A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  In other circumstances, Negus would have kept a close eye on the loading, but on this night he let the dockers go about their work unsupervised. His attention was fixed on the unlighted road that led to the pier. Across the bay, the lights of an oil refinery glowed like the towers of a phantom city. Slightly above them, on a cactus-covered hillside deep in darkness, were the dim, scattered lights of Serrano Town. A wall of barbed fencing and thorny acacia divided Naftali’s marina from the desert wilderness outside.

  The dirt road that led to the pier was blocked by two Dodge trucks parked head to head across it; fifty yards beyond them was a steel hut lit by a single naked bulb over its doorway. A man with a holstered pistol stood under the light watching the loading operation. Negus cursed and went into the cockpit.

  “I reckon he’s not coming,” Negus said.

  Mrs. Callahan was stocking the galley shelves; Callahan himself was bent over his charts.

  “And what does that mean?” Deedee Callahan asked.

  “He never done this before,” Negus said.

  Callahan said nothing.

  “Listen,” Negus said, leaning on Callahan’s chart table. “Put it together, man. We’ve got this punk off the coast on our hands. Then Tino goes over and he doesn’t come back.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Callahan asked. “That the kid did away with him?”

  “By Christ, I wish I knew. But all of a sudden Tino’s gone and he doesn’t come back. Either he’s in something he can’t get out of—or else he thinks the deal’s queer and he’s pulling out.”

  “Wouldn’t he have let you know?” Deedee asked.

  “Hell, I’d have thought so. Maybe he wasn’t able.” Negus turned from the chart table and looked out through the windshield at the dark water. “It’s always number one first in this business. That’s the rule.”

  Callahan kept his eyes on the chart, not answering.

  When the fueling was done, Pablo took a brief turn at loading crates. He, too, was watching the dark road that led to the pier, thinking of the room in the Hollandia Hotel where the wind chime would be sounding faintly on the light breeze. From the pilothouse he heard Negus’ rasping petulant drawl. As he stepped onto the dock, he noticed that the armed man beside the shed had turned to look down the road, and that far in the distance along it was a flickering, wavering light. Pablo glanced over his shoulder at the pilothouse and jogged toward the shed.

  “What’s up?” he asked the guard.

  The guard looked at him, shrugged and looked down the road again.

  As the light drew closer, Pablo saw that it was the night light of a bicycle; a tall islander wearing a mack’s violet platform shoes was pumping it along the sand-and-shell track. He pulled up beside the iron shed and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He and the man who stood by the shed spoke together in Papamiento. The rider held a manila envelope in his hand.

  “Boy come up from town,” the guard told Pablo. “Got a letter for Mr. Negus.”

  Pablo turned around and saw that the bulk of the iron shed stood between him and the Cloud’s bridge.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  “You Mistuh Negus?”

  “That’s right,” Pablo said. “Just give it here.”

  The man with the bicycle spoke again. He, too, wore a pistol on a web belt around his waist.

  “This man say the boy come from the city. Twenny mile. Got to give him sometink.”

  Pablo reached into his pocket for a handful of island bills. Gulden. He put a wad of them into the rider’s hand. He had no idea of how much they might amount to; they turned out to be enough.

  While the guard and the armed rider stood by, Pablo walked to the light from the shed’s doorway and stood where he was still out of eye line from the shrimper’s deck. He took a note out of the manila bank envelope and read by the naked bulb.

  “Deer Fredd,” said the note, “I muste tell you in haaste. Thees jung pog Pablo ben by Naftalie and that man by him morded. Sure bad you knowe it yeerself. You know brudeer I ben skipping wit you everie ways but thees onie gone be deadt ver us. I doont daar mov vom this place I een. Policia ben versoor. I tinkie say mouten to olde mann. Beterie saaf yoorselv. Die Shell tug standen byheer we get outen byher. Olde mann got to see hees oun way outen. We get to Curacao and thats de ende to it. Thees Pablo a ritt bastad.

  “Ritten in Jesus Christ, Valentine.”

  Pablo put the note in his pocket. The bicycle rider spoke again.

