A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  “Jack?” Negus asked, and reached for a light he had set down on the hatch cover.

  As Negus reached for it, Pablo turned full around, got off a shot, then flung himself out of the hatchway and scuttled across the slimy deck like one of the creatures that had swarmed there during the evening. His shot, he knew, had missed. His leg throbbing, he crawled for darkness, his steel-hearted killer’s trance deserting him. Negus was after him, rounding the hatch for a shot. Pablo, terrified now, cowered in the scuppers, he had two shots in the little Nambu and the light was bad. Then he saw Negus stumble backward, make two little capering backward steps and fall back against the hatch cover. The shotgun discharged heavenward.

  Pablo, uncertain of what he was seeing, came to realize that Negus had slipped on the deck. It was a miracle of God. He hesitated for a moment, saw Negus try to bring the gun to bear and shot him. It seemed to him that he had missed again. Negus dropped the shotgun on the deck and was looking down at it, cursing softly. He turned toward Pablo.

  “You stop, you hear! Just stop it!” There was a catch in his voice. He was hurt.

  Pablo lowered his gun.

  “Don’t yell at me no more, Mr. Negus. Get back there against the rail.”

  When Negus stood clear, Pablo lowered himself on his good leg, and picked up the shotgun.

  “Oh, you dirty monkey,” Negus said. “You little son of a bitch. What’d you do?”

  He seemed furious. Pablo felt as though he had done something wrong.

  “They’re down there,” Pablo said, pointing to the lazaret hatchway. “You look down there, you’ll see them.”

  Negus walked stiffly to the flashlight on the hatch cover, took it and went to the top of the lazaret ladder. Tabor stood behind him, keeping him on the top step as he played the beam over the silent space.

  “You dirty fucking monkey,” Freddy Negus said.

  “They were turning me around,” Pablo explained. “You was too.”

  “Well, they ain’t turnin’ you around no more, bucky,” Negus said. “They’re dead. You killed them.”

  “Well, they were,” Pablo said. He felt remorse and disgust.

  Negus sat down on the hatch, his arms folded over his stomach.

  “I don’t know how the hell he took it in his head to hire you. You were just a wrong number.”

  From the cockpit, they could hear the RDF’s steady null signal, sounding over and over, a noise from space.

  “Goddamn foibles and human error,” Negus said, “you got such a little margin anyways and them two always overplayed it.” He coughed and spat thickly on the deck. “Figured you were fun or something.”

  “Well, I can’t live for fun,” Pablo said. “Some people can afford to but I can’t. A lot of times people try and turn me around and they always find that out about me.”

  Negus stood up and started forward, paused and went on, holding to the rail.

  “I’m not walking well,” Negus told Pablo.

  “Me neither. But you’re gut-shot.”

  When they reached the wheelhouse hatch, Pablo started in; Negus stayed him with a hand.

  “I don’t want no blood in there.”

  Pablo understood. Negus sat on a gear locker and looked out to sea; Tabor leaned on the rail. There were no lights in sight, or ridges to block the great field of stars. The pointers and Polaris were over the starboard quarter.

  “You got no sense, son,” Negus said. “Why’d you ever come aboard?”

  “I needed to. Thought you needed me.”

  Negus spat again. “But we didn’t, did we? No need on anybody’s part.”

  “Guess not,” Pablo said. “But that’s the breaks.” He was beginning to think there might be a way in which he was going to make out after all. Most of all, he was wondering if there was any more speed on board.

  “Now what we got, kid, is a Mexican standoff. You know what I mean?”

  “No,” Pablo said. But he was intrigued and encouraged to hear things put that way.

  “I’m hurting. I got a slug in my gut. I don’t know but that …” He let it go. “But you’re hurting too, kid. You can’t get nowhere from here. Nothing on that coast for you now. You’ll pile her up or the Guardia’ll get you or the pirates will. You’re bleeding, boy, you’re drawing sharks, you see what I mean now?”

  Pablo listened in silence to the beat of the null tone.

