A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  A violent red sunrise assaulted Holliwell’s eyes as he awakened. He had not drawn the curtains and his room was bathed in its light—the tiles of the floor, the dressing-table mirror, the sheets of his bed stained a color like blood and water. Outside, the sun was rising into smoky rain cloud over Misericordia, the eastward peak. He eased his feet onto the tiles. It was the dry season, he thought. The rain clouds had no business in that sky.

  During the night, there had been three calls, each promising him a painful death forthwith. Each time it had been a different voice, once it had been a woman’s. He had not neglected to call the switchboard before collapsing into bed; he had asked them not to put calls through. But the calls had come.

  He stood up and in the next moment he was sick, on his knees over the toilet fixture, gripping the sleek rounded edges of it—his body running sweat, his hair plastered to his skull in the faint breeze of the bathroom ventilator. For a few moments he thought he would die there.

  Presently, however, he was upright; he showered and brushed his teeth. As he cleaned up, the events of the previous night came back to him in small paroxysms, each jab of memory occasioning him a minor convulsion.

  The red glow had not softened when, wrapped in a towel, he went back into his bedroom. He walked to the window and saw the sun higher but still fixed in its prism of rain cloud and smoke from Santiago. Its broken light dyed the still surface of the pool below, was reflected on the waxy surface of the leaves of the trees along the hotel’s wall and on the whitewashed walls of the city beyond them. Blood red were the tin roofs of the shacks on the lower slopes, the chrome and windshields of the cars on the highway that led to the airport. He drew the curtains, dressed, and pouring himself a drink, drank the straight scotch in cautious sips until it was down and easing him.

  His watch read seven-thirty, local time; the daily plane for Miami left at eleven. He spent the next hour and a half in chill combat with the switchboard until he had determined that there was no one at Aerochac to take a reservation. Between calls he drank and paced the floor, smoking his duty-free Kents one after another. The flights were almost always filled the day before departure, and as for standbys—there were always enough people crowding the Aerochac desk at the earliest possible hour, ready to slip some clerk a five for such cancellations as might occur. If he had troubled to make the reservation the day before there would have been no difficulty, he could even have done it through the hotel. But he had not planned to leave so soon.

  More and more frequently as he paced his curtained room, the thought of calling Tom Zecca came to him. With the thought came the recollection of a poem he had once heard read, about a mouse so frightened it went to the cat for love. But he was not a mouse—he had always been good at taking care of himself. He was neither a coward nor a small animal. The fact was that in spite of what he might tell himself or others, he simply did not have enough direct knowledge of present conditions in Compostela to be able to interpret the degree of danger his threatening calls represented. There had been killings, there was no question of that. And he no longer trusted Oscar Ocampo enough to accept his reassurances.

  His confidence rose and fell irrationally. He became drunker. Shortly before ten he made contact with Aerochac—there was nothing. Standbys? Standbys were being turned away.

  If at sunrise, he thought, he had summoned the presence of mind to go straight to the airport he could probably have bought someone’s seat from under them. It was too late for that now. Grimly, he made a reservation for the following day.

  It was not going to be a pleasant twenty-four hours. There would be more calls. He would be confined to the hotel, messengers of death would pursue him through its grounds. Oscar would importune him.

  Soothed by the whiskey, he thought further of the ride to Tecan. He put the card with Tom Zecca’s number on it beside the phone. It was almost ten-thirty; if he did anything, it must be soon.

  He knew shortly that he would go to Tecan. There was every reason for it now. He could not face flying home as he was, to the safety of white winter, terrorized, more crippled than when he had come. He had business down there. On the coast near Puerto Alvarado were things to be seen that it was his business to see, his secret business, the business of his dry spirit. He refused to be frightened away.

  Of course, there were the islands just offshore, and the ocean. And he had never driven the stretch of Pan-American Highway between Santiago de Compostela and San Ysidro.

  Holliwell finished the drink in his glass and went to the telephone. It’s what you want, he told himself. Don’t obsess over it. Do it.

