A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  “There is no mercy. Not the kind you’re talking about. Not in this place. We can’t bestow it and we can’t receive it. It’s just not available at this level.”

  “But I believe in it,” Campos said. “I believe in mercy.”

  “One as experienced as you should know better.”

  “What is there, then?”

  “Oh,” Egan said with a shrug, “you know, don’t you, Campos? Half moments. Glintings. A little rising of the heart, eh? It’s dappled.”

  Dappled, he thought, looking at the web of vine and flowers. Good.

  “But mercy in that sense? Oh, no, I don’t think so. One does what one can.”

  Campos stared at him and struggled to his feet.

  “I’m on my knees before a devil,” he said. A shudder seized him. Breathing hard, he backed away from the rock on which Egan sat and leveled his service pistol. A convulsive giggle rattled in his throat and he pulled the trigger. The weapon clicked in a businesslike manner. He pulled the trigger again with the same result.

  “Holy Mother,” he said, “my cartridges are gone.” He lowered the gun and felt the pockets of his shirt. “I’m disarmed,” he told Egan in a tone of apology. “I have no more cartridges.”

  “Well,” Egan said, “I haven’t any.”

  Campos put the pistol in his belt and looked about in despair.

  “Look,” he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, “there’s someone there!”

  Egan turned to see. A few hundred yards away, at the base of an unexcavated pyramid, two men were digging with pickaxes and shovels. The men had arrived immediately after the battles, while the shooting was still going on, and commenced to circle the overgrown structure with a trench. They worked with great single-mindedness; from time to time one of them would climb the wall of red earth their digging had thrown up to put a pot or a piece of copal jewelry in the flour sack they kept nearby. They had been hostile to Egan at first, they had threatened him. Now they ignored him. They had not seen Campos yet. Both of them wore holstered pistols.

  “They’re huaqueros,” Egan told the lieutenant. “Robbers.”

  “Ah,” Lieutenant Campos said. He began to back silently away in the direction from which he had come. His eyes, fixed on the laboring huaqueros, were wet with rage and desire.

  Egan watched him go. By the time the huaqueros spotted him he was passing into the cover of the trees. The two men stood motionless for a moment, hands on their weapons. Then one gathered up the half-filled flour sack, and they dodged out of the clearing.

  When they were gone, the priest’s attention returned to the net of flowers enclosing the ancient stones. In the days since the battle, the flowers had seemed to spring from their pods almost as he watched. Their odor was heavy and sweet; it hung like a Mystery over the clearing and the surrounding forest.

  He had seen the tracer bullets in the distance on the night the company’s plant was stormed by the Guardia. Justin had been there and they had captured her. Then, during the next day, there had been more shooting, and when it stopped the motif of a Schubert trio had settled on his inner hearing and stayed. He could not think where he had heard it first; long before, in another place. It was just a little jig of a thing, a ditty, but its particles of sound were so wondrously conjoined that the sensing of it was delicious, an ineffable pleasure. Egan wondered what made him feel so happy at times.

  “Never a dull moment,” he said to himself.

  It was true. His moments were never dull since he had come to occupy them one by one. Something was always happening and he passed many of the daylight hours without a drink. But happy as so many moments might be, he was not yet proof against sadness. It was not the same consuming soreness of heart that had poisoned his life before, but it came and he had to endure it. He was able to examine it now.

  Oppressed, he would consider the quickening decomposition of his body and its attendant faculties. He could hardly recognize his own image in a glass. His hands shook constantly, his fingers were numb, his heart fluttered. All the keepers of the house were trembling. This relentless failing of life was comforting in its way. It reminded him that however desperate and alone one single creature might feel, creation looked after its own and brought everything round full circle.

  He had been elected to awareness, and while awareness had its satisfactions, it was not easy to watch all the world’s deluded wandering across the battlefield of a long-ago lost war. One had to close the heart to pity—if one could. The truth was a fine thing, but it had to be its own reward.

