by Robert Stone
“Yes,” Holliwell said.
Lady of sorrows, he thought, creature of marvel. It was enough for her that people took care of themselves. In the meantime.
I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in, lady. Sully your kind suffering child’s eyes with it. Live burials beside slow rivers. A pile of ears for a pile of arms. The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their burned trucks.
He thought she was a unicorn to be speared, penned and adored. He was a drunk, middle-aged, sentimental. Foolish.
He wanted her white goodness, wanted a skin of it. He wanted to wash in it, to drink and drink and drink of it, salving the hangover thirst of his life, his war.
Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me? Then in a moment he thought he knew why, although he was sure that she did not. You did not have to be an anthropologist to know.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
He would never bring it to that. He was more honorable than that, an honest man. But he was sure now and he did not feel ashamed for thinking it. Exalted rather and moved at her innocence in that regard, who was so wise.
The smile had left her face; she looked at him in slight confusion, raising a weary hand to her face.
“I’m supposed to have dinner,” Holliwell said, smiling. “I’m supposed to see the ruins.”
“Oh, my gosh,” she said. “I forgot.”
“Is it all right?”
She stammered, the hand touching her scarf.
“Not, not … for me. I mean I don’t think I can. But Father Egan will take you.”
“Good,” Holliwell said. “Well, I’ll see you anyway.”
“Yes,” she said. She had turned back in the direction from which she had come, she did not look at him again. “Take care. Take care of your leg.”
When she walked off he felt like crying. He stood up and walked the beach, hardly thinking of his leg. When he had been wandering around for a half hour, he found himself even with the ragged cabana where the Cuban and his friends were resting. It was their blender that attracted his eye. It was amazing how many people owned blenders in places like Tecan. Where there was electricity, even people with barely enough to eat seemed to have them. The Cuban was waving to him, motioning him over.
The man’s name, it turned out, was Miguel Soyer. He was tall and youthful with a square good-natured face, warm eyes under thick Celtic eyebrows. He did not much resemble his sister.
“You were diving with my brother-in-law, no?” Soyer asked as the three men with him watched politely from behind their dark glasses.
“Yes, indeed,” Holliwell said. He had been introduced to the others but had immediately lost their names. All of them had the sinister air that respectable businessmen so often projected in the South. Holliwell was not disturbed by it; it was an incongruity of appearance only, the result of a difference between Anglo and Latin expectations and masculine style.
“Twixt,” Soyer said. “Beautiful.”
“It was a fine day’s diving.”
Soyer turned and looked in the direction of the mission.
“You’re a friend of Sister Justin?”
“Not really. I had a minor accident in front of the mission the other day and she took a sea urchin spine out of my knee. So we’re acquainted.”
“She’s a nurse,” Soyer said vaguely. “Now you’re her patient, eh?”
“Yes.”
Holliwell accepted a piña colada.
“A very dedicated woman,” Soyer said. “We admire her here.”
“She’s very nice, isn’t she?”
“Yes, very nice. Very American. Una tipica.”
“I suppose,” Holliwell said.
“I know North America well. Once I spoke English but I’m out of practice.”
Holliwell was reassuring. It was not his impression that Mr. Soyer had difficulty with the language. The three men with him held their silence.
“I was in school at Washington,” Soyer said. “At Georgetown University. I was preparing for the foreign service of Cuba when the Communists took power.”
“Ah,” Holliwell said.
“America is so free,” Mr. Soyer said. “That’s what I liked. So many opportunities.”
“But you chose to settle here.”
“The style is better for me. I like the quiet life, I think.”
“How’s business?” Holliwell asked.
“It’s not bad,” Soyer said. He was still looking toward the mission. “We hear that Sister Justin is leaving.”
“That’s what she says.”
“Then it must be true, eh?”
“Gosh,” Holliwell said. “I guess so.”
“Do you think she is a true idealist?”
“I assume so,” Holliwell said. There was a silence. “Do you mean,” he asked, “as opposed to a false idealist?”
