A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  “I’m afraid,” Holliwell said, “that you’re deluded.”

  “I assure you,” Ocampo told him, holding the strange smile, “that I’m not.”

  “I mean that literally,” Holliwell said.

  He had clutched for a moment on the notion that Oscar Ocampo was now insane. But there was Marty Nolan. And Tom. And Marie, the social worker type.

  “There are delusions, Frank, but not mine. Believe me when I tell you my life is in danger. You risk nothing but I have to get out of here. And I have Patrick. And they can get me a job in the States.”

  “No, they can’t.” He was trying almost desperately to sober. Very deliberately he pushed the drink in front of him toward the bar and closed his eyes for a moment. “They can’t do that anymore.”

  Oscar spoke to him in a low voice, the smile closing.

  “I see more clearly than you. I beg you.”

  Holliwell took Tom Zecca’s card from his pocket and held it flat against the bar where Oscar could see it. With all the concentration he could summon he tried to read Oscar’s expression as Ocampo looked down at the card.

  “Who is this? Do you know the man? Have you heard of him?”

  Oscar read the card, looked away and shrugged.

  “Never. I don’t go down there. I have no idea who he is.”

  “What if I tell you that he came to my lecture and that he offered me a ride to Tecan tomorrow?”

  Ocampo was confused, plainly; he looked unhappy.

  “I don’t know what to say. Maybe they do everything by multiplicity. You know? Maybe everything is multiple.” He was silent for a moment. “Clearly, if you go—I want it known it was for me. But maybe it’s coincidence, no? There is still coincidence, is there not?”

  “Maybe there isn’t,” Holliwell said. “Maybe we’ve located ourselves beyond coincidence. You see more clearly, Oscar—you tell me.”

  Ocampo did not answer him but ordered them both another drink. Holliwell declined. As Oscar’s drink came, the bar telephone began to flash again and they both watched it.

  “Señor Holliwell?” the waiter called out over the music. They shook their heads; Oscar held up his hand in a gesture of refusal. The waiter, who had brought the phone, looked at them both and then walked off with it, saying something into the receiver.

  “It’s not bad they think you’re a leftist. In reality it’s safe.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you, Oscar?”

  “Yes, Frank. What I’m told. To escape.”

  “Some lecture you got me,” Holliwell said after a moment. “Who in hell were those turkeys?”

  “Turkeys?” Oscar asked. “Pavos? Well, usually it’s the same faces. People with little to do.”

  “But these days,” Holliwell said, “it would seem that everyone has something to do.”

  Ocampo drank.

  “There was a woman there who was very beautiful indeed and her name was Mariaclara Obregón. Back there in the happy realm of coincidence. I imagined that you might introduce us further.”

  Oscar smiled and nodded.

  “Mariaclara. The most beautiful and intelligent. Our Minister of Social Services. This is progressive no? A woman, beautiful?”

  “Well,” Holliwell said, “that was then.”

  “In my present circumstances,” Oscar told him, “there is nothing I wouldn’t do for you, Frank. In any circumstances, truly. But Mariaclara—you have to take my word because I know—unavailable. Committed. Without hope.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “All the same,” Oscar said dreamily, “we’re all whores here. Because of you. I mean, of course,” he explained, “because of the U.S.”

  “That’s your story.” It was an old taunt of Holliwell’s. Meaningless now.

  “It’s too bad, eh, Frank?” Ocampo took his thought. “We no longer can argue.”

  The drink was closing in on Holliwell again. He took the bar with both hands to fight it off.

  “All right. What about Nicolay? Who’s Nicolay?”

  “Ah, Nicolay,” Oscar cried. He laughed with such contempt that it was almost affectionate. “Nicolay is just a …” He shook his head to find the word. “Just a turkey.”

  When Pablo returned to the Paris Bar, the Callahans were nowhere in sight. Cecil, still working the bar, paid him no attention. He sat down on a stool, his eyes fixed on Cecil’s round bland face, working himself into a tight-lipped exaltation of rage.

  “What the fuck, man?” he demanded of Cecil at length.

