A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  “Sure you do,” Pablo insisted. “The hell you don’t.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s for me,” Pablo said. “They belong to me now.” He forced himself up again. “That’s just the same as me you’re hearing.”

  “What are you hearing, Pablo?” He himself listened again, half hoping that there would be something to hear. “Are they … voices?”

  “You’re a card,” Pablo said. “You’re a shrewd son of a bitch.” He grinned. Holliwell’s heart sank.

  “They’re nothing but beautiful,” Pablo said. “Beautiful is what they are.”

  Holliwell, nodding, despaired and agreed.

  “We’re buddies now,” Pablo declared. “We’re brothers.”

  “Absolutely,” Holliwell said. He was trying to convince himself that the wound and infection had rendered Pablo too weak to be threatening. But as he looked at Pablo sitting upright across from him, charged with deluded passion, he knew that he himself was the weaker, with his chill, his burn, his sentimentality.

  “I was gonna kill you, Holliwell. No shit.”

  “Now, now,” Holliwell said. “Aren’t you sorry?”

  “I ain’t ever sorry,” Pablo told him. “You know why?”

  “No,” Holliwell said.

  Pablo laughed. “Because I got nothing to be sorry about.”

  “Aha,” Holliwell said.

  Pablo’s lean brown face was all youth and strength and chemical good nature. In time, Holliwell knew, the chemistry would turn, the creature in there would turn on him and require, as such creatures always required, an external victim. Then it would be his role to speak softly, to mouth little smiles in solicitation of pity which would not be forthcoming. With all the goodwill in the world, Holliwell thought, he was not up to it.

  “I killed people,” Pablo declared. “I don’t give a shit. They were turning me around. They asked for it.”

  “I’m not turning you around.”

  “No,” Pablo said. “And I been looking for it. Don’t think I ain’t been.”

  Evening brought forth the wind without remission. The power of Pablo’s madness and the chill on his braised body laid Holliwell low. He steadied himself on the side of the boat; he could not stop shaking.

  I know you now, he thought, watching Pablo. Should have known you. Know you of old.

  He felt the force he had encountered over the reef.

  The stuff was aqueous, waterborne like cholera or schistosomiasis. He had been around; he had seen it many times before. Among swarms of quivering fish, in rice paddies, shining in gutters. It was as strong as anything in the world. Stronger perhaps, when the illusions were stripped away. It glistened in a billion pairs of eyes. Comforting to think of it as some aberration, a perversion of nature. But it was the real thing, he thought. The thing itself.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Pablo asked.

  “I guess it’s the sunburn,” Holliwell said. “The chill.”

  Pablo drew up the tarp on which he had been resting and handed it to Holliwell. He started undoing the top button of his work shirt.

  “Hey, you want to wear my shirt on top of yours? I don’t need it. I’m fine.”

  “Thanks. Keep your shirt.”

  The failing sun glowed like an ingot plunged in clear liquid, casting its refracted light on them. Pablo sat facing it.

  “Your regular run of people,” Pablo said, “I don’t care about them. They’re no goddamn good.”

  Tabor closed his eyes for a moment and opened them.

  “Nothing can stop me now, Holliwell. I got it all together. Like there are ten million people think they got it all together but I’m the one who has. That’s how it was meant.”

  “Good,” Holliwell said. “Good.”

  “We’re gonna stick together, us two. You’re gonna tell me what you’re supposed to—I’ll make you. And then,” he said, “I’ll do the same for you.”

  He leaned forward and took Holliwell by the arm.

  “When you got the mojo, brother—when you’re on the inside—the world is fantastic.” He surveyed the empty sea, the sky, the violet clouds, with a look of triumph. “It’s mellow, it’s all a high. It’s wonderful.”

  “Good,” Holliwell said.

  He was not seeing Pablo any longer; it could have been anyone there. His heart beat faster. An old anger was quickening it. If we could get them all together in one place, he thought, all these inspired, these bright-eyed ones, they might no longer make us tired of living.