  Marie answered. She sounded pleased enough. It would be fine. Finer still since he had only one bag. Plenty of room.

  Holliwell hung up, a little stunned at what he had set about. They would call for him at the hotel at twelve-thirty. There was only time to pack, check out—and go.

  When the Zeccas’ car pulled up, he was on the street side of the hotel wall having his shoes shined by a feral twelve-year-old. He leaned against the oily stone, regardless of his best dark shirt, his suitcase behind the heel of his disengaged foot, a Saigon reflex, a half measure against snatchers. The boy was whispering to himself, working over Holliwell’s second shoe with elaborate snaps and flourishes of his cloth.

  The Zeccas waved and smiled and left their engine running. There was a balding young man in the back seat. His expression was amiable.

  After an unconscionable amount of time the boy proffered up to Holliwell his shined shoes with a deferential smile.

  There were sores on the boy’s gums.

  Holliwell felt around in his pocket and came up with what proved to his embarrassment to be a U.S. dollar. He handed it over. The shoeshine boy took the dollar and looked quickly up and down the street. His sunken little chest expanded in triumph; he gave Holliwell a smirk of contempt, picked up his box and fled. Two older city Indian boys were advancing on him along the tree-lined avenue, racing barefoot under the palms of the traffic island to cut off his retreat. One of them held a screw-driver handle up in his fist. The blade would be sharpened to a cutting point.

  “What did you give him?” the amiable-looking young man in the back seat asked Holliwell, as he climbed in the car with his suitcase. “What’d you give him—a buck?”

  “It was all I had,” Holliwell said. “Forgot to get change.”

  “Good for him,” Marie Zecca said. “He had a good spot there.”

  Tom was watching the pursuit in his rearview mirror. Clutching his box, the smaller boy had turned the corner but the other two were gaining fast.

  “Good for him if he gets to keep it.”

  They drove toward the Old City, where the Avenida Central broke up its act, rounding the seventeenth-century cathedral and dissipating, delta-like, into the back streets of the market. Indians in straw sombreros with marital knots in the band carried loads of cured hide, squat women in white carried fresh-killed turkeys or stacks of cheap hammocks to sell in front of hotels like the Panamerican. With the hand of experience, Tom Zecca guided his gold-colored Honda through the crowds, past the Salvadorean chorizo stands and the shops selling tail pipes and stolen hubcaps and dried beans.

  “Kind of reminds you of market day in Danang,” he said.

  The blond young man in the back seat beside Holliwell was named Bob Cole; he sat rigid, staring out at the market streets. He was pale and overweight in an unwholesome way; his teeth were crooked and yellow from smoking. Holliwell sensed a peculiar tension in his frame; Cole held his hands clutched against his knees and the khaki cloth around his grip was moist. He seemed somehow atremble. At first, Holliwell thought he had been drinking.

  “It’s all the way,” Cole said.

  “What do you mean?” Tom Zecca asked him. “You mean it’s all like Danang? You mean after you’ve seen one marketplace you’ve seen them all?”

  Cole never looked at him.

  “He means the Third World,” Marie said. “The pre-industria
l world, right, Bob?”

  “Yes,” Cole said.

  “When you get too far from Madison, Wisconsin, it gets unsanitary,” Tom Zecca said. “The people get funny-looking and it’s hot.”

  “Tom,” Marie said, “stop teasing.”

  They passed the reeking meat markets, the third-class bus station with its cluster of dormitory hotels, and followed the rutted streets to an intersection where the road to the banana lands commenced—the back way out of town, through the side which Santiago de Compostela presented to most of its countrymen and subjects. Within a mile or so of the last cluster of hovels the plantations began.

  “My grandfather,” Tom Zecca told them, “always said to me—kid, you don’t know how lucky you are you live in America. Back there it’s all shit. You take your hat off and you eat dirt. Here you got it made.”

  “He must have been successful,” Cole said.