  “Keep you voice down and you damn head on straight,” Cecil said without looking at him. “You been hired.”

  “Yeah?” Pablo asked. “No kidding?”

  Cecil shook his head at Pablo’s fecklessness.

  “No kiddin’. Anythin’ wrong wif dat?”

  “Not a thing,” Pablo said.

  “Den you and me got no problem, eh? So if I tell you what you gone to do you gone to sit and listen and not sell me no tickets, ain’t dat right?”

  Pablo laughed. “Sure, bro.”

  “In de mornin’ I gone to have your passport and your gear for you. You take it, you go to de bus terminal and you get de bus to Palmas. Palmas, you understandin’ me?”

  “I understand you.”

  “Dat bus under way at ten in de mornin’ and you got to be on it because de commander say so and you best do it. Dese people don’ wait on you desires.”

  “The thing is—what about tonight?”

  “You can sleep up topside here tonight,” Cecil told him. “And you don’t say nothin’ to a soul about your billet or how you come to get it. When I give you you gear you pay me twenny dola.”

  “I thought I paid you, Cecil.”

  “Eh, I don’ wan’ you tickets, mon,” Cecil said. “I ’splain dat one time. Dis here is trouble. I be goin’ to trouble on you behalf. Natural ting is you pay me for it.”

  “You’re the only game in town, ain’t you, Cecil?”

  “Precisamente, mon.”

  Pablo went out and found another bar and watched darkness fall over the piers. With the quick failing of light, the place filled with banana loaders. Feeling crowded out, Pablo went to sit in the park beside the navy building where he had spent part of his afternoon. The stations of the afternoon birds in the ceiba trees were taken up by the birds of night.

  Gypsy, Pablo thought. Gypsy mongrel like my mother. He could remember very clearly his morning walk with the dogs in the brake outside of town and the cold inside him when he shot them down. Then the sun on the scaled skin of the trailer going home.

  His line was playing out; there was poison in his blood. For the sake of the little boy it was better that he not be there. Better that the woman abuse him with her damned unconsciousness, leave him without clothes, leave him to ratburgers and television all night, than that Pablo be there to bring the curse down, bring the knowledge of bad blood, bring murder.

  From the naval barracks there sounded a bugle call, and the sentries at the gate were relieved with a halfhearted precision that would have given the loosest Coast Guard admiral a case of the chokes. Pablo thought the bugle call was the saddest sound he had ever heard.

  Son of a whore. The words made him tremble and he repeated them to himself with a fascination that chilled his blood. Pablo, son of a whore. Hijo de puta. Pablo. Sometimes it seemed that was the world’s whole message to him—that was all it ever told him. He could catch it in every roll of laughter and see its meaning framed in the mildest eyes.

  Let one of these half-nigger gibrones try it on me, he thought in a sudden rage. Let one.

  Let one and the strange metal figure would form under his hide and death be.

  He looked around the darkened park in alarm; he had not checked it out when he sat down. There were a few rummies settled with their bottles on the guano-dappled benches. Two of them were watching him. He smiled at them. The smile seemed serene. Try it, scumbag, was what the smile said. Whatever you got,
try it and see.

  Son of a whore. Even my fucking dogs know it, he thought, and suddenly, absurdly, he was mourning his dogs, numb with grief, and in a moment he was crying for his son, smiling at the two rummies, waiting for a move. Try it and see. The two rummies stood up and wandered toward the pierside.

  Pablo, son of a whore himself, now father to another one.

  Well, Pablo thought, maybe he won’t know it or maybe he won’t care, he won’t think that way. Maybe the world will be different then. But it won’t, he thought, it won’t ever be except the way it is with people fucking you over and putting their handles on you to turn you around by. Mex mestizo mulatto nigger spic. Malinche. “Tell me, brudduh, you a black or a white mon?” Gypsy mongrel. Son of a whore.

  Now, why, Jesus, Pablo asked from his bench in the Parco de los Heroes de la Marina, Puerta Vizcaya, Compostela—why in the fucking fire do you run it this way? In need of quietude now—the hard-bought speed rattling in his skull—he walked the half block to a tienda, bought a bottle of Flor de Cana and returned to the darkness of his bench. Brown-bagging it, only in this fucking country they didn’t give you no bag.

