A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

Tabor stood his ground, his hands by his sides.

  “Don’t let nothing hold you back but fear, McPhail.”

  Nancy moved between them, looking as though she were ready to duck.

  “C’mon, now,” she said. “C’mon, you all.”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, Tabor?” McPhail demanded. “You lost your goddamn marbles or something?”

  “Maybe a lot the matter from your point of view, Chief,” Tabor said. “But I don’t appreciate your point of view. You don’t even wash your hands when you go to the toilet.”

  McPhail stared at him, blank-eyed, silent, a head taller than Tabor.

  “You’re just nuts,” the chief said finally. He took a step toward the door and lumbered on out, like an oversized old man. “You better see a doctor,” he said.

  Nancy fixed Pablo Tabor with a wise little mother look.

  “Everybody’s gonna be pissed at you, Pablo. Not just the Coast Guard but everybody.”

  “Well, that’ll be too bad,” Pablo said, and drank the rest of his beer. “I don’t give a shit. I’m getting out here. Got to.”

  “You gonna request a transfer?”

  “I’m gonna transfer myself,” Tabor said. “This damn station is draggin’ me down.”

  “Where would you go if you had a choice?”

  “I’d wait for a message. When I got that message—goodbye. Could be any time. Maybe today.”

  “Well,” Nancy said, “I hope you work it out O.K.” She lowered her voice a little and glanced toward the door that led to the lobby. “Hey, Pablo—you wouldn’t have any extra speed around, would you?”

  “Nope,” Pablo said, and went out.

  He drove to the inshore end of Main Street and turned west, through a neighborhood of old frame houses with peeling shutters and unfenced gardens gagged with kudzu. After a few blocks the houses and the paving ended and the road ran a course of sandy islands in the mud and saw grass that stretched to a distant line of pines. At the end of the roadway was a small square bungalow with some wooden dog pens beside it. Tabor parked in the muddy yard by the pens; as soon as he was out of his car, the dogs set up a barking.

  “Hello, dogs,” he said. His own two shorthairs were in the nearest pen, beside themselves at the sight of him, pressing their noses against the chicken wire, rearing and scratching against the boards of the pen gate.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Tabor said.

  He took his twelve-gauge Remington from its cardboard box in the trunk, assembled it and stuffed his pockets with shells. The disc of the sun was over the horizon; he put his sunglasses on.

  Freed, the shorthairs made a lightning circuit of the yard and hurried back to Tabor, bounding at his shoulders, climbing his legs until he put a knee up to force them down.

  “Get down, fuckers,” he told them. “What you think you’re doin’? What you think you’re doin’, huh?”

  An old black man came out of the bungalow holding a coffee pot in his hand.

  “Gonna take ’em out?” he asked, glancing at Tabor’s Saturday-night clothes.

  “Sure am,” Tabor said. He gave the old man three dollars, the dogs’ boarding fee. Tabor lived in a trailer court where they didn’t allow dogs.

  “They been good dogs,” the old man said. “Good dogs.”

  He followed the old man into the kitchen and accepted a half cup of coffee.

  “See any birds?” Tabor asked.

  “Le’see—I seen one, two up the other side of the airfield. That dry ground. Brush up there. Didn’t have my gun at the time.”

  “Too bad,” Tabor said.

  The old man watched him take two pills from the aspirin bottle and swallow them with his coffee.

  “I might have a shot at one of them airplanes back there,” Tabor said. “Piss me off with the noise they make. Scaring the cows. And the dogs.”

  “Don’t do that now.”

  Tabor set the cup down and picked up his gun.

  “I been wasting my time around this place,” Tabor told the old man. “Wasting the best years of my life, no shit.”

  “You got that feelin’, huh?” He sat waiting for Tabor to take his dogs and go. “I s’pec’ that’s ’cause you a young man. Be restless. Nervous in the service, heh-heh.”

  “Nervous in the service,” Tabor repeated in a lifeless voice. “Well, I’ll see you.”

  “Sure enough,” said the old man. “You might could get one outen that dry brush.”

