A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  “I think we went to the same sort of schools,” Holliwell said.

  “Tom and I both went to St. Bonaventura,” Marie told him. “In Olean, New York.”

  Captain Zecca was drunk. So was Marie. So, to his own reckless satisfaction, was Holliwell.

  “I’m sorry,” Holliwell declared. “I don’t approve of the American presence here.”

  “Someday,” Captain Zecca said, “I’m going to work with the Chinese. Someday somewhere the conditions are gonna be right and me and the Chinese will get something going—I don’t care if it’s Africa—maybe even China.”

  “Wouldn’t that be great,” Marie said.

  “I’m a fucking master of destiny,” Zecca said. “My family is related to Napoleon’s. I’m gonna get down with those Chinese.”

  “Listen to him,” Marie said. “I hope you realize we’re all drunk here.”

  “I realize it,” Holliwell said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “But, Jesus,” Marie went on a little sadly, “I wish we could trust you. I mean, we don’t even know who you are and here we’re talking about the Chinese.”

  “You know who I am and you can trust me,” Holliwell said. “Personally, I enjoy talking about the Chinese.”

  “Well, one day,” Zecca said, “this army will get me and the Chinese together and together we are gonna be the fucking Yellow Peril.”

  “Include me in,” Holliwell told him. “As far as possible.”

  “There have been Chinese for five million years, man,” the captain said. “I don’t know how long there’s been Zeccas but I know there’s one thing that Zeccas and Chinese have in common. We know how the world goes.” He took a little salt from the edge of his margarita glass and rubbed the grains between his fingers. “We know the price of salt. The Americans forget, if they ever knew. But Zeccas and Chinese will always know.”

  Holliwell toasted the ancient wisdom of the Zeccas and the Chinese.

  “Cole doesn’t know shit. Fat Frank doesn’t know shit. El General—well, he’s an ape. You, sir,” he said, addressing Holliwell, “I don’t know what you know. I won’t presume to speculate. But things don’t work the way people think.”

  Holliwell shrugged. “I know that my redeemer liveth,” he said. The Zeccas stared at him. It was too Protestant a text.

  After a moment, Tom laughed.

  “We have a proverb, sir, in my grandfather’s country. In his island. I’m positive they have the same proverb in China. It goes ‘To trust is good. Not to trust is better.’ ”

  “A salute,” Marie said, and they drank the last of the margaritas.

  “To Sicily,” Holliwell said.

  Captain Zecca’s face seemed suddenly drained of good feeling. In the light from the living room, the shadow of his thick brows masked his eyes, high cheekbones and the arch of his nose covered the play of his thin lips.

  “To the price of salt,” he said, “and the ten pains of death. Which is all we really know.”

  Marie sighed. Holliwell held his seat until Captain Zecca rose from the table. He had seen such drinking parties in Vietnam and sometimes they ended badly. Zecca had begun to “sir” him rather a lot, a bad signal.

  “Next month,” Captain Zecca said, as they all staggered off to show Holliwell to his quarters, “we have to have twenty barrels of green beer. The way things get done in this country we better get on it now.”

  The room to which Holliwell was shown was small and comfortable, typical of the house; a touch of suburbia, a touch of Spanish formality. It had its own bath.

  “Green beer!” Marie said. They shook hands all round.

  “Good night, Doc,” the captain said. “Great ride.”

  “Really,” Marie said.

  Holliwell thanked them profusely, excessively.

  Washing up in the small neat bathroom, he could hear them plainly when he turned off the tap. They were in the kitchen.

  “St. Patrick’s Day,” Captain Zecca was telling his wife. “It’s in March.”

  “Oh, you’re kidding,” Marie said.

  “Like hell I’m kidding. I’ve got to locate this individual who can dye beer green without poisoning the whole station.”

  “That’s too goddamn ridiculous,” she said.

  Sitting on his bed, Holliwell could still hear them.

  “Some Kraut, maybe. They’ve gotta have some Kraut over at the Germania brewery. Maybe he can do it.”

  “He’ll think you’re crazy.”

  “Fuck him.”

  “Tom—in this town—they’ll dye it with old socks and deadly nightshade.”