  When Pablo sank back to his rest, Holliwell watched the knife in its sheath as he had watched the ship that passed them in the afternoon. Then, his eyes on Pablo’s flickering lids, he reached down, and as gently as he could, lifted the rubber noose that held the hilt and drew the knife out of its bright plastic sheath. The blade shone, in the last of the sunlight. When he had it, he put it behind him, on his belt. Within minutes, Pablo roused himself. Holliwell waited for him to notice the missing weapon but he never did.

  “You know anything about people’s past lives?” Pablo asked him.

  “Not me,” Holliwell said.

  Something about Holliweill’s look disturbed Pablo. His eyes narrowed.

  “You O.K., brother?”

  “I have a dream,” Holliwell said. He shuddered, not with the chill but with fear and revulsion. He laughed. “I mean I keep having this dream. It recurs.”

  “What dream?” Pablo pulled himself upright along the thwart.

  “In my dream,” Holliwell explained, “I’m different from everyone else. Maybe I’m on the subway, understand, and everyone in the car is black except me. Something really lousy is about to happen to me—only nobody cares. Everybody’s laughing because they’re not like me.” He was trembling and dry-mouthed, his heart beat so hard that he felt he could barely contain it. “Or else I’m on a ship. The crew are Chinese or Malays, Indians, anything, something that I’m not. That thing’s about to happen. No one cares. It’s funny to them. I’m different from what they are.”

  Pablo nodded, wide-eyed.

  “Oh, you got it,” he said. “You got your finger on it.”

  “Do I?”

  “Because that’s me,” Pablo said excitedly. “That’s what I been running into all my life.”

  “That’s what things are like,” Holliwell said.

  “I’m Spanish, see? Or my mother was. She was … I don’t know, Indian, Spanish blood. So I never been what anybody else was. And down inside me, I never been. That’s why all these people turn me around.”

  “A terrible thing,” Holliwell said.

  “It’s the worst thing in the world when people turn you around because you’re something else than them. It hurts you. It fucks you up so bad. You just go round and round.”

  “There’s a story about how people are,” Holliwell told Pablo. “You hear it a lot of places. You used to hear it in Vietnam. They probably tell it in Tecan as well.”

  “I’m free and clear,” Pablo said, looking at the ridge of violet cloud ahead of them. “Free, man.”

  “It’s about a buffalo and a scorpion. I’m sure you’ve heard it.”

  Pablo turned his attention back to Holliwell and he shook his head absently.

  “What is it?”

  Holliwell put his hand behind his back to touch the knife. His arms tensed. He took a deep breath.

  “A scorpion comes up to a buffalo on a riverbank. Please, sir, says the scorpion—could you give us a ride across? No way, says the buffalo. You’ll sting me and I’ll drown. But the scorpion swears he won’t. Why would I, he asks the buffalo, when if I did, I’d drown along with you? So off they go. Halfway across the scorpion stings the buffalo. And the poor buffalo says, you bastard, you killed us both. Before they go under, the scorpion says—it’s my nature.”

  Pablo looked blank and nodded.

  “You get it, don’t you, Pablo? That’s how it is, right?”

  “It don’t have
to be like that,” Pablo said.

  Holliwell licked his rope-dry lips.

  “I’ll tell you what, Pablo, I think you’re right after all. I think each of us has something to offer the other.”

  “Damn right,” Pablo said.

  “But what you offer, Pablo—I’m not having any, understand? Because in my lifetime, boy, I’ve had fucking enough of it. So let me offer you something while you’re still in the mood to learn.”

  Pablo was perplexed. “Say what?”

  “Call it,” Holliwell said, “the abridgment of hope.” He braced his legs against the stern.

  After a moment, Holliwell saw Pablo’s lips move. He was repeating the phrase silently. The abridgment of hope.

  Holliwell sprang forward from the brace; his left hand clutched at Pablo’s throat, his right, bent at the elbow, held the knife. In the next second, he made the thrust and felt the horizontal blade strike resisting bone. He shoved harder and the tip worked free of the rib and went in. He pushed until the hilt was against Pablo’s shirt. He was shouting; exhausted, he leaned his full weight on Pablo, forcing him back against the side. Pablo’s hand was gripping his left arm, twisting it numb. When the hand relaxed, he drew back and then he met Pablo’s eyes. In their look was surprise and also disappointment, yet beyond all that something expectant, as though there might be a good part yet to come. Holliwell pulled the knife out and Pablo grunted. There was no good part to come and Holliwell felt sorry.