Soyer slapped his knee and laughed loudly and vacantly.
“I’m misusing the language,” he said. “Forgive me.”
“I’m intrigued,” Holliwell said. “I wonder about the relations between the missionaries and the community here. Are they good? Are they cordial?”
“Why not?” Soyer asked. Then he said: “Why ask me?”
“I wondered,” Holliwell said, “what you thought about it.”
“I think they’re more than agreeable,” Mr. Soyer said. “But I’m a sucker for Americans.”
Holliwell supposed his smile appropriate and kept it in place.
“This mission,” Soyer said, “Sister Justin’s—I don’t know what they do now there.”
“She was telling me they feel kind of redundant. That’s why they’re going, I guess.”
“Ourselves and you,” Mr. Soyer said, “I speak as though I’m of Tecan because it’s my home now—ourselves and you, we have a great deal in common. We have common enemies.”
“Very true,” Holliwell said.
“The greatest enemy,” Soyer said, “is the enemy inside America. Do you think so?”
“We’re all our own worst enemies, aren’t we?”
“I don’t mean that,” Soyer said. “Not exactly.”
“American politics is rather frenetic.” Holliwell hesitated. “Fucked up.”
“From maybe too much comfort. Everyone is comfortable.”
“Not everyone.”
“I see,” Mr. Soyer told him. “I understand your point of view.”
“I’m not very political.”
“Sister Justin?” Soyer asked. “Do you think she is political?”
“No, I don’t,” Holliwell said. “Not at all.”
He watched Soyer frown. The Cuban grunted and shook his head as though he had been given information of significance. Holliwell turned toward the ocean and saw with some relief that Sandy was bringing the Paradise boat around the outer reef.
“I don’t see Mr. and Mrs. Paz,” Holliwell said.
“Gone home,” Soyer told him. “Only this morning.”
“Thank you for the cold drink, Mr. Soyer.” He got to his feet and nodded to Soyer’s three friends. They nodded back.
“Staying long?” Soyer asked him.
“No, I don’t think so. I only wanted a little rest after my labors.”
“Listen, Holliwell—don’t take the boat back. Come have a drink with us and we’ll take you.”
Holliwell explained that his foot was hurting and that he had writing to do.
“Ah,” said one of Mr. Soyer’s hitherto silent friends. “Writing.”
In fact, Holliwell was in some pain. He felt dizzy and he was thinking for the first time in a while about the telephone calls in Santiago de Compostela.
On the run back, Sandy spoke to him above the engine.
“How you leg now, mon?”
“Better,” he shouted. “I still can’t put a fin on.”
Sandy grinned. “Keep you outena trouble.”
“I think it’s too late for that,” Holliwell said.
With the sun bel
ow the green saw-toothed ridges of the coast, darkness gathered quickly. Venus was the evening star. She hung low over the eastern horizon and the unbroken sea beneath her transit was dulled to the color of lead. The wind rose in that quarter, setting a roll beneath the Cloud’s counterfeit boards but nowhere breaking the skin of the sea’s expanse. Across the sky, Deneb and Vega twinkled beyond a calligrapher’s stroke of purple nimbus.
Freddy Negus, holding to the wheel, had pulled the night shade down behind the cockpit. Callahan, a drink in one hand, stood beside the wheelhouse hatch running his infrared binoculars along the coastline.
“How’s traffic?” Negus asked him. “I’m getting blips on my scope here.”
“Let’s light it up,” Callahan said.
Negus threw a switch that lit the running lights in the stabilizer mast and the work areas around the hatches. Callahan went forward to light a spot on the forepeak.
“We’re gonna be out in front of Port Alvarado presently, boss,” Negus said.
Callahan refilled his glass and bent to inspect the digits on the Raytheon and leaned over his chart table. He turned the Loran signal up so that it was audible and timed the tones on his watch.
“We’re getting there, Freddy. What’s your bottom like?”
“Bottom is marbles,” Negus said. “A couple of yards to starboard and we’d be sitting on them.”