  “We’ll find a Kraut,” Captain Zecca said. “We’ll make him drink the first barrel.”

  Marie was giggling as they went to bed.

  “Green Tecanecan beer for St. Patrick’s Day. That’s the living end. Will anybody mind if I stick with agua mineral?”

  Holliwell heard them laughing together until he went to sleep.

  Pablo woke to the goony birds. He had propped a chair against the doorknob; he was lying in a soiled mesh hammock in a bare evil-smelling room. Roaches in the size and quantity of delirium were scurrying across the slat floor, stripes of hard sunlight came in through the closed battered shutters. He struggled out of the hammock and took a Benzedrine at once. On the floor, he found an empty pack of the local cigarettes; he poured his remaining tablets into the packet and folded it away in his shirt pocket.

  His clothes and his body were sweaty and rank and it had been days since he had been able to brush his teeth properly. This was a particular discomfort to a young man of Pablo’s fastidiousness.

  Downstairs, Cecil was cooking refritos in a kitchen off the bar.

  “Don’t you never sleep, Cecil?”

  Without a word, Cecil came out of the kitchen and threw a plastic bag on the bar that contained Pablo’s passport and his turista card. Beside it he placed the blue duffel bag that Pablo had come south with.

  “Twenty,” Cecil said. “Damn cheap at de price.”

  Pablo paid him.

  “De bus station—you know where it is. Take de bus to Palmas—make sure. In Palmas go on down to de quays and you see de Cloud. Das de name of her—de Cloud. Goin’ to be your new home.”

  “See you, Cecil.”

  “Hope so, mon. Hope you be doin’ all right. Find out de use of you, all like dat.”

  “Shit,” Pablo said.

  Cecil watched him walk out with his gear and went back to the beans.

  The bus to Palmas ran past mile upon mile of banana plantation. One of them was enclosed by a chain link fence surmounted with barbed wire; at its gate was a Coca-Cola sign with its center board replaceable for the inclusion of the name of the establishment on whose behalf Coca-Cola was prepared to extend its welcoming logo. The sign read: “Coca-Cola—Bienvenidos a—LA COLONIA PENAL.”

  The bus stopped often and it was crowded. There were a few women with children but most of the passengers were young plantation workers wearing machetes hung in leather sheaths from their belts. Listening to them speak together in a soft-edged Spanish of which he could pick up scarcely a word, Pablo fell victim to his wonted suspicions. That they were mocking him, taking counsel in avian trills and hisses to plot his undoing, seemed as obvious to him as the cloudless sky and the green mountains. Pablo was scornful of their ill intentions; he was armed, as was his custom, with a Dacor diver’s knife strapped to his calf and the automatic pistol bolstered against his armpit.

  But the passengers in the bus aroused within Pablo another sensation and it was one on which he scarcely dared reflect. As his guarded glance swept the people pressed close around him, he felt that he could anticipate every smile and gesture that he saw. There was a secret self inside him that knew their rhythms and their stirrings, even knew their thoughts. In the hot cramped space he realized suddenly that he had some kinship of the blood with these dark stunted people whom he so despised—that they were, however distantly, his mother’s people a
nd in that way, his own. It did not make him feel in the least warm toward them.

  Palmas was a gas station at the end of a dirt street that led past mean wooden shacks to the ocean. Pablo climbed off the bus with his gear and walked the length of it. He paused at the dockside—there were a few shops and bodegas and the office of the captain of the port. Tied up at the two piers were two dozen local shrimp boats of seventy or eighty feet, their wheelhouses painted in bright tropical colors like the local buses. There was no craft in sight that looked as though it would be the Callahans’ powerboat. He put on his Macklin Chain Saw hat, took his sunglasses from the pocket of his shirt and looked from one quarter of the harbor to the other. Nothing but shrimpers. He walked out on the pier, set his bag down and leaned against a piling, cursing under his breath.

  From behind the tinted-glass windscreen of the Cloud, Mr. Callahan and Freddy Negus watched Pablo on the pier.

  “That’s our boy,” Callahan said.

