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.”