. “Ye’ve read me mind,” she smiles. “I was just feelin a bit light-headed, I was.”

The colored girl follows them down, careful not to spill on the stairs. The idea is to go from top to bottom, cleaning backward out of every room, so as never to foul their own handiwork.

Mrs. Coldcroft is in the kitchen, slumped over the baking table, sleeping with her head resting on her arms.

“They probably run her ragged when they’re here, poor thing,” whispers Molly as they pass through. “I’d crave a drop or two meself.”

They lift stools into the butler’s pantry to eat at the shelf where the meals are arranged before going up to table in the dumbwaiter. Molly crosses herself, bows her head over her bulging ham sandwich.

“May the good Lord and all the saints above bestow their blessing upon us,” she says, “and kape our poor Mr. McKinley on the road to recovery.”

“Did ye vote for him then?” asks Brigid, who knows that Molly has family, mostly coppers, in the Tammany machine.

“I did not,” she snorts, indignant. “But I’d sooner have him at the top than that little Roosevelt. He tossed me cousin Hughie off the force, fer nothin more than a little tit-fer-tat.”

“He’s a reformer—”

“Let him reform the bankers and the coal barons as rubs elbows with him in his fancy clubs, then,” says Molly, attacking her sandwich, “and lave our byes in blue alone.”

The colored girl has only a poppyseed roll without butter.

“And where d’ye hail from, darlin?” asks Molly, who has not a mean bone in her body nor a sharp thought in her head, as she attacks her sandwich. “Somewheres in the South, is it?”

“North Carolina,” says Jessie.

“And what brung ye up here to the cold and the crowd?”

The girl thinks for a long moment before answering. “It was time to leave,” she says.

Molly accepts it for an answer. “Can ye imagine this lot here,” she sniffs, nodding her head toward the upstairs as she eats, “houses scattered all over Creation, luggin their entire mob of servin people, except poor Mrs. Coldcroft, from pillar to post every time they want a change of scenery? A dozen staff for only the two of em and a set of wee twins. There’s a photograph of em in the gentleman’s library.”

“It’s a lot to manage,” Brigid agrees.

“And d’ye have children yerself?” Molly asks the colored girl.

“I have a baby daughter,” says the girl. “Her name is Minnie.”

“Well, it’s a start,” Molly approves. “I’ve got five meself, and I believe they’ll be the death of me. They say there’s war in this Philippines — ye should see the slaughter I’ve got to face every night when I come into our rooms. A mob of heathen savages, that’s what they’ve become, with me out workin every day.”

“Who looks after them?”

“Fiona is the oldest, but she’s only ten and no match for her brothers when they join hands against her. They say she’s threatened to brain em with a sashweight.”

The girl only picks at her roll and has the good manners not to inquire about Molly’s husband, who is a lout and a tippler as likely to be sleeping in a cell in the Tombs as in her bed. The girl makes Brigid uneasy, though she has worked with colored many times before. The Irish boys and the colored boys are always fighting on the streets of her Hell’s Kitchen, of course, sometimes with their hands and sometimes with sticks and rocks or worse and their language is a scandal. But when there are no colored handy the Irish boys fight each other or go hunting for Italians. Harry is much more comfortable with them, able to engage a strange colored man on the street to ask a question or offer a comment, but he is from the South with all its twisted history, and she from a scrap of turf that rarely saw a Protestant, much less a black man.

“D’ye think,” asks Molly, peering in at the stacks of gleaming chinaware in the glass-paneled cabinet before them, “that somewhere there is a gentleman and a lady livin off the fruits of our labor? I’ve heard tell of the Rail Trust and the Coal Trust and the Steel Trust and Wheat Trust — there must be a debutante somewheres who when she passes in her carriage, lookin like a gleamin pearl on an oyster shell, they all whisper ‘Here she is now, heiress to the great Scrubwoman Fortune.’ ”

“Mr. Burke at the employment agency takes out his percentage, I know,” Brigid answers, “but he hasn’t changed that vest he wears, or washed it, in the five years I’ve worked for him.”

“The money goes further up,” says Molly. “It rises. Like smoke.”

If her father were alive and here, Brigid knows, he would be grumbling about how to burn the townhouse to the ground.

There is a gas heater in the scullery just for the deep basin used to wash dishes, where they refill their buckets. When they walk into the ballroom again Brigid can see a difference, very faint, between where they’ve scrubbed and where they haven’t.

“A pity they didn’t leave the orchestra,” says Molly, “to coax us through the afternoon.”

The trick is to keep your weight balanced between your knees and the heels of your hands. Patsy Finnegan’s father would have her brothers kneel on marbles when they were wicked, and Brigid thinks of that often when it feels like she can’t bear another moment. She only stands to refill the bucket or when the backs of her legs begin to cramp. There are venerated saints, she thinks, whose road to glory was paved by little more than what I’m doing now. But then they were rich men’s daughters, promised a life of ease but scrubbing the floors of lepers or other unfortunates without pay.

“Self-abnegation,” Sister Gonzaga always told them, waggling her finger with the huge Bride-of-Christ ring on it, “is the quickest way to Heaven.”

They have worked their way almost to the tall sliding doors when Brigid realizes the colored girl is no longer with them. Then she hears the music.

It is not religious music, exactly, but it gives her the feeling she has now and then at a High Mass, with the singing, when she thinks if God pays attention to us at all it is this he listens to. Brigid stands, wincing, and steps straight across the hall to the doorway of the music room.

Jessie sits at the piano nearly in the dark, the late-afternoon sun slanting through the skylight to spill only on her long fingers at the keys. And the music, angry then sad then romantic then brooding — who could believe it is one small person filling the air with this war of emotions? The music seems to grow larger, to possess the entire house, and Brigid imagines it entering each of the countless, empty rooms like a warm liquid, bringing a glow of life back into them. Brigid feels Molly at her elbow and for once the woman has nothing to say, only watching and listening. They stand for a long while, till Jessie ends the piece, last note hanging in the air—

The girl rests her elbows on the keys and puts her head in her hands.

Brigid and Molly walk softly back to the ballroom and kneel at their buckets.

“Would ye believe it?” says Molly, shaking her head.

The colored girl comes back then, not a word, and puts her little bit of weight into scouring away the scuff marks just inside the sliding doors. The sun deserts the floor and Brigid has to turn on the gas lamps. They are finished with the ballroom and have done the back half of the hallway when it is time to quit.

The colored girl says thank you, quietly, when she takes her pay and puts her coat on, a worn-looking item not nearly up to the weather outside, and leaves with a small nod of goodbye.

“I’ll expect you to have reached the reception room by tomorrow,” says Mrs. Coldcroft, a mite bleary-eyed, face creased on one side from where she’s slept. “Which means the fireplace will have to be dealt with. And how is the—” she nods, frowning, toward the deliveries door that Jessie has just left through. “How is she making out?”

“Oh, she’s a crackerjack, she is,” says Molly, beating Brigid to it. “Not much for conversation, but she’s a terror on the floors.”

Jessie’s legs are aching by the time she reaches the third-story landing, and she can hear little Minnie crying inside. The heat is on again, but unbearable now, either none at all or an inferno, and Minnie is wrapped tight in a blanket lying in the cradle Father made from a dresser drawer he found on the street, wailing her strange little cry that sounds as if it comes from a tiny spirit inside of her. Jessie wrestles the kitchen window open and props it with a can of beans, then unwraps her daughter and lifts her into her arms. She is overheated, which Father says is just as dangerous as her being too cold. Jessie is about to call angrily for her mother when she sees the opened envelope on the little kitchen table. It is stamped just the same as the letters that come from the Philippines, but it is not her brother’s writing on the front, the words squarish and thick and filling her with dread. Minnie has stopped crying.

Mother is sitting on the bed, staring out into the air shaft, the letter lying folded beside her.

“They’ve killed him,” she says wearily, not turning to look at Jessie. “They’ve killed my son.”

UNDERSTUDY

“He’s gone,” says the messenger. “We need you now.”

Alexander must have had a similar moment, ungirded in his tent at the news of his father’s murder, or Marcus Antonius on the stabbing of Caesar, even poor hapless Andrew Johnson when word sped back from Ford’s Theatre. Some are born Great, but others—

But there is no time for reflection when a nation has been orphaned. The coach awaits below, the steeds restless in their traces as if they sense the urgency of their mission. The jehu flicks his persuader and they are off, careening pellmell through the labyrinthine passages of Greenwich Village, citizens clustered on each corner reacting to the announcement with shock and mourning. The tidings had been so propitious at first, medical experts present at the calamity, speedy intervention, clear sailing expected for the President. Then the first grudging qualifications — the bullet left imbedded, the rise in temperature, the threat of dreaded infection. But this — this was not to be imagined, it was unthinkable that he, of all men, should be hoisted so precipitously to the summit, that his hand should rest upon the tiller of the Ship of State—

“What will you say?” asks the messenger. The boy is pale, goose-necked, sweating, no doubt unnerved to play even a supporting role in history’s great drama.

“Words are of minor importance in times like these,” he replies. “What is paramount now is a display of strength and continuity, a reassurance that though their beloved captain has passed, we are not without rudder in the storm.”

The messenger looks out the window of the coach. “There’s going to be a storm?”

They considered him a joke at first, no better than fifth business. A buck-toothed little runt, an asthmatic four-eyes with a grating voice, the sort who came on after the sword-swallower or the skating chimpanzee. A meddler and a blue-nose, an overgrown boy playing with his toy boats in the bathtub. And then Cuba and his crowded hour and the public reassessed him. There was laughter still, yes, but with a tinge of respect. What will the little man do next?

On to the White House — but as an appendage. Second billing, a court jester employed to fill out the bill for the veterans and the crowd in the cheap seats, or worse, a “chaser,” meant to aid the ushers in clearing the auditorium. But he bore it with fortitude, as a man must, taking the national stage with the same brio that had made him a byword in New York. The campaign hat was somewhat battered, true, the uniform no longer à la mode, but they still cheered him in the hinterlands, some wag inevitably shouting “Take that blockhouse!” from the throng and the merriment that ensued was fond enough. That alone would have been career enough for some men, but to scale the heights yet never stand at the pinnacle—

The coach jolts to a stop and the doors are thrown open. Attendants are waiting, hustling him into the building, husky bodies shielding him from solace-seeking eyes.

There is a full house out front, he can sense it. Keith himself is waiting in the wings.

“The uniform!” the theater magnate exclaims, panic tightening his voice. “You’re not wearing the uniform!”

“The moment demands a statesman,” he demurs, “not a warrior.”

“One minute!” hisses the wizened caliph of the curtain. “Get him out there!”

As he steps out to his platform in the dark, as he has done so many times before, Goldoni is onstage massaging his tonsils. But tonight is different. Tonight is Destiny—

God of our fathers, known of old—

— sings Goldoni—

Lord of our far-flung battle line—

— singing with his hand over his heart, facing a bier with a coffin draped in the Flag upon it, a diapositive of the martyred McKinley’s profile shining on the flat behind him—

Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine—

Behind, in the dark, he pulls the spectacles, clear glass, out from his vest pocket and adjusts them on his nose. The moustache, affixed with spirit gum in the early years, has grown with the man. And now for the role of a lifetime—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet

Lest we forget — lest we forget!

— Goldoni finishes and there is muted applause, sniffling from the stricken multitude.

“And so,” the tenor intones to the fervent throng, their yearning almost palpable, “we bid adieu to our trusted steward, our stalwart in peace and in war. O where, where shall we find a man to replace him?”

And then the spotlight rises on a stoic five feet and two inches of muscular Christianity, eyes fixed on glory—

Teethadore Resplendent.

And some, he thinks as the applause spreads like his lock-jawed grin, first one, then a dozen, then the entire house rising to their feet in thunderous ovation, some have Greatness thrust upon them.

HOSTAGE

They don’t have a shovel. Royal hacks and jabs at the rocky soil with a rusted bayonet, then tosses what comes loose out with his hands. The fever has passed but he is running with sweat and finally Bayani, the one who does most of the bossing, gets disgusted and jumps down with him, digging with his own knife. One of the rebels, who had been falling a lot as they climbed, didn’t wake up this morning. A couple of the other men are laid out and moaning, Royal surprised that they get just as sick as imported troops do.

When the hole is deep enough, about the size of a small bathtub, Bayani taps him and Royal crawls out, his hands bleeding. At first he just sits out of the way as they lay the body down, but then when the leader of the rebels, who speaks English and says to call him Teniente, starts to say what sounds like religion over it he stands to be respectful. One of them, the one with the beak of a nose, is crying as he holds his hat over his heart and looks down at his dead friend. There is some praying of the men together and then most of them help Royal cover the body with dirt and rocks. Somebody has made a cross from bolo-cut branches bound with a piece of harness and it takes a while to get it to stand straight. When they buried Junior in Las Ciegas, Kid Mabley played his bugle after, but these people are afraid to make noise.

“These mountains are full of danger,” says the Teniente, sitting beside Royal as he washes his hands clean. They’ve made a camp in a little bowl on the side of the mountain, a place where rainwater pools up and there are some trees high enough for shade. The Teniente won’t leave off him with the “colored American soldier” business, how he should be on their side against the white folks. But there’s nobody else he can understand, and the more they know you the harder you are to shoot.

“There are the Igorot who will cut off your head and maybe eat you after, and the Negrito, who are of your color but very small and will kill you with a dart that they blow from a tube, and a group of very religious people, the Guardians of the Virgin, santones, who you cannot predict what they will do. That is if you are not stung by a viper or die of hunger before they find you.”

Royal has no thoughts of trying to escape. The fever has passed and the rebels have very little to carry and he has no idea where he is. Nilda is still with them, helping to gather firewood and to cook when that is possible.

“It is dangerous even for us.”

“So why you want to be here?”

The Teniente waves a hand at his dozen sorry-looking insurrectos. “Most of my men were born in these mountains. And I lived here, on the other side near the sea, when I was very young.”

“You think you can beat them?”

He isn’t dressed any different but the way they treat him he must really be a lieutenant or maybe just rich before the war or what they have instead of white people. It is hard to tell the differences just by eye, specially with all them looking so raggedy and underfed and no coolies to truck their goods but him. They don’t joke with Teniente like they do with each other and a couple even take their hats off when they talk to him. Bayani, who they call sargento, looks at Royal the way you look at a brood hen that might be ready for the pot. If the time comes for killing the dark-skin American, he will be the one to do it.

“Are they willing to follow us all the way up here?” asks the lieutenant. “To send men to every island, to fight the moros whose god tells them it is beautiful to die in battle and who were never broken by the Spanish army?”

Up here, hungry, cold now, and if the Teniente is telling the truth, surrounded by all these wild people, it seems crazy to think you could ever bring it all under control. But the people who make the decisions, who send the Army to do their business, are not up here and never will be.

“They run the flag up,” he tells the Filipino. “And once they done that they won’t leave off, no matter what. I been to where they chased old Geronimo, there aint enough in that country to keep a snake alive, and still they went and chased him down and thrown the irons on him and drug him back to the reservation. Once they run that flag up, the story is over.”

He can tell it is not what the Teniente wants to hear. He seems to ponder something for a moment. “What do you know of Roosevelt?”

“Teddy? He was in Cuba. Got up the hill without they shot him, so he’s a hero now.”

“He is your new President.”

“That dog sink his teeth in,” Royal tells him, “he aint letting go.”

The Teniente nods, looks over to where the little boy, who the others call Fulanito, sits staring at the pile of rocks and wooden cross.

“Nicanor, the man who has fallen, was not meant to be a soldier,” he says. “He was a breeder of the male birds.”

“For rooster fights.”

“You have this?”

“Sure. I seen a bunch of em.”

“It is very popular among my people. Wagering—”

“Hell, my people bet on whether the sun come up.”

“And music. You are also great musicians.”

“Some of us are. I can’t hardly sing.”

“You won’t try to escape,” says the Teniente, more a statement than a question. “Will you?”

It is so many years since he has prayed. Diosdado was a firm believer as a child, the star pupil of the cura parroco, wearing the subaltern’s vestments for special masses, thrilling his poor, God-intoxicated mother with his ability to parrot the Latin phrases. He sits alone on a knob of limestone looking eastward down at the valley they’ve run from, straining to muster the faith to tell his men what must be done next. If the Father in Heaven who Diosdado was taught to adore — remote, wise, looking very much like a Spanish don — is a fabrication, a mere projection of men’s fears and desires, then what of this mythical Republic? The men who personified it, Bonifacio and Luna murdered, Aguinaldo captured and tamed, San Miguel and la Vibora Ricarte grown less rational with each doomed engagement, have all failed them. Our Father Who art in—

He prayed, pretended to pray, over Nicanor, over the other fallen who they’ve had time to bury. The men expect it, need it, sometimes demanding that hostage friars be dragged from their confinement to mutter phrases in languages the men do not understand, to make their holy signs. A breeze climbs up the side of the mountain, carrying the smell of canefields burning over, sugar rising up into the stalks. The Igorots have an older god, one they never speak of to the curas españoles, a god who makes the spears fly true and the arrows find blood, a god of severed heads and fire. It is a terrible god to have to pray to, thinks Diosdado, dreading whatever decision comes next, but the only one left who will listen to him.

Royal hears banging and sees the little boy, Fulanito, slamming the barrel of his rifle against a rock.

“What you doing that for?”

Royal squats next to the boy. Fulanito snags the fixed sight of the rifle on his shirt front and says something. Royal has seen Mausers abandoned in the field or in the arms of dead rebels with the sight filed off. These are the people who hacked Junior to death, not the very ones maybe, but on the same side. Up close, though, they only seem scared and confused, running and hiding and running again the way a rabbit will if you’ve filled up all its holes. He holds a hand out. “Lemme show you what that’s for.”