  He drank his rum and watched the running lights on the little draggers that ran beyond the breakwater, and the freighters, lit like pinball machines along the wharves. The naval sentries before the gate of the naval barracks paid no attention to him.

  What if the world got different? If it was different it wouldn’t have me in it, I’m nothing anybody wants and that’s for sure. I damn sure ain’t anything I want, he thought, so what the hell is the use of me? No use at all.

  Unless maybe. He reached into his pocket and bit a piece off the little yellow pill; he was drunk enough, it seemed to him, for it not to send him spinning through the impending night in a state of whacked-out hyperanimation. Unless maybe something comes along. And he began to dream of a sunup when something had come along and the world was different and he was in it after all. There would be a great summoning of powers and dominations; Pablo himself would be a power and a domination, a principality, a mellow dude. Big easy Pablo, the man of power. It was a warm happy vision but it went funny on him as such things often did. For the first time in a while, however, he was not angry.

  He stood up, waved to the sentries and marched with his bottle straight into the Paris Bar. Cecil looked unhappy with him. But the wariness, the genuine caution with which Cecil watched him sit down was pleasing. At the far end of the bar, a drunken man was playing a tape recorder he had somehow acquired.

  “Chinga,” the drunken man said into his recorder and pressed the replay button. “Chinga,” the machine replied.

  “Maravillosa!” cried the drunken man.

  Pablo laughed and the man laughed back, unthreatening, unafraid. A happy thief.

  “Hey, that’s good,” Pablo said. “You teach him how to work that, Cecil?”

  Cecil only looked vexedly at him.

  “Hey, Cecil,” Pablo said, “I want to ask you something, man. Promise you won’t get pissed?”

  Cecil took the cigarette he was smoking out of his mouth and set it in an ashtray. He raised his boxer’s jaw toward Pablo.

  “What do you think is the use of me?” Pablo asked.

  For a long time Cecil stared at him, then slowly his shoulders sagged and a smile spread across his wide scarred face that lit it from chin to hairline.

  “De use of you?” Cecil asked, incredulous.

  “Yeah, man. What do you think the use of me is?”

  Cecil, in a moment, was wary again but his smile held.

  “You mean to me, brudduh?”

  “No, no,” Pablo said. “The use—you know. The use of me.”

  “Well now …” Cecil began. A throb of laughter trembled in his throat. “Dat be hard to say, you know.”

  “Cecil, I’m the first fucker in the world knows that. But right off … what would you say the use of me was?”

  “Oh, you just drunk,” Cecil declared. But he could not control himself. “De use … imagine askin me dat? De use … de use of you?” He slapped the bar and gave a quiet whoop.

  Pablo shrugged and drank from his bottle. Reassured, Cecil brought him a glass. They poured one out for Pablo, one for the bartender, one for the thief with the tape recorder.

  “De use of you, mon? Same as everbody. Put one foot to front of de other. Match de dolluh wif de day.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Sure dat’s all. Good times, hard times. Mos’ certainly dat’s all.”

  “Don’t you think everybody got some special purpose?”

  “Hey,” Cecil demanded, “what I look like—a preacher, mon? Purpose of you and me to be buried in de ground and das hard enough to do. Be buried in de sweet ground and not in dat ocean.” They drank their rum together.

  “Dreamin’ be de ruin of you, sailor. Be de ruin. Old chap, you too young to be worryin’ after dose tings. Be burnin’ out your mind.”

  “It is burning,” Pablo said. “Burning out.”

  “Go to sleep, Pablo,” Cecil said, not unkindly. He handed Pablo a key across the bar. “Go upstairs and sleep it off, mon.”

  Pablo took the key, surprised that Cecil did not charge him further for it. As he went up the narrow stairs, he heard Cecil in a low voice explaining to the thief in Spanish what it was that Pablo had asked him. The thief giggled.

  “Y yo?” the thief asked after a moment. “Para que sirvo? What about me?”