  “Dey tell de boy wait for an answer.”

  “No answer,” Pablo said. “It’s all right.” Pablo pursed his lips in outrage. “Damn lucky you got up here,” he told the blank-faced rider. “Really appreciate it.”

  In the wheelhouse, Mr. Callahan was setting his Rolex to the time signals from Corn Island. Negus ran his hands through his thinning hair as though the steady double beats from the receiver were flaying his nerves.

  “If Tino doesn’t show,” he told Callahan after a moment, “I’m not going.”

  “We’ve just concluded that he isn’t going to show,” Callahan said. “Have we not?” Deedee Callahan looked in turns at Negus and at her husband, the shell of a pistachio nut clenched in her white teeth. “Stop it, Freddy,” Callahan said. “Don’t be an old woman.”

  “You’re a damn fool,” Negus said. “That’s what you are.”

  “Where is our sloe-eyed boy?” Callahan asked his wife. “Where’s he got to?”

  Deedee put her head out to see.

  “He’s up on the hatches,” she said. “Looks like they’re about done.”

  “Go and stroke him,” Callahan said. “Keep him out of harm’s way. Freddy and I have to talk.”

  He watched his wife smooth her hair as she went forward.

  “If you don’t go, Freddy, I can’t go. And God knows I’ve set my heart on it.”

  “You have to know when not to go. Callahan. I do if you don’t.”

  “Freddy,” Callahan said, “you owe me one.”

  “Not my bloody life, Jack. I don’t owe you that.”

  Callahan rolled up the chart he had been studying and put it in a drawer beside the map table.

  “I can’t go just me and Deedee and that kid from nowhere. Those bastards on the coast—they’ll take the weapons and then they’ll board and sink us. I need at least one man I can trust.”

  “Don’t go.”

  “My dear man, I have to go. I must. I bet the ranch on this run.”

  Negus looked away from him.

  “Remember what happened to Otis in Grenada, Freddy? Him shorthanded and his boat full of M-1’s?”

  “He made it to St. Eustatius,” Negus said absently. “They’re good people there.”

  “Now here we are,” Callahan said. “We’ve paid and we’ve loaded cargo. We can’t quit now. I can’t.”

  “I can,” Negus said. “Tino did.”

  Callahan closed his eyes, rested an elbow on the chart table and put his hand over his eyes.

  “Listen to me, Freddy. We won’t have money on board until we deliver. Pablo wants to do us, it’s the money he’s after. We can keep him in line until then.”

  “Maybe. What about then?”

  “Then,” Callahan said, “kill him. In fact he’s yours for the whole run. If you seriously feel he’s more trouble than he’s worth, deep-six him. I’ll leave it to your discretion.”

  Negus was silent for a while. Callahan turned in his seat to read the tide tables.

  “No chance of paying him off now and turning him loose?”

  “No chance,” Callahan said without looking up.

  Negus leaned in the hatchway, his teeth set in a rictus of unease.

  “Shit, if it’s up to me I’ll put him over as soon as we clear the reef.”

  “No, you won’t, chum. You’ll be patient. When the balloon goes up you may learn to love him.”

  “When Deedee Callahan came back, Negus turned on her in surprise.

  “Where’s the kid?”
<
br />   “He’s right where he was,” she said. “What’s happening, gentlemen? Are we setting forth or not? Because this vessel’s all loaded and the dock boys are wondering what we think we’re doing.”

  “Take her out, Freddy,” Callahan said.

  Negus put his fishing cap on, went out on deck and shouted at Pablo to let go the mooring lines.

  Callahan took the whiskey down from a pantry shelf and poured himself a shot. “And how’s our young man?” he asked.

  “He’s in some kind of sulk. You ever see a speed freak trying really hard not to talk? That’s how he is.”

  “In the words of a great Irish wit,” Callahan said, “it’s not enough to opt for silence. You have to consider the kind of silence.”

  “Ah,” Deedee said, “that’s very good. But you know something, Jack baby, I don’t like this too well.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “He is bad news. He is, he is.”

  “Then we’ll kill him,” Callahan said. “Stay close to him. We’ll want to know what’s on his mind.”