  Negus stood up and leaned on the rail a few feet away from him.

  “I can take this vessel anywhere. I can get us anywhere. Clear.”

  “How?” Pablo asked.

  Negus grew enthusiastic.

  “Oh, by Jesus Christ, boy, why, plenty of places. San Ignacio. Colombia. One of the islands there. I got friends in all them places. I can get us a doctor. We can sell our goods, man. Emeralds. We can get them.” He was trying to see Pablo’s face in the faint light that came from the cockpit. He was smiling.

  “What would you tell them there? If we got to Colombia—one of them places?”

  “Well, a thousand things. A thousand things, hell …” He was talking faster and he began to laugh. “They don’t give a goddamn what you done or where you been if you got cash or goods. We’d have it made.”

  Pablo was straining toward hope. That it might all be true. There were moments when they both believed it all.

  Negus drew his breath painfully, and encouraged, went on.

  “Listen, Pablo. You’re using twenty gallons an hour out here. More than that. More. You goin’ to be sailing in circles.”

  When Pablo did not reply, he grew more heated.

  “You be out here, boy, you’ll see things day and night. Stuff that ain’t there. I know what I’m talking about. You don’t ever want to be alone out here because the stuff you’ll see sometimes it ain’t there and sometimes it is. When it is it’s worser. I know. I’m the one that knows. And me takin’ us in, old shoe, we’ll be home free. Home. Free. They know me, man. They don’t care.” He laughed and ran out of breath, and Tabor saw that the man was lying to him, talking for his life as though to a child. Turning him around.

  Years before in a town Pablo knew, the bootleggers had chained an old boy to an anchored oil barrel at low tide, chained him up for the high water to come in on him. There happened along this young child out where he had no business and the man talked to the child and begged and hollered at him to go for help. But the child forgot or his parents told him better not to say and the tide came in over the man four feet and they only found out about the child afterwards.

  Pablo looked at his weary enemy and was sorry.

  “Well, O.K.,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  Negus’ delight was so great that, sorry as he was, Tabor couldn’t keep from laughing. The old dude was whooping and shouting like the drunkard he was, going on about emeralds and cocaine and private villas and his face was happy as Christmas morning when Pablo blew him away. It was necessary to hold the dead old man up against the rail so that he would not become a burden. Holding him up hurt Pablo’s injured leg, so the two of them leaned over the rail side by side for a while. Fellow travelers. Then Tabor bent down, took hold of Negus under the knees and pitched him over. The null tone went right on sounding.

  He remained at the rail, his elbows resting there, his hands clasped, and looked up the Dipper. He had been watching it edge around Polaris through the night. Perhaps because of the wound, he felt cold. Now he and the creatures in the ice hold were the only living things aboard.

  His work done, Pablo became afraid. An unfamiliar emotion oppressed him which he came to recognize as loneliness; a loneliness deeper than he had ever experienced.

  “Jesus help me,” Pablo said aloud.

  He missed them, that was it. A crazy way to feel, because they were low-down people, they were just shit as people and they had certainly been turning him around. Not the way he missed Naftali—Naftali was all right. But them being dead now, all of them, it was hard to take. It put a strain on him. Cecil, he tho
ught, that black bastard was the root of it.

  Then he thought of speed and how that would be the ticket. On his way to the sleeping quarters he stopped in the cockpit and looked over the navigational gear. The compass bearing was set for zero-zero-zero and the constant null tone signified that this was where it should be. They had gone out on one-eighty from the marker and were headed straight back in—no problem there. On the chart table he found Callahan’s rough line-of-sight chart; in one corner Callahan had written the Loran digits he had noted at the spot. For the moment things were all right but later, up near the reef, he would have to do his own steering and find the market in darkness. And there would be the men on the coast, those money-crazy bird-talking people. Perhaps his mother’s people.