  Much later the edges of the world came alight and Holliwell was relieved at first, but soon he realized that there was much to dread. Fearfully he looked eastward, knowing the sun would rise there. He felt afraid of sunrise.

  When the first burning sliver came out of the sea, he knew that he would see the eye of the world, and the knowledge made him tremble more violently than he had throughout the long imprisoned night. He turned his back on it.

  In the core of the risen sun, it would be there for him to see—the eye of things. Blue, yes. Boiled clear. A guileless stare. He would be transfixed before the eye and every cell of his identity would rise up in recognition of itself. He, Holliwell, was things. There was nothing better. The absence of evil was the greatest horror.

  Then out of the sky suddenly blue as the eye of things there came in dogged laboring flight, heavy-winged, a pelican with a spot of blood at its breast. His head snapped back to follow it, but he dared not turn full round and face the eye in the sun.

  A little later, a yellow bird, a tiny thing, came and stood on the edge of his boat. It took a few hopping steps, inches from his face, and cast its eye, the size of a flower seed, on him. In the trifling lizard glance, the world’s eye was fleetingly reflected. Yet, he could confront it there, he thought. It was only a little yellow bird.

  Keeping his flayed back to eastward, he turned in a crouch and saw with astonishment that there was an island close by. There were low sandy bluffs and above them low hills covered with bright green and yellow vines. There were cacti and sea palms. Coconut trees. Light surf rolled gently toward a leeward shore and he was drifting in. He looked over the side and saw coral heads only a few feet beneath his keel. It was the island Pablo had promised him.

  He reached out and groped about him for the water jug, still afraid to see the sun. When he had drunk and put the jug by, there was another sight to amaze him.

  A hundred feet away swung a boat, scarcely larger than his own whaler but with a forward superstructure and two fishing chairs mounted aft, fast to the deck. Between the chairs and a cooler in the stern three people stood watching him, mute and motionless.

  A black man in a blue captain’s hat held the wheel. Beside him was a middle-aged white American, very tall and balding, in steel-rimmed glasses and wearing a long-sleeved white shirt. A tourist—a visitor to the island out fishing.

  The third person in the boat was a child, a boy of eleven or twelve. The boy held a red Coca-Cola can in one hand and a long sport rod in the other. He was staring straight at Holliwell and his expression was beyond surprise, the expression of someone seeing such a sight as he had never seen or thought to see. His face reflected the sun; the look of its eye was in the boy’s eye.

  A trick, Holliwell thought. In desperation he turned at last to face down the sun and it was only a glare, a blind star.

  Holliwell began to laugh until the spasms froze his jaw and he clenched and ground his teeth.

  “Ho,” he called across the water.

  The helmsman kept the fishing boat well off, as though he were afraid that Holliwell would try to board them.

  “It’s just us, kid,” Holliwell said. He looked into the boy’s fearful eyes and it was all there—all of it. We look at us. The thing looks at itself. It’s as innocent as daylight.

  What is a good word, he wondered, to say to them?

  “American,” he called out. That was a good enough word for his purpose.

&nb
sp; “Hey, brother”—he directed his question at the boy’s father—know the one about the three monkeys?” He was only mumbling.

  Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?

  They all went on staring. The eye you see it with, he told them, is the one that sees you back.

  Nor, he thought, am I going to tell them stories about murder. This is another day.

  “I’m glad to see you well,” Holliwell called. “I require rescue here.”

  The helmsman gunned his engine and hung back. They were floating a little fiber-glass minuet. Holliwell tried to stand but the sun beat him down.

  “Why is he looking at me like that?” Holliwell asked.

  As though I should be something else. Because it’s not as if I haven’t tried.

  She has her sunrise, he thought, and I have mine.

  Holliwell knew that he was home; he had nothing to fear from the sun. A man has nothing to fear, he thought to himself, who understands history.