  “He’s not dumb. Remember that.”

  “Isn’t he?”

  “Not at all. He’s pretty fucking clever.”

  “Too bad,” Callahan said.

  “So this time it’s me who gets to drink if I’m supposed to stay close to him. And it’s you that stays sober. Because he’s not dumb and you better be on top of things.”

  “You’re right, of course.”

  “Damn straight,” Deedee said. “Some fun, hey, boss?”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Callahan said.

  All night they steamed with the stabilizers down, rolling almost dangerously before a dying northeast swell. At dawn a roseate raft of clouds was massed over a solitary mountain to southward. Clouds there seemed to slip away reluctantly on the wind and were replaced by others that, singly or in packs, came over the flat far horizon and made straight for the veined slopes that were brightening to green. It was San Ignacio, once English, then Colombian and Panamanian by turns, now its own, or anyone’s, island.

  Pablo had settled in the lee of the after hatch; sleeping in short fits, sliding into undersea dreams, awakening to the stars. Spray had started him once and he had lifted his head to see white water racing under the rails and felt the vessel’s boards tremble from the power of the engines and a steady slap of the bow against the sea ahead. They had been making a speed which he could not calculate but a speed of which no shrimper on earth was capable. When she settled down to her accustomed fifteen knots he had gone to sleep again.

  The rumble of the Lister engine raising the stabilizers woke him to morning. He backed off to the rail and turning, saw in the distance a white reef line and green hills fading into cloud. The deep black valleys among the hills were inlaid with rainbows.

  “That’s Tecan,” Deedee told him.

  And he recalled that she had been around all through the night, smart-talking and boozing, coming on. He had paid her no mind. She was lying across the hatch cover now, in jeans and no shirt at all, leaning her chin on her hands. Pablo felt for the diamond in his shirt pocket and found it over his heart.

  He saw Freddy Negus come out of the wheelhouse and engage the windlass engine. They were settling down for the day. Negus never looked in his direction; he felt that the man was trying not to see him.

  “So,” Deedee Callahan asked him, “you believe in the invisible world?”

  It was just smart talk, but the words troubled him. He turned over the leeward rail to piss.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “You don’t sleep much, do you?”

  “I don’t feel the need of it much.”

  “In the Navy they say, ‘All time not spent in sleep is wasted.’ Don’t they say that in the Coast Guard?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “They do.”

  He saw that in the smooth flesh of her shoulder there was a miniature tattoo, the links of a chain. It was tiny and elegant, a beauty. She saw him looking at it.

  “Chain of Cashel,” she told him. “It stands for eternity. On and on and on and on and you don’t know where she starts from and you don’t know whither she goes. So you string along.”

  She was smoking a reefer. It seemed to him that she had been smoking through the night; he had been smelling it in his dreams.

  She rolled over and he looked quickly at her breasts; they were small and round, young, a paler tan then her shoulders.

  “This is Praisegod Reef,” she said.

  Looking over the side, he saw no reef; the water under the boards looked as deep and blue as the expanse around them. He turned to look at the coast again, wondering if it could be the same coast they left three days before.

  “I spent so many mornings here,” she said, offering him the joint. He shook his head. “So many mornings I wonder how many. Mornings.”

  “On this thing?” Pablo asked.

  It seemed to take her a moment to realize that he meant the boat.

  “Hell, no.” She was looking toward the coast with a melancholy vacant smile. “On the real Cloud. The real article.”

  “What was that?”

  Deedee raised the joint to her lips and drew from it. “That was,” she said slowly, “that was a schooner, boy. Seventy-footer, two masts. She was built in Halifax, she was a Lipton Cup racer and you could smell her teak before you saw her coming. That was the real Cloud.”

  “Where’s she at now?”

  Deedee shrugged, pouted her lips and opened them with a little groan.

  “She’s in times past. Sailing along in past perfect.”

  Pablo snickered at her. He told her she was stoned.

  “I been staying awake on this dope,” she said. “It’s good for that.”

  “How come you been staying awake?”

  “How come you have?” she asked. She got no answer from him.