  “Gawd,” Freddy Negus said.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Callahan demanded. Callahan was drinking a rum and soda and the sight of it in his hand at so early an hour made Negus uneasy. “He showed up, didn’t he? He’s just a deserter, that’s all.” He saw Negus glancing at the drink in his hand and put it down beside the Fathometer. “I mean, what do you want, for Christ’s sake? Billy Budd?”

  “You hire these monkeys and then I got to keep them in line. I’ll tell you, Jack, I’m getting plumb wore out with it. We could have taken on a local crew for this.”

  Callahan picked up his drink angrily.

  “I told you, Freddy, didn’t I, Freddy, that I did not want a native crew for this? I need people I can control and who need me. I need a guy with a little technical savvy who’s a long way from home and who can’t take to the hills if the deal goes queer. A deserter is perfect. That boy you’re looking at is gonna work out fine.”

  “Gimme a dope run any old time,” Negus said. “At least you know what you’re up against.”

  “Hell, Freddy,” Callahan said, “you been out in all the weather. An old pirate like you.” He stepped unsteadily over the hatchway and into the galley for another drink.

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” Negus said. “We’re all getting a little old for piracy.” He kept on watching Pablo, fretting down on the pier. “And when’s Deedee coming back? We want to clear tonight.”

  “She drove over to Pico to find a dentist,” Callahan said, measuring out his rum. “She’ll be back in plenty of time.”

  “Fuckin’ ’ell,” Freddy Negus said. He put his baseball cap on and went out on the little bridge beside the wheelhouse, squinting into the sun.

  “Hey, you!” he called down to Pablo. “Pablo! Come on up here.”

  Hearing himself hailed from one of the ratty shrimpers, Pablo picked up his bag and started along the pier. There was a white man in a baseball cap on the bridge of the largest of the boats; the man was waving Pablo aboard. It occurred to him that the Callahans’ yacht must be lying to offshore somewhere. He had suspected contrabanding but nothing so complex.

  “Tabor?” the man asked him when he stood abeam of the shrimper. A black man who had been painting bright yellow numerals on the vessel’s prow turned to look at him. Pablo nodded.

  “Come aboard, Tabor.”

  Pablo stepped over the rail. The man who had called him was tall and lean, tanned, with lazy faded blue eyes. He indicated a hatchway behind the wheelhouse and followed Pablo through it.

  “I’m looking for the Cloud,” Pablo explained.

  “You’re standing in her,” the tall man said.

  Mr. Callahan came forward from the galley, a glass in his hand.

  “Well done,” Mr. Callahan said. “Right on time.”

  Pablo turned from the tall man’s steady gaze.

  “Christ, Mr. Callahan. You told me you had a powerboat. You didn’t say nothing about shrimping.” He felt disappointed and betrayed. It was not at all what he had looked forward to.

  “You don’t see any sails, do you?” the tall man asked him. “This is a powerboat.”

  Pablo turned to face him. “No question about that.”

  “What’s happening right now,” Mr. Callahan said, “is that you’re being engaged as a crewman on the shrimp boat Cloud. We’re registered out of Marathon, Florida. We’re licensed to fish in the territorial waters of the United States, of Mexico, Belize, Compostela and Tecan. Any other questions will have to wait. O.K.?”

  “What am I working for?” Pablo asked bitterly. “A percentage of the catch?”

  “That sounds like a question to me,” the tall man said.

  Pablo looked at the man again. From his accent, Pablo made him out to be a white Bahamian. Hope Town, Spanish Wells, some sorry-ass town like that. A mean redneck.

  “Let me introduce Mr. Negus,” Callahan said. “My number one.”

  Pablo nodded. Mr. Negus shifted the plug of tobacco in his cheek.

  “And let me hasten to assure you that you’re not being taken advantage of. If we were looking for cheap labor there’s plenty to come by down here. You’ll do fine but you’ve got to go by our rules.”

  Negus was looking out at the pier through the hatchway.

  “Where you from, son?” he asked Pablo.

  “Texas.”

  “Lay out your gear for us.” He indicated Pablo’s bag and the deck of the passageway in which they stood. For the first time, Pablo noticed that the interior bulkheads were paneled in dark wood, the rubber-matted deck was spotless. He opened his bag and spread his store of worn work clothes, toiletry bags and slickers across it. Negus crouched to rifle through it and immediately picked up the plastic bag that held Pablo’s passport and tourist card. He handed it over to Callahan.