  He set off along a raised trail through the swamp, the dogs running ahead, the sun behind him.

  Nervous in the service. O.K., Tabor thought, he didn’t mean nothing by it. Just an old nigger, shooting the shit.

  The dogs closed over a rabbit scent, their snouts poking into the saw grass, haunches low and quivering, stub tails wagging out of control. Tabor kicked at the male.

  “Get along, Trouble. Goddamn, it’s a fucking rabbit.”

  The dogs, who dreaded his anger, took off through the grass, circled back to the trail and ran ahead looking busy. They had been good dogs to start with but they were too rarely hunted, gone to seed.

  “Fucking morning,” Tabor said.

  From the airport off to his right, a Cherokee rose on a roar of engines and shot over his head toward the Gulf. Bound for the islands or Tampico, maybe Villahermosa, maybe Yucatán. There were clearings back in the swamp where the dope pilots landed their grass or Mexican brown—thousands of bills for a few hours’ hauling. The dogs barked after the plane; Tabor watched the sunlight on its bright yellow wings as it gained altitude and settled in southwesterly.

  “Very far from God this morning,” he said. The second rush of speed began to jangle him. “Very far from you this morning, God.”

  The morning sun was raising the sweat beneath his shirt but his limbs felt cold and unconnected.

  If I were God, Pablo Tabor thought, I wouldn’t have mornings like this. The sun up on a swamp, two worthless dogs, a sparky with his blood full of speed and gasoline. No such morning could have a God over it.

  If I were God, he thought, if I made mornings I wouldn’t have no Pablo Tabor and his dogs in ’em.

  “You do this, God?” he asked. “You operate and maintain mornings like this?”

  He came to a fork in the raised trail and the dogs ran off to the right, toward the deeper swamp where the game was. Tabor turned left toward the shore. After a few minutes, the puzzled dogs fell in behind him; then, scenting the carrion of the beach, they whipped forward, running together.

  The sun was partly in his eyes, his rush came up speckled, buzzing in his brain, old rages rose in his throat. Tasting the anger, he clenched his teeth.

  Where the fuck to begin? he thought. But these people—there was hardly any getting at them.

  “Usin’ me,” he sang out, “usin’ me usin’ me. Turning me arid turning me and turning me around.”

  His mind’s eye started flashing him shit—death’s-heads, swastikas, the ace of spades. Dumbness. Dime-store badness. His anger rolled along, cooling and sharpening on the Dex. Before long he was standing on the beach, the sunlit Gulf spread out before him, coarse sand clinging to his wet cowboy boots. The dogs nosed along the waterline.

  He walked down the beach, away from the sun, then stood with his eyes closed, his shotgun resting on his neck and shoulders, his forearms curled over it. His heart was throbbing in his side, in his temple, under his jaw. He eased the gun down and propped the stock against his thigh; from the jacket pocket he fished out two of the red and gold cartridges, forced them into the magazine of his shotgun, pumped them into place. Then a third—inserted it and pumped it forward.

  The dogs had found the shell of a horseshoe crab and were worrying it, trying to lift it from the sand with their soft retriever’s teeth. Tabor watched them.

  If I moved, he thought, it would be like this.

  The anger fell away from him as he raised the gun. He felt as though he were a metal image of himself, cool, without muc
h reality.

  Like this.

  The charge drove the male dog’s head down into wet sand, sent the rest of its body swinging on the pivot of its nearly severed neck to splash in the ebbing of a faint Gulf wave. Blood on the shimmering regular surface of the washed sand.

  Tabor pumped the spent shell out. The female stood quivering at the shot, confused at what she saw, almost, it seemed, about to run. His second charge sent her into the air and she fell, still quivering, across a bough of flotsam mangrove.

  He pumped the second shell out and licked his dry lips.

  You happy now, you fool, you just murdered your dogs?

  “I feel fine,” Tabor said, “just fine.” But it was not true. “They’re fucking with my head this morning,” he said.

  He was walking away from the dogs, making himself not look back, when he caught sudden sight of two heads above the line of saw grass at the edge of the beach.