  “The We Never Sleep Shrimp and Shit Corp., right? Eternal vigilance is the price of parsley.”

  Pablo was watching the anchor chain grow taut as they drifted to windward. The hook was fast on bottom.

  “How come he put the hook over?” Pablo asked.

  Deedee flipped the end of the jay overboard and rolled onto her stomach.

  “Better ask him that, Pablo.”

  In the cockpit, Negus maneuvered the dial on the Cloud’s VHF receiver; the cabin hummed with submarine static and faint Spanish voices. He and Callahan looked at each other and sat back to wait. Callahan glanced at his watch.

  Quite shortly, what might well have been an American voice came in loud and clear.

  “Waterbrothers, this is Marie Truman, you copy? Over.”

  “Well, well,” Callahan said. “There he is now.” He picked up the mike.

  “Marie Truman, Waterbrothers. Copy real well. What kind of night you have up there?”

  “Waterbrothers, Marie Truman. Slow night. Scraping the rocks. We got us a sawfish bill. Over.”

  Callahan grinned at Negus.

  “Marie Truman, Waterbrothers. Don’t throw that away, hear? It’s worth forty bucks on the beach. Over.”

  “Waterbrothers, Marie Truman. We’ll see you-all up to Gracias a Dios tomorrow. Have a nice day. Over.”

  “Marie Truman,” Callahan said, “this is Waterbrothers. You have a good one too. Out.”

  “Isn’t he a darling?” he asked Negus. “He’s playing he’s a Texas boat. And he’s got what we want and we have what he wants.”

  “We still got all day,” Negus said.

  “If we have him on VHF he’s within seventy miles of here.” Callahan went to the chart table and brushed a worn copy of Bow-ditch from on top of his coastal charts. “By his coordinates he’s coming out from a place called French Harbor. Coming out over a reef.” He took a pair of reading glasses from the breast pocket of his tennis shirt and bent to the chart. “There’s supposed to be a church tower there. Anyhow it’s just a hair down from Puerto Alvarado and they have
all kinds of lights. So we’ll run past him around dusk. See what we got to work with and take a sight bearing.”

  “You get the weather?”

  “Beautiful weather, Freddy. Fair. Light northerly. And no moon until after midnight.”

  “That guy speaks gringo awful good,” Negus said. “God help us if that’s the Guardia we’re talking to. You know,” he said, “they got a lot of Yankee know-how behind them.”

  “Ah, Fred,” Callahan sighed, “if they had him they’d want me. And here I am right on their front porch.”

  “Maybe they got you and they want him.”

  “Then how would they have his codes? Use your head for Christ’s sake.”

  “Negus went on deck and swept the coastward horizon with his binoculars.

  “Nothing happening,” he told Callahan when he came in. He set the glasses down in their box beside the windshield.

  “The thing is, Fred,” Callahan told him, “you do a thing or you don’t. Now we are doing this thing, so let’s carry on and do it without bitching all the time.”

  “I was thinking,” Negus said. “Our people could be just a nice bunch of good patriotic Spanish boys. Probably just pay up and take their hardware. Probably wouldn’t give us trouble at all.”

  “Then we could get rid of Pablo right now, couldn’t we?”

  “That’s right,” Negus said.

  “But it’s more likely they’re a bunch of fucked-up ratones. You don’t get a good class of Spanish boy on this coast anymore. Not since the cocaine boom.”

  Negus put his head out of the cabin hatch and looked aft at Pablo, who was propped against the lazaret with his hat over his eyes.

  “Goddamn that guy,” he said.

  She was driving in from Alvarado with two ten-pound sacks of beans and a few kilos of fruit when she saw Campos in the road before her. His jeep was parked so that it blocked passage to any other vehicle and he stood in front of it, languidly waving her down, his Foster-Grants ablaze in the afternoon sun. Although she had firmly made up her mind not to be afraid of Campos, the positioning of his jeep troubled her. Someone would have to back off—a minor matter on the face of it but a confrontation, charged with suggestions of authority, confidence and guilt. She stopped her own jeep in the middle of the road and stayed behind the wheel.