The boy has only one 7-mil round, carried in a small pouch hung around his neck. After he brought Royal in he jacked it out of the magazine and stuffed it back in the pouch. He does the same now before letting Royal touch the rifle.

Royal flips the rear sight ladder up, then pushes the elevation button and slides the marker up and down the calibrated numbers.

“You got to guess at how far your target is and set the number here, then you line it up with the tip of your front sight there — which is why you don’t want to go knocking it off. And if they close to you—” he indicates Bayani standing forty yards away, looking back down the mountain, “you slap this down and just use that front one. Otherwise you might’s well just grab it by the barrel and try to club em on the head.”

Fulanito takes the Mauser back and Royal leaves him playing with the sight ladder. The Teniente says the boy, no telling where he came from, walked into their camp carrying the Mauser one day, doing a dumb-show about how he stole it from a Spaniard. Since it is old and crooked-looking and there is only the one round they let him keep it. This bunch seems mostly to want to move as fast and as far from the shooting war as they can, and Fulanito can run with any of them.

Nilda is shelling corn, piling the dry kernels on a banana leaf, when the American sits to talk at her again. The men don’t seem to care. Fecundo talked at her like this when they were still in Las Ciegas and he wanted to leave, only Fecundo was always nervous and waved his hands and talked loud like making a speech. The American, Roy, has a soft voice and is sad and sometimes helps her with whatever work is simple enough for a man to understand. Fecundo hit her once because he thought she wasn’t listening. There was nowhere to go. She had run away from Candelaria at fifteen to be with Fecundo even though her parents said he was a gambler and a bassi drinker, even though they had chosen Ciriaco Kangleón who was the cabeza de barangay and had two boys nearly her age from his wife who died of the coughing. They sent word that she was no longer their daughter. In Las Ciegas she had to live with Fecundo’s mother who had wanted him to marry a different girl and called her a puta, even when Fecundo was in the room. When Padre Praxides finally came to marry them and end the scandal he said she had offended Our Father. But she decided that Our Father had surely gotten a look at el viejo Kangleón and his two lazy sons and would understand.

“Nobody who is intelligent can live like this,” Fecundo would say. “The people here are ignorant and jealous and they cheat at cards.”

She would keep weeding or digging or chopping or cooking or washing or feeding what few chickens the wild dogs hadn’t eaten and usually he didn’t need her to speak. Fecundo was sure that the people in town were all against him, telling lies and spreading rumors, maybe even poisoning the crops though he had given up caring for them already.

“Any man with sense would be in Manila by now, where there are jobs that pay a real wage, where you don’t have to scratch in the dirt to eat and there are things to do besides listen to our pile of shit neighbor brag about his Hercules.”

Hercules had killed Fecundo’s last fighting bird, Relámpagos, and Fecundo did not have enough money to cover his bet so all the men were making jokes about what he would have to give up to settle it. They passed the house and if Fecundo’s mother was not outside they made noises at Nilda.

“All I need is a little something in my pocket to get started,” he would say. “And then we will live a real life.”

What he turned out to need wasn’t in his pocket but in a sack that Fecundo would not let her touch or look into, leaving in the dead of night and saying if she did something to wake the dogs he’d leave her behind. They made Iba by the next day and he sold what was in the sack for the boat fare.

“When we get to Manila,” he told Nilda, who hadn’t spoken since they stepped on board, “don’t talk to anybody. You don’t want to give yourself away as a boba.”

Tondo was full of bobos, and when they opened their mouths they revealed it in Zambal and Pampangano and Ilocano and Pangasinense and Tagalog. Nilda walked to the cuartel every day hoping for uniforms to wash while Fecundo carried bales of hemp at the port with the Chinese. When they met at the end of the long day in the tiny room they were renting he would pace, four steps between walls, and wave his arms and talk loud as if making a speech about how the españoles malditos had fixed it so an honest Filipino couldn’t rise to his proper station. If she had money that day he would take it and look for a pangingi game in which to change their fortune.

The men who came to search the room for filibustero papers wouldn’t tell her what had happened or where Fecundo was, but the neighbors knew, and spoke of others who had been strapped to the chair and strangled. She went to the cuartel then and asked the soldiers what she should do, and they said forget him, find yourself another man to take care of you. A few volunteered. She took their dirty uniforms, then, and washed them to earn enough to rent the oxcart for the body.

Nilda does not speak as she shells the corn, does not respond or look at the American when he pauses in what he is saying with his soft voice. He has eyes that are not afraid, a captive here among his enemies, but sad. He says a word again and again, and the way he says it she thinks it must be a woman’s name. She folds the leaf into an envelope to hold the pile of corn and then starts on another. The American, not really paying attention to it, takes up an ear of the corn and starts to worry the kernels off with his thumbs. She steals a look at the skin of his arm, dark and glossy with sweat, and wonders if he feels like a normal man.

REQUIEM

It appears that they will have to make their own electric chair. Despite Mr. Edison’s intercession the Warden has not been moved. They may film the prison’s exterior walls from a distance and nothing more, not even the arrival of the state’s witnesses. A dozen illustrators and news photographers wait under umbrellas farther down State Street in front of the institution, hoping that somebody of note will venture outside. A pair of uniformed guards stand before the front gate to keep them at bay.

It is very early, cold and starting to rain, and Harry has had the device out before sunup to be sure the lens won’t fog, rigging a tarp overhead to keep the wet off it. Rain this sparse won’t register on film, which is a shame given the circumstances. Harry pulls his watch from his pocket. If the authorities have kept to their schedule the Assassin within must already be dead. Ed Porter, come over from the Eden Musee to work in the film department at Edison, steps over blowing on his hands.

“I don’t think the light will get any better today.”

Harry holds his watch up high and swings it from the chain. “If we wait ten minutes more we’ll have the 8:19.”

“And so—?”

Harry stands in front of the camera and makes an arc from left to right with his hand. “We follow the locomotive coming in to begin the move, not quite matching its speed, so when it passes out of the frame it brings us along the wall to the rows of elms out front. Otherwise we have only stationary boxcars sitting idle in front of a mass of stone.”

“But the prison is the subject,” says Porter.

“If we’re going to bother with a panoramic, something should move.”

As if to support him a whistle sounds in the distance, three times, approaching.

Porter grins. “You know I love a train.” He steps behind the camera and loosens the pan head. “After this we’ll make a shot of the front from the roof over there, looking down in. Maybe we’ll see a convict moving.”

The New York Central is rumbling past when Grogan taps Shoe for the detail. Five cons in all, and more shields than you can shake a billy at — prison screws, state bulls, Doc Gern scowling and Warden Mead himself to escort them out with the box, Mead hunching in the light rain and peeping up on the walls like there might be snipers lurking. Most of the cons who croak in the joint go to the state lot at the Fort Hill boneyard, but then there are special cases who end up in the shadow of the back wall. Shoe has planted cons in the Warden’s garden before, and the wrinkle this time is there’s no lid on the crate, only a sheet thrown over the fried remains of the former Mr. Goulash. There’s a con on each corner of the stained-black crate and one of the colored they call Scrap Iron following, pulling a hand trolley with a big slab of concrete on it.

Father Costello is waiting, his Book open and getting wet. Shoe and the other trustees let it down easy into the hole, then pull the ropes up. There is a funny smell, like eggs left too long in the skillet. They say it cooks your insides, the jolt, that your blood boils and your brains go to hot mush and run out your ears. They say a lot of crazy things, but nobody’s come back from the hot seat with the straight dope.

They usually shoot the juice before daylight, get it done with and move on with life as usual on the yard. The Warden is very big on routine, only he calls it Discipline.

“You men are here, principally, because you lack Discipline in your daily lives,” he tells them every time there’s a big Sunday powwow. “This will not be a problem at Auburn, as we will provide it for you.”

Father Costello mutters a quick one, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, while Shoe and the other cons stand with their eyes down and their hats in their hands. The bulls all keep their lids on. Captain Grogan says to step back and then a pair of the troopers lug up a huge glass carboy like they use at the brewery and the smell hits him big time. The troopers got their riding gloves on, bending and shutting their eyes tight while they tip the carboy into the hole and a steaming liquid dumps out and sizzles loud when it hits Goulash down below, smoke coming up and the smell really godawful, makes your eyes tear up. There is a half-dozen guys on the north wing wouldn’t be inside if they’d been this thorough disposing of their victims. Shoe is wise to the play now — the Warden don’t want nobody pestering him later to dig up the deceased and poke around in his skull for clues as to why a gink would want to pop the President. There was a bird come through during Shoe’s first bit on Blackwell’s Island who they let stick calipers on the noggins of all the cons and old poxy parlor girls and write down the results and he never seen the point of it — what are you going to do, toss some guy into the slam on account of his hat size? The sizzling and smoke keep on for a while, Father Costello turning his back on it, and then it’s over.

It takes all five of them to get the slab centered over the crate and drop it, the dinge having to jump down on one corner to get it level in the hole. All the bulls but Sergeant Kelso and Stuttering Steinway go back then, the Warden watching the walls as he walks like he’s still expecting company, leaving the detail with a pile of dirt turning to mud and five shovels.

“Fill her in quick, lads,” says Kelso, lighting up a coffin nail when the Warden is out of sight. “I don’t like the look of this sky.”

The heart tries to compensate. At first she just said her chest was sore, but they’d only just received the news about Junior and she was weeping so much, waking him with it, and he’d hold her then but she seemed to take no comfort in him. Then the headaches, and finally she couldn’t lie on her left side.

You can only tell so much listening to it. There was a clink just to the right of the apex beat, a metallic clink, then a murmur. The heart tries to compensate. There is a lesion, or a valve collapses, some insult to the system, and one of the ventricles, usually the left, has to do twice the work and it starts to grow, like any muscle. It is trying to keep you breathing, to keep you alive. But it thickens and becomes too strong, too strong—

It was clear she shouldn’t be climbing the stairs anymore, but she didn’t want to be a prisoner.

“Minnie and I can’t stay inside all day,” Yolanda said. “She needs fresh air to grow.”

So they moved again, to a place even worse, which he had not thought possible, but the apartment was on the ground floor in the back. There was a bulge then, just below her sternum on the left. He tried bleeding. He tried ammonia and digitalis. Yolanda stopped eating. She slept badly, jolted awake by nightmares that white men had come to kill them with a Gatling gun, that Minnie was burning in the oven. He resorted to spirits of chloroform with a little camphor, dissolved in hot whiskey, just before bedtime. She slept so soundly that he worried she would not wake, and spent the whole night laying his ear against her chest.

Dr. Lunceford had planned their redemption. They would build a new fortune in the North, would ascend to their former heights and someday return, preferably with a federal marshal and several armed officials, to reclaim what was theirs.

At the end, when her blood pressure was so high and her spirits so low, he could only try a pill that combined digitalis, squill, and black oxide of mercury.

“No more medicine,” Yolanda said. “I am in the Lord’s hands now.”

It is hard, still, for him to accept. Dr. Osler thought that severe fright or grief could induce a failure of compensation, and he himself has seen patients, older people mostly, seem to will themselves to die. But the look on her face, even after the letter sometimes, when she would walk with Minnie, alive, loving, joyful—

“You wouldn’t catch me dead in Brooklyn,” she used to say, but that was the neighborhood in Wilmington, where the idlers and the fallen women congregated, where the colored people seemed happy to live for the moment. This Brooklyn is a tentative green, the very first stirring of spring showing on the hillsides, and there is ground not profaned by tenements or commercial buildings and here she will lie forever.

It is all the money he has saved to bury her, the carriage fare across the Bridge alone more than he can scrape together in a week. There will be no redemption for the Luncefords, even if his license to practice is finally awarded. Without her—

“You have to take care of them, Aaron,” she said on the last day. “They have no one else in this terrible place.”

The baby, against all his expectations, is thriving. The human organism, that can be so fragile, that contains an organ capable of exploding itself, can also prove indestructible under the most inauspicious conditions. And Jessie, who has become a mystery to him, barely speaking these days, is now a toiler, the sort of woman they used to employ to keep the house clean. After this is ended, the phrases uttered, the earth piled over, it will only be him and Jessie and the baby in the miserable rooms across the river, across the island, in a building that looks like a tomb.

His wife is dead of a heavy heart and he cannot bear to live so far away from her.

Jubal stays at the edge. The turnout is not so bad when you think about how far it is from home, Reverend Endicott come up from where he’s staying in Philadelphia to say the words and Felix Birdsong there, and Dr. Mask and Mrs. Knights and Ned Motherwell who used to work at Sprunt’s and Dr. Lunceford up front with Jessie and what folks are sposed to think is Dorsey Love’s baby. It is nice to see some faces he knows here in the City, but Jubal stays at the edge because he didn’t know Mrs. Lunceford so well, just Yes M’am, thank you M’am delivering goods to their big house and because of how it went with Jessie and Royal.

It is a middling-sized cemetery, not nearly so pretty as the Oak Grove in Wilmington, but there are some old dates on the stones in the colored section. People been resting here for a long time. It brings Mama to mind, and Royal, who nobody has heard from for so long.

“As I pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” says Reverend Endicott, “I shall fear no evil—”

Jubal wonders how he would do, passing through the Valley of Death like his brother done in Cuba, where you don’t know is it you they gone to kill or the man next to you and it’s not for the moving pictures. The closest he ever come was the riot and there it was just busting out all around you with no sense to it and nobody expecting you to act brave. If we had guns, all the men said afterward, but the ones who did have guns ended up shot dead and sunk to the bottom of the Cape Fear River.

The Reverend finishes his words and then Miss Alma who used to work for the Luncefords steps out to sing.

Even though he stands back at the edge Jubal can see tears shining on her cheeks, all dressed in black and singing like to pull your heart out—

Just a closer walk with Thee

Grant it Jesus is my plea

Daily walking close to Thee

Let it be, dear Lord, let it be—

He has always admired Miss Alma, love the way she smile, how she carry herself, but never known she had a voice like this—

When my worldly life is oer

Time will be for me no more

Something melts in Jubal and he wants to cry for all of them — Mrs. Lunceford and the Doctor and Jessie and poor Junior buried so far across the ocean and Royal lost in the Valley of the Shadow and all of them wandering here in what the Jamaica man who hollers on the corner call Babylon, all of them run out from their homes and their lives and lost in this City—

Guide me safely, safely oer

To Thy shore, Thy kingdom

To Thy shore

What kind of woman carry a voice like that in her? She is tall and handsome and wide-shouldered and Jubal didn’t even know she come up here like the rest till now. Miss Alma ends the song and it is quiet but for the rolling of the carriage wheels over on Bushwick Avenue, never gets all the way quiet in the City, even out here. Dr. Lunceford drops a handful of dirt in the hole and then Jessie, who is older now but still look like an angel cut in butter, does the same and the people start away. If this was home it would be a hundred or more to pay their respects, but up here Jubal only counts nine and then him who maybe doesn’t even belong there.

Dr. Lunceford carries himself heavy when he step by. He set Jubal’s arm back when he break it falling off Jingles and was as polite with Mama as if she was a white lady.

“That is a man of stature,” Mama would always say when his doctor buggy pass by. Only he don’t appear so high right now, hair gone to gray, lost his wife and son one right after the other.

Jessie comes past next with the baby in her arms and if she sees him she doesn’t let on. It is a girl baby, not enough hair yet to put a twist in. Jubal nods to the ones he knows and to the Reverend and waits for Miss Alma, who is lingering, reading off the headstones.

“Miss Alma?”

She smiles just a little bit. “Jubal Scott.”

“Yes, M’am.” He nods after the mourners. “You still doin for the Lunce-fords?”

“They can’t keep nobody now. Doctor lost everything he had.”

“He have some money if they sell that house.”

“They took the house.”

“How they do that?”

Miss Alma shakes her head like he is a fool. “Same way they took the city. How you think?”

He frowns and falls into step beside her, still carrying his hat.

“How you keepin, then?”

“I got on with some Jewish people, mind their little boys. Ira and Reuben. They had a German girl, but she gone moody and set their place on fire.”

“You a nursemaid.”

“They too old for nursing.”

“Jewish people.”

She raises her eyebrows. “I aint seen no horns, if that’s what you wonderin.”

He laughs. “May I offer you a ride, Miss Alma? I got a wagon.”

She looks him over. She is maybe five, six years older than him, and nearly a inch taller. “What you haul in it?”

“Cameras,” he says. Mr. Harry give it to him to have the springs changed out but the shop don’t open till Monday. “For the moving pictures.”

Miss Alma laughs. Her laugh is just as good as her singing. “You always been a lucky one. Jubal Scott fall in the creek, he come out with a catfish in both pockets.”

“You member Mr. Harry Manigault? Mr. Harry is who I’m working for.”

She look like she just swallow something bad. “That other one aint up here, is he?”

“No, M’am. Mr. Harry say he went over fightin Filipinos, just like my brother, and now he gone missin.”

She is still frowning. “Well let him stay missin.”

She stops to ponder the writing on the side of the panel wagon, looking struck by it. “Cameras, huh. What they take pictures of?”

“Mostly people act out stories and they take pictures of that.”

She nods. “I heard of it, but I aint never seen one.”

“Maybe I take you to see it sometime. They put the stories up and then there’s singing and dancing and whatnot.”

Miss Alma looks the wagon over like she doesn’t know if it’s safe to get on it. “You carry a lot of gals around on this?”

“No, M’am,” he says. “You the first one I ast.”

She smiles at him then — Lord, that smile — and he unties Hooker and climbs quick into the seat and pulls her up after. People walk by and stare at the writing on the panel and he gathers the reins and the horse’s ears go up.

“That up there is Hooker,” he says, pointing. “She been through a lot, but she got plenty good years left.”

“Her and me both,” says Miss Alma Moultrie.

