A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  “It’s not only for the use of the station. We need you too if you think you can help. If you feel you can’t—well, I understand.”

  “I will,” Justin heard herself say. “I’ll help you any way I can. Not only with the station. There’s nothing I want more.”

  “I don’t try to seduce you in this,” Godoy said. “You have to make your own decision.”

  “I have no family,” Justin told him, smiling. “No special home. Where people need me that’s where I go. See, I’m lucky that way.”

  She could not read his look. Suddenly she wanted him to reach out and touch her in some way, clap her on the shoulder, shake her hand, give some human token of what they had entered into. But he did not move and neither did she.

  “This is work of armed struggle, so people may get killed. I won’t deceive you.”

  “I don’t come from a pacifist tradition,” she said. Immediately it struck her as a cold and pedantic thing to say. She kept wondering how she must appear to him. That he would ask, that he would say that she herself could help—it meant he must esteem her. Surely, she thought, he must.

  Godoy looked at his watch.

  “We’ll go,” he said.

  She walked beside him toward the dark square; somewhere beyond it there was music, uncertainly amplified, and the noise of a crowd.

  “Maybe,” he said as they walked, “we can arrange your status within the church if you stay. It would be better.”

  “Whatever you think.”

  “We won’t talk about it anymore now. During the week—we can meet and talk further.”

  Justin nodded; she felt lonely again, and frightened.

  As they started across the plaza, Godoy stopped and turned to her.

  “In the work we’re doing,” he said, “one has to change a little. You develop and you become a slightly different person. It’s hard on the ego but it’s for the best.”

  “I understand,” she said. She understood thoroughly. His message was the one she had been receiving all her adult life, the one she had always lived by.

  I’ll be right at home in this outfit, she thought. It would have cheered her up to say it aloud to him but she did not—because it would be boastful and presumptuous and because he would not have understood her. As far as she could tell, he was without humor.

  Immediately, she reproached herself for reflecting on his lack of humor. It was judgmental and perhaps a little racist. Look to your own seriousness, she told herself.

  They found the little fun fair on the far side of the church, behind the ruined eighteenth-century wall. In the space between the old church wall and the river, a traveling carnival from the capital had parked its bright machines. There were two carousels, a small loop-the-loop with pink and purple cockpits and a whirly ride called the Carretera de Fortuna. Two ice-cream sellers had brought their wagons up from the square, there was a man with balloons, a man with a fortune-telling parrot and an Oriental in a kimono demonstrating karate strokes to an audience of teen-agers and cane cutters. A stand sold soda and beer and black or white rum.

  The Syrian’s sound truck was parked beside a mobile generator with its sale signs still aloft but it was empty and silent. The carnival machines made their own music as they turned, music as peeled and rusted at the seams as the machines themselves. The fairground was surrounded by colored lights and around each bulb was a little cloud of insects drawn from the riverbank.

  As Justin and Godoy walked toward the fair, beggars crept out of the shadow of the church wall to intercept them. In the darkness, they were tiny, barely human figures, small wads of cloth appended to upturned palms, uttering soft wails. Justin handed out some ten- and twenty-centavo pieces, Father Godoy gave them nothing.

  One of the machines played “La Cumparsita” as the two of them strolled out on the little midway. The light there was fantastical, compounded of rainbow colors. Children’s faces were unearthly shades, the grass underfoot looked painted.

  The men in the crowd were drunk and somber but there were mainly women and children about. A few groups of teen-agers huddled beyond the light like predators around a camp, some of them smoking marijuana. In the darkness by the river, a drunk or a madman was screaming but his cries were drowned by the music.

  People greeted Father Godoy as he passed among them; stony Indian faces softened toward him, there was some quick whisking off and clutching of straw sombreros. Both he and Justin towered over the crowds.

  “A fair was a great thing once,” Godoy said. “There were a great many tents and tricks. Today it’s not so much because the movies come here now.”

  “It’s still a great thing,” Justin said.