  Stopping, he saw a boy and a girl in the grass not forty feet away from him. They stood in a peculiar crouch as though they had just stood up or were about to duck. He walked over to them.

  The boy was blond, with a red bandana tied around his head; the girl almost as tall with shorter, darker hair. Tabor saw that she was crying.

  “Had to be done,” he told them. “They was sick, know what I mean? They had heartworm, had it real bad.”

  The young people seemed to relax a little. The girl wiped her sunburned cheek.

  “Jeez,” the boy said. “They were pretty dogs.”

  Tabor looked away from him.

  “What the hell you know about it?”

  He saw the girl’s sad blue eyes on his shotgun.

  “Don’t you be crying over my dogs,” he told her. “I’ll cry over my own dogs.”

  They fell silent. The boy swallowed and twisted his mouth slightly.

  “You want to chant with me?” Tabor asked them.

  “I don’t believe we know any chants,” the boy said, with something like a smile. The girl clung to his arm.

  “You think I’m gonna hurt you, don’t you?”

  “I hope not,” the boy said softly. “We didn’t mean any harm. We were just sad about the dogs.”

  You little bastard, Tabor thought, you got it all figured out. Humor the crazy man with the iron. Be gentle. Save your own and your girl friend’s ass. Smart boy, Tabor thought. Smart boy.

  “You’re good kids,” Tabor said. “I can see you are. You go to college, don’t you?”

  The boy nodded warily.

  “Well I ain’t gonna hurt you,” Tabor told him. He turned from their frightened faces toward the sun. “Go ahead and have a nice day.”

  He walked off toward the water and they called “You too” in unison after him. As he passed between the corpses of his dogs, he turned back toward them and saw that they had not moved.

  Cold to the marrow of his bones, he drove through town again and onto the Interstate, traveling west. The trailer court where he lived was beside an old canal, padded with water hyacinth. Across the highway was a brown slope where a billboard advertised a beach hotel and three derricks stood, their pistons rising and falling in perpetual motion.

  Tabor’s trailer was in the last row, the one furthest from the road and the most expensive.

  He parked beside it, in a little driveway of crushed shell with a sick banana tree at the end of it. He had taken his sunglasses off getting out of the car, and the sun on the streamliner siding of his trailer dazzled his eyes. As he put the glasses back on, he looked toward the sorry little playground that stood fenced between two rows of trailers and saw his son. The boy was lying belly down on one of the rusty miniature slides, his arms dangling to the ground. With one hand he was sifting the surface of shredded shell and dried mud under the slide.

  Tabor went to the playground gate.

  “Billy.”

  The little boy started and turned over quickly, guiltily.

  “How the hell come you ain’t in school? Whatchyou doin’ around here?”

  Billy walked toward him ready to flinch.

  “She didn’t get you up, did she?” Tabor shouted. Billy shook his head. Tabor stood tapping his foot, looking at the ground.

  “Dumb bitch,” he whispered.

  Hearing him, the boy wiped his nose, uneasily.

  That could just do it, Tabor thought.

  “Look here,” he told the little boy, “I’m gonna drive you in after a while. Meantime you stay right out here and don’t come in, hear?”

  He went back to the trailer and let himself in. The living room had a sweet stale smell, spilled beer, undone laundry.

  And it was just the sort of place you had to keep clean, he thought. Like a ship. You had to keep it clean or pretty soon it was like you were living in the back seat of your car.

  Clothes were piled beside an empty laundry bag at one end of the pocket sofa—her blouses, work uniforms, Billy’s dungarees. Spread out across the rest of the sofa were the sections of the past Sunday’s paper. On the arm was a stack of Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets she had let some missionaries give her.

  She was asleep in their bedroom, the end compartment.

  Tabor went quietly into the kitchen and opened the waist-high refrigerator. There were three shelves in it—the bottom shelf held nothing except cans of Jax beer. On the two top shelves were row upon row of hamburger patties each on its separate waxed-paper square. She brought them home frozen in cardboard boxes from the place she worked.