  “He burned his bridges and he was tough. He lived to see his son be Man of the Year. That was in Toledo, see. They have a Man of the Year every year and my old man was Man of the Year twice. He had a real camel’s-hair coat and my grandfather would come up to him when he put it on and rub his fingers on the cuff and shake his head.’ ”

  “America,” Marie said, “success—the whole bit. My family was a little like that. Only we didn’t have any Men of the Year in mine.”

  “Have you ever gone to Italy?” Holliwell asked.

  “Oh sure,” Tom said. “The Bridge of Sighs. Florence. Verona. Marie and I once spent two weeks in Taormina. Well, the old man flipped. Sicily? What the hell you want to go to Sicily for? It’s all strunz there.”

  “That means it’s all shit,” Marie explained.

  “I suppose I understand how he felt,” Bob Cole said.

  “Eh,” Zecca said, in a tone of mock menace. “Watch it.”

  After about an hour of the banana trees, they came to a town called La Entrada. There were railroad yards there and the stacks of an industrial complex. The town had a great many shops and a bank with bright wide windows through which one could see decorative plants and fluorescent lights. There were neat stucco houses with chain link fences in front of them; the square had a new church of triangular concrete slats in the North American suburban style and a playing field with basketball courts.

  “They got themselves a steel-rolling mill in this town,” Zecca said. “Old Compostela—little by little—it’s coming up in the world.”

  “And Tecan,” Marie said, “little by little it’s going down. Or under. This year there’s a banana disease and a coffee disease. They get the worst of the quakes.”

  “When new diseases are invented, Tecan gets them first,” Tom said. “And of course they hold fast to the old ones.”

  “And of course,” Bob Cole said, “they have our continual attention and assistance.”

  No one answered him.

  “Are you from Madison?” Holliwell asked Cole after a while.

  “No,” the young man said. “Never been there.”

  After a few more miles of bananas, Holliwell helped himself to the water jug in the car and went to sleep again.

  When he drifted out of his whiskey doze, they were driving a curving road in uplands that might have been Colorado. The hillsides were pine-clad. There were meadows of rich green grass and wild-flowers intersected by fast-rushing streams that ran clear over smooth rock, trout streams they might have been, looking pure enough to drink. The roadside window carried a fragrance of sun-warmed evergreen.

  “They must have looked for gold here,” he said dreamily.

  The Zeccas turned and looked back at him.

  “Welcome back,” Marie said.

  Bob Cole was leaning forward in the seat, his face nearly pressed against the window.

  “They did,” he told Holliwell. “It was a man called Martínez Trujillo, one of Alvarado’s captains. He used Alvarado’s techniques. He would gather the Indian leaders and give them until dawn on a certain day to produce the weight of his horse and armor in gold. If they didn’t he burned them alive. He never got any, of course, because there isn’t any up here. Never got a nugget but he kept on burning Indians. He burned thousands of them in these mountains.”

  “The gold was all down in the swamps where it didn’t belong,” Zecca said. “Under the mud. No one’s ever found gold up here.”

  “What became of Martínez Trujillo?” Holliwell asked.

  “He burned a few too many Indians,” Cole said, “and he never had them baptized. The friars complained. Martínez Trujillo was a New Christian and the Inquisition got him in the end.”

  “And burned him, we hope,” Marie said.

  “The histories are vague. He appears and disappears. He was a minor unsuccessful conquistador. Impatient and cruel. Probably just stupid.”

  “History is tough on guys like that,” Tom said.

  Cole told them that was as it should be.

  Cole, Holliwell thought, was a man who respected history. History was always affecting to be moral and to be just.

  “Another loser, another prick,” Tom Zecca said. “You ever see the murals at Bonampak? These characters all deserved each other.”

  “Well, you can’t really say that,” Cole said.

  “What can you really say?” Zecca asked.

  “It’s still going on,” Cole said. “The same thing. It’s unresolved.”

  “Do you think,” Marie asked, “that the Indians knew where the gold was all the time?”

  “Who knows?” Zecca said. “Who knows what they knew?”

  A few kilometers further along the highway, they pulled off onto a freshly paved track that curved through the pine forests. A short distance in, a sign beside the track read: “Lago Azul Lodge, Global Fishfinders, Houston, Texas.”