  Four of Godoy’s schoolboys were waiting in line by the larger carousel. Justin watched him apprehend them and point to his watch. The boys waved little red ticket stubs up at him. He shrugged and then stood looking about him over the heads of the crowd. Justin thought of having a beer but decided it would not be right for her to approach the stand and the drunken men there.

  “I’m missing two,” Godoy said to her. “It’s a nuisance.”

  “It’s fine,” Justin said. “I’ll wait by the merry-go-round.”

  While Godoy combed the shadows, Justin found herself some space by the rail to watch the carousel. Around her were women whose children rode and women who stood with their children around them, watching the others.

  He sees me as a fool, Justin thought fearfully. He sees my foolishness.

  Under the lights, her face fixed on the whirl before her, she contemplated her inward place. It was a foolish place, of course, but orderly. Like a corridor in some worthwhile institution, the walls and floors all spotless, the suffering and the flesh behind white screens. A virgin’s place, a bit of a whited sepulcher.

  It was dim and Lenten, its saints were shrouded and if it held any tabernacles they were open and empty. It was very far away.

  The notion frightened her. Far, she thought—far from where?

  It was fearful and a prison and so was the world. She looked at the crowd across the lights from where she stood; she and they were separated by miles.

  But she had been in prison before and she had been afraid. Marched through the cicada din of a Mississippi night, to a place where the cotton fields were ringed with hooded watch lights and barbed wire under a million stars, to a blockhouse smelling of drains and urine. And then they turned out the lights in the block and the matron came out to tell ghost stories in the dark. It was the torment reserved for outside agitators that night, the treatment the guards had smirked about all the way to Parchman. No prods, no bucket across the skull, not that night—but darkness and ghost stories.

  Somebody said boy, if Folkways Records was here. They were in a black block because the white girls would kill them. In the dorm outside their jammed segregation cell, the black girls laughed or moaned and cried; some of them were sisterly, some insane and armed with razors.

  The matron’s dusty little voice demanded “Who Got Mah Golden Ahm?”

  The jughead innocence had its own horror. And nuns were bad luck there.

  Goddamn it, Justin said to herself, I’m not a fool. He must know that.

  She had seen the guns and the dogs; she knew well enough the difference between real wounds and painted martyrdoms. She had courage—her parents had it and she had it from them. All her life she had worked and soldiered with the best; wherever work and soldiering were required she could pay her way. We are not afraid today, she thought. What am I getting myself into? She shivered.

  Then she looked up and saw that Father Godoy had taken a place opposite her along the carousel rail and, with the lights behind her, she felt that she could look at him unembarrassed. The two older boys whom he had sought stood, looking annoyed and drunk, behind him. Godoy was watching the children on the carousel.

  The machine was playing a march from an old operetta; the children, with their eyes full of lights, were reaching out to snatch the brass ring that was
suspended by a strap from a stanchion beside where Godoy stood. They circled past his gaze, undersized, rickety, plenty of them dwarfed or scabrous, the sixty-five percent, the survivors of birth and infancy in Tecan—on their painted horses. He looked at them as no father she had ever seen looked at his own children. His gray eyes shone like theirs, with such fierce love that she trembled to see him.

  She felt then that all the companionship, all the moral recognition she had ever required from the universe reposed in the eyes of this priest. Between them the children went round and round, children of the campesinos, rojos, jíbaros—the wretched, the pobrecitos. She could not take her eyes from his face as he watched them.

  At 0401 Pablo Tabor signed himself off the circuit and put out the last cigarette of his watch. On his way through Search and Rescue to the Coke machine, he saw the sky through the Operations Room window, it was alight and clear, pale yellow.

  “Ah me,” he said softly.

  Breedlove, the Operations yeoman, was watching him.

  “Ol’ Pablo must have smoked about a thousand cigarettes tonight,” Breedlove told his yeoman striker. “I been watchin’ him and he’s smokin’ the shit out over there.”

  “Leave me alone, Breedlove,” Tabor said. “I already told you.”

