A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  “You’re getting the idea now, aren’t you? Well, he’s as real as it gets, Justin. Here or anywhere else.”

  “All right,” she said. “All right.” She began to pace up and down. Egan sat down at the desk beside the transmitter and looked at the matted floor.

  “We’re getting out in a hurry,” Justin said. “While we do, we’ll get that kid locked up and sent back to Nicaragua. I mean it’s tough, but it’s got to be done. Maybe the Mennonites can get him proper care.”

  One was not a child, she thought. One was not a hysteric, one was trained to deal with the world as it came. There were three things—to see that the Movement did not ruin itself trying to use the mission, to get the insane young person out of circulation, to get herself and Egan back to the States.

  I’m not going to be afraid, she told herself. I’m going to do what I have to and if I louse it up I’ll carry the weight. She was, she thought, not just anybody.

  “There’s a message for you,” Egan told her. “Your friend Laura brought it. It seems she’s a Latinist.”

  “I see,” Justin said evenly. “And where is it, please?”

  She watched Egan go into his trouser pocket and bring forth a crumpled piece of paper which he carefully straightened out against his thigh. Steady, she told herself. She felt, for the moment, strangely calm.

  The message was indeed in Latin, hand-printed on bonded stationery.

  NOLI RESPONDERE NI NECESSE SIT. APPARA, ET LUMINES CUSTODI. NOLI TIME.

  “No response unless necessary. Prepare and remember the lights. Don’t be afraid.”

  Justin read it over several times, using every fraction of her strength to keep hold of the suspect calm she had achieved. The lights, of course, meant an incoming boat or plane. No problem there unless they were disposed to set down right at French Harbor. If that was their plan then everyone involved in the business would be killed outright, the President could proclaim a national holiday and Campos would get a medal. That was what was bound to happen, she thought, unless she reached them in time. They had to stay away—there could be no question of them using the dispensary. At the same time it seemed as though events had overtaken her and, unfortunately, Egan with her. Campos, as the priest had observed, was after her and she saw no point in letting him get her without a fight. With things so far along and gone, being of some use to the Movement was the only way she could accomplish anything more life-affirming in Tecan than to successfully run away from it. And she wanted to fight, wanted to desperately—in spite of her terror, perhaps because of it. It was just possible that she might have it both ways—fight and run. More folly perhaps, but her chances were not the best now either way and that was not entirely her doing. If she could get a message through that would both warn them away and arrange a quick meeting, they might have other work for her, worthwhile work. With things as they were, she would probably be told to drop out of it—then she could get Egan away and be free herself with a good conscience. And even warning them off would be a valuable service.

  Hope, sweet and green, came to her in the midst of their ruin.

  She shooed him away from the chair and with one of his dictionaries sat down to compose her own Latin message.

  UTI HOC LOCO NON POSSE EST IN CONSILIO. CONGREDI DEBEMUS. GRAVIS EST.

  “This place should not be used in the plan. Necessary to meet. Urgent.”

  She wrote it out on the sheet on which she had been composing the radio message to Sister Mary Joe. She would hold the radio messages a day, until after the meeting. If there could be one. The light in which she wrote had the red cast of sunset. She would have to keep the dock lights on, all the same.

  “I wish I could pray,” she said to Egan. “How I wish I could.”

  “There’s really no need,” he told her. “Everything’s all right. In spite of what seems.”

  “Hell,” she said. “No wonder you’ve got yourself a following.”

  The angle of the sun came aslant the peak of his baseball cap and lit him from another shallow sleep. Since Serrano he had been drifting into this dozing, a reptile suspension of awareness that was impervious to speed. He rose, sunburned and sweating, and went down to his quarters in the lazaret to draw a change of clothes.

  From his pockets, he was able to salvage three whole Benzedrine tablets and one that was nearly crushed to powder. Immediately, he swallowed two of them. Perhaps the Callahans would have more. Yes, certainly they would. Pablo believed there was always more. He left the diamond where it was, in his soiled work shirt.

  When he climbed on deck, the engines were turning over and the anchor chain winding itself around the windlass. He stood by the hatchway and watched the forepeak swing round until the mountainous coast and the declining sun lay westward. Then he went to the rail and leaned on it, looking at the weakening sunlight on the blue water, letting the bennie spin. There was a diamond in his pocket.

  He blew a spot of crushed cigarette ash from the white tee shirt that he held rolled and folded in his handful of clean clothes. Things turned up if you kept your eyes on the moment. For a few minutes, with his Benzedrine and his clean clothes, Pablo was a happy man. But he was certainly in danger now; no question. It would be utter dumbness to dismiss this fact and of utter dumbness he felt himself incapable. He was all right. He was better than all right. The Coast Guard turkeys at Berry’s Point were so many peons, so many stooges compared to him. His was the life of adventure. As he walked into the wheelhouse he was thinking that what he would buy next was a tuxedo. A white one that you wore a black tie with. For hot countries.

  Negus was at the helm in the cockpit, Mr. Callahan leaned on his chart table and looked toward the coast.

  “Mind if I take a shower?” Pablo asked them.