AMBUSH

Royal is loaded with the rest of the food, with sticks for the fire, with the cookpot and ground mats and the empty Winchester of Joselito, who has come up lame, when they are surrounded by the other band. He counts about thirty of them, just as hungry-looking as his own outfit, many of them stepping close to look him over. He puts only the cookpot down, meeting their stares evenly as the Teniente palavers with the head man, who is staring at him suspiciously. It isn’t an argument exactly, but the Teniente is tight and frowning when he comes back to talk to Royal.

“I told them you are with us. If I don’t say this they will take you as a prisoner with the others.”

“Others.”

“Act as if you are not afraid.”

The new band escorts them up a rocky, zigzag trail to the saddle of the mountain. They’ve seen yanquis patrolling the area, says the Teniente, and an ambush is planned.

There are three American prisoners in the camp.

Two of them are Colorado Volunteers in uniform, a lieutenant and a private, and the other a man in civilian clothes, sitting with their hands tied, backs to the trunk of a stunted acacia tree, with a single rope around their necks that holds them tight to it. They look even more starved than the rebels, and the private is only half-conscious, eyes swimming.

“Oh, Jesus,” says the lieutenant when Royal passes, “it’s him. It’s Fagen, come to murder us.”

They are allowed to unload and start a cookfire, the rebels around them watching Nilda as she moves. There is no joking. Royal’s legs are knotted from the climb, his back sore. The Teniente squats beside the head man, who is taller than most of them and bearded, some kind of a Spanish mix, scratching in the dirt with a stick. Bayani steps by Royal on his way to join them, catching his eye and putting a finger to his lips.

There is nothing he can do for the prisoners. He is in his underwear shirt, his uniform blouse sewed up by Nilda to make a carrying pack, the arms serving as straps, and he hasn’t shaved or had his hair cut since the river. Look like some nigger gone wild, he thinks as he steals a look over to the hostages. The private’s head is lolling, rope cutting into his neck.

“They want us to join the ambush with them in an hour,” says the Teniente when he returns. “You will have to attend.”

“What they gonna do with those three?”

“Perhaps they will able to trade them for some of our own people,” he says. He doesn’t sound hopeful about it.

The new band has not been resupplied for a week, so Royal’s bunch shares their food — handfuls of corn, the sweet-potato-looking thing they dug up on the way, some bananas. There is not much for anybody once it is all divvied out. The prisoners are not fed. Nilda sits by Royal while they eat, which she has never done before. A couple times she has done for the chigger bites on his legs without him asking, spitting tobacco juice on them and rubbing it in, and the welts have gone down some. There is no taste to the food, but it is gone quickly and then they are preparing for battle.

The Filipinos have rituals. Some kneel and pray and make a cross — head, heart, and shoulders — with their right hand. Others of them have charms they wear around their necks or wrists or put in their hats or in their mouths and some do the kind of witchy business his mother used to, like they’re putting some kind of spell on their rifles and bolos.

The Teniente gives him Fulanito’s Mauser and its one round. The boy sits sulking by the dying cookfire.

“They’ll be watching you.”

“They can watch all they want,” says Royal. “I aint shootin nobody.”

The men from Teniente’s band, Bayani, Kalaw, Legaspi, Pelaez, Ontoy, El Guapo, Puyat, and Katapang, seem to take no notice of him as he joins them filing back down the mountain. They walk for nearly an hour, silent, then deploy in the pass at the bottom, some in the sharp rocks jumbled at the base of the slope and some in the trees a bit ahead and on the other side where the pass makes a bend, offset so they don’t shoot into each other when the smoker begins. They are supposed to wait for the head man, whose name is Gallego, to fire before they open up on whoever walks into the trap.

If it is the 25th or one of the other colored outfits he supposes he will have to try to switch sides. If it is white soldiers he doesn’t know. There are a couple of Gallego’s rebels in the rocks just above and behind him and when he looks back one has him sighted.

It is hot again and the shade is on the other side of Royal’s boulder. The one round for the Mauser is still in his pocket. He tries to work his way into a position where nothing is digging into him, then closes his eyes.

The first gunshot wakes him. Regulars, white men, one hit and writhing on the ground and the others forming up, kneeling or flopping down in a rectangle to return fire. Royal stands and works the bolt a couple times, pretending to shoot, and hears one of them shout “Get the nigger!” before he ducks and the rocks before him are blasted into chips by a concentrated volley. The firing is wild on all sides then and Royal keeps his head down till he hears whooping and looks out to see the white boys charge the woods, shooting as they run, and take the position in a moment. The two sides, dug in, trade shots and insults for a while, the engagement hot at first and then cooling down to an on-and-off, harrying fire. Royal does not bother to pretend to shoot again. If they try to retreat back up the mountain now they’ll be exposed, so he has to hope the regulars won’t make another charge before it gets dark.

“Come on out you yellow-footed, back-shootin nigger,” drawls a voice across the pass. “We seen you, you goddam turncoat. Come on out and die like a man.”

Gallego’s man is still there and if Royal answers he will likely be shot from behind. If he managed somehow to cross over, the regulars would probably kill him on the spot instead of dragging him back to Manila to be tried and hanged.

In that land of dopey dreams

Happy peaceful Philippines—

— the regulars sing from behind the trees now—

Where the bolo-man is hiking night and day

Where Tagalos steal and lie

Where Americanos die

There you hear the soldiers sing this evening lay—

Royal knows the words and sings along softly, thinking about Junior and the boys in the 25th—

Damn, damn, damn the Filipinos!

Slant-eyed khakiac ladrones

Underneath the starry flag, civilize em with a Krag

And return us to our own beloved homes!

It is not nearly dark yet when one of the rebels signals by shooting a chunk out of the rock not far from his ear. Or maybe trying to kill him. The man jerks his rifle for Royal to come up, then draws a bead on him again. There is cover here and there but wide spaces between it and he is scrambling uphill on loose rock with the Americans whooping in joy and trying to nail him and by the time he dives behind the first outcroppping he has been grazed on the arm and is soaked with sweat. He catches his breath and on his second run there is some covering fire and he can see other rebels climbing around him so he is not the only target. His next dash is sideways across the base of the mountain to where the footpath starts and there behind a tangle of uprooted trees he finds the Teniente with Bayani, who has been shot up bad.

“We have spotted another patrol on the way,” says the Teniente. “We must retreat.”

Bayani is shot in the hip and through one side under his arm, having a tough time breathing. Got a lung, thinks Royal, and hands the Mauser to the Teniente, who has his own rifle and Bayani’s captured Krag as well. Royal turtles down and the Teniente helps Bayani, surprisingly light, onto his back. They wait until there are others climbing and being shot at before they move, Royal almost running uphill with the wounded Filipino till they are behind cover again and he can get his wind back. Bayani clenches his grip tight a couple times but doesn’t make a sound and the Teniente hurries behind them, the rifles rattling on their slings.

“It hurts when we move,” Bayani reports, “and it hurts when we stop.”

When they get back to the camp the American drops to all fours, exhausted, and Diosdado helps the woman from Las Ciegas pull Bayani off his back and lay him out on a mat.

“The other time I was shot,” says Bayani, “it didn’t hurt like this.”

There is not much to do without a doctor. One bullet has passed through his chest and out his back but the one in his hip is embedded. Another wounded man, hit in the jaw, is already there drooling blood on the ground. Diosdado waits for his own men to arrive — Legaspi, then Ontoy, then El Guapo, then Kalaw, then Katapang and Pelaez and Puyat, then Gallego stomping into the camp, furious.

“We have them outnumbered and your maldito africano doesn’t shoot.”

“He ran out of ammunition,” Diosdado says to him. “He never had a chance.”

“I’ll give him a chance.”

The American has caused him no trouble and in time might even join their cause, but now Bayani is hurt and they need to get him down to help, so when Gallego has his men drag the negro forward, hands him a bolo, and demands that he execute the prisoners, Diosdado does nothing.

The negro, Royal Scott, raises the bolo over his head. The prisoner who is a lieutenant of volunteers cries out “No, don’t do it, boy, don’t do it! I got land here, plenty of land and I’ll give you some!” and the other man who is not in uniform tells him to shut his mouth. Royal throws the bolo down so it sticks in the ground.

“Hell with it,” he says. “Yall want em dead you can do it yourself.”

The Colorado lieutenant starts to weep.

There isn’t room for him on the tree, so the negro is tied hand and foot and thrown on the ground next to the man with the shattered jaw.

“He saw his father’s nakedness.”

The Correspondent only groans.

“Noah drank of the wine,” Niles whispers feverishly, “and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”

The Correspondent, dullard, does not stir.

“It is more than Genesis, though,” hisses Niles. This is important, this is so very important. “There is Leviticus 20:11—If a man has sexual intercourse with his father’s wife, he has exposed his father’s nakedness.”

“Lunatic,” mutters the Correspondent.

“He must have been a lunatic, no doubt, to do such a thing and at such a time. For there were three that copulated on the ark, and all punished — the dog was doomed to be tied, the raven to spew his seed into the mouth of his mate, and Ham, Ham was smitten in his skin, and thus was darkened the face of Mankind. They are the sons of Ham, the descendants of Canaan.”

None of the tormentors are awake. It is only Niles, Niles ever vigilant, beyond sleep—

“Their blackness comes not from their time in the sun, but the dark source from whence the degraded race sprang.” If his hands were free to gesture he would indicate all of those sleeping about them. “These are the children of vile incest, and thus have been cursed with darkness. Darkness of the skin, of the mind, of the soul. That nigger — it was Fagen, the demon. He was going to smite us but I fixed him with my eye. They cannot abide that. As long as we are steadfast, as long as we do not sleep, they cannot slay us, for we are the children of God. It is written on our faces.”

This is a test. Noah was tested, and Abraham, and poor sweet Jesus on the cross, and now Niles Manigault. He will not falter. He will not fail. He will not pray or plead, for God loves a forthright man, a self-reliant man, a manly man. The nigger with the sword was only a test, a creature from Hell, and I stared it in the eye and it was vanquished. The Hamites are our servants, it is written in the Book and they know it within their hearts. When they rise up, when they rebel, they know in their hearts that He will not let them succeed, for they are the spawn of filth and wickedness.

“On the Ark,” Niles sighs, his heart racing, all his senses open, alive to epiphany. “With his father’s wife. Can you imagine such evil, such bestiality? On the Ark.”

“Stark, raving mad,” mutters the Correspondent.

They have men waiting down the pathway to shoot if the Americans decide to climb up after them, but nobody above and nobody on the other side of the mountain. Everybody left in camp is asleep but Roy and the man who was shot in the jaw, who has his eyes closed and is crying. Even the other American prisoners sleep now, heads nodded forward and to the side, the rope binding them to the tree digging into their necks. Nilda takes a small sack of the corn and an American canteen that is almost full of water. Her knife is dull from splitting bamboo and it takes a long time to saw through the hemp around his wrists and ankles. They soaked it before tying so the knots can’t be untied. Roy says nothing and watches her face, which makes her cheeks burn. They have left him at the edge of the camp, far away from the fire, and his hands are cold to the touch. He shouldn’t have to die. None of them should have to die, but they are set on their war and haven’t decided to stop fighting yet.

When he is free, they stay low and walk as silently as possible. There are fireflies dancing all around them, and it feels like magic, like the other men will not wake up as long as the spell continues. In the village there would be dogs but the dogs here in the monte have been eaten. She leads when they start to climb, careful not to pull any rocks loose. She can hear his breath behind her. When they are over the crest and starting down the other side she is less worried. The men won’t bother to come after once they’re out of sight.

Once, on the far side when it is very steep, he holds her arm to help her down and it is a strange feeling. She has been inside herself, alone, since Fecundo left her for the last time, saying she was his problem, that you couldn’t bring a village girl to Manila and expect to become wealthy.

Nilda doesn’t know if her parents are still living or not. If they are, seeing her with the dark American will not make them think any worse of her. If she is truly dead to them they will give her what she needs to move on. Nobody wants to live with ghosts.

VARIETY ARTS

The way it works is you got to fill in between one picture and the next. The Yellow Kid is feeling about as bum as a newsie can without he’s croaked on the pavement but the yarn on the screen takes him away for as long as it lasts. A girl in a green dress stands in a spotlight next to it, singing along with a violin, one of those weepers about she misses her Dear One who’s across the sea. Not much of a canary but she’s easy on the glimmers.

It starts out how they always do when it’s a war story, with the soldier boy in his outfit kissing off the old folks and his girl, who is another looker. His old lady don’t stop honking into her snotrag the whole time and his old man who is one of those Mr. Whiskers like they trot out for parades all the time is pounding the soldier on the back and probly saying Go over there, boy, an give em hell. It’s like when you look in through the window displays at one of the swell shops on Broadway and there’s people inside jawing and waving their paws around and you try to suss out what they’re saying. The first picture in the story ends when the soldier marches out the door and the looker throws herself down on the ottoman and hides her head under her arms. These people got such a big room, fit a whole floor of apartments from East 5th Street in it, so you wonder how she’s got anything to kick about.

The canary gives her pipes a rest and the screen goes dark for a second the way it does and then they’re in the jungle, big tall palm trees all around and the soldier boy with a bunch of his pals blasting away with their rifles at something you can’t see. There is lots of smoke from the rifles and they shoot off some firecrackers in the Hall so the pair of old babes sitting right by the Kid with their big hats on blocking the view cover their ears and make with the Oh my oh dearie me and then the soldier boy tells the others to scarper, that he’ll stay back and cover their keisters. So they run off the screen and drums start pounding at the back of the Hall and on the screen this bunch of darkies run in wearing skirts made of palm leafs and nothing else only a couple got a bone in their nose, waving their spears and swords and the soldier boy uses his last shot to plug one of them dead and then they’re all over the guy, grabbing his rifle and one stabs him with a sword and they got him down on his back and start to do the googoo dance while the biggest darky stands over him with a spear ready to finish him off. The Yellow Kid is sweating and his head feels hot, maybe cause it’s the jungle or he’s worried about the geezer gonna get croaked or cause there’s so many people crowded in the seats here even on a Tuesday or maybe he’s just down with the crud. It don’t even help when this doll wearing not much more than the darkies runs in and throws herself on top of the soldier. She isn’t so dark as the other characters, but you can tell she aint white. Still she’s a doll and for some reason she’s telling the one with the spear to hold his water. The Kid wonders if he missed something or if the other paying customers have read about this deal in one of the rags he peddles. Even if she seen him fighting in the jungle at some point a doll, even a Filipino doll if that’s what she’s sposed to be, wouldn’t tumble for a guy that quick. Dolls take some heating up is what Specs and everybody behind the Journal building says, you got to blow them to a good feed or do the candy-and-flowers routine before you can lay the first digit on em.

Only this one must be bughouse for the soldier boy, cause even when the big geezer puts the spear to her throat she don’t leave off begging for him to be spared. Then the pit band plays Hot Time in the Old Town and there’s more fireworks and the pals who scrammed come blasting back onto the screen, bagging the big one and chasing the rest away. When their smoke clears somehow there’s the looker from back home kneeling by the wounded soldier boy and the pals have got the drop on the native doll. Only then the wounded guy does a lot of palavering and pointing and finally the girl from home falls wise and gives the doll her necklace as thanks for saving his bacon and the soldiers lay off of her. She seems pretty gaga about the necklace, clutching it to her melons and falling on her knees in front of the white girl. The looker from home and the soldier grab hands then and the two old babes start to blubber and the spotlight comes back on the canary in green only now she’s with a geezer decked out like a soldier only you can glim that he’s not the same one, the pair of them looking lovey-dovey and warbling at each other and the Yellow Kid can’t take no more.

He stomps over the old babes’ trotters on his way out of the aisle and makes a beeline for the exit. There is more on the bill, Wheezer and Spats and then The Great Bendo and then Professor Poodle which is what he really come to see but right now he needs air.

14th Street never smelled so good. He feels dizzy but the sun is out and the cabbies are trotting their nags up and down and the moll-buzzers are shuffling by the box office and some old wop with an accordion is wheezing away and the only thing that don’t seem right on the block is maybe the monkey dancing on the sidewalk, and even he is wearing a fedora.

The Yellow Kid sits on the curb and watches the carriage wheels roll past and waits for his head to clear. The evening edition will hit the bricks pretty soon and he’s got to get hisself down to Park Row. When he holds his head in his mitts it is still cooking, which makes it hard to think and is maybe why he missed how the looker gets herself all the way to Googooland just in time to save her boyfriend.

And how did she know to wear her pearls?

It goes by so fast. People shooting and smoke and soldiers with the flag and everybody in the theater cheering and then him flopping round so the horse don’t stomp him. People laughing in the theater when he run off, the white folks like that, and then it is over. He wants to say to Miss Alma that there was more to it, that if they had more cameras looking from different spots they’d of got the whole story. But Miss Alma grabbed his arm when the volunteers charged and he fell down, Jubal sitting with her back where the colored are supposed to, or at least where they always do sit in the theater. They don’t have it marked off up here. It goes by so fast and then they are in Auburn.

Buzzing from the folks when they see the title. When the train runs across the screen in front of the prison wall Miss Alma gasps. It’s her first time seeing a moving-picture show and Jubal is feeling proud he is the one to take her.

There is another view of the front of the prison from high up, nothing moving but the camera, the way you’d swing your head from left to right to look for something, and then they are in the hallway.

“Assassin!” cries somebody sitting up with the white folks. “There’s the assassin!” and sure enough there he is behind the iron bars of the door to the left while the prison guards wait on the right for their orders.

“Murderer!” hollers somebody else, standing up from his seat and pointing, and for a moment it is so real Jubal thinks maybe they will rush the screen and hang the man themselves.

But then the guards, four of them, march to the cell and one unlocks it and goes in to bring the killer out. He is not in the striped suit but in dark pants and a gray jacket and there is one guard on each side of him and two behind as they walk off to the right.