  “Air,” Breedlove said, winking at the striker. “Ay-er—that’s what you need, Tabor.”

  “Give him air,” the striker said busily.

  Pablo was listening to his change rattle in the machine, to the bottle zip down its tin track. He picked it up, icy in his hot hand, and opened it.

  “You know, you’re just a couple of fucking noises in my head.”

  The striker smiled.

  “That’s all you are.”

  “We’re all a deck of cards,” Breedlove said.

  “Hey, good night, Tabor,” he called down the corridor when Tabor walked out. “Sleep well, hear?” He leaned over the Operations desk to see that Tabor was out of hearing and addressed himself to the striker.

  “Don’t think he ain’t scoffin’ those pills again. Tell by the little tiny eyes.” He narrowed his own eyes to a squint. “Speed-freak sparky. When he moves—it’s jit jit jit.” He moved the flat of his hand in little jits.

  “Jitters,” the striker said.

  “Don’t think they won’t nail him,” Breedlove said complacently.

  “With this old man? Shit sure they’ll nail him.”

  Some morning, Tabor thought, walking into the locker room, I’ll kill that skinny prick. Except he wants me to so much, I won’t.

  He changed out of the dungaree uniform in which he had stood his watch and into civilian clothes. That morning he had brought a silky Western shirt, twill pants, a leather-like jacket and seven-stitch fancy boots. In the pocket of the jacket was a large aspirin bottle of Dexedrine and when he had changed he set the aspirin bottle beside his Coke and sat down on the wooden bench with his head in his hands.

  Lord, he said to himself, the shit I sit still for. Make you weep, Jesus. He stood up suddenly and hit the tin grill of his locker with his left elbow and followed through with the palm of his right hand.

  Just anybody calls me anything and I sit still for it. I don’t know the fucking difference. He sat down again, unscrewed the cap on the aspirin bottle and tucked two Dex tabs in the pocket of his shirt. He swallowed two more with his Coke.

  Now Breedlove, he thought, I’ll tell him again and that’ll be it. Breedlove’s old lady worked in the supermarket, a good-looking head.

  Gimme a break, God, Tabor prayed going out. Gimme a rush and ease my mind. A little good feeling.

  On his way to sign out with JOD, he remembered the Coke bottle in his hand, so he went back around to Search and Rescue to stack it in the rack that held empties. When he left the bottle off, he saw Breedlove watching him.

  He walked over and leaned on the Operations counter until Breedlove came over.

  “I want to tell you something, Breedlove,” he said, leaning close to the counter and speaking so softly that Breedlove had to incline his own head to hear him. “I want to tell you get off my case, man. Now if you don’t do it I’m gonna transport your ass over to Gulfstream Plaza and I’m gonna beat the living shit out of you in front of that big old supermarket window. So your old lady can watch from the cash register.”

  Breedlove walked away pale, shaking his head.

  Tabor checked out and went down the magnolia-lined walk that led to the gate and the parking lot. The lemon light was spreading across the sky, coloring the flat waters of the Gulf and the white hull of the fishery protection cutter that was tied up at the end of the pier. Eastward, night lights burned on the steel coils of the Escondido refinery and in the highway distance beyond it westbound headlights glowed snake eyes against the dawn.

  “Gimme a rush, Jesus,” Tabor said. He walked to his Chewy with the keys in his hand. He put the key in the door lock, smiled and licked his lips. One of these times, he thought, I’ll have a car where you don’t turn the key upside down. “Contact,” he said. He was getting off a little and he turned to look at the sky over his shoulder.

  “Gimme a rush, Jesus.” He put the car in gear and rolled to the edge of the highway. “If you want me for a sunbeam.”

  A truck full of melons went by the gate and he smiled after it.

  Gimme a rush if you truly want me for your personal sunbeam.

  Once out of the gate, he ran in front of the drug, passing the melon truck with a grin.

  Good morning, boys. What nice watermelons, yes indeed.