  “Sorry,” he said. Then he punched Pablo across the face to turn away the wrenching accusatory stare, and in a long straining wrestler’s roll, he heaved Pablo out of the boat and into the darkening water. One of Pablo’s hands was reaching for the side; he had an impulse to strike it away but he could not bring himself to do so. He was spent, in shock. Scarcely able to breathe, he watched Pablo’s head and struggling shoulders drift away from the stern. If there was blood he could not see it against the color of the sea.

  The last of the sun shone on Pablo Tabor. He brought his arms up once—but only once—in a single feathery stroke, trying to tread water. Then he threw his head back, keeping his open mouth above the surface.

  Against his will, Holliwell looked at Pablo’s face. He was at a loss now to find the shimmering evil he had seen in it before. The stricken features were like a child’s, distorted with pain and fear yet still marked with that inexplicable flicker of expectation. It was a brother’s face, a son’s, one’s own. Anybody’s face, just another victim of ignorance and fear. Just another one of us, Holliwell thought.

  I get the joke now, he said to himself. We’re all the joke. We’re the joke on one another. It’s our nature. In the same moment, he thought of May. What a misfortune, he thought, that we have only each other.

  The boat drifted further and Pablo was gone. Small swells, borne on the offshore breeze, closed the tiny rent in the seam of ocean where he had been suspended.

  When the sun was down, a thin stream of low clouds moved north across its azimuth and were lit to red and gold beyond imagining. Holliwell had started the engine out of an impulse to escape; he held the throttle at full, riding the breeze eastward. When he saw the illuminated clouds he began to recite.

  “See, see,” he said aloud, “where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!

  “One drop of blood will save me.”

  In Vietnam he had recited the lines in company to amuse and they became a little sunset superstition, a formula in times of stress, never remotely a prayer. He said them now, over and over until the words were purged of meaning. There was blood on his shirt. He took it off and, shivering, scrubbed the wet stains in sea water. Then he saw that there was blood in the boat as well; he cleaned it up with more salt water, using Pablo’s trousers and the bilge pump and the bailing can. After dark, he was still looking for blood; he cut the engine, took a flashlight from the gearbox and inspected the deck for traces of it. Under the bow, he found a small sparkling stone. It appeared to be a rhinestone when he examined it in the beam of his light. He threw it overboard, together with Pablo’s bloodstained pants.

  Half an hour later, the lights of a passing ship came in sight and Holliwell signaled S O S with his light until it was apparent that there would be no result. He was feeling very cold and sick now; even the warm drinking water in the jug made him shiver. He lay across the tarpaulin and tried to sleep.

  During the night, things overtook him. There was music that had somehow to do with the passage of the stars overhead and there were jokes. In one of the jokes a shark passed near the boat, on his way to a feeding frenzy.

  “What is there?” the shark asked a companion.

  “Just us,” the other shark said.

  Holliwell laughed in his thin sleep.

  “She’s dead,” Lieutenant Campos told Father Egan, “your nun.” In the surrounding woods ramon nuts were falling from the higher boughs, an unceasing rain that rustled the leaves softly.

  “I knew it,” Egan said.

  Campos had come weaving into the clearing where the stelae stood, thrown himself upon his knees and demanded Penance. He was pointing his service revolver at the priest; it was a sacramental hijacking. He had not made it to Miami like the President, so he was forcing Jacob’s ladder.

  “The Lord who loves tricks,” he said bitterly, “has played a trick on me.”

  Campos was wearing a jaunty lemon-colored yachting cap with crossed anchors, badly soiled above the visor. It was the kind of cap that street-corner sports in Alvarado favored. His white shirt and trousers were caked with red mud. All that remained of the former official Campos were the one-way sunglasses. When he removed them to wipe his face, Egan saw that the pupils of his eyes were dilated. He would have taken Justin’s bag for the drugs, the priest thought.