Next the picture kind of goes hazy and then comes clear and they are in the Chamber itself. Jubal leans over to Miss Alma. “I help build that,” he says, and she looks impressed and squeezes his arm.

There is the Edison man who got a board filled with light bulbs laid across the arms of the Chair and when they turn the juice on to test it in front of the Warden and the doctors all the bulbs flash on. The Edison man takes the board off to the left then and the guards march the Assassin on from the right and put him in the Chair and are all over him tying straps — straps on his wrists and on his ankles rolling up one leg of his pants and straps over his thighs and chest and even one across his forehead. Then the Edison man come out and check that they’re all fixed tight and nods to the Warden that it is ready to go.

Jubal can feel Miss Alma holding her breath beside him. There are three different times they put the juice through, the Assassin trying to rise up but the straps keep him down — Miss Alma like to crawl in his lap when they make sparks crackle up on both sides of the screen and people cheer.

“Kill him!” hollers the man who stood up. “Fry the sorry son of a bitch!”

Jubal looks over and Miss Alma is crying. Got a soft heart, even for a white man shot Mr. McKinley.

“That’s only the actor,” Jubal says to her, quiet. “I seen him get paid afterwards.”

One doctor puts the heart button against the Assassin’s chest and listens and then hands the earpieces to another doctor who has been feeling the man’s wrist for life and he listens and they nod to the Warden who is a long drink of water, and he turns to look right at them in their seats like they are the witnesses and if you watch his lips he say “The Assassin is dead.”

Big cheering then, lots of the white men and even some of the colored standing up to clap their hands. Then the lights come on and the band starts playing and it is the next act, Moke and Smoke.

Moke and Smoke are two colored men who tell jokes and act funny but they got the cork ash rubbed all on their face to make them even blacker and wear suits that is green and yellow with big square checks and Miss Alma is not laughing. The more folks in the theater laugh, even the colored around them, the less she think it’s funny. They go on rolling their eyes and saying their jokes and end with singing a song about Old Alabamy but she is crying again. Miss Alma always seem like one who could go through the Fire and not drop a tear so Jubal ask does she want to go and she says yes.

Another time he would worry about people staring at him, leaving down the aisle while the show is still running, but Miss Alma still got hold of his arm and he can’t help but smile.

Look who I got.

He takes a look back right before they step out into the lobby room. Teethadore the Great who is a friend of Mr. Harry is coming out, dressed up like Mr. President, which is what he is now, and right away people start up clapping.

Teethadore does not run onto the stage anymore. The strut is slow, confident. Presidential. There is a full minute of applause and he lets it fill him up, chest out, grin locked in place. He puts one foot slightly in front of the other, squares his shoulders. The diapositive flashes on the screen behind him.

AMERICA AND THE PHILIPPINES

— it says in bold letters.

Take up the White Man’s burden—

—he says, and there is another wave of applause from those familiar with the verse—

Send forth the best ye breed

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples

Half-devil and half-child—

PRODIGAL

Nilda hangs the Bleeding Jesus over him in the morning.

“Para los santones,” she says.

It is two squares of cloth connected by red shoestrings, one hung down on your chest and the other in back between your shoulders, both with Christ on the cross sewed on them and some words Royal can’t read, Catholic words probably, and He is bloodied up something awful. There is a tiny stitching of blood from the thorns and from the spikes in His hands and feet and the spear in His side and little red dots of blood-tears down His cheeks. It is more of their hoodoo that doesn’t work as far as Royal can tell, meant to protect you from bullets, but he doesn’t fuss when she hangs it on him any more than he did when Mama put herbs and bird bones in a little sack round his neck. She, Nilda, cut him loose and is leading him, he hopes, away from folks who want to shoot him or cut him up, so why kick about it?

The sun is on their right the whole morning, the two of them heading north, following a foot trail that runs just below the mountain ridge. She knows where she is going, slowing to turn and look at him a few times, stopping once to share the last potato. Royal tries not to think any further ahead than he can see and not to think behind at all. It is not so bad except he’s thirsty. Royal’s undershirt is torn and his leggings stolen and his boots still on his feet only because they didn’t fit none of the rebels who tied him down. He wishes he had his hat and some wet banana leaf under it the way he’s seen them do. The sun isn’t high but already it is cooking his skull.

There is a man walking toward them on the path. Barefoot, his hair longer and wilder than any of the rebels. When the man steps aside to let them by, his eyes burning, Royal sees that his shirt is hanging open to show off a dozen of the cloth squares, different colors and pictures and words on each. Nilda keeps walking like it’s nothing so Royal follows. They come to a swaying bridge made of bejuco rope and bamboo slats suspended over a little gorge, and halfway across he feels it shudder behind him. The man is following, maybe twenty yards behind, and is muttering something to himself.

The footpath picks up on the other side and there is a little bamboo shack next to it, and then another a little farther along, the houses here roofed with grass instead of palm, and then as the path widens there are men walking alongside them, men wearing the religious squares and medals and crosses on the outside of their shirts and all of them with eyes red and burning, muttering, like a humming prayer, as they walk. These men have bolos dangling from a thong around their wrist or some gripping tight to the handle. An older man, wild hair touched with gray, stands blocking the way in the center of the little group of huts that make up the town. The old man has dozens of pictures hung on him, Bleeding Jesuses and red crosses and lots of the Holy Mother and he has a flaming cross painted or maybe even tattooed on his forehead.

Mama wear some things, some homemade and some boughten, but not like these people. There was a crazy man at home, called himself Percy of Domenica, who jingled and clacked with all sorts of hanging charms and grew his hair down long and woolly, but he never had a follower. The man with the cross on his head starts to bark at Nilda and she answers back steady while the mumbling men surround them and other people, women among them, step out from the huts to watch. Sometimes Mama go off at the Pentecostal. The first time it scared the living Jesus out of him and Jubal, Mama hollering in the tongues and her body twitching and the sisters in white not able to get down the aisle before she could knock her head on the floor a couple times. The flaming-cross man pushes past Nilda and fixes his hot eyes onto Royal’s and yanks the Bleeding Jesus out from under his shirt.

“Your Mama been saved,” the righteous sisters would say over their shoulders. “She give up on her evil ways.”

At least one of those sisters come to Mama later for a root cure to lose a baby, but that first time it felt better to know the twitches and hollers were about Salvation and not some sickness that come on her.

The mumbling men are very close, hot breath on his neck from behind and all of them gripping hard on their bolos, make him think of Junior all cut apart, think of the man he shot with the gun barrel almost touching his body and there is a desperate note in Nilda’s voice now and the flaming-cross man is shouting questions Royal can’t answer right into his face.

“You don’t call Him,” Mama always say. “You just open all the way up an in He come.”

He sees Junior at the river, hacked apart like a side of bully beef.

“Kasheeebobobobobobobobobosheegowanda!” Royal cries out, eyes rolling back in his head. “Kwasheeedavasagavasagachooogondadada!”” He sinks to his knees and the Spirit, or whatever it is his fear has called up, rattles through his body like a runaway freight train, his right arm curling up to his chest and his left shooting straight up over his head, fingers splayed out wide. The bolomen back away. Royal jerks forward, his forehead rapping hard against the ground and his stomach begin to heave, spasming his body like when he got the fever in Cuba though nothing but a taste of bile comes up and then for a little while he loses himself to it and doesn’t know what he is doing exactly. Finally he is able to right himself and sees through eyes streaming with water that Nilda is kneeling and rocking and praying and making the Sign, head, heart, shoulder, shoulder and he makes it too, again and again, the Spirit or whatever it was run through him and gone now, so he sings, as holy as he can sound, rocking back and forth—

Life is like — a mountain railway—

— being the only song he can think of at the moment—

With an engineer that’s brave

We must make the run successful

From the cradle to the grave

— rocking and singing, never the voice that poor Little Earl had, but nothing to be ashamed of—

Watch the curves, the fills and tunnels

Never falter, never fail

Keep your hand upon the throttle

And your eye upon the rail

The cross man barks something and a woman steps into a hut and then comes out with a piece of pork wrapped in a leaf and some cooking bananas and lays them beside Nilda—

Blessed Savior, wilt Thou guide us

Till we reach that blissful shore?

— Nilda gently guiding him to his feet and the cross man stepping aside and her leading him, still singing, through the sorry little village—

Where the angels wait to join us

In God’s grace forevermore!

— on down the path and away from them, Nilda carrying the food, safe now but singing because it feels good, because it puts him in mind of Mama and Jubal and himself before he ever killed anybody—

There you’ll meet the Superintendent

God the Father, God the Son

With a hearty, joyous greeting

Weary pilgrim, welcome Home

When he finishes singing Nilda stops and takes the cloth of the bleeding Jesus hung on his front in her hand and kisses it in thanks. Royal wants to kiss her back.

They leave Gallego’s band and take only what they came with, food all gone, Legaspi and El Guapo lifting each end of Bayani’s camilla and Kalaw shouldering the extra ammunition and the iron cookpot. “Every time I lift something heavy,” says Kalaw, “I’m going to miss that negro.”

“Without us he won’t survive,” says Diosdado. Pelaez leads the way down the mountain on the far side, raising his arm in warning when the slope grows treacherous. It is a clear morning, clear enough to see all the way across the misty coastal plain to the distant horizon-line of sea. “If the headhunters don’t get him the cristeros will.”

“No — if he’s with that woman he’ll be safe. I wouldn’t want to cross her. A real Zambala.” Kalaw shakes his head. “The ones still tied to that tree though—”

Diosdado shrugs. He had avoided talking to the three tied by their necks. “That is their problem.”

It is hard going down the pathway, Bayani having to clutch the sides of the litter, cursing, to keep from being pitched off it. Diosdado gives him the last of their medicine, black poppy tar they bought in Pampanga, and he chews on it grimly as they descend. They reach the bottom at noon and stop to replenish their water at the stream that crosses Don Humberto Salazar’s property, crossing fields of petsay till they come to the north road and hear the loud chok chok chok of a karatong ahead of them, someone beating the bamboo gong to announce that strangers have arrived. Diosdado waits for Fulanito to shinny up the telegraph pole and cut the line, then puts his pistol in a sack and sends the boy ahead, telling him to fire a warning shot if he sees any sign of the Americans, then run as fast as he can. Fulanito hurries away, excited as always to have a mission.

“He’s your best soldier,” says Bayani. The wounded sargento’s eyes are all pupil now as the narcotic takes effect.

“He doesn’t even know what he’s fighting for.”

“The war is his home. He fights to keep it alive.”

Diosdado looks across the familiar fields. “But one day we’re going to win,” he hears himself say, “and it will end. You’re going to live to see a Fili-pino Republic.”

Bayani holds a hand over the wound in his side as he laughs silently. “Is this a promise or a threat?”

The men spread out around them at the side of the road.

“Let me tell you a story, hermano,” says Bayani.

“Are there women in the story?” asks Kalaw.

“Not the kind you like,” the sargento answers. “These are the kind that will cut your pinga off.”

“Then I’m not listening.”

“When I left San Epifanio,” says Bayani, turning his head to the side to stare at the countryside, “I fell in with a group of tulisanes, not so different from our glorious Filipino army today — only when we robbed and kidnapped we had no great cause to excuse it.”

Diosdado’s men are expressionless, exhausted as they listen. They have all heard the rumors, legends almost, about their sargento, but he has never spoken of his past to them before.

“We told ourselves at first that we would only take from the rich, because we hated them and because they have more to steal. But it is always less dangerous to steal from the poor. One of our band was captured by the guardia civil, and he betrayed me. I would have done the same to him, I suppose, because when I was given the choice of swinging from the hemp or fighting for the Spanish, I made the coward’s decision.

“They treated the disciplinarios like the scum that we were. I don’t know how they treat their own men, the jóvenes pobres who join or are conscripted back in Spain, but five of our company were shot during the first week. One of them complained too loudly about an order to march when we were tired and the capitán stepped up and put a pistol bullet through his brain, which stayed on all of us, in small pieces, for the rest of the march. Many of us were killers already and by the end of our training we were organized, disciplined killers. They called us their tigres, and somehow I felt proud to be a member of this brigade.

“We were sent to Mindinao and barracked at Fort Pilar in Zamboanga. There were no women, of course, the moro girls afraid to even meet our eyes in public lest they be beaten or even killed by their men, and the vino we brewed there was very bad.

“ ‘Muchachos,’ said our alferez, because he always called us his muchachos indios, ‘we are here for one purpose only. To kill moros.’

“There was an old datu in the interior, Datu Paiburong, who was the devil’s own servant. The tribes along the coast were afraid of him and the ones who spoke chabacano and had come to Christ were terrified of him and it was he and his people we were sent to destroy. You know how once their kris is drawn from their belt in anger it must not be replaced before blood has been spilled? Datu Paiburong drew his when he was a young man and never put it away.

“For almost a year we raided the stockades his people lived in, but whenever we came the men would be gone. Some of our own were ambushed and some fell into the man-traps the moros dug and were killed or lost a leg, so we began to tear the stockades apart, to burn them to the ground. But they would rebuild almost overnight. The next time we raided and there were no men the alferez looked the other way and some of the women were violated. There were men among us who had done these things before. We knew that this was the same as murdering the women, that even if their lives were spared and they did not kill themselves they would be filth in the eyes of their people until the day they died. And after these violations one of our men was captured and tortured and when we found him his intestines had been pulled out of his stomach and tied to a tree and he had been forced to walk around it many times, wrapping his insides around the trunk and then left for the tree ants to eat him. They wrote on his chest in his blood — they wrote Each of you shall die like this.

“ ‘There you have it, muchachos,’ said our alferez. ‘It is a Holy War that we are fighting.’

“The order came down then to herd all the people who followed Paiburong — this is the time of General Weyler — into one guarded area where we could keep them under control. But they knew. Sometimes we thought the birds of the forest were in league with them, because whenever a new campaign was ordered they knew almost before we common soldados did, and this time when we came to the stockades they were deserted. Not a hen living, not a mouthful of food left. So we began to track them, farther and farther in from the coast, deep into the jungle, and by the time we started to climb we were exhausted and short on supplies, eating nothing each day but a tiny puñal of rice and beans mashed together and cooked in our own drinking cans and a man was bitten by a víbora and died screaming. The capitán and the teniente and the alferez no longer called us their boys, they called us indios hijos de puta or malditos criminales and kept their weapons ready all the time, afraid we would mutiny.

“Datu Paiburong’s men laid ambushes for us on the way up the old volcano. They are excellent shots, the moros, even with those ancient muskets they use, and our men who were hit in the first volley almost always died. And then they would be gone, and it was time to climb again. We could not pause to bury our dead, so we wrapped them in ponchos and tied them with mil leguas vines into the branches of trees and hoped to be back before the ants and the jaguares got to them.”

The men all sit close to Bayani now, listening. When he breathes in there is a wheezing sound, but his voice is calm, steady.

“The colonel broke us into three parties, each climbing from a different direction. We were to meet at the top in the evening.

“When we reached the part of the mountain where there were no more trees our buglers signaled and the moros fired at us from the rim and we had to charge up over the bare ground. We had started with a half-dozen field pieces but they’d been left behind so we could keep up with the chase. So we had only our rifles and they killed many of us as we charged up the slope, hating them, hating them for murdering our friends and for the jungle and the heat and for the oficiales cursing at our backs and because they were moros, though we were not, in fact, the truest of Christians.

“By the time we reached the top they had retreated down into the old crater. The crater was deep and so old that a ways down inside it there started to be trees again, and soil, a little round valley within the mountain.

“We had suffered many bajas, but it was the whole battalion and we had them outnumbered and had better rifles and knew they must be nearly out of ammunition. We had no fires that night, but they did, two huge fires where they cooked and sang and chanted and then, very late, the women began to shriek. It drilled into your soul, the noise they made. One of our guides said the singing was to their god, telling him they would soon be at his side, but he had never heard the women shriek like that. You could see their shadows, moving around the fires, but the colonel said to save our bullets for the morning.

“ ‘They’re halfway to Hell down there,’ said our alferez. ‘Tomorrow we send them the rest of the way.’

“The women came in the front. The sun rose and we heard them all making that noise with their tongues, high, like when the cicadas in the trees are singing their last notes because the day is dying, and then they came running up the side of the crater toward our positions, their faces painted and a dagger or a sword or some only with a sharp rock in hand and the men right behind, some with muskets and the rest with their kris drawn for the last time. They are beautiful people, the moros, their long hair, the colors they wear — beautiful. Beautiful targets as they ran up the side of the crater to us and we fired in volleys and then at will, hardly needing to aim, the men climbing over the bodies of the women as they fell and we were told to fix bayonets as they kept coming, muskets fired and thrown aside, screaming as they climbed up the steepest part where there was no cover and tumbling backward. Only a few survived for us to run the steel through. One of these was the old datu, who had some bullets in him and eyes like a cat and managed to hack one man in the arm before he was killed. We lifted him up on bayonets and marched around and all the men left in the battalion cheered till the colonel said to lay him down, we were taking the body back to Zamboanga for display.

“I was among the men who were ordered to go down into the volcano. On the way we finished the ones who were wounded. I finished a girl, a beautiful young girl, who was shot in both legs. She looked into my soul and cursed it and I shot her in the heart. At the bottom we found the children, the ones they thought were too little to fight, with their throats cut like lambs. The women had been shrieking by the fires while the men killed their children. They were laid out on flat stones, stuck to them with blood. I was afraid that the mountain would wake when it understood what had been done in its heart, that God or Satan would melt the rock and drown us in fire.