  Neither man glanced at him.

  “We may be fishing tonight,” Callahan said. “You’d just get yourself all gamey again.”

  “Fishin?” Pablo asked.

  “Anyhow,” Negus said, “the lady’s using the shower. She might be a while.”

  Pablo took himself out on deck again, the anticipated clean clothes he carried were just a useless embarrassment now. He was nearly enraged. It was a hell of a thing not to get a shower when you wanted one. It was a bring-down. It made you negative.

  He threw the clothes in a heap on his bunk in the lazaret. If they were fishing tonight, he thought, it would be for show, to have shrimp to put on the ice in the holds where the guns were stored. He climbed the ladder and stood scratching at his scroungy frame, looking over the stern as the Cloud picked up power and headed along the coast. His elation fled.

  There would be no tying up on this coast, he should have known that. In Serrano, they might have a setup, but here the guns were for people to use against their own government. The coast here would be Reef City all the way; any passage broad enough to be worth dock space would have a town and any town must have some type of cops. The draft of the Cloud, even with her modified hull, could not possibly be less than eight feet loaded—so they would have to lie offshore, beyond the reef, and wait for a small boat to come out to them. Then there would be no way for him to get ashore and when the job was done it would be only the four of them on a big ocean. And whoever was in the small boat would be no friend of Pablo’s.

  Showerless and negative, his rush fading, he thought things over several times to make them come out his way. In this, he was not successful.

  Not a word had they said about Tino. Not Word One. Back in St. Joost, Naftali’s body would have been discovered. He found it very difficult to believe that the Callahans would ever be prepared to pay him off and let him go. Yet, he thought, if they had wanted to do him they could have done so by now. They were waiting for the deal to go down. For the money.

  Pablo began to discern the diagram of events toward which the life of adventure was propelling him. Either the Callahans and Negus would get their money and he, Pablo, die—or he must make it be the other way round. But he was not a killer; he could n
ot conceive of killing them. Even if they forced him—out of their greediness, their paranoia, their natural two-timing way of doing—to defend himself, he was outnumbered and lost and alone. On the other hand, he found his own death even more difficult to conceive.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  He tried again to make it come out all right in his mind—another coast somewhere, the diamond in place, cash in hand, a grudging admiration all around. Then a few months on the beach. Daiquiris, elegant flunkies, his tuxedo.

  No help. He was boxed. In over his head—and the image of that dreadful game came to him on Naftali’s dying whispers, the game with his skull. He looked at the deep green coast and was frightened.

  “I can’t cut it,” he told Naftali. “I’m up the well-known creek.”

  Thinking about Naftali made him feel a little bit better because that had been a time when things had looked bad and he had made out. He had put his mind to it and scored.

  So, he thought, there was something more than just human to it. There was the Power. He might be Aided—his mother had said that to him. Aided.

  He prayed to Jesus and to his mother and to Naftali. They gave him to understand that in the coming days he would know.

  Late in the day, Holliwell took the boat ride to Playa Tate and limped along the beach to a small dock that ran thirty feet or so from the sand to the first ridge of coral. He wore long cotton trousers, a windbreaker and a shapeless straw hat to defend himself from the force of the sun. Down a curve of the coast, he could see the beach where he had been spined and the mission building with its pier, its high veranda and wooden cross. In a way, he was spying.

  At the other extremity of the Playa, the Cuban hardware dealer, brother to Mrs. Paz, lounged under a desiccated palm cabana with some men who had driven out from town. The men appeared to be local merchants like himself; the dusty late-model Ford in which they all had come was parked at the edge of the dirt road. The Cuban and his friends were drinking piña coladas, mixed in a blender that plugged into the car’s dashboard.

  For over an hour, he sat and watched the sun play on the coral shallows, the darting silver shapes of shore-feeding barracuda. Again and again he turned in the direction of the mission beach. It was where he wanted to be. Even with the use of his injured leg, there was no way for him to simply present himself there with discretion. But he wanted to see her.

  It was hard, in the sunshine of Playa Tate, to consider repression and retribution, sacrifice and justice. It was hard anywhere for Holliwell to consider such things except as abstract functions of behavior. They were things other people believed themselves to be motivated by, his objects of study, the people who also believed themselves to be at home in the world. Wars he understood, what people did in them and believed they did and how they explained it to themselves and to others. All at once he found himself wondering again about what he would say back home when they came around to ask him. He realized now that they would surely come around to ask him—he had been seen to go. He might tell them nothing, he thought. Or something that explained things or obscured explanation. Of one thing he was certain—he would find out what it was she believed herself to be about over there under the wooden cross. He would find out what it was like for her; that was all he cared about.

  It was a little dangerous. The thought made him smile and quickened in him a subtle fine excitement. Like the feeling that had come to him over the black coral—but not so coarse as that. It had to do with the girl. There was something of seduction in it.

  He lay back on the splintering boards, his hat beside him, arms across his face, until something, a bird’s shadow, the passing of a cloud, roused him. He sat up then and put on his hat and saw a solitary figure coming toward him along the water’s edge. When he saw that it was she, a rush struck him like cocaine in the blood and he was surprised. He had been hoping against hope that she would come that way.