  The lieutenant’s pit-centered lustrous eyes rolled under his brows.

  “Such a thing as you—how can you understand? A coward is degenerate. I am a man that knows who he is and you want to make me ridiculous. A man of stern formality with a responsibility for order. You’re not worthy to kiss my prick but I’m on my knees to you.”

  Egan was bemused.

  “You did kill her, didn’t you?”

  “I killed her. She was a dilettante.” He sniffed ferociously and spat on the ground. “How many deaths were caused by her? Hundreds? Thousands? She herself didn’t know how evil she was.”

  “Oh, Campos,” Egan said.

  “Confess me!” Campos shouted, waving the pistol loosely. “It’s my right.”

  Egan drew a benediction on the air. You who love tricks, he prayed silently, who made Leviathan—why will you confront us in these monstrous aspects? Who made the lamb?

  It was His way of not listening, the priest thought. On the field of folk He is never at home, never available. Reach out a hand and there’s only the terrifying touch of flesh, nothing firmer or finer. Ask questions and the answers are veiled in illusion, words from a fever dream.

  “She was tortured, I presume?”

  “In the Guardia we’re serious. It wasn’t a birthday party.”

  Egan bent forward over the flat stone on which he sat and leaned his forehead on his fist.

  “Why confess, Campos? I’m not your judge.”

  “For my peace,” Campos said thickly. “You see what’s happened, priest? I was what I was and now I’m poorer than the poorest Negro. My life is in danger. My soul also. The church exists for people like me.”

  “Oh, the church,” Egan said, and smiled. “Of course.”

  “Before she died, she said, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord.’ ”

  Egan raised his head. “Justin did? Good heavens. How about that, eh?”

  Campos curled his moustache and looked at the ground.

  “She said that, did she? You beat her lifeless and you did your business with the cow prods and she said that? Good girl.” Egan wiped his eyes. “She was special, young Justin. Well,” he said to Campos, “I guess that showed you, eh?”

&n
bsp; “It showed me up,” Campos admitted. “It put me in the wrong. Then I knew that God had played a trick on me.”

  “Maybe you’re just being superstitious.”

  “I?” said Campos, outraged. “It was a sign from God!” he shouted. “Don’t dare deny it! A sign from God to me.”

  “Of what?”

  “You don’t even know how to be a priest, you maricón! A sign that I would have to ask forgiveness.”

  “Oh, I see.” Egan found himself looking at the purple flowers growing from the vine on one of the pyramids. “I suppose Justin would forgive you if she could. She’s all right now. But you have a debt to discharge to her.”

  “I’ll swear,” Campos said.

  “If you want Justin to forgive you, you’ll have to stop murdering young women. They may be well out of it, see, but it’s very hurtful to their families. That kid you had in the freezer couldn’t have been more than twenty and that’s awfully young to be terrified and murdered.”

  “It happens everywhere,” Campos said.

  “All the same, Lieutenant.”

  Campos crossed himself and squinted ardently at the flawless sky.

  “But I must have comfort,” he said when he had sworn.

  “If you want comfort along with Justin’s forgiveness you’ll have to embrace a vision. Could you?”

  “With ease,” Campos said. “That’s the sort of man I am.”

  “You must concentrate as hard as you can and imagine a world in which you don’t exist. A world in which there is no trace of you whatsoever.”

  Campos crossed himself again and closed his eyes.

  “Just a moment,” he said. “I don’t understand this.”

  Egan, looking at the flowers, was impatient. “Oh,” he said. He thought he had been clear.

  “I must know that God forgives me,” Campos insisted. “I’ve come. I’ve humiliated myself before a maricón of a priest. Now it’s up to Him.”

  “Campos, God doesn’t care what you do.”

  “Not care?”

  “Of course not. Why should he?”

  “Don’t tell me God doesn’t care what I do,” Campos said indignantly. “He must. He must or … there can be no mercy.”

  Egan turned to the lieutenant and smiled.