  He cooled it at the town line, drove past the line of shrimp boats at the commercial pier, the fish market, the ceviche restaurant. First light hit the wide oily sidewalks of the main drag; a few Mexican women in tailored jeans walked toward the cannery.

  He parked his Chevvy just down the block from the Sullivan hotel. The Sullivan was a three-story building with rounded corners of frosted glass and a sign beside the door that said “Locker Club, Servicemen Welcome.” Tabor went in and across the small dusty lobby to the lounge out back. In the lounge there was a bar on rollers and a few plastic tables and chairs but the jukebox was the treasure of the Sullivan; it dated from World War II like the “Locker Club” sign by the street door. Linda Ronstadt’s “Heart Like a Wheel” was spinning on it.

  At one of the tables Mert McPhail, the station’s chief radioman, was sitting with two girls in pants suits. The girls were drinking Jax; McPhail had a bottle of bourbon and a cardboard cup of ice beside his glass. They all looked up when Tabor walked in.

  The older of the two girls with McPhail was named Nancy.

  “Haayy, Pablo,” she called as he walked toward them, “how’re you keepin’, keed?”

  “Hey,” Pablo said.

  “You want a drink, honey? Want a whiskey? A cocktail?”

  “Just a beer be nice. Why don’t everybody have a beer?”

  “Gracias, amigo,” Nancy said, and went to the cooler. Tabor pulled up a chair and sat down beside McPhail.

  “What say, McPhail?”

  McPhail had been in the hotel most of the night. He was tired and drunk, a huge balding man with a brown, lined face—sloped-shouldered, six-six or -seven. He glanced at Tabor with distaste. The girl with him watched them both with a spacy smile.

  “Real good,” Tabor said. “Hey, you know,” he told them after a minute, “it’s such a nice morning I might just go after some birds. I got my Remington in the car. I might just go up back of the airport and get me a turk.”

  The girl at the table looked down at Tabor’s feet.

  “Gonna stomp through that old swamp with them pretty stitch boots on? Just get ’em all muddied up.”

  “I don’t mind,” Tabor said.

  Nancy brought the beers to the table and set them out.

  “Don’t know about turkeys,” she said. “But I bet you could get you a alligator back there.”

  “If I meet one I’ll rassle with him. Hey, you think I could rassle a alliga
tor, McPhail?”

  McPhail had been studying the bare wall beside him.

  “How the hell would I know?” he said.

  “You could bring me back a pocketbook,” Nancy said quickly. “But that’s against the law now, ain’t it? Alligator pocketbooks, they’re against the law now.”

  “Ain’t no more against the law than what’s doin’ in here,” the younger girl said.

  After a moment, McPhail stood up heavily and walked into the John. Tabor picked up his beer and drank half of it at a draw.

  “Dry,” he said.

  The girls laughed as though he had told a joke.

  “Hey, Pablo,” Nancy said, “you goin’ hunting right away or you gonna hang around a while?”

  “I don’t know,” Tabor said. He picked up his beer and walked into the men’s room after McPhail.

  In the men’s room, he found McPhail flat-footed before the urinal, pissing contentedly. Holding the bottle in his hand, Tabor took up a position directly behind him and leaned against the wall.

  “So I’m on report, huh, Chief?”

  McPhail had turned his head as far to the side as he could, trying to see Tabor behind him.

  “I did put you on report,” he said as though he had just remembered it. “Chit’s still on my desk. Straighten it out Monday.”

  He left off pissing and hastened to zipper his fly.

  “Sure,” Tabor said. “I’d really like to straighten it out, know what I mean, Chief?”

  McPhail left quickly. When Tabor went back out, he found the chief radioman sitting on a barstool near the movable bar combing his thin black hair. Tabor watched him with what appeared to be good humor.

  “What are you combing that with, McPhail? You combing it with piss? You didn’t wash your hands in there.”

  The younger girl stood up at her place and walked straight out of the lounge into the lobby. McPhail struggled off his stool. His legs were trembling.

  “I had just enough of you, you crazy son of a bitch,” McPhail said, advancing on Tabor. “You damn psycho.”