“The moros had thrown the last of their food into the fires so we would not get any of it. We pulled the jewelry off all the dead except for the datu and started back for the coast. All the men who had been wounded became infected and died. A man in our company who had worked in a bank in Manila and stole money from it went crazy and said he would walk no more and was left behind without his rifle. We took turns carrying the body of the datu, who was sewn up inside the canvas of a tent, two men at a time. He didn’t weigh much but he smelled like something from Hell. There were mosquitoes everywhere and no water left that was drinkable and nobody spoke except to abuse the Lord’s name or give an order. We knew we had been cursed.

“ ‘At least,’ said our teniente, ‘we left all that heavy ammunition behind in the moros.’

“When we came to the field pieces, there were lizards living in the barrels. None of the bodies of the ambushed men were where we had left them, or else we weren’t on the same path. The officers would compare their compasses to be sure we were heading in the right direction, but it took two days longer to come down from the mountain than it took to get up it, and a third of our battalion was gone.

“They hanged the body of the datu from a crane arm in the port, with his beautiful clothes and jewelry still on him, but the moros there, even the ones who had hated and feared him in life, only came to kneel and touch their foreheads to the ground. Honoring him. After a few days of this the gobernadorcillo had him taken down and stripped and thrown into the harbor for the fishes to eat.”

Bayani closes his eyes. The men are silent. A flock of birds twists over the cassava field across the road, changing shape, threatening to break apart and then flowing together.

“If we had that kind of unity,” says Diosdado after a while. “If we believed like the moros—”

“You miss the point of the story,” says Bayani from his stretcher. “You always miss the point. They believed. They believed so much that they slaughtered their own children. But they were outnumbered and outgunned and so they all died.”

Diosdado scowls. The valley is very lush now, crops growing as if there is no war. “It doesn’t matter how you die, or when,” he says. “It matters how you live.”

Bayani sighs and there is a rattle in his chest. “Say that when you are down inside the mountain, hermano. Say that when you are where I am now.”

They walk through the valley, crossing petsay bean and corn fields, and then come to his father’s vast huerta, mango trees as far as the eye can travel. These first ones are the abuelos, a hundred feet to the crown, the dark green spear-shaped leaves nearly a foot long, the trees full and round-topped and laden with hundreds of carabaos, fat and green and just about to turn. The smell, sweet and resinous, makes Diosdado’s mouth water. His mother would chop the young leaves for salad with tomatoes and onions, would shred the unripe fruits and serve them with bagoong, the salt of the shrimp paste cutting the sour of the green mango, and him out climbing the sturdy branches with the sons of the trabajadores till it was time for his lessons.

They are halfway through the orchard, in the section where the picos and the tiny señoritas are mixed in with the carabaos, when his father’s workers surround them. Diosdado is suddenly aware that he is dressed in rags like the rest of his men. He recognizes a few of the dozen trabajadores but not their leader, who points a shotgun at his belly.

“What are you doing here?” asks the man in Zambal.

“We are soldiers of the nation,” answers Diosdado. His men are ready to fight, even at such a disadvantage, but there should be no need to. “We have a wounded man.”

“This land belongs to Don Nicasio,” says the foreman. “You are not welcome here.”

A few of the workers have rifles, the rest bolos. One clutches a rusted cavalry saber. They are better dressed and better fed than Diosdado’s men, and know loyalty only to their patrón.

“We will walk with you back to where his lands begin,” says the foreman.

“Put your fucking weapons down,” snaps Bayani, whose fists are clenched against the pain once more, “and go tell Don Nicasio that his son is home.”

The plantation house is, like his father, solid and implacable, built of stone on both stories and buttressed for an earthquake that has not yet come. Don Nicasio does not embrace Diosdado when he receives him in the despacho. Nothing has changed in the room, the smell of leather and ink, the map from the shipping company displaying its myriad routes still covering the wall behind his father’s desk. The desk was Diosdado’s favorite forbidden playground when he was small, its dozens of cubbyholes and sliding panels and secret drawers revealing their treasures — a magnifying glass, a flask of Scotch whisky, the heavy pistol he was afraid to even touch.

“While you were busy running from the Americans,” his father informs him, still seated, regarding his son’s torn kasama clothing and sun-weathered face with weary condescension, “your mother, Dios le protige, has passed away.”

Diosdado feels unsteady on his feet, but that may only be hunger and the long journey over the mountains. He has guessed the sorry news already, noting the ribbon of black crepe stretched diagonally across her portrait, chrysanthemums abundant throughout the house.

“I am sorry.”

“She was a good woman. Too good for this world.”

Don Nicasio’s face is more lined than he remembers, yellowish, but his eyes burn as they always did.

“I suppose you’re here to demand tribute.”

“One of my men is wounded and needs a doctor,” he says flatly. “And an offering of food would be considered patriotic.”

Don Nicasio snorts, pushes himself up from his chair and steps past Diosdado. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with here.”

The men are in the rear garden, by his mother’s shrine to the Virgin of Antipolo. The statue is of a young, beautiful woman with her head tilted to one side, as if trying to hear something far away.

“She is listening for an infant’s cry,” his mother explained to Diosdado when he was little. “She is the Mother of us all.”

Beyond the stone bench where they have laid Bayani out Diosdado can see the panteón familiar, a tiny alabaster tomb with a cross upon it marking the grave of Adelfonso, his brother who did not thrive in the School of Survival, and his parents’ mausoleum, recently garlanded with wreaths of carnations.

That was her name — Encarnación.

The segundo with the shotgun and several of the other workers stand nearby, watching Don Nicasio’s face for instruction.

It takes the old man a moment to recognize Bayani, studying the wounds first before looking at the man’s face. Don Nicasio’s body stiffens. He turns away to confront Diosdado.

“Why have you brought him here?”

“He needs a doctor.”

“Dr. Estero is in Palauig.”

“That is ten miles farther on.”

“You have no right.”

“But here we are.”

Bayani raises an arm with some difficulty. “Don’t you recognize me, Don Nicasio?” he asks in Zambal.

Diosdado’s father does not speak. Bayani raises his voice, speaking to the old man’s back.

“Both of your boys home and this is your reception?”

The other men, Diosdado’s guerilleros, look away. Don Nicasio tells his segundo to send a carriage for Dr. Estero and to have Trini bring some food for these beggars, and then strides back into the house.

“I’m sorry, hermano,” Bayani says to his brother. “I was never taught proper manners.”

It was somewhere back in Pampanga that Diosdado guessed, but he has not found the words to acknowledge it.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did,” Bayani shrugs. “Not in so many words, but I did. You people only hear what you want to.”

Trini comes out then, bent with age, tears in her eyes.

“God has spared you,” says his old ama, embracing Diosdado and then setting up a table for the men to eat. When the food comes there is more than enough to fill their shrunken bellies.

“We had better finish this,” says Kalaw through a mouthful of lechón, “before the Americans take it all.”

Diosdado is certain his father will have no trouble with the Americans, even if his son — sons — are insurrectos with a price on their heads. Men like his father are making their accommodations all over the Philippines, coming to an understanding, waiting in line for the positions that will be handed down by the new masters of the land. The americanistas will not look so different than those who did the bidding of the Spanish — businessmen, the wealthier politicians, the owners of plantations. Ilustrados, even many of the scribblers, especially the ones who can write in English, have begun to campaign for “wiser heads to prevail” and “the gradualist approach” to independence. He has heard of a masquerade party in Manila with an adobo prepared, quite purposely, with American tinned pork obtained from their quartermaster corps.

“I’ve never set foot in that house,” says Bayani when they try to move him into the zaguán, “and I’m not going to now.”

Finally Diosdado sends the others to sleep on the palm mats Trini has laid out, and stays outside with Bayani in the garden, covering him with a blanket. It is very difficult for the sargento to breathe now, as if he had to strain through a quart of water to find the bubble of air within it.

“The doctor will be here soon,” Diosdado tells him.

“The doctor isn’t coming.”

It grows darker in the garden, the shadow of the Virgin lengthening toward them. Bayani fights to keep his eyes open.

“I hated you,” he says after some time. “I hated your clothes and I hated your shoes and I hated seeing you in your carroza on the way to church and the times I heard you speak I hated your voice. I hated Don Nicasio too, though my mother said he was a great man, great and proud and very intelligent. But I hated you more because you were where I should have been. You wore my shoes and ate at my table, the one with the cloth covering it, with a separate plate for every dish, while I was out sneaking chickenshit from your yard to spread on our potato patch. I tried to get the Baluyut brothers to beat you up because I was too shy, too ashamed, to do it myself.”

Diosdado smiles. “I always wondered what I did to upset the Baluyut brothers.”

“When you went away to school I was already in the world, stealing from people, killing moros for the Spanish, and I forgot about you. I thought I did. But when I joined the sublevo my first thought was to come to Zambales, to evict Don Nicasio from this house in the name of the Revolution and live here, rule here, myself. And when you came back one day, looking like a maricón in your white suit with your hair full of brilliantine and speaking Spanish like a peninsular, I would say ‘Go away, boy, you are not welcome on this land.’ ”

Talking costs Bayani, and he pauses to catch his breath.

“Then you ruined my dream,” he says when he can speak again, a slight smile on his lips. “You ruined my sweet dream of revenge. ‘We have a young lieutenant from Zambales,’ they told me, ‘and we want you to look out for him.’ ”

“I am sorry,” Diosdado tells him. For confession, carefully choosing one of the friars who didn’t know his voice to unburden to, he said the words but never felt the remorse. He feels it now. “I am sorry for what was done to you and your mother.”

“She didn’t want money. She only wanted him to look at her when he passed on his horse, passed in his carriage. To look at her as if she was there, as if he had loved her. But he is not corrupt enough, our father, to love two women and be just to them both.”

“My mother must have known about you.”

“We called her La Rezadora, whenever we’d see her coming back from morning mass, muttering her novenas. The One Who Prays. Maybe she was praying for our father’s soul.”

“And you still hate me.”

Bayani laughs, coughs wetly. “Take a look at us now. We could be twins, except I have more holes in me than you do. How can you hate your twin?”

Diosdado feels himself crying now. Maybe for his mother. The shadow of the Virgin covers Bayani’s face.

“The doctor will be here soon,” he says. “We’ll regroup and make a stand here in Zambales and on some of the other islands—”

“They’re paying fifteen American dollars if you hand in your rifle. How many of our men have ever had that much in their pocket? No — the yanquis will win and all of your friends will learn their language, your children will learn their language and priests of the American religion, if they have one, will take the place of the friars.”

“Maybe.” Diosdado has had to wrestle with the possibility. Being steadfast does not mean you have to be stupid. “But one day they will leave—”

“But one day they’ll leave,” says Bayani, “just like the Spanish are leaving, and then we’ll be able to kill each other in peace, the Christians against the moros, the Tagalos against the Ilocanos, the rich against the poor, men like me against men like our father. A true Republic of the Philippines.”

One of the workers returns then, a young man Diosdado remembers climbing trees with when they were boys, the kind of young man who should be bearing arms for his country. He steps forward shyly, deferential.

“Señor,” he says, “I am very sorry to report that Dr. Estero cannot be persuaded to come. He says that he is afraid that when the Americans arrive people will tell stories. He sends this.”

The young man, Joaquín is his name, Diosdado thinks, holds out a hand to reveal a small black ball of opium.

“No more,” Bayani growls. “If it hurts enough, I won’t regret leaving.”

Diosdado sits with him into the night, the tuko lizards chirping, the moon rising slowly over the grave markers in the panteón. Diosdado is cold but does not move.

“Bury me with my mother,” says Bayani at the end. “May God forgive us all.”

PROMETHEUS

It is the filth he can’t abide. Niles has come, in the last few days, to pray that they will kill him.

“They live like beasts, like hunted beasts,” he remarks to the Corre-spondent, who he knows is still alive because of the occasional tightening of the tether around his neck. “And we are less than beasts to them.”

It has been some time since the Correspondent has acknowledged his complaints or observations, the man going mute this morning after they cut poor Private Moss, dead from his wound and their appalling treatment, loose from the tree and tossed him into the ravine. Niles worries his teeth with his tongue to see how loose they have gotten. He tried once, maybe yesterday, to asphyxiate himself with the rope around his neck but was only able to slump enough to make himself less comfortable. He has witnessed two hangings in his life, one a formal and somewhat legal execution that ended with a hard snap and twitching legs, and the other an amateur affair meant to prolong the agony of the miscreant, a white man vile enough in his predations to merit the attentions of Dr. Lynch. There will be no public obloquy attendant on his own passing, the wretched niggers barely glancing in their direction anymore, moving them from camp to camp like necessary but annoyingly unwieldy baggage.

Niles has been recalling his Bulfinch of late, the Judge’s voice intoning Olympian exploits to him and Harry when they were boys, Niles perking up at the naughty bits and staring longingly, whenever the Judge was not present, at the gauze-caressed bosoms of violated maidens in the wonderful illustrations. Lately it has been the fate of Prometheus weighing on him, bound to a rock for his transgression, the giant golden Eagle of Zeus sent each day to tear his still-beating heart from its cavity. How the screech of the feathered terror, how the breeze from the waft of its enormous wings must have quickened that heart with apprehension! And then, after the wrenching pain — what? Was he made whole immediately or left pouring blood from his violated innards, life ebbing from him, thinking this is the last, the end, till darkness — and then a sharp jolt of consciousness, sun bleeding onto the ocean horizon and the heart pumping life again? He imagines that the groan emitted from Promethean lips is not unlike his own when coming to, still knotted to a tree, and realizing that nothing has changed.

He has begun to envy the Titan. Bound, yes, but with the healthful sea air in his lungs, the magnificent blue waters, joyous with dolphins, stretched below him, and the song of cliff-nesting birds in his ear. Wind in the hair. What of a few sharp moments with a razor-beaked demon, a gory, if inconclusive death? Niles is being consumed by insects while still breathing. Lice cavort in his scalp, ants, beetles, many-legged crawling vermin he cannot imagine inhabit the rags of his clothing and every sweat-sticky fold of his body — biting, nesting, breeding. Flies have burrowed into his face and left their eggs, the lumps on his tortured countenance growing larger and more tender each day, filling him with terrible thoughts of what will come with their spawning, what manner of squirming pupae unleashed to feed on him. There is no place on the surface of him that does not itch or sting or prickle with the traffic of tiny legs and he has taken to cursing the niggers in the crudest and most detailed manner whenever they wander near, hoping one will understand and take enough umbrage to send a quick bullet through his worm-infested skull. He feels not so much Prometheus as Caliban, styed in a crevice and bent with ague, victim to sorcerers without wit or pity.

“The Anglo-Saxon,” he informs the Correspondent, “has the ability to amuse himself without cruelty. However, even among those considered, academically, as members of the white race, there is a great deal of variation in this attribute. Take the Dago and his corrida, for instance, or the slaughter in your typical Italian musicale. And these miserable buggers,” he jerks his head, though the Correspondent cannot see him, toward the rebels, who have stirred from their midday torpor and seem to be breaking camp, “these mongrelized Asiatics practice cruelty as a matter of course, barely taking any pleasure in it.”

There was one for a while who spoke English and would share a few words, but he is gone. The jefe of this pack, a degenerate Spaniard of some sort, has a hateful, impatient disposition and rules his cretinous minions through fear.

There is gunfire lower on the mountain.

“Another of their hapless ambushes. We’ll be moving soon.”

If he refuses to go, feigns unwillingness or inability to move his legs, surely they will kill him. Quickly, dispassionately, but not with a bullet. There’s the rub. He has seen them butcher a captured mule with their bolos, the animal dismembered before someone thought to silence its bellowing with a chop to the neck, eyes still large and sentient after its larynx was cut. They fed Niles bits of the half-charred, purplish meat for a week. No, when they come to make him move he will clench his toes to force some blood into his numbed leg, will try to hold the mewling woman of a Correspondent he is yoked to upright and drag him down the pathway after their captors. If they haven’t been killed yet, burdensome as they are, there may yet be an exchange, something already in the works.

The rifle fire is closer now, closer than he’s ever heard it.

“Buck up, my friend,” he calls to the man tied to the other side of the tree. “Our salvation may be at hand.”

The rebels are running now, this way and that way to gather their paltry belongings, and the jefe, whose name he knows is Gallego, is walking toward them with the brute who has been charged with their security ever since the colored renegade was untied, the brute who yanks the knots so tight that both Niles’s wrists are chafed and infected, so tight that he has lost feeling in the discolored fingers of his left hand.

Gallego barks an order to the brute and stalks away. The others are nearly all gone now, fled in panic. The man has only a bolo, one of the long ones they use for killing, tight in his hand. He scowls down at them for a long moment.

“If you’re not going to kill us,” says the Correspondent flatly, breaking his long silence, “at least cut this cracker bastard’s tongue out.”

The pain is worse than Niles has imagined, the first blow snapping his collarbone close to the neck and twisting as it rends him apart, and he hears something like the bellowing of a mule before the white light—

He wakes anew, still bound, heart pounding, but far from whole. The pain is like a scream tearing at every fiber of him and there is another scream, audible, something like a baby’s constant wail, only from a grown man on the other side of the tree. When his eyes clear, Niles sees the googoo lying several yards away, a huge stain of blood spreading on his back, bolo still clutched in his outstretched hand. He goes away again, pain still there. He is only pain. And then he feels a hand take his chin and lift it up. It is a nigger staring him in the eyes, not one of theirs but one of the back-home variety, in a Regular Army uniform.

“This one still breathin, too, Lieutenant,” the man calls. “But the googoos done hack him up to pieces.”

MONSOON

It is raining again today. Nilda is already cooking when Royal wakes and sits up on the banig. The mosquitoes have been at him again in spite of the netting they sleep under, sneaking up through the cracks in the split-palm flooring. The thatch above makes a raspy sound as the rain hits it, and he can hear the surf, waves breaking steadily. Unless there is a storm he figures that four waves tumble in and sweep away for every minute in the long day. Maybe sometime he will get out there and count them, sunup to sunup, and do the sums and it would be like a clock. Though nobody here needs a clock.