  “We ask everyone to do that for us,” Mr. Callahan explained. “These days you can’t be too careful.” He looked the passport and tourist card over and returned them. Negus took Pablo’s wallet from him. There was nothing in the wallet except what was left of his money. Negus gave him back his wallet and motioned him up against the bulkhead. Pablo leaned forward on his palms.

  “Sorry,” Mr. Callahan said.

  In a few moments Negus had the automatic and the diver’s knife out on deck. Grimly, he turned out Pablo’s trouser pockets one by one.

  “What’s all that for?” Mr. Callahan asked mildly.

  “Just for protection.”

  “Now how in hell,” Mr. Negus wanted to know, “did he get down here trussed up with all that weaponry? Don’t you think it’s a bit odd,” he asked Callahan, “that they didn’t get it off him?”

  “Nobody ever searched me,” Pablo told them. “I come down to Vizcaya on the bus.”

  “The bus? All the way from the States?”

  “Yes, sir. All the way from Matamoros, Mexico.”

  Negus sighed in exasperation.

  “I mentioned that it would be our rules,” Callahan said to Pablo. “If any of that troubles you”—he motioned back toward the shacks of Palmas—“we’ll pay your way back to Vizc and wish you luck. Otherwise—our rules and no questions. That way you’ll make out very well indeed.”

  “O.K.,” Pablo said. “I guess I’m with you.”

  “You can’t keep that pistol while you’re aboard,” Callahan told him. “You might have an accident. The knife, O.K.”

  Negus gave him his Dacor knife. “Wear it on your belt where a man can see it, sailor.”

  “Welcome aboard,” Mr. Callahan said, and took his drink aft.

  He walked through the galley and into a dark compartment where the forward ice hold should have been, closing a door behind him. Pablo looked from the well-stocked bar in the galley to the tinted glass fronting the pilothouse. At the forward end of the passageway in which he stood was a Modar UHF transmitter and a CB. There were A and C Lorans and what appeared to be a seventy-eight-mile-range radar scanner. The wheelhouse cockpit had a brand-new recording Fathometer. From the dock the Cloud had appeared to
be a moderately clean eighty-five-foot shrimper. Inside she had the appointments and equipment of a cutter.

  “I take it,” Mr. Negus said, as he watched Pablo look over the electronic gear, “that you’re familiar with this stuff?”

  “More or less,” Pablo said.

  “Everything the latest boats carry, we carry,” Negus told him. “Your big Texas boats have all this stuff.”

  Pablo did not contradict him. They went out on deck and Mr. Negus led him aft. Between the mainmast and the upright outriggers, some kind of extra compartment had been constructed. Its uppermost section rose above the level of the main deck and was boarded over with three-by-five hatch covers. This, Pablo thought, would be the compartment into which Mr. Callahan had taken his drink.

  Pablo decided that he would venture an observation.

  “Never seen that space on a Texas boat,” he said to Mr. Negus.

  “You’ll see it on plenty of boats down here,” Negus told him casually. “When a man takes his family out, he needs more space. The Cloud’s a home, you understand. It’s a lifestyle.”

  “Oh,” Pablo said.

  There were two ice holds, empty and with their hatch covers off. Aft of them a hatchway led down to an airless lazaret where there was a single bunk and some bales of chafing gear.

  “You can sack out for a while if you like,” Negus told Pablo. “But we’re going out before sunset and I want everybody standing to.”

  “Roger,” Pablo said.

  “Tino can fix you up with boots and whatnot when he’s finished painting. He’ll show you around. Once we’re under way you come on up to the pilothouse and we’ll tell you what you need to know.”

  “Yes sir,” Pablo said out of instinct.

  Down in the lazaret, he took off his cowboy boots and lay down on the bunk. The sheet smelled freshly laundered, the pervasive odor of diesel fuel made Pablo feel somewhat at home. A powerboat.

  He lay low for a while, listening to the slap of water against the boards, the sounds of the quiet harbor. At some time during his rest, the woman came aboard; he heard them call out to her from the pilothouse and then her voice with theirs in a muffled echo through the holds that lay between his quarters and the dark compartment.