Callahan hung in the hatchway, looking coastward.
“I got Puerto Alvarado light,” he told Negus. “I see the bastard. If you could get me a mite more speed, Freddy, I would love it. So we have a tiny bit of daylight when we drop the buoy.”
“I can get you twelve knots on just the main engine. That’s what you got.”
“Puerto Alvarado,” Callahan said, pronouncing the city’s name in careful Spanish. “I see the banana piers and I believe I see the national streetlight.”
“Some hole that place is,” Negus said. “Had to get some of my boys out of jail there once. No trouble either. Being a British subject meant something in those days.”
Callahan studied the harbor.
“They planted a few light buoys in these roads since I was here last,” he said. He glanced at the Raytheon scope. “Lot of boats around without lights.”
“That’s how it is out here,” Negus said. “Nothing faster than ten knots. Nothing coming our way.”
Callahan checked the Loran digits and his charts.
“Very shortly we’ll get on the CB. Right around the point.”
Callahan had taken the rum bottle from the galley shelf and was pouring himself another drink, easing the neck of the bottle against the glass so that Negus would not hear him, when Negus stood up in his chair and turned around.
“Look at this, Jack. I got a fucker on here bearing three-forty. He’s coming at us and he’s coming fast.”
Callahan put his drink in the galley rack, ran into the lounge to slam his wife’s door twice and ran out on deck with the glasses.
“I don’t see him,” Callahan said. “He’s not lit.”
“Bugger fucking all,” Negus said.
Deedee Callahan was standing beside her husband in the next moment, straining to see into the near darkness.
“Engage the diesels, lover,” he told her. “Do it faster than anything.”
She ran around to the engine space and had opened the metal hatch when she heard her husband laugh.
“He just lit up,” Callahan called to them. “He’s a dragger.”
Negus looked out the windshield at the fresh lights.
“He must have been making thirty. You sure he’s a dragger?”
“He’s the Rastafarian Navy,” Callahan said, watching through the glasses. “He’s going right into Alvarado.”
Deedee came forward wiping sweat from her forehead.
“Is there an explanation for him?” she asked. “Or is he just stoned like us?”
“Probably be his lights don’t work very well,” Negus said. “He wants to get in before United Fruit runs him over. And he’s souped up for running ganja.”
“Don’t want no more,” Deedee Callahan sang, “midnight rambles no more. Que vida.”
“Where’s that fucking Pablo?” Negus asked.
“Sacked out. Leave him.” He bent over the Raytheon and marked his Loran chart. “O.K.,” he told them, “Freddy’s going to find me a hole in the wall.”
As they looked on, Negus turned the Cloud’s head toward the reef and cut speed. Everyone watched the Fathometer.
“Gotta be it,” Negus said after a minute. “Ninety and ninety and sloping up.”
“Engine stop,” Callahan said. “And drop the hook so we don’t drift on the marbles.”
Deedee was on deck peering into the darkness.
“You don’t get more than a flash glow from Alvarado light,” she said. “It’s around that point.”
Callahan was at his chart table with a piece of chart paper before him.
“Let me get a quick line of sight here,” he said.
“There’s an aviation beacon on that mountain,” she said, shielding her eyes from the glow of the deck lights. “It’s on your Loran chart.”
“I got it,” he said. He marked the coordinates from the Raytheon on his line-of-sight chart and x’d in the aviation beacon. They were waiting for the boat to swing full around on its chain.
“Two dock lights at sixty degrees off the beacon. Over them there’s a building with a cross on it.”
“That’s fine if those dock lights are on all night,” Negus said. “But whoever they are must be using a generator because there’s no electricity out here.”
“They’ll be on,” Callahan said. “We were told they’d be on.”
He marked the dock lights on his handmade chart and put it under the Bowditch.
“Now,” he said, “Deedee, go turn that bozo to and get the marker buoy over. It’s time to talk to the customer.”
The CB was silent as Negus dialed in.
“José,” Negus said into the night, “you get those pumps for me?”