Nilda looks at him when he stands but she doesn’t say anything. He has learned some of the words, like lalo which is “more,” and learned “yes” and “no,” but she is not much of a talker, Nilda. You don’t need so much talking here on the coast to get by, only the men when they sit after the fishing is done and drink palm beeno and tell stories or the women when they play cards and chew all that business that makes their teeth go red. Nilda doesn’t chew and doesn’t seem to be invited for cards. He wonders if that makes her sorry. It is the kind of thing they don’t have the language for. And the love-words, when they’re doing it, which is often on the long rainy days, he would like to know some of her love-words but all she’ll say is lalo sometimes, at least make him feel she wants it. He can say whatever he wants but hearing himself say things she doesn’t understand makes him disbelieve them, so now it is mostly just noises.

He takes the bamboo tubes and steps out onto the narrow platform, barefoot. His boots are too hot and the soles starting to pull away from all the wet, the leather with a green mold on it, and he’s only bothered with the sandals Nilda made him the few times they’ve walked in to her mother’s village. The rain is cool on his bare shoulders and when he is wet enough he rubs himself down to get the night-sweat off. He hops off the platform onto the dirt, startling one of Bung’s half-wild pigs sleeping underneath, and heads for the beach.

It’s not a village, really, eight of the bamboo and palm-thatch huts scattered along the ocean and another half-dozen, like the one he and Nilda have taken over, on the banks of the little stream that runs into it. A couple of the men are already out in the stream, thigh-deep, checking their fish weirs. They see him but don’t say good morning. A couple of the men are runaways like him, dodging something or other, and except for Bung, folks pretty much ignore him. A low mist comes up off the water as the rain hits it and Royal thinks again how pretty, in its dopey, dreamy, slow-ass way, it is in this country.

The beach is wide with a gentle slope to it, yellow-brown sand leading back to a thin strip of cocoanut palms before the thick brush begins. The stream cuts a different channel through the sand to the ocean every day, and this morning it is deep and swift-moving, churning at its wide mouth where the waves roll in over the freshwater pushing out. There are stick-legged birds skittering along the surfline and ghost crabs popping in and out of their holes, but it is too cool and rainy for the big lizards, lizards as long as Royal if you count their tails, to be out on the sand. Royal sees the pigs first, snuffling around some fallen, rotting cocoanuts, and then spots Bung way up in one of his palms. Bung waves and shouts a greeting, always cheerful.

Bung cut the notches for Royal’s first tree, somehow able to get enough mustard on the bolo while he’s clinging halfway up the trunk and not chop his own fingers off, taught him the whole routine. Royal stuffs the bamboo tubes in his belt and starts up. Bung cut the notches to fit his own legs which are shorter, but Royal is glad for so many hand- and footholds as he wrestles his way up the slippery-sided palm. They are so damn high, swaying mightily at the top on windy days, and he tries to never look down. In Cuba the little muchachos had a way of tying a short cord between their ankles and gripping the trunk with that but they were just skin and bone and had been doing it their whole life. It is a long hard climb for Royal, nothing like getting up in the spreading sycamores back home, and he has to rest his arms and legs a bit when he reaches the top. He pulls off a few ripe-looking cocoanuts and drops them to the sand, the time between letting them go and the soft smack reminding him how high he is.

He’s tapping just three of the flower stems, like Bung showed him, rattan strips tied to bind them over so the sap drips down into the bamboo tubes. The sap will run for half a day before the cut heals up and clogs, and then you have to climb again. Royal unhooks the bamboo tubes he’s left there, all three full with the whitish sap, carefully slipping them into his belt. He cuts a finger-long section off the end of each of the stems with Nilda’s little curved knife, then binds them down with the rattan strips and fixes the new collector tubes underneath. He licks his fingers off, sweet and sticky, clamps the knife between his teeth and begins to feel his way down the trunk.

The stems give less in this rainy season than before, but with two trees it is enough. Bung works six of them, but Bung does it as a living, selling some as frothy tuba in the village of Nilda’s mother and letting some pass into vinegar which he spices with hot peppers and once a week cooks down in the still he’s built to make lambanog which is even stronger than the beeno locals used to peddle to the boys in the garrison. Lift the top of your skull right off. Royal trades whatever he doesn’t drink himself to Bung for a little pigmeat.

Bung’s little herd is mostly out on the beach now, rooting for crabs, and Bung is waiting at the base of the palm, grinning, offering Royal a strip of the mangrove tanbark he crumbles into the tuba for color and to give it more punch. Bung talks at him, laughing and dancing around in the sand the way he does, waving his hands. He is bowlegged and keeps his hair short and bristly, rubbing the back of his head whenever he laughs. He is ripe-cocoanut colored, like when the bark first turns from green to tan, and lives with a very short, very round woman whose teeth are so red from the betel nut that when she smiles it looks like she doesn’t have any. At first Royal thought Bung was so happy because of his home brew, but has never seen him take a drop of it. Bung and his wife speak a different lingo than the other folks here, and even Nilda who has been other places doesn’t always understand them.

Royal is soaked through from the drizzle by the time he is done tapping his second tree, wearing only his pants which Nilda has cut and hemmed above his knees. He has gotten used to being wet all day. He leaves the tubes of palm sap on the bank of the stream and wades in, picking his way over the ankle-breakers on the bottom to the fish trap he has set up. There are three caught in the hemp, foot-long, bass-looking things, and he bends to snake his arm in and pull them out. He cracks their heads against a hardwood stump on the bank and strings them through the gills to carry. Food, at least enough to keep you going, pretty much just comes to you here. Fruit falls, root crops bump up from the dirt, fish are flushed down the river or swim in close to the beach to be caught. Before the rain started some of the beach men went in to work in the fields for the people in the village of Nilda’s mother, but none of them would hire Royal. They are poor, what people back home call catfish poor, having enough to eat and a roof overhead but not much else.

Their bahay has a steep-pitched roof for all the rain, hinged thatch shutters propped open and a little rough hemp mat on the platform to wipe your feet on. Nilda dries his hair with a cloth and has fish and rice hot for him when he comes in from the rain, pulling it off the indoor stove that is nothing but a hollowed section of log lined with mortar. It tastes like geechie food, only hotter when it is hot and sweeter from the cocoanut when it is sweet. They eat with their hands from the same bowl, sitting cross-legged on the woven sea-grass banig with their shoulders touching. Everything she fixes tastes fine but it is always the same things mixed in different ways.

Better than Army food.

When they are finished Royal sticks his hands out in the rain to wash them and then drinks some of yesterday’s tuba juice, already tangy with alcohol, from a gourd. Nilda will take some with food when it is maybe a half day old and still sweet, calling it lina, but Royal needs the extra kick.

He sits in the opening and watches the rain come off the thatch, watches the stream roll by, taking another sip now and then. The tuba softens the sound of the water hitting the roof, dulls the sound of the waves pounding the sand, smooths the edges off any thoughts that try to force their way into his mind. After a while he will lie out on the mat, not so much tired as waiting out the long day, and if she wants it Nilda will be lying next to him when he wakes. She is careful never to wake him, explaining in a complicated pantomime that when you sleep your soul wanders away, and that a person startled from sleep might lose it. Royal doesn’t have the words to tell her he left his behind long ago, in a cactus patch outside Bisbee.

In the early evening, hard to be exact in this season where you never see clear sky, he will climb to tap the palms again. Bung has a store of rice and he will trade some sap for it and then maybe sit and listen to the sea fishermen when they come in with whatever they’ve netted and drink and tell their long stories, eyes and voices growing soft with liquor, talking along with the slow rhythm of the waves. If there is news from the war, or if the war is still going on, nobody is trying to tell him about it. He feels his eyelids growing heavy. He senses Nilda moving around behind him, always with her hands busy, sewing mostly. She can make all kinds of pictures and patterns with the thread, and other women, the ones who don’t ask her to play cards and the ones in her mama’s village who won’t hardly look her in the eye, pay her in goods or sometimes in Mex money to put fancy borders on their clothes. Sometimes she will get up and step over to just touch him, like she needs to check that he is still there, that he is real. He knows she is there, always. This is where she is from, where she belongs, and he is just something that has washed up and doesn’t really fit. It is not so bad, a dreamy sort of life, the waters he has given himself up to warm and gently flowing. Royal drifts on the palm wine, barely able to hear the drops hit anymore, the air just a kind of water that is not so thick as what is in the slow, meandering stream outside, the sky is water and the earth soaked and overflowing with it and he lies on his side right where he is. A little chacón lizard is scuttling across the wall, hunting for insects. He can’t hear the waves but knows they haven’t stopped rolling. It will rain again tomorrow.

REAPER

The boy has been following him for two blocks, eyeing the bag, undoubtedly seeking the perfect moment in which to spirit it away. Dr. Lunceford has never been this far south, below Canal Street, and is unfamiliar with the neighborhood. It is his last day in Manhattan, the apartment across the river arranged for, and he has exhausted the appetite for Dr. Bonkers’ elixir in the tenements farther north. There is alleged to be a settlement of colored people down here, but thus far he has not discovered it.

“Hey Mister!” calls the boy.

Dr. Lunceford stops and turns to face him. The boy is perhaps eleven or twelve, though it is difficult to be certain with the more undernourished of the street Arabs. The boy glances down to the bag.

“You a croaker?”

The license has been promised, but given the vicissitudes of state bureaucracy there is no telling when it will be delivered.

“Are you in need of a doctor?”

“It’s me pal,” explains the urchin. “He’s awful sick.”

The boy leads him to Duane Street, then toward the West River. Dr. Lunceford is wary, not discounting the possibility that the boy has older confederates in waiting. He has been waylaid twice uptown, once losing several bottles of Dr. Bonkers’ to a gang, boys who were not, surprisingly, interested in the more valuable leather bag or the rest of its contents. He assumes they were disappointed upon drinking the nostrum. In the other incident he merely fled, prudently if not with dignity.

The boy, who offers his name as Ikey Katz, stands at the head of an alleyway a block from the pier and waves him in.

“He’s down here at the end, Doc,” he says. And noticing the doctor’s suspicious demeanor, adds, “On the level.”

The spill from the streetlamps does not completely penetrate the narrow passage. A trio of eating establishments of the lower echelon back onto the alley and the smell is not pleasant.

He notes rat droppings as he walks, and trash bins that have not been emptied in some while. At the end there is a hodge-podge of discarded wooden pallets, and lying on one of these, muttering in a language Dr. Lunceford has no inkling of, is a semi-comatose young boy.

“We figgered somethin was crook wid him when he don’t show at the Newsies’ Home yesterday night,” says Ikey. “Thursdays they wash your drawers for free, and he don’t ever miss out on that. So we been checking all the spots where he flops at night, an I found him here.”

The boy is moaning and muttering, his forehead damp and hot, his pulse racing.

“He’s been like off his nut lately, the Kid, and — you know — getting darker.”

“What is his name?”

Ikey shrugs. “We call him the Yella Kid.”

He is not yellow now, despite his mop of blond hair, but more of an angry bronze. Dr. Lunceford presses lightly on the swollen abdomen and the boy cries out, his eyes popping open to stare at the stranger in fright.

“Aw Jeez, not yet!” he cries. “I ain ready to go!”

“Calm yourself, son. I’m here to help you—”

“Shit you are! You’re here to stick me on the boat!”

“I don’t understand—”

“He thinks you’re the Reaper, Doc,” says Ikey. “The character that takes you unnerground.”

Dr. Lunceford removes his black homberg, forces what he hopes is a reassuring smile.

“I’m here to help you.”

The boy’s terrified eyes swing to his friend. “You member the one I showed you, Ikey? Right in the front winda at Altgeld’s. It’s all white—”

Ikey turns to Dr. Lunceford. “See? He’s been like that all week. Bughouse.”

“You got the meatwagon here, right?” says the boy. His voice is hoarse, unsteady, his eyes burning feverishly.

“I am not Death,” says Dr. Lunceford. “I am neither a butcher nor an undertaker. I am a doctor and I’m going to take you somewhere you can be treated.”

The boy’s eyes grow wider. “I aint goin to no croaker shop! They slip you the black bottle or you end up on one of them Orphan Trains—”

“Those are just stories—”

“The Orphan Trains is real,” says Ikey Katz. “They got their paws on Jinx McGonigal and shipped him out to some farm where there’s nothin but squareheads. Made him work like a dog and kneel on a wooden pew every Sunday. Took him most of a year to scarper and bum his way back here.”

“He won’t be going anywhere for a long time,” says Dr. Lunceford, realizing how little reassurance the phrase offers. “Do you know where the Hudson Street Hospital is?”

“Sure.”

“You run there as fast as you can, straight to the ambulance barn, tell them that it is an emergency and bring them back here.”

“You got it, Doc.”

Ikey runs off down the alley. The sick boy’s breathing is rapid, shallow. A late-phase cholestatic jaundice, the bile ducts obstructed by a tumor or, less likely in one so young, gallstones, growing steadily. Nothing to be done till he is on an operating table.

The boy squints his eyes at him, as if his features are hard to make out in the weak half-light from the street. “You gotta tell em about the funeral crate,” he pleads. “It’s right up front in the winda. I got enough saved to cover it.”

With a good surgeon, thinks Dr. Lunceford, and the helping hand of Providence—

“I’ll be sure to let them know,” he tells the boy.

The boy clutches his middle, tears streaming down his cheeks. “It hurts somethin awful,” he says. “It hurts awful.”

“I know,” says Dr. Lunceford. “I know it does.”

The boy begins to convulse then, eyes rolling up into his skull, slender limbs thrashing against the pallet until Dr. Lunceford is able to take hold of him. The doctor hugs the boy’s head against his chest, wrapping his arms around him tightly till the spasms stop, muscles exhausted. His eyes clear slowly.

“I’m scared as hell, Doc,” he says, grimly lucid now, turning his head to look up to Dr. Lunceford. “I never figgered on that.”

“Don’t you worry,” says Dr. Lunceford. “It won’t be long now.”

The doctor sits on the pallet holding the Yellow Kid, waiting and thinking. Thinking about his life and what has happened to it, thinking about where he should be now, with Yolanda, instead of down this filthy alley in a city of orphans. Junior was about this size the one time they thought they were going to lose him to scarlet fever, Yolanda furious at him for being a doctor and not being able to do more, only hold him and rock him and talk to him while Yolanda pressed the ice packs to his forehead. He felt it in his fingertips when the fever broke and his son was able to sleep, past all danger.

The street boy, shaking weakly, manages to lay his hand over the back of Dr. Lunceford’s.

“Lookit that,” he says in a small voice. “We’re the same color, you an me.”

RESCUE

Jacks watches the sand. The rebels are keeping close to the crashing waves but it isn’t high tide yet and they’ll have to leave track on dry sand to get into the trees. The tip was on the level for a change, some amigo earning himself a couple gold eagles or a pass out of the hoosegow, and if they’d gotten there a few minutes earlier they would have had the rebels boxed in. For some of the terrain here it would be good to have horses, ride down fast on the little shack towns before anybody has a chance to holler, run down whoever tries to light out. This humping around on foot won’t get it done.

“Got to be something wrong with these people,” says Coop. “Don’t know when they been beat.”

“Or maybe they know it, but got nothin better to do,” calls Hardaway from the rear of the squad. “Vex us with sniper fire and make us haul our narrow asses down this damn beach chasin em.”

“Army’s not paying you to eat beans and sleep, Private.” Jacks turns and walks backward for a few steps, making sure his men aren’t strung out too much. There is a good thirty yards of open sand before the tree line here, perfect for a googoo ambush.

“I forgot,” says Hardaway. “We all making a fortune here.”

Coop walks like he’s on a Sunday picnic, rifle held casually in one hand. “We ought to send the ones we caught back home,” he says. “Let them be the niggers for a spell.”

Even on a flat beach the surf can kill you. The wind is moving one way and the current another today, something like a storm collecting out over the water, and the waves are high as Royal’s shoulder with the out-sucking fierce enough that they seem to hang in the air for a moment before slamming down on the hard, bare sand. Bung maneuvers his little banca out beyond the breaker line, looking for an opening, turning the boat out to face the biggest of the swells, now and then raising his oar to be seen when he slides into the steep troughs. He is riding low, like he has a big haul of fish or has taken on water. The outrigger is about the only thing Bung owns in the world and Royal knows he will risk his life to save it.

Bung makes no signal when he starts in, just paddling hard, one side and then the other, trying to ride a medium-high swell in without getting too far down its slope, no reason to think this one is any easier than the others so he must be at the end of his strength. Royal stands up on the beach where the spent waves race around his calves and then hurry away, the front line of the ocean booming, churning white, and wishes Nilda was here. But it is too late to run for her and the surf too loud for him to shout and everyone else is in Candelaria for the festival of Saint Somebody. Bung is moving fast in the banca now, flying like a spear, and on some days when the waves aren’t high and undercut Royal has seen him glide ashore, effortlessly disengaging from the boat to grab the painter at the bow and run it up another ten feet without breaking speed. But today the water comes apart before you can get to the sand, the sea violent against itself, and Royal pulls a deep breath into his lungs before rushing in.