  Upright, his hands clutching the edges of the dock, he watched her draw closer. She was in white and he thought, at her expense, it was appropriate. Loose-fitting white work pants and a short-sleeved shirt. There was a red scarf over her hair.

  When she was near the dock, he could see that her face was drawn and paie, her eyes harried and haunted and clouded with fatigue. She walked looking down at the sand.

  As soon as he called to her, something like a voice inside him said: You are foolish. A middle-aged drunk, meddling. Foolish. By then he had already spoken. When she turned toward him her look was blank. He took his hat off.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said, and he nodded, lamely agreeing that it was.

  “You shouldn’t be out in the sun. How’s your leg?”

  “It’s healing,” he said. “I don’t much like sitting around the Paradise.”

  “Don’t you like it there?”

  “Not much. Do you know it?”

  “Not up close,” she said.

  “One thing I can’t do is get a fin on. I’m thrown on the cultural resources of the area.”

  “That’s a shame,” she said, “because there aren’t any.”

  He asked her if she could stop to talk; he was afraid of sounding breathless. He wanted her to sit beside him on the dock but she stood off, tensed for flight.

  “How are things going?”

  “Oh,” she said, “not too bad.”

  “Packing?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Right.”

  “How long have you been here now?”

  “About six years.” She seemed to have to think about it. “Six it would be.”

  “You’ll be sorry to leave then. Or will you?”

  She pursed her lips as if she were trying unsuccessfully to smile.

  “Yes, I’ll be sorry. I’ll be sorry to leave this way. To leave things as they are, when I might have helped more.”

  “When you talk about things and how they are do you mean the country? The conditions?” He watched her then for a hint of suspiciousness; he was reminding himself of the secret policemen who started conversations with suspicious foreigners about the state of their countries. One found them all over.

  “It’s a poor country.”

  “With tourism coming down,” Holliwell said, “things might improve.”

  “For some people they’ll improve.”

  “Not for the campesinos?”

  “For a few of them. If they mind their manners and smile a lot.”

  “You don’t read much in the papers about the politics here,” Holliwell said. “Not in the States.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” she said.

  “You do read a few things though. Guerrilla stuff in the mountains. Makes you wonder who you ought to be for.”

  “Good,” she said.

  He laughed. “People like to tell you it’s the politics of bananas.”

  “Sure,” she said, and her smile changed until it had a bitter turn to it. “It’s a banana republic. I’m sure that’s in the papers.”

  “Strategic considerations aside,” Holliwell said, “bananas are worth fighting for. Any nutritionist can tell you that.”

  “Really?”

  Holliwell stood up, his eyes on hers. There was clear light there, when the film dissolved. The film of weariness or fear.

  “If you don’t eat your bananas, you don’t get enough potassium. If you don’t get your potassium, you experience a sense of existential dread.”

  “Now I’m a nurse,” she said, “and I never heard that.”

  “You can look it up. One of the symptoms of potassium insufficiency is a sense of existential dread.”

  “You’re the scientist. I’m supposed to believe what you tell me.”

  “Certainly. And now you know why Tecan is vital to the United States.”

  “The United States,” she told him, “may be in for a spell of existential dread.”

  “What do you think will happen after you go?”

  “There’ll be changes. I’m absolutely sure there will.”

&
nbsp; “They say the more it changes here, the more it stays …”

  She was shaking her head. “Changes,” she said.

  “You mean … something like a socialist government?” It was a crude question and he was ashamed of it.

  “The country is going to be overrun by its inhabitants. We may have to pay a little more for our potassium and our sense of cosmic certainty.”

  “So,” Holliwell said, “we’re the bad guys again.”

  “Look,” she told him, “they’re good people here. They suffer. Their kids die and they get pushed around and murdered. That’s all there is to the politics here—no more than that. Just people who need a break.”

  “Will they get it?”

  “If there’s any justice they will.”

  “Is there any?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Even here. Even Tecan isn’t beyond justice.”

  “But it’s only a word. It’s just something in people’s heads.”

  “That’s good enough,” she told him.

  He had not been paying close attention to the things she said. There was no need for him to draw her out and sound her politics. Instead, he had been concentrating on the way she was, and in the time it took him to spin out his net of marginal civilities he had seen, or was persuaded he had seen, what fires were banked in her. Fires of the heart, of sensibility. There were plenty of engagés, he thought, plenty of them were honest and virtuous. She was different; she was heart, she was there, in there every minute feeling it. This kind of thing was not for him but he knew it when he saw it; he was not an anthropologist for nothing.

  It’ll kill her, he thought, drive her crazy. Her eyes were already clouding with sorrow and loss. It was herself she was grieving and hoping for; for that reason she was the real thing. So he began to fall in love with her.

  “Maybe it is good enough,” he said.

  “Even here we have history. Things change. People want their rights.”

  “Does history take care of people?”

  “I wish I knew,” she said. “Maybe in the end. In the meantime people take care of themselves.”