“You greenhorns got a long road to tramp before I’d call you soldiers,” says Jacks without turning. “But even if you were, somebody got to be left behind. There aint enough war to go around, and every damn body, regular or not, wants a piece of it.”
The Rough Riders pulled in just a few days back, college sports and ranch hands and little Roosevelt who belongs at the Ferlita bakery singing his own praises with the Cubano peacocks, four-eyes Roosevelt strutting all over the camps and the Port trailing a remuda of so-called war correspondents and Kodak fiends. Jacks is a professional soldier and his pride, the one thing he has to show for his years of service, is wounded.
“Volunteers nothing but a bunch of ward heelers and merchant princes leading a bigger bunch of saloon trash who couldn’t find their way out of a half-acre woodlot. But they got pull, see, and there’s only fifty-some buckets out in that harbor ready to steam away, and even packed like sardines that won’t do for the whole force we got mustered here. So the regulars leave without their full compliment and the cavalry leave without their mounts and the volunteer outfits with friends up high leave without a clue among the lot of em as to what they be facing when they get there.” They are passing out of town now, and the sergeant can hear a hurdy-gurdy playing, a Dago selling shaved ice and colored syrup by the stables where the American teamsters congregate. Once he starts the boys jacking crates from the boxcar he’ll come back and get one. He likes the green syrup, the mint, best in the heat of the day.
“And then at some point they expect there will be slaughter,” he says with no bitterness, “or there’d only be white boys going over.”
“And somebody’s got to clear the roads and bury the dead.” Scott is a smart one, not book-educated but quick to pick up on what’s needed.
“Oh, we’ll do our share of that, too. If there’s a shit end to the stick we get to hold it. But there’s times in battle,” he says, a little uncomfortable to be sharing this with rookies, “when your job is to go soak up bullets.”
“Cannon fodder.”
“Mexicans call it carne de cañón. Cannon meat. You stuff that first wave of troopers down their mouth so’s they can’t bite no more, and then send in the boys that are gonna survive and pose for the statue.”
“There’s companies greener than ours set to go on them boats,” says the one they call Little Earl. “How come ours got to stay?”
“Your company has to stay because your company has been ordered to stay, Private,” says Jacks, putting a little steel into his voice. “You’re in the Army — don’t be trying to figure out a reason for what you’re told, don’t be trying to guess what comes next or why. Aint a thing you can do about it one way or the other, and the sooner you give yourself up to that, the sooner you’ll make a soldier.”
Still, he thinks, it would be wondrous duty to be deployed in China.
They reach the little single-track rail depot and Jacks finds the boxcar and shows the dozey white sentry his orders. Patch gets his fly-addled mules in order and pulls the wagon alongside. There are crates inside the boxcar, unmarked, and the orders don’t specify what is in them either, only that they are to be loaded and delivered to the Wisconsin Volunteers, wherever they might be found. It’s just enough work to keep the four rookies busy and afford him a stroll around Ybor.
He pulls his dollar watch out and pretends to study it. “When I get back here,” he says to the private soldiers, already wrestling crates onto the wagon bed while Patch hunkers down in the shade of the boxcar, “this wagon best be ready to roll.”
“No problem, Sergeant.” Poor Lunceford, thinks if he hustles and pleases and keeps his buttons shining he can somehow earn the privilege of accompanying the rest of the outfit to go have their heads blown off. So far this deal is more like the game the Mex kids play at their birthdays, blindfolded and batting wildly at who knows what swinging creature, than it is a war.
“If it isn’t ready, we might have to revisit those dunes,” says Jacks, turning back toward town, always careful to leave with a threat.
Maybe the purple one, he thinks, that they say is blackberry flavor. No telling if they’ll have that in Cuba.
Tampa is a fever dream, a snake swallowing its own tail.
Coop digs and the sand slides in from the sides. He’s spent more time with a shovel in his hands than a Krag, something about him that makes sergeants’ eyes get big when the shit details are handed out. “You! Cooper!” they say, and he knows it’s something down and dirty they’ve got in mind. The white officers, lieutenant and up, don’t even see him, which is happy news. Coop keeps on digging and the sand keeps filling back in.
Sooner or later somebody with chevrons will come and see it is impossible, that the company will either have to be let to shit where the white boys do or walk through their territory to firmer ground. Coop has his shirt off, suspender straps cutting hot into his bare shoulders, red bandanna soaked on his forehead. I’m just a latrine-diggin fool here, staying in rhythm, throwing sand and watching it slide back in. And this after they try to kill us on them dunes. That’s one thing with the Army — half of what gets ordered is just doing to be doing. There’s no goods that come out of it, no cotton, no tobacco, no tree gum. Back home they happy to let you lie easy till the harvest, and then a black man better jump quick and get him a job before the sheriff put him on the work gang, same work but you got nothing to show at the end of it but marks where they put the irons on. But nobody let to lie in the Army—
Dewey comes by and watches for a moment.
“You wants to help,” says Coop, not breaking his rhythm, “kill up some a these damn flies be pesterin me.”
“I don’t want to help,” says Dewey. “I just come to see where we going tonight. That’s if they let you out.”
“Tampa City,” says Coop, making Dewey hop back from a shovelful of sand heaved at his feet.
“Been having an awful row with the white folks in there.”
“Yeah, and I aint been in on it yet.” Coop likes Ybor well enough, but the idea that there is something he’s not supposed to do, somewhere he’s not supposed to go, even in the uniform their own damn Army give him — well. “Hear they got some ladies there make your toes curl.”
“Not for us they don’t.” Dewey has been in for ten years and likes a good time without too much trouble.
“Well if them others wants to know,” says Coop, “that’s where I be.”
Dewey watches him shovel for a moment. “That hole gonna just keep filling up.”
“You see Sergeant Cade, you tell him about it.”
“Oh, he knows, Coop. He just don’t want you cooking up mischief. Idle hands is the devil’s instruments.”
Dewey steps away. Though Coop has made some kind of shallow bowl the back-sliding sand is halfway up to his knees now. Keep this up long enough, he thinks, and I bury my own self.
They don’t whip you in the Army, or chain you up at night. They give you real folding money, thirteen dollars a month, instead of cardboard scrip you got to use in their own store and they give you a rifle and teach you how to use it. Just show up telling them you’re Henry Cooper, jump over a stick, cough while the Doc puts his fingers on you, and you can wear the blue. He was skinny, bleary-eyed, a week hiding in the piney woods and two more tramping north and west, with nothing in his pockets and clothes that didn’t fit he had to steal on the way. The recruiter in Kansas City barely looked at him. “Cavalry is full up,” he said, “but if you don’t mind walking we got a place for you.”