“Absolutely, Mr. Fry.” It was a different voice, but relaxed, easy with English.
“That’s just fine,” Negus said, and hung up the receiver. “Think he sees us?” he asked Callahan.
“No question about it,” Callahan said.
Deedee and Pablo came in slightly breathless. At Deedee Callahan’s call, Pablo had been huddled in the lazaret hatch close to Naftali’s pistol, looking at the Puerto Alvarado lights with longing and dread.
“Hi, kids,” Callahan said to his wife and to Pablo. “Now we’re going to open up the arms locker.”
Pablo watched Callahan unlock the gear locker in which his automatic was stowed. There were half a dozen other pistols beside it. Seeing his weapon, Pablo took a step toward it.
“Leave it where it is,” Negus snapped at him.
“No, Pablo,” Callahan said patiently. “We’re unlocking them, we’re not going to wave them at passing shipping.” He stepped through the galley and down into the paneled compartment and there, with another key from his key ring, opened what looked like a teak book chest between two lounge chairs. The chest had a small automatic rifle of foreign make and a number of shotguns. When he had unlocked the chest, he closed it again.
“It’s very frustrating,” Mr. Callahan explained, “to look for keys when you’re in a hurry. In the meantime, let’s everyone remember that we’re a few miles offshore with all our lights blazing like Christmas. So let’s preserve our workaday respectability and demeanor and leave this stuff where it is. Until we need it. Which of course we all hope we will not.”
“You’re so right,” Deedee said.
Callahan picked up the glass of rum he had been drinking. “Now,” Callahan said to Pablo, “you and Deedee are going shrimping.”
“I don’t follow you there,” Pablo said.
“Mrs. Callahan will explain.” He put his hand beside his wife’s ear; it was a caress of sorts. “And while you�
��re out on deck, Dee, put a watch cap over your hair, O.K.? So you’ll look like a gringo shrimper and not a Rhine maiden?”
She went into her quarters and came out with a black watch cap and a green down vest. She tucked her hair under the cap and winked at Pablo.
“Let’s go, Tex,” she said to Pablo. “Let’s go get the hatches clear.”
When they were on deck, Callahan sat down in the cockpit chair and drained his drink. He picked up the rough line-of-sight chart he had make and smiled at Negus.
“We’ll take her out on the Bonaire radio beacon. Right out on one-eighty. At eleven hundred we’ll have her back here along zero-zero-zero.”
“Aye, aye,” Negus said, and swung the bow toward the open sea.
“We’ll have the net over,” Callahan went on, looking at the Raytheon scope, “so you better keep the speed way down. Eight or nine knots, no more.”
“Hey, Jack, lay off the sauce, will you? We got a lot of time to kill and you’re like to get me started.”
Callahan made a placatory gesture with his slim small hand. They heard the stabilizer engine cough up and chain line being dragged across the deck.
“Damn Tino,” Negus said.
Deedee Callahan appeared in the galley in work gloves and white shrimper’s boots, the watch cap tucked down to her eyebrows. She took the rum bottle and a handful of joints down from the shelf.
“Hey, man,” she said, eyeing the level of the bottle, “I thought it was you staying sober tonight. I thought it was me could get snackered.”
“You may get as snackered as you see the need of,” Callahan told her.
Negus looked over his shouder.
“What are you gonna do, missus, have a party back there?”
“Why not?” she said. “We gotta head all those little nasty things. You know,” she told them, “I was once quite fond of shrimp.”
“Don’t bother heading them,” her husband said. “Just get it in there and make sure it’s all shrimp.”
Negus reached out from his chair and took the bottle from her.
“That’s my limit,” he announced when he had drunk. “First we work, then we can get fucked up. That’s the way you’re supposed to do it.”
“Are we using the tri-net?” Deedee asked.
“The hell with it.” Callahan stood up and went to the hatchway and looked out at the black ocean. With the net and stabilizer down, the Cloud had begun to roll at an angle not at all commensurate with the mild weather.