  “The bass lake,” Holliwell said. “I’ve heard about it but I’ve never been up here.”

  “Well, I’ve done got some beauties out of here,” Tom Zecca said. “Biggest was over twenty pounds. God only knows what the record is.”

  “Twice that,” Bob Cole said. “Maybe bigger.”

  The paved road began a descent and, rounding a turn, they saw the lake itself, immense and truly blue, girded on the near shore by flame trees and then by sharply rising palisades. There were no boats in sight. Its uncanny blue surface shivered under the faintest of breezes; a flight of black ducks was crossing it at midpoint, flying in a V wedge inches above the shimmering water.

  “Good God,” Holliwell said.

  After twenty minutes’ descent they pulled into the grounds of the lodge itself; a cluster of neat huts with bamboo lattice windows. Near the lakeside, above a series of piers where aluminum boats were moored with their outboards up, was a large building, open on all sides, with wicker shades curled under its wide winged roof. Its decorative style was tropical-Bavarian and fixed to its walls were the mounted carcasses of outsized largemouths, some of them bigger than sand sharks. On the muddy strand beside the piers a few reed pole boats had been drawn up.

  They parked beside the building and climbed out stiffly. The lakeside air was warm, the vegetation about them more tropical. There were palms near the shore and parakeets in the flame trees.

  The open-sided building was a restaurant; it had a fireplace with German beer mugs on the mantelpiece above it and more, dozens, of the outlandish stuffed bass.

  “Where are the global fishfinders?” Holliwell asked.

  “Just be grateful they’re not here,” Tom told him.

  They took a table near the lakeside and after a few minutes a black waiter came out to serve them. His English and his air of deference and bonhommie under pressure might have come from Houston with the fishermen.

  Bob Cole and the Zeccas had bass. Holliwell called for beer and then for an omelette, which was huge and fishy.

  “Everybody know the story of Lago Azul Lodge?” Cole asked them.

  Holliwell had not heard it.

  “Let’s hear your version,” Zecca said
.

  “This lake,” Cole said, “used to be called the Lago de los Camaidos. But back in the thirties an American airline bought it and the land around it with the lodge in mind. The airline figured that los Camaidos had too much bad history in it and they wanted their customers to feel more at home. So they named it Lago Azul and they stocked it with largemouths from breeding tanks in Louisiana. As you can see, the largemouths thrived, they grew to enormous proportions. Also they killed every native species in the lake. The Indians who lived by netting the native fish starved, their nets couldn’t hold big bass. A lot of the lake birds—some of them didn’t exist any other place on earth—died out completely because the monster bass ate their young.

  “The only problem was that these big bass wouldn’t take a hook. They simply could not be caught on a line. So the tourism angle went by the board. After a while, the airline sold out to Global Fishfinders, who were a bunch of rich Texas doctors, and the Fishfinders developed some kind of Arkansas shiner that the bass would take on a hook. Now they’ll take plugs if they look enough like shiners. Eventually, the Indians learned to spear the bass. Some of the birds survived.”

  Cole fell silent. Tom Zecca took up the tale. “So now—every few weeks, a planeload of gringos turns up in Santiago and they bus them out here. They make a few jokes about the country and the people, they go around yelling ‘Sí, señor,’ and ‘Hey, Pedro,’ and they fish. Every night they sit in here and get drunk and talk about the niggers back in Texas compared to the niggers down in here in Compostela. I tell you, this is the Forest Lawn of fishing, a bigger bunch of drunken bigoted assholes than these Fishfinders you couldn’t come across.”

  “When we come,” Marie said, “we try very hard to avoid the times they’re around. It’s not much fun then.”

  Zecca was watching the birds on the lake. Cole smoked one local cigarette after another.

  “Marie had her fanny pinched by a Sun Belt executive type once when we were down here.”

  “You should have let it pass,” she said.

  “I sent him home in a neck brace to straighten his head out,” Tom told them. “That’s what diplomatic immunity is for.”