  As he looked at the rows of hamburger, a curious impulse came into his mind. He straightened up and took a breath—he had the sensation of time running out, of seconds being counted off toward an ending. Finally, he took a can of Jax out, opened it and sat down on the living-room sofa facing the plastic door.

  If he allowed himself one more, he thought, he might coax another rush. On the one hand go easy because things are getting fast and bad; on the other hand fuck it. He took a Dex out of the bottle, bit off half and swallowed it with the beer. After a few moments he swallowed the other half.

  In the kitchen again, he threw the empty beer can away and stood looking out of the little window above the sink. Miles of bright green grass stretching to the cloudless blue, the horizon broken here and there by bulbous raised gas tanks on steel spider legs, like flying saucer creatures. You could picture them starting to scurry around the swamp and they’d be fast all right, they’d cover ground.

  He opened the refrigerator and took one of the hamburger patties out.

  “Now that’s comical,” he said, holding it over the sink. His chest felt hollow.

  His hand closed on the hamburger, wadding it together with the waxed paper. A fat, dirty, greasy fucking thing. He couldn’t stop squeezing on it. The ice in it melted with the heat of his hand and the liquid ran down the inside of his forearm. He took a couple of deep breaths; his heartbeat was taking off, just taking off on him. He dropped the meat in the sink.

  When he had washed his hands, he went into the compartment at the opposite end of the trailer from their bedroom, the place where he kept his own things. Everything there was in good order.

  There was a locked drawer under the coat closet where Tabor kept his electronics manuals and his military forty-five automatic. He took the pistol out, inserted a clip and went back into the kitchen.

  With the gun in his right hand, he gathered up as many of the hamburgers as he could manage with his left and went to the bedroom.

  “Meat trip,” he said.

  She had the blue curtains drawn against the morning light. The covers were pulled up over her ears; in the space between her pillow and the wall were a rolled magazine and a spilled ashtray that had fouled the sheet with butts. Tabor moved around her bed, delicately setting hamburger patties at neat intervals along the edge.

  “Kathy,” he called softly.

  She stirred.

  “I killed the dogs,” he said.

  “You did what?” she said, and as she came awake she saw
the little circle of meat in front of her.

  She started to turn over; Tabor let her see the barrel of the gun and forced her back down on the pillow with its weight.

  “Pab,” she said, in a small broken voice. He held the gun against the ridge of bone beside her eye and let her listen to the tiny click the safety made when he released it.

  She had begun to tremble and to cry. Her nose was scarcely two inches from the waxed-paper edge of the hamburger in front of her.

  “You want to go out on a meat trip, Kathy? Just you and all those ratburgers all over hell?”

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Oh, Pab.”

  He was thinking that when he had pressed the safety the thing was as good as done. If I moved, he thought, it would be like the dogs.

  “Shall I count off for you? You want to read one of them Jehovah books before you go out?” He reached behind him and pulled a little chair nearer the bed and sat down on it. “No use in getting out of bed, baby. ’cause it’s good-night time.”

  He watched her mouth convulse as she tried to breathe, to speak. Like the dogs, he thought.

  A fecal smell rose from the covers; he lifted them and saw the bottom sheet soiled with bile. He covered her again.

  “You fuckin’ little pig,” he said wearily.

  The voice broke from her trembling body.

  “Baby,” she said. “Oh, baby, please.”

  He stood up and put the gun down on the chair. From his wallet he took two singles and dropped them on her covers.

  “That there’s for all the good times,” he told her, and picked up the gun and put it in his pocket.

  She was still screaming and sobbing when he went out with his bag. It was like a bad dream outside—the traffic on the highway just shooting on by, the derricks across the highway up and down up and down. Craziness. He was weak in the knees; he put the bag in the back seat and walked to the playground to call his son.

  “Hey, you gonna drive me now, Daddy?”

  “Looks like I ain’t today. I gotta go somewhere, so you can just hang out and play.”

  “Neat,” the boy said. “You ain’t goin’ to sea, are ya, Daddy?”

  “Yeah, I am,” Tabor said. “The South Sea.”

  He leaned on the wire fence and took a deep breath.