  He took a light and went into the head where the shower was and found an unlocked cabinet under the small sink. Up front there were first-aid kits and soap and every kind of downer, all of them prescribed for a Dolores Callahan. In his impatience he swept them aside; he found aspirin, aloe powder, ginseng, exotic shampoos. Not until he was on the edge of despair did he find, on the bottom shelf under the pipe, a small bottle containing six Desoxyn. He clutched the Desoxyn bottle and bent his head against the shelf in gratitude. Less impatient now, he looked through the rest of the scattered bottles and found a jar of pain-killing tablets. He recognized the gray half-moon pills and their brand name because they were the things that Kathy took for menstrual cramps and he had used them as speed back home.

  Pablo sat on the deck of the head, swallowed two Desoxyn and one of the pain-killers and made a bandage for his wounded leg. There were no exit or entry holes, only a scythe-cut wound along the side. It did not seem serious; there was not much blood. He would do.

  With the light at his feet he sat in one of the lounge chairs of the saloon to let the speed and the pain-killer do their work. A ridiculous place it was, the saloon, with its teak and rattan and Spanish table. He recognized it now as a third hold, the sort they had on the big Texas boats. The Callahans had made it into a floating parlor. And it suited them, he thought, it was their idea of fun and high living. The wooden louvered shutters at deck level could keep it cool at sea but it was really just a hidey-hole, set everywhere with fans and as cramped in its fancy way as the lazaret.

  When he felt better he went to Deedee’s compartment and opened the teak door. There was a wide bunk bed against the bulkhead and a steel bookcase with a great many books. On top of it was a picture of both Callahans on a lawn with a lot of tables and lawn umbrellas behind them. Callahan, looking young and thinner, was standing behind a bench upon which sat his wife, who looked very much the same. Her blond hair was tied back severely and her smile was sweetness itself; her legs, in tight breeches and gleaming boots, were crossed in comfortable self-assurance. Callahan’s hand was on her jacketed shoulder. Her own hand, in a string glove, rested on his.

  Pablo turned the picture face down. The room smelled of saffron.

  The Callahans would have to go with Negus now.

  Tabor hobbled up on deck, bringing two stationary flashlights with him. Scanning the night horizon, he saw no lights in view; he would have to risk some light of his own to get the thing done. But to bring the bodies up from the lazaret by main force was more than he could manage. He switched the flashlights on—one beside the hatchway to light the compartment, the other beside an after hatch to light his work space. Then he engaged the tri-net motor and swung the bar amidships; the chain line, coils and chafing gear spread out around him like a collapsed circus tent. From among the heap, he seized an end of chain line and, grasping it under his arm, eased himself painfully down the ladder, pulling a web of coils behind him.

  He came to Callahan first and linked two sections of chain line under the dead man’s fleshy shoulders. When he thought the links were secured, he went topside and set the tri-net bar to hauling upright. The coils and chain with their burden rattled up the hatchway like a receding tide; Pablo stationed himself at the top of the ladder to ease the corpse through. With Callahan netted and swinging above the deck, Pablo loosened the chain from under his shoulders, swung the bar outboard and lowered away.

  It went easily. Pablo had been standing by with a gaff in case the netting or the body fouled the overworked engines. But the chain settled, the net spread out without bird’s-nesting and Mr. Callahan rolled off into the quiet ocean and disappeared.

  Pablo rested then, nursing his throbbing leg, looking around for lights, for aircraft, for a wall of mountains against the sky northward. When he felt up to it, he went up to the cockpit to check the speed, the bearings and Fathometer. The speed was steady, the Fathometer read over eight fathoms and unchanging, the compass needle was fast on triple zero and the null as constant as Polaris.

  Topside, he started up the Lister again to bring back the net to center line. A second time, like a diver, Pablo descended into the lazaret compartment, dragging chain line behind him. He found her easily enough and pulled her into the coils. Her death’s darkness smelled of suntan oil. The net hauling, he guided her up the ladder and out of the hatchway.

