They find a place two blocks up serving steak and eggs and settle in.
“The fat gink,” says Big Ten, “is some kind of newspaper writer who also promotes shows. I pulled his coat for a handout over by the Opera House and he pitched this boxing idea.”
“Jail in Leadville?”
“One week, they got tired of feeding me. Took me to the freight yard, told me to catch the first thing smoking.”
The Indian doesn’t look any thinner. Fighting him will be like punching a tree stump.
“You know what you’re doing in the ring?”
“Hell no.”
“What they paying you?”
Big Ten shrugs. “The fat man got me a flop for the night,” he says. “Then it’s twenty for showing up and then the sky’s the limit, he says, depending on how I handle myself. What about yours?”
“I think he owes Masterson a lot of money, so this is mostly on the cuff,” says Hod. “But if I catch him before he can reach a faro table I might see a few dollars.”
Big Ten sighs as the food arrives and they dig in.
“There was a sign over that bar,” says Big Ten. “Said it was against the law to serve an Indian — less he’s been cooked first.”
“The whole deal sounds like lots of lumps for short money.” Hod stares out the window at the characters circulating on 18th. “I’d recommend taking a powder, only these people always got an in with the law. If they catch us—”
“If you promise not to hit too hard,” says the Indian, “I promise not to fall down too quick.”
They linger over their coffee, just thinking, and are on their way back to the Windsor in a light drizzle when a tramp steps up on the sidewalk to block their way.
“You fellas spare some change?”
The man is swaying a little as he stands, skin and bones, hair wet and wild, looking slightly through rather than at them like fellas will do when they put the touch on you. Big Ten gives him a nickel and a penny.
“That’s it, buddy,” says the Indian. “Now we’re as busted as you.”
“That’s white of you,” says the tramp, who Hod recognizes from Butte, a mucker on the day gang with a Polish name longer than an ore train. The man staggers around them, almost falling off the curb.
“Always does the heart good,” says Big Ten, “to see somebody worse off than you are.”
On the next block they see the recruits.
There are three of them, two normal sized and one half-pint kid, standing at stiff attention in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the Elite Saloon.
“Our sergeant said he needs to kill his thirst,” says the kid, who the others call the Runt. “Or maybe he just gone in to wound it. One way or the other, we got to stand here at attention till he comes out.”
“We’re volunteers,” says one of the normal-sized ones.
“Sure you are,” says Big Ten. “I can’t see how anybody’d pay you to stand out in the rain.”
“In the Army,” says the Runt. “Off to battle the Spaniards.”
“You don’t say.”
The Runt closes his eyes, then opens them and begins to spout.
Oh it’s Tommy this, and it’s Tommy that
and it’s “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Savior of his Country”
when the guns begin to shoot!
The biggest one looks embarrassed. “He does that. Right out of the blue.”
“We come up from Pueblo and he latched on to us,” says the middle one. “But they took us anyway.”
The sergeant comes out from the saloon then, a long man with a long moustache drooping off his face. He glares at his volunteers. “Have you been talking to these civilians?”
“They were asking about enlistment, sir,” says the Runt, eyes forward, chin tucked in, his scrawny body held rigid. “And I was explaining the opportunity.”
The sergeant turns to look Hod and Big Ten over. “I’ve got one deserted already and one lost to the clap shack,” he says. “You boys ready to take the trip?”
The Polish miner wasn’t a drinker, Hod remembers, just a steady, hard-working fella trying to keep grits on his table. He looked like hell, a ghost of a man out there alone in the rain. This is not Hod’s war, the plight of the oppressed Cuban a subject he has barely considered. But it had felt right, that one moment, marching with the Skaguay Guards, and there will be three squares a day and a chance to see the palm trees and it won’t be Soapy Smith or anyone like him running the deal. Hod, light in the pocket and blackballed from the mines, exchanges a look with the big Indian, who he can tell is also considering the offer.
“Where to?” asks Big Ten.
“Five blocks over to the Armory,” says the sergeant, “and then on to Glory.”
ARMADA
The Americans are there before the sun comes up. Just there, out in the bay, somehow passing the Corregidor batteries without a shell being fired.
“Como Pedro por su casa,” says the Spaniard next to Diosdado at the sea wall, a long-nosed ayuntamiento clerk wearing the yellow armband of his volunteer unit. It is first light and already there are hundreds lined up along the Malecón to watch, men only, though there are a few women among those fleeing behind them on the Paseo, the poorest with their rolled tampipis over their shoulders, the wealthiest trailed by barefoot coolies staggering under bulky pieces of furniture. This day has been known, has been inevitable, for weeks — what can they have been waiting for?
“Do you think they’ll bombard the city?” asks Diosdado. His orders are to gauge the mood of the people, both Spaniard and Filipino, and it has required a sociability he never thought himself capable of.
“That is the present subject of discussion,” the clerk tells him. “Do you see their light?”
At the bow of one of the still distant American warships a beam flicks rhythmically on and off. The clerk points across the road behind them, where a corporal and his capitán stand on top of the Baluarte de Santa Isabel, the capitán watching the signaling ship through binoculars and the corporal wig-wagging a pair of flags, one red, one white, in a complicated sequence.
“If General Augustín promises not to fire from the shore batteries,” the Spaniard explains, “their Admiral Dewey may agree not to level the Intramuros.”
“So you think no shells will fall on our heads?”
The clerk gives Diosdado a weary smile. “Leaving more available to murder our boys in the fleet.”
The fleet, if the less-than-a-dozen Spanish ships fanned out uncertainly in front of Las Piñas, escape route blocked by Sangley Point, may be conceded that name, has nowhere to go.
“What are they doing?”
The clerk watches the closer ships for a moment.
“One would hope,” he says finally, “they are making their peace with the Creator.”
This same bitter humor, this mix of exasperation and stoicism, has infused every conversation Diosdado has engaged in or overheard since the news arrived that the Americans were steaming away from Hongkong. Haunting the Escolta in his moustache and country planter’s outfit, in for a quick drink at the Tabaquería Nacional or La Alhambra or the San Miguel beerhouse, rubbing shoulders with the peninsulares, infantry, cavalry, volunteers — for every Spaniard between sixteen and sixty has been called to service — it has been the same shameful story.
“We have been abandoned,” said the teniente, said the merchant, said the cargo inspector. “The people in Madrid make speeches and wave their fists, but they send us no ships, no arms, no men.”