He stands sideways to the first wave and is almost torn off his feet by it, then runs three long steps forward to dive into the base of the next breaker the way he’s seen the boldest of the local boys do, swimming hard to push out the other side of it, and feels right away that he’s never been in anything this powerful, stronger than the water that swept him away from the company, fighting hard just to keep himself pointed out to sea. Three strides and dive, two strides and dive, not making any ground but surviving each wave and not at all sure how he’s going to help but he can’t just watch a man drown. He digs in, chest-deep and able only to duck under the next rumbling wall of water. He pops up to see Bung still coming, looking sideways and back over his shoulder as he paddles, as if trying to outrace the swell he is on. They meet eyes before it happens, Bung indicating with a flick of his oar that Royal needs to get out of the way, and then the next wave is bigger than all the others and Royal is wrenched off his feet as it breaks early and he is tumbled, the bottom smacking him in the shoulder, back, head, knee, head again, a rag doll in the churning white, saltwater driven up his nose and then lying sideways in outrushing foam being pulled back toward the next breaker till Bung, it must be Bung, grabs him by an ankle and pulls him out of the surf.

Royal snorts out water and sand. The banca flips and tumbles down the breaker line, both outriggers snapped off, and Bung is frantically running, bowlegged, to toss flopping fish higher onto the sand before the sea can take them back.

Royal stands. One knee has been twisted, his shoulder scraped, his jaw sore. There is sand in between his teeth. Bung is pointing at Royal, giggling now but with his arms and legs trembling from the struggle and fish, dead and dying, scattered all around him. He sees something beyond and the smile dies on his face. Royal turns to look.

They are coming up from the south, moving fast like something is behind them, with the Teniente in front. He hasn’t shaved or cut his hair for a long time and looks skinnier than ever. Kalaw is still with him, and Locsin and Pelaez and Ontoy and the little boy Fulanito. The segundo, Bayani, is missing. All of them have rifles.

The Teniente speaks to Bung first, but the man is frozen, too terrified to answer. Royal steps in front of him.

“Yall people still running?”

The Teniente does not smile at him. “We need the road to Candelaria.”

“I take you there.”

The men all stare at Bung as they step past him, eyeballing a warning, and Kalaw quickly gathers some fish to stuff in his mochila. Though nobody is pointing a rifle at him Royal feels like a hostage again.

“The war gone come up here?”

The Teniente looks back as they wade across the mouth of the stream where it hits the beach. “It has already arrived. Your men are behind us.”

They squeeze through the stand of nipa palm that lines the far bank, then step carefully over the gnarled, guano-spattered roots of the mangroves, branches laden with sleeping fruit bats hung upside-down, the only thing Nilda ever cooked for him that he wouldn’t eat. Royal leads the band through a maze of boulders then, turning inland when the dunes begin, sandy, palm-studded mounds that lead to the Candelaria road without taking you past any of the fishermen’s huts. The Teniente pauses at the top of the first one, giving Fulanito an order, then waves for the others to keep going.

The boy lays on his belly at the top of the dune, facing the beach, rifle by his side.

“Fulanito will fire when they come into view.” The Teniente’s face is grim. He looks as if he hasn’t slept for a long time. “If they believe they are attacked they will delay their pursuit.”

“They aint gonna care he’s so little,” says Royal as they hurry away. “They kill him anyways.”

There are a few shacks up by the tree line and a broken dugout boat tumbling in the surf and Coop finds a fish lying in the dry sand, gills still pumping.

“This got to be a googoofish,” he shouts before flinging it over the breakers and into the sea. “Don’t know where it suppose to be.”

“We could of ate that.”

“I aint eatin no more fish in this lifetime.” Coop has been the one most eager to believe the rumor that they will all be replaced by Texas Vols and sent back home. “Rice neither. I get back it’s gone be steak and potatoes or nothin.”

There is a woman, youngish, eyeing them from up the bank of a little stream that empties out into the ocean, standing motionless. There are still a lot of them up here never seen an American, colored or not. A number of the palm trees have bolo slashes on their sides, footholds, and Jacks looks into the tops for snipers. It has become that kind of fight, like a handful of wasps worrying a water buffalo. No way they can bring you down, but now and then you get stung.

The tracks of the band, six of them now, appear on the far side of the stream past the nipa fronds, cutting away from the roaring surf and into a jumble of boulders. The new one is bigger, barefoot. Jacks holds his arm up and Gamble and Ponder scoot ahead into the rocks, ducking low as they run. The rest of the patrol squats or takes a knee. There is no shade here, and Jacks has his midday headache, the rhythmic pounding from the shore working on him all morning long. Huachuca and Bliss would cook you but it never made you wet like this, like you been steamed through. He wonders how Lupe would make out here. He misses her.

Gamble and Ponder pop out and wave them up.

“Single file,” he says, and they head into the boulders.

The rocks are near shoulder-high, no reason they should be there, just something God didn’t have noplace else to put. The men walk silently, rifles held high and ready. Jacks doesn’t have to do much sergeanting with this bunch, all of them experienced soldiers now, turning quick but holding fire when the rustling off to the left turns out to be only a monitor lizard, one of the big long ones that all start to sing when the sun drops out of sight.

They come out at the base of a low dune with a few crooked palms sticking out from the top. The rebels have climbed it.

“These boys never learnt to cover they tracks,” says Coop and then his head makes a snapping sound, a wet clot of it hitting Jacks on the shoulder and they are all down on their bellies firing at the top of the dune at the spot between two palms where there was a flash of metal. Gamble and Ponder split wide from each other, lizard-crawling up the slope while the others continue to pour it on to cover them. They hold fire when the boys wave.

Coop is gone, laid backward in the sand with a hole between his eyes and his head in a puddle.

“Cover him up with something,” says Jacks and trudges up the side of the dune, slinging his rifle and dropping onto his hands for the steep part. It is only a boy at the top between the palms, shot four or five times, a Mauser lying next to him. Ponder picks up the rifle to put another in him, but the chamber is empty.

“Hit the man when he didn’t have but one shot,” says the corporal. “What’s the odds on that?”

Diosdado has given up trying to read the gunfire. It was Fulanito and then a lot of Krags and then silence.

“Road just up over the top of this hill,” the American says, pointing. “You head east on it. But that boy, if they didn’t get him, he gone get lost.”

“You could join us.”

“And yall could give up. You give them rifles over, I bet they still payin out.”

There are Americans, white men, living in his father’s hacienda now. Americans hold the railroad all the way up to Bayambang. When he gets the men to Candelaria they will bury the rifles and split up, each going to a baryo where they have friends, and pass as Juan Tamad. See their families, maybe raise a crop until it is time to strike again. The yanquis are impatient people, and if they think this war is a disease they can never shake, persistant and painful, maybe they will go home.

His men are waiting for an order. There is no firing now and they feel the enemy closing in.

“Go back and find the boy if you can,” he says to Royal Scott, “and lead him to the road when it is safe. We aren’t finished yet.”

He starts over the hill and the others hurry after.

Royal backtracks a ways and then sits out in the open just over the crest of a dune. Fulanito should find his way at least this far, and if it is the others they will at least see he is unarmed. He rubs the flea bites on his legs softly with the palm of his hand, soothing not scratching like Mama taught him, and waits. Bung will have told everybody left near the shore by now and they will make themselves scarce. It seems like the end of the earth, but the flag has followed him even here.

He recognizes them before the faces take detail, the way they move on patrol, their shapes. Sergeant Jacks spreads them out in a defensive position and climbs the dune alone.

“You not supposed to be here, Private.”

“That aint a lie.”

Jacks steps past him to the top, looks down the other side, then comes back to sit beside Royal in the sand.

“Where they gone to?”

“Up the road. There’s a village.”

“That boy killed Cooper. We come into any village, somebody’s dyin.”

“Cooper.”

“Uh-huh.”

The waves seem very far away, rolling now, and the sky has gone clean of bad weather. Royal is wearing only a wrapped cloth like Bung does and feels naked next to the sergeant. Jacks stands.

“You better get your story together, son.”

The other men nod and Too Tall mutters a hello when he comes back down with the sergeant, but they keep their eyes away like he might be a ghost. Corporal Ponder is carrying Fulanito’s Mauser.

“Those people long gone,” Jacks tells them. “So we just liberate this prisoner and head back to the garrison.”

They follow their own tracks back over the dunes to the boy’s body. They have rolled him onto his side and except for the blood he could be napping in the sand. Coop’s body is stretched out way down the slope, a palm leaf covering his head. It wasn’t an easy shot.

Nobody offers to help when Royal squats and puts Coop’s body over his shoulder to carry. He feels the head sticky against the small of his back as they walk, over and through the dunes to the beach, making their way around the boulders, squeezing through the nipa and crossing the stream knee-high where it spreads out. The tide is up now, only a little strip of sand left uncovered. Royal kneels and lays Coop down on it.

“I get something we can carry him in the rest of the way.”

“You go with him, Hardaway,” says Jacks, looking into Royal’s eyes. “Might be some of them googoos still about.”

He leads Hardaway to Bung’s hut, better built than most, and unties the hammock stretched between the deck post and the cocoanut palm growing next to it. He speaks softly, searching hard for the words in Tagalog. Bung won’t be far away.

“What you say there?” Hardaway asks when they are coming back with the hammock.

“Told where that boy is. Maybe somebody will do for him before the crabs get busy.”

The others have stripped most of Coop’s clothes off.

“I tell the lieutenant you got lost in the river, got caught, run away and spent you some time in the sun out here,” says Sergeant Jacks, tossing Coop’s pants at him. “But you best walk in there looking like a soldier and not some wildass golliwog been shacked up with a native gal.”

The other men busy themselves wrapping the body in the hammock, satisfied with the story. You sign up to fight for the flag but at the end it’s only each other you risk yourself for. Coop’s clothes fit Royal fine except for the hat, which slips down over his eyes, and the boots. His feet have gone wide from walking barefoot so long and they pinch like a son of a bitch.

Nilda stands back from the beach, watching from behind the trunk of a big dapdap tree as they file past. Even in the uniform and at this distance she can tell which one is him by the way he moves. And by the way he moves, she knows it is no use following.

ARRIVISTE

Uncle has put on some muscle. Sleeves rolled up, the biceps of his powerful arms bulging as he holds the squalling, ragged pickaninny labeled PHILIPPINES over his knee and administers the medicine, a shoe with AMERICAN MILITARY printed on the sole raised in the other hand. Other urchins in their native costumes — a dark-haired little Spaniard, a big-lipped Hawaiian, a Mexican in a sombrero, a yellow Chinaman, an Indian in breechclout and feathers — nurse their throbbing backsides while kindly Lady Liberty deals out schoolbooks to each and indicates the bench on which they are to sit quietly. An unruly gang of onlookers, German, Jap, Colombian, Russian, even a portly John Bull, observe the thrashing with wide eyes, duly impressed. Uncle fixes them with eyebrows raised and chin thrust forward—

WHO’S NEXT?

WHISTLE STOP

They are all colored, the ones who come in, which makes it simple. Hod doesn’t care, it’s all business, but some of the white soldiers and the leftover Spanish do and they are the customer, who is always right. The locals, whatever their color, tend to wait for the time in between trains to come in and he has decided not to put up a sign or make a policy. Let them work it out on their own. He catches the sergeant looking between him and Mei while they handle orders at opposite ends of the counter, the troop with maybe a half hour before their transport is serviced.

“This place has gone through some changes since we last come through,” says the sergeant. It’s clear he means San Fernando, not the lunch room, which has been open just two weeks.

“Earthquakes, Spaniards, American gunboats—” says Hod, “not the first time it all come down.” The sergeant has ordered a hamburger sandwich like most of the others, like most of the Americans who come in off the train. The carabao beef is a might stringy so he has Chow mix a little duck fat into the grind. “But you can’t leave it just sit. Hell — I heard them folks back in Galveston already built their downtown back.”

“Never understood why people want to stay there,” says the sergeant. “I’m from El Paso — the river don’t flood and the earth don’t shake.”

“On your way home?”

There is a looseness to these men, a lightness, that he remembers from when the Colorados got pulled off the line for good. Had your chance to kill me and now it’s gone.

“They send us to some fort,” says the sergeant, looking down the counter at his laughing, shouting soldiers, “and we’ll sort it out from there. Not like you vols, walk off the boat and that’s the end of it.”

Mei touches his arm and tells him she’s going back to help Chow fix the orders. He can feel the sergeant watching them.

“Where you been garrisoned?” he asks. It is no skin off his ass what people think, it really isn’t, but some of them act like if you married a Chinese it’s their business to say something.

“Zambales.”

“Sittin on the beach.”

“Ever walk ten miles over loose sand with your full kit on?”

Hod grins. “Wasn’t any picnic where we was either. How the people up there?”

“Not so different than here. Got some different languages, some folks up in the mountains still carryin spears.”

“I heard about them.”

The sergeant swivels around in his seat to look out the front window. The window cost more than anything else, that much glass a rare item in earthquake country, but the swivel seats were a steal after Hod told the workmen what he wanted, the head fella having seen the real thing on a visit to Manila and able to copy it.

“It’s no wonder my boys just give up and called em all googoos,” says the sergeant. “So many kinds to keep track of.”

“I suppose.”

“The Mexicans, they got names for every kind of mix. Mestizo, castizo, mulato, morisco. Even got something called a salta-atrás—a jump backwards.”

“Which is—?”

“Chinese man and an Indian woman.” The sergeant shrugs. “You figure these folks have their own words for all of it.” He points out the window. “Like what would you call that?”

He is pointing at Bo, who stands on the porch holding himself up by the bamboo roof support watching the other boys hustle their peanuts and cigarettes and bananas next to the steaming locomotive. Mei has scared him enough about the tracks that he will stay there for hours, following the action in the station like it is all a show put on for his enjoyment. He doesn’t look like the other boys here, who could all go for twins, and Hod has never thought before about what name to give. He told the major he’d applied to be British so they’d let him stay, but has let it slide and once the ship sailed with the regiment nobody has questioned him. Bo turns to look inside, and, seeing Hod, lights up with the smile he does with his whole body.

“That,” says Hod, reaching for the water jug to serve the colored infantry, “would be a Filipino.”

FAVORITE SON

If it wasn’t so damned blue. The band is playing When Johnny Comes Marching Home as his son requested and Sally is weeping prettily and half the folks who matter in Wilmington are on the platform waiting. But the first thing the Judge’s eye falls on is the blasted yankee outfit Niles is got up in, and it makes his blood boil same as always. Niles pauses in the doorway of the Pullman, showing his brilliant teeth and waving his arm at them and all the ladies crying now and the men clapping their hands, he looks so heroic, and then there is the sleeve pinned up on the other side and what they’ve done to his face and the Judge has to breathe deep to hold himself together. He steps forward and takes his son’s hand, the right, thank you Lord, and they embrace. The band rushes into There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, people clapping and stomping as Sally hugs Niles and the people cheer and then he is led to the little platform they’ve set up where Tom Clawson and Mayor Waddell are waiting, the other instruments dropping out to leave just the boy on the trap drum rattling a quiet tattoo to reclaim the military theme of the proceedings and the redcaps stop and set their burdens down, watching respectfully at the edge of the crowd.

“My fellow citizens,” intones the old Colonel, “it is my great honor to welcome home a son of our soil, a young man who has risked his life and sacrificed his health that the light of Freedom might shine on one of the darkest corners of our world. Lieutenant Niles Manigault, our prayers have been with you, you have done us proud, and we offer you our everlasting gratitude and esteem!”

The boy on the trap is joined by three more drummers now and a color guard from the Wilmington Light Infantry steps forward, the master-at-arms presenting Niles with a yankee flag folded in a triangle. He’s paid a damned arm to protect it, thinks the Judge, they might as well give him one for a souvenir. There is more clapping and folks calling for a speech and the drumroll cuts off sharp.

Niles looks around at the gathering. The engineer has stepped out to watch, his locomotive wheezing hot water up the track, waiting for the ceremony to end before he pulls out of the station.

“It has been my honor,” says Niles finally, “to represent you good people, to represent our fine city and the great state of North Carolina, in this desperate and glorious conflict.”

Cheers and exhortations. Whatever the Judge’s apprehensions about his son serving in a Colorado unit with a troop of illiterate miners, the experience may well have made a man of him.

“As Colonel Waddell has so eloquently stated, our mission in Asia is not one of conquest, but no less than the struggle of Christianity and enlightenment against the forces of darkness and ignorance. I believe that in my absence you folks have triumphed in a similar crusade.”

Laughter and applause at this. There has been some grumbling, concern that the best of the niggers were driven out with the worst of them, Sprunt even sending recruiters up North to bring some back and fill out his shifts. But on the whole, white Wilmington is pretty pleased to have recaptured the city.

“I believe that our success on both of these fronts is evidence that our cause is just and that Almighty God is with us. I have returned not only to reunite with those dear to my heart—” turning to nod fondly at Sally and the Judge, “—but to offer my support, in whatever form proves most useful, to the revitalization of our city and the ascent of our section to its rightful prominence in national affairs.”

More cheering. The Judge gives a nod to Clawson, who steps forward to stand beside Niles.

“We’d all like to know,” grins the editor, quieting the crowd, “if that support might include a run for public office?”

Niles puts his hand over his heart and smiles modestly. The saber scars on his face temper his good looks — even with the gap cut into his moustache he seems more trustworthy than before. War has carved him into something finer.

“I believe Colonel Waddell would concur,” he says, “that if the times demand it, a man must step forward to meet his responsibilities.”

A cheer then and the Judge nods to the band leader, who drops his baton and it is Dixie with the Stars and Bars unfurled from the roof of the station and confetti tossed into the air and stomps and yells and the Judge is not the only man with his heart in his throat. The whistle blows then and all move away from the blasts of steam as the train starts to roll and Niles steps down for what seems like an hour of handshaking and backslapping, the yankee flag wedged under the stump of his left arm and the band shifting into The Volunteer to serenade the folks heading home.

“I thought that went rather well,” says Niles when they are just family and on the way to the carriage.

“The state ought to have a regiment in this fight. With you as commander.”

Niles smiles faintly. “I believe I’ve seen enough of that hellhole for the present, thank you.”