  When the tri-net boom was lowered and the web offered her out she did not go readily as her husband had. The colorless hair, almost phosphorescent over the water, spread itself among the coils, her down vest was caught on a cross wire, her legs, akimbo, were wrapped in the chains. In the end, he had to bring his light to the rail and cut her free from the webbing. The chains snapped loose, and then upright, her hair held on its ends by the coils that enshrouded her like a veil, she fell. Wide-eyed, as though eight fathoms held some new curiosity—like a figurehead, dolorous, an image of destiny—feet first into the water.

  So Pablo had done with his dead and he switched off the lights. The null tone and the engines went on throbbing and the pointers held their places. He smoked and took another pill. He felt that his unseen presence on the ocean was ceremony enough for them.

  “The answer”—Father Egan was saying—“I think they have it on the prayer wheels. Do you know what it says on the prayer wheels?”

  Most of them had gone to sleep. From among the group only the girl with the bandaged arm, the feverish girl and her boyfriend, the dark-bearded young man and the blond giant remained to listen. A few others had gathered around a fire at the base of the overgrown pyramid and were smoking marijuana and passing a bottle of colorless rum. Their laughter sounded a muffled echo off the ancient stone.

  “On the prayer wheels it says, ‘The jewel is in the lotus.’ They turn the wheels round hundreds of times a day. The little flags flutter so the wind says it. The Jewel is in the Lotus.”

  The feverish girl moaned and stirred in her lover’s arms. Egan stopped speaking and looked at her and saw that she had the dengue. He had had it himself several times. He would have to get her some medicine, he thought, and for a moment he forgot what it was he had been preaching to them. Then it came back to him. The girl, he thought, was like a lotus and the pain in her overbright eyes a jewel.

  “The lotus,” he told her, “is sweet and fragrant, beautiful in life. But it’s fallible and it’s born for death. It’s sown in corruption. But the jewel—” He felt his arm go numb and when he tried to raise it he could not. “The jewel is undying and beyond time. Beyond measure. The jewel is the meaning, you see.”

  A high-pitched cry sounded from somewhere in the deeper jungle, a cry that might have been human. Something surprised in the dark.

  “You’re the lotus. Your dear bodies that you’re so fond of. You’re the lotus. The jewel is in you.” Egan laughed and brushed his sleeve across his mouth again. “The jewel’s in hock to you. And the whole world of mortality is the lotus. And the Living is the jewel in it. That’s the bright side.”

  He looked for the drunken man who had heckled him, but the man had gone away.

  “It is sown in corruption,” Egan declaimed, “it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power
! On the bright side—everything’s fine. You’d think they’d have no business here whose place is on the bright side. Here—it’s whirl.” He put out his hand and described a spiral with three fingers. “Whirl is King and it’s lonely and in shadow, but over there—well, that’s life over there, that’s where the Living belongs. But,” he said, and tapped his palm with his forefinger as though citing some father of doctrine, “the Jewel is in the Lotus! Why?”

  He looked at them each in turn.

  “Why, children?”

  They were all still, watching.

  “Because,” Egan thundered, “they’re as lonely as we are! The Living is lonely for itself. For the shard of itself that’s lost in us, the jewel in the lotus.” He paused to draw breath.

  “Isn’t it wonderful after all? That we’re secret lovers? Because why else would the Living be concealed within this meat, in all these fears and sweats, the Holy One among the dead? Why would he hide himself in Whirl to give meaning to a pile of corpses? Why isn’t a campesino just an animal with a name? Why not? Why is there any meaning in a heap of dead? Or a lost kiddie. A sick little girl, a drowned …” A shudder ran through him and he paused again. “Because the Jewel is in the Lotus out of loneliness and secret love. He doesn’t have any choice.”

  Exhausted, he leaned on the stone. Then he thought of something that he had once read. Or perhaps he had written it himself.

  “It’s hard to see,” he told the young people. “You never know when you see the Living. The eye you see him with is the same eye with which he sees you.”

  The girl with dengue put her hands on her companion’s shoulders and pulled herself upright.

  “The bands broke,” she said, half singing. “The bands broke on Faithful John’s heart.” The boy who was with her tried to ease her back down; she fought him. “The bands broke on the heart of Faithful John,” she screamed.