  As Pablo was prowling the rat-infested darkness over the bar, a door opened and a girl in a tight blue dress looked at him from her lighted doorway. There was a little statue of the Niño de Praha on a dresser beside her. Pablo stumbled toward her, then, mindful of his wallet, turned away.

  “It’s a Walt fucking Disney true life adventure, sweetheart,” he told her. “That’s all it is.”

  The mission’s mail that morning was wedged to the rail at the bottom of the steps leading up to the veranda. From the top step, Justin could see that among it was a letter with a Canadian stamp—for Egan from his nonagenarian mother, and the monthly newsletter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. This door delivery service was something new; until a month or so before it had been necessary to drive to Puerto Alvarado for mail. Justin suspected that the extension of postal convenience did not indicate any advance in the state services of the Republic, but rather that the Guardia, probably in the person of Lieutenant Campos, was opening and reading, however imperfectly, their mail.

  Out beyond the road and the narrow beach, the ocean had assumed its winter’s morning contour—it was pale and flat, mild-seeming, without affect. Within two months, the spring winds would be up and there would be storms and rain. The days might be easier to get through.

  It had been weeks since she had heard from Godoy. On the rare occasions when they met, they exchanged polite, ecclesiastical greetings. This might be sound strategy—but Justin, who was as prudent and sensible as anyone, found it wounding and frustrating. And there was no work at the mission. No one came. No one. They were not needed.

  She went listlessly down the steps and gathered up the mail. In addition to the letter from Egan’s mother and Fellowship she found a second one for him, from the Devotionist provincial in New Orleans. There was also one for her, in a yellow flower print envelope, from her sister. The tab seal on the magazine was broken; all the letters had been opened and resealed with wads of soiled Scotch tape.

  Back upstairs, she sat down in a wicker chair with the mail in her lap and leafed through it again. The clumsiness of the resealing, the absurdity of the dirty tape made her shake her head in contempt.

  You bastard, she thought, enlarge your lousy life. Egan’s ancient mother, my worn-down sister—they have no secrets from you. But the provincial’s letter might be another matter.

  The letter columns of Fellowship were filled with a controversy over whether or not the antiwar movement in the States should use its supposed influence with the Provisional Government in Saigon to impl
ore a degree of clemency for the new regime’s enemies. The An Quang pagoda had been closed. Justin put the magazine aside. Her long tanned fingers, clipped and scrubbed, tore the wads of tape from Veronica’s daisy-patterned envelope and she lifted out the letter inside, handwritten on personalized stationery in the same design. The letters from Veronica arrived, or at least went forth, about once every two months. Often when pictures had been enclosed, the letters arrived with the pictures removed. During her best years there, Veronica’s letters had sometimes made her feel like crying for the two of them; on this particular morning she was certain that she would never get through the three daisy-dappled sheets without coming apart. But she read.

  Veronica had at last joined the Purple Sage Cowbelles. She was not the only Catholic woman in the Cowbelles—there were two Basque ladies who went to the same church, Our Lady of Mercy in Tatum, eighty miles away. Veronica drove the children there and back each Sunday morning. The stock were, for the most part, healthy and thriving in their winter pasture. But the coyote problem was bad, their population had increased and with calving time coming up the darn things would be a menace. Morton had shot eight of them one day, contrary to federal law, but they were prowling the edges of the spread as though they knew that calves were soon due. She herself had shot a few.

  The winter was fairly mild, with the temperature above zero most of the day and fairly little snow. Down south, the ski resorts were hurting and the summer pasture might be drier than it should be. But the sunny days made you gay instead of gloomy; she and the younger children had done some Nordic skiing and Morton and the boys were enjoying their snowmobiles.

  The library in Arrow had spent the last of its budget getting its collection of Star Trek books up to date—it was enough to make you scream the way that library wasted its funds on trash books and detective stories and the blandest best sellers. Their collection of Dickens was falling to pieces, they had no Stendhal, not a single Thomas Hardy, no Thomas Wolfe, no F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joyce, forget it. There was nothing worthwhile for the kids to read, to cut their teeth on in a literary way. The kids watched crap on television, and it was really crap too.