The Judge is glad to see Niles swing himself up into the barouche on his own and then reach back to help Sally. Coleman, the third driver the Judge has hired since the city was liberated, does not think to come down from his seat. Decent government is restored, but the impudence lingers.

“Clawson and I have spoken with Josephus Daniels,” says the Judge, hauling himself on board and facing backward. “There’s a position in the state senate about to open up, and he says he’ll run a campaign in the News and Observer to draft you. With your approval, of course.”

Niles leans his head back against the seat as Coleman sets the team in motion. The journey has tired his son, or else he is just looking older.

“Until I learn to deal poker with one hand,” he says with his new, saber-slashed grin, “I might as well give politics a go.”

NAGASAKI

They won’t step ashore in Nagasaki. Just a coaling stop before the long leg to Honolulu and then to the States. Royal wonders if the white troops going home get to go in and stretch their legs. Except for the crew it is only colored on the A.T. Crook, sitting out in the long protected anchorage with low mountains on both sides, the harbor ending with the little man-made island of stone warehouses where the chaplain says they kept the Dutch traders operating after they crucified all the Catholics, a short bridge connecting it to the small city that spreads by the river’s mouth. The Japs have their navy training here, thick fortress walls near the water’s edge and warships maneuvering all around them for what looks like practice.

Royal sits up on the forecastle deck and watches the first of the barges come alongside. The loaders squat on the mounded coal till the lines have been secured, then clamber up the webbing, one man and more than three dozen women forming their line from the port gangway across to the coal bunker, four men left on the barge to shovel. The sun is straight down on them, harbor surface dead flat and most of the soldiers lolling on deck wasted from the heat. The women chatter with each other as they get into position, gabbling like a flock of wild turkey hens, and then go silent the moment they are in place and the coal starts moving, big bamboo baskets loaded with forty, maybe fifty pounds hoisted hand-to-hand up the side of the ship and then passed down the line by the women, the hems of their short robes tucked up into waistbands, baskets never slowing for a moment till the man at the end dumps the coal into the bunker opening and flings the basket toward the rail, where a woman catches it in two hands and drops it over the side to another woman feeding baskets to the shovelers below.

Ants, thinks Royal, ants like he’s seen in the jungle, filing into their anthill with their loads and filing back out to carry more, blind to everything but the task. Some of the other men come out to the edge to watch with him, mute with the heat, five more gangs feeding the bunkers now and then more as the other barges and lighters swarm both sides of the ship and it is all women doing the passing, the webbing and decks overrun with them, hundreds of women passing baskets of coal toward the bunkers. No shouting, no talking, only the crunch of the shovels in the coal and the hollow crashing as it tumbles into the bunker and the occasional thunk of a barge against the big ship’s hull.

They are short, sturdy women, from fifteen to fifty, many of them wearing straw hats with very long bills against the noonday sun, keeping their legs slightly bent as they turn their hips to take a load, turn to pass it on and then turn back to take the next, their faces and arms glistening with sweat, clothes sticking wet to their bodies, long black hair, where it hangs loose, dripping with sweat. A few of them are as brown as Nilda. He was starting to have more of her words just before the Army came to bring him back, words for things you could point to, for water and fire and wood and the names of things to eat. The other ones, words between a man and a woman that aren’t things you can point to, those he can barely remember in American. They don’t look like people right now, these coal-passing women, only like part of a machine that is feeding the ship. He can’t imagine Jessie here, can barely even bring back her face. She is a little girl he used to look at through window glass, wearing a velvet dress and gloves that she only pull off to play white people’s music on the piano.

But she is not there behind the glass anymore, and Junior cut to pieces and Coop laying in the dirt up in Zambales and Jubal run north, all of them dead or scattered and Royal is cooking under the sun in the middle of a harbor on a hot metal ship crawling with ant-women.

The last basket makes its way down the first of the lines and as each loader unhands it she sits or lies on the deck to recover till the next barge is in place, hands black with coal from the baskets and faces darkened with it now as they wipe the sweat away, a trail of exhausted women laid out with their eyes shut tight against the sun and their tiny ribs moving up and down.

A coal-smudged young woman with no hat but a red band around her forehead looks up to the forecastle before she sits on the frypan of a deck, locking eyes with Royal. There are another two ships, a German and an English, waiting behind them to be serviced. She cocks her head sideways as if considering something she has never seen before, then smiles at him, face glistening black as a minstrel. Royal feels tears running down his cheeks and suddenly aches, aches all over to be somewhere he can call home.

AMNESTY

Diosdado searches along the edge till there is nothing but reflection. The pond is filled with weeds, their ragged tops poking through the surface, but he finally finds a smooth patch and sees himself looking down with the open sky behind him. When he empties his eyes of comprehension there is nothing about the unshaven, shabbily dressed man to suggest he is more than an illiterate tao. He hides his alpargatas under the roots of a flowering narra tree, sinks his bare feet into the pond to coat them with muck, then heads down the acacia-lined road to Tautog.

He won’t be the last patriot to surrender his rifle, not even in Zambales. Luciano San Miguel will fight on, and some of Tinio’s people who have crossed over from the Ilocos, and Toque Rosales, who was a tulisan before the war and will become one again. But they will not win. If dying could drive the yanquis back across the sea he would find a way to die.

The sentry calls halt and he stops on the path with the rifle held in both hands high over his head. There is a rumor that the Americans have been shooting men who try to surrender, tired of paying the amnesty fee for rifles, angry and hot and bored and claiming their victims were ambushers or bandits. It is a rumor Diosdado helped to start when the men were weary of fighting, weary of running. Two soldiers step out at him, white men, each with a Krag aimed at his heart.

“Lay that piece down, amigo. Real slow.”

He remains with frightened eyes and the crooked-barreled Remington overhead. He traded his Mauser to Pelaez for it, a piece of his soul left in the fight.

“Lookit here, nigger,” says the other, and broadly mimes laying a rifle in the dirt. Diosdado puts the Remington down and steps back from it.

“There’s a good boy. Now march.”

The other Americans in Taugtod barely look at him as he is led in with his hands behind his neck. Two of them are chasing a flapping rooster around the plaza, cursing it, and another is shaving himself in a tiny mirror hung by a cord from the branch of a barren santol. The villagers seem resigned to the yanquis among them, as they were resigned to the Spanish before. Little boys are throwing a white ball back and forth with one of the soldiers who wears a leather glove on the hand he catches with. A lieutenant steps down from the house of Ignacio Yambao, the alcalde with the beautiful singing voice who was assassinated after the fiesta of the Ina Poon Bato.

The lieutenant has very green eyes and a blond moustache. The interpreter is a Macabebe, dressed in the yanqui uniform but for gray trousers and a red band around his hat. The Macabebe pokes Diosdado with a stick and indicates a stool placed in front of the lieutenant, who sits on a dusty friar chair and glares at him. Diosdado sits stiffly and looks at the ground like any terrified peasant, twisting his battered straw hat in his fingers, answering the questions in a respectful monotone.

“Who were you fighting with?” barks the Macabebe, first in Pampangano and then in heavily accented Tagalog.

“I was taken from my village, jefe. They tore up my cédula and forced me to go away with them,” he answers, in Tagalog. “They called the leader El Porvenir.”

“That is a lie.”

“As you say, jefe. They told me I was fighting for our nation—”

“You are a bandit and you should be hanged from a tree. Where were you born?”

“I was born in Moncada, in Tarlac, but we moved to San Felipe when I was small. I made my First Communion there.”

“You are a liar and a heathen.”

“As you say, jefe.”

Behind them, next to the little chapel, he sees the cemetery. He wonders if the tall marker with the angel on top belongs to the alcalde. He turns to the lieutenant and tries to grin as idiotically as possible.

“Americano mucho boom-boom,” he says. “Filipino mucho vamos.”

If things get really ugly he will tell them where the head of Columbus is buried.

“What is this one’s name?” growls the lieutenant, pen poised over a ledger book held in his lap.

“How were you baptized?” asks the Macabebe.

There is a price on his head throughout the province, even a picture of his face, badly drawn, tacked to the telegraph poles.

“My mother named me Bayani,” he says in Tagalog, raising his eyes to meet the unsettling gaze of the American officer. There is no way to trust a man whose eyes are so green. “Bayani Pandoc.”

There are bats gathering in the acacias in the evening as he heads back to reclaim his sandals, screeching, squirming, the branches bending with the weight of them. Diosdado pauses to wrap the thirty pieces of Mexican silver they gave him for the rifle tightly in a handkerchief, making sure the packet doesn’t jingle, and stuffs it down the front of his shirt. The yanquis cannot be everywhere, and there are bandits on the road.

FORT GREENE

There are too many trains. Royal takes the Ninth Avenue elevated all the way down to Park Row and then transfers to the Myrtle Avenue line that crosses the bridge to Brooklyn. They have moved three times since the last address Junior wrote them at, no trace in those sorry buildings but Jubal able to come up with another possibility through Alma Moultrie. It has been too long. Dragging his feet after mustering out at Fort Reno, sick again, feeling like it was hopeless, something gone forever. The bridge makes him sweat, so high over the water, the train wobbling as it speeds across, passing wagons and carriages and even some people walking beside the tracks. San Francisco was enough of a mare’s nest, but this city, spread across rivers, looming over your head, even tunneling under your feet — the idea of finding anybody in it seems impossible, the kind of lucky accident that never happens to him. People here move all the time, says Jubal, move up, move down, move out, Jubal himself just resettled to the far north of the main island.

That any city can have two hundred streets all in a row, and more without numbers below those, is more than he wants to think about.

One day at a time, the doctor at the military hospital told him. You’re still carrying the worst of the tropics in that body.

Royal gets out at Navy Street, climbs down the stairs, and walks to a large park a block away. He needs more time to think. If they haven’t moved, if she is still there—

He crosses the long, grassy rectangle of a park to a bench that faces a large stone crypt and sits.

TO THE VICTIMS OF THE PRISON SHIPS

— is inscribed on the side of the crypt. Royal wonders who the victims were, whose ships they were on.

There are women pushing babies in perambulators, and there are children running free, some making a hoop roll with a stick, and people sitting on the other benches alongside the path that snakes down the terraced hill to a large circular walk. It is a relief, this green after the brick maze of the island, but he doesn’t feel any more sure of what he is here for.

“Somethin for the kiddies?”

It is a small man, maybe forty, white, with a crate strapped around his neck. WORLD OF FUN say the red letters painted on the front and sides. The man steps up and drops one knee onto the grass so Royal can see into the box.

“Got a little bit of everything here, dirt cheap.”

There are tops and jacks and small wooden horses and rubber balls and throwing rings and a paddle-whacker and five metal soldiers, regular infantry. One of them, only one, is a tan color, something like Junior’s shading. Royal points to it.

“Aint that the nuts?” says the man. “A one-of-a-kind item.”

Royal lifts it out of the crate to study the face. It is surprisingly heavy for a toy. The eyes are not bugged, the lips not bloated like the golliwogs sold on almost every street corner here. Just a colored soldier.

“How much?”

“Fitty cents,” says the older man. Royal gives him a look.

“Hey, like I said, it’s one-of-a-kind.”

Royal pays the man and sets the soldier on the bench. He sits. The other people in the park, who know why they are here, go about their business.

Royal sits and watches the carefree people on the green. The sun feels good against his skin as it dips lower and lower in the sky. They are all different colors up here, sometimes all jammed together in the same trolley car, and there must be rules about it but not so clear as back home. What was home. The shadow of the prisoners’ crypt is very long when he stands to go back to the elevated train. It was never in the cards and time passing doesn’t change anything. Spend the night with Jubal, tell him they’ve moved on, gone who knows where, say goodbye the next morning and then — what?

Royal realizes he’s left the iron soldier on the bench. He goes back and when he picks it up he is suddenly ashamed. He can’t leave it here, and riding back over the river with it sitting beside him—

A bullet in the head will only kill you, Sergeant Jacks used to say, but cowardice in the field will hound you into the grave and beyond.

It is a street of three-story brownstone buildings with front stoops leading down to the sidewalk. There are children everywhere, mostly colored, running and playing and talking in groups, ignoring Royal as he searches for the number Jubal told him.

There is a middling-sized girl at the top of the steps, minding a very tiny girl with her hair twisted into braids and red ribbons tied at the ends.

“The Luncefords live here?”

The girl looks at him sideways, suspicious.

“They aint in.”

“But they do live here?” The tiny girl is staring at the iron figure in his hand.

“Doctor out with his bag. An Miz Jessie workin.”

It would be easier, better probably, if they had moved on.

“You mind if I sit?”

“S’a free country.”

Royal sits a couple steps below them. The tiny one is pointing at the soldier now, making sounds, so he sets it in front of her. She smiles and grabs around its body, maybe not strong enough to lift it, and begins to talk to it. Not words, really, but with the music of a conversation.

“Miss Jessie has a job?”

“Right now she learnin to be a typewriter girl.”

Royal looks into the tiny one’s face and counts the time. She seems too little to be three, but her eyes are old.

“If you sick,” says the big girl, “Doctor don’t usually get back till dinner.”

She is halfway down the street before he knows it’s her. She is wearing spectacles and no gloves and doesn’t look like a girl anymore. Jessie slows as she sees him, then comes forward. She looks up to the top of the stoop.

“Thank you, Berenice.”

“Night, Miz Jessie.”

The girl goes inside. Jessie steps up past him and lifts the tiny one into her arms.

“Hope you don’t mind,” says Royal. “I was visiting my brother—”

“This is Minnie,” Jessie tells him, holding his eye and placing the tiny girl in his lap. “We have been waiting so long for you.”

ALTERNATING CURRENT

They are putting her feet in the shoes while Harry sets up the camera. The crowd in Luna Park is growing, held back at what the policemen think is a safe distance. Harry helps lift the instrument onto the tripod and levels it. A trainer with a wooden crook taps the huge beast on her rear leg. She shifts it and a pair of nervous-looking roustabouts quickly strap on the copper-lined shoe. She seems impassive, obeying each new tap from the trainer until all the shoes are secured, a thick hawser rope around her neck running taut to a donkey engine on one side and a telegraph pole on the other. If the cyanide carrots have affected her at all she doesn’t show it.

They petted her, Topsy, only last summer, Brigid commenting on the bristles on the top of her trunk, on the incredible heat coming up through her skin. Technicians step in warily to attach cables to each of the shoes, cables leading back to the electrical plant that powers the million lights of Coney every evening. Harry was there in the stadium on the last day of the Pan when they tried to shock Jumbo II, another man-killer. There for the smoke and the sparks and the horrible trumpeting of the beast and then the laughter of the crowd when the giant animal remained standing, angrier than ever. The price of admission was refunded.

“I hope they do a better job of it on Czolgosz,” quipped the wag in the next seat.

Jubal is ready at the wagon with another roll of film in case the first jolt fails and they choose to try again. Harry feels his stomach flutter, nervous, unsure if it is because of the fiasco in Buffalo last year or because this is his first time as operator. Ed Porter is supervising, having him roll a few feet as the mammoth was led up to the shoes. Porter is watching for the signal from the technicians.

The owners of Luna Park wanted to hang Topsy, but there were protests that hanging is barbaric, a relic of a bygone age, so Mr. Edison has stepped in to volunteer his expertise.

The eyes are so tiny for the bulk of it, as if a smaller and very intelligent creature is trapped within the monstrous body. The eyes of the people in the crowd, wide with anticipation, seem enormous by comparison. If there was a second camera Harry would love to do a panoramic of them — begin on Topsy’s tiny, disinterested eye, then use the pan-head to circle slowly, registering the face of every human witness in the front ranks of the throng, holding on this woman in the purple velvet hat, or perhaps that worried little boy clutching his father’s massive hand, holding on a human face as it contemplates the world’s largest land mammal felled by George Westinghouse’s alternating current.

Or pan a little farther to show Jubal at the wagon, back turned to the event, holding his horse by the bridle and covering its eyes with his hat.

“Get ready,” says Porter. The technician by the cable-join relays a signal from the dynamo, windmilling his arm. Harry begins to turn the crank, steady, the rhythm of it like breathing now, trying not to let his nerves push him faster. The camera operator is the God of Time, Porter always says, the power to speed or slow events resting in the palm of his hand. Topsy begins to tap the ground with her trunk, as if searching for something, and Harry remembers the song—

You absent-minded beggar—

The young men on the ferry were singing it and he was worried it would offend his Brigid, but she sang along. They have been back here just once, Brigid attracted to novelty but even more delighted to witness the joy of others. On their trip to the Falls she was constantly looking out for other honeymooning couples.

“Do ye think,” she’d shout to him, over the roar of the great waters, each time she spotted a likely pair, “they could possibly be as happy as we are?”

He doesn’t see the second signal.

He is cranking steadily and there is a noise from the crowd around him, a thousand gasping at once as smoke billows up from all four shoes, white smoke and burned-flesh odor and then Topsy buckling without a cry, collapsing in a pile like a condemned tenement building.

Shouts and some cheers and somebody crying, but Harry cranks through it, strangely shaken by the end of this breathtaking, murderous creature, the song in his head running to the rhythm of his cranking, as if it is a hurdy-gurdy and not a motion-picture camera—

You absent-minded beggar

Be you city-sport or jay—

The roll runs out and Harry calls to Jubal for another. The veterinarian is there to proclaim that the beast has been executed and a trio of groundskeepers, colored men, wait to dispose of the gargantuan carcass. It is a heroic task, much more difficult than throwing a switch, and he wants to record the process on film. But Porter is already taking the instrument off the tripod.

“People have seen what they came for, Harry,” he says. “Show’s over.”

But it won’t leave his head, the song the young men were singing incessantly on that first boat trip to Coney Island with Brigid McCool—

You absent-minded beggar

Be you city-sport or jay

If you want to see the Elephant

You must pay, pay, pay!