A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  Late in the afternoon he looked up to see the black man who had been painting the bow framed in the hatchway above him. The man dropped a pair of white rubber boots down the hatch: each boot had a rubber glove stuffed inside it.

  “Vámonos, muchacho.”

  “Sí,” Pablo said. “Momento.”

  He rolled out of his rack and put on a pair of clean woolen socks, pulled the boots over them and jammed the gloves in his pockets. The black man stepped back to let Pablo climb topside and extended his hand.

  “Soy Tino.”

  Tino’s hand was like a shard of coral. Pablo wondered what Tino made of his own soft hand.

  “Pablo.”

  “Buenas. Usted es norteamericano, no?”

  “Texas.”

  “Dat’s what I figger,” Tino said.

  “Sure is a fine boat.”

  “Surely is. Dushi, we say on my island.”

  “Which is that?”

  “Sint Joost,” Tino told him. “You see it couple days.”

  “Be my pleasure to be the fuck off this coast, I’ll tell you.”

  Mr. Callahan, looking fresh and sober, was standing on the dockside in conversation with a Compostelan in a smart naval uniform. They were laughing together. Pablo saw them exchange sealed manila envelopes and shake hands heartily. Negus, who had been leaning on the rail beside the pilothouse, sauntered back to Pablo and Tino.

  “Reckon we’re just about set,” he told them.

  “You don’t want the net rigged?” Tino asked. “Don’t want the outriggers over?”

  “Fuck it. We’re not fishing tonight and we don’t have to put on a show. Weather’s nice, so we won’t need the stabilizers. Just get up steam and we’ll ease along out.”

  Tino took off for the engine room.

  “Like the boat?” Negus asked Pablo.

  “Dushi,” Pablo said.

  Negus did not smile.

  Holliwell traveled down the Río de la Fe from a town called Tapa. The Zeccas together drove him there from San Ysidro. If Captain Zecca had received a line on Holliwell in his workday morning’s mail, he gave no indication of it. At the same time, it seemed to Holliwell that they talked less on the drive than they had before and that their talk was more bland. On the dockside, they shook hands with him gaily and assured him that it had all been fun. Holliwell, quite sober now, felt inexplicably forlorn watching their Honda disappear down Tapa’s single muddy street, headed for the potholed, switchbacking mountain road back to the capital.

  In the guidebook Holliwell carried, the local boat was recommended because it afforded a leisurely journey in the course of which one might inspect the magnificent gorges of the river valley, see the Indian towns on the bank and the landings where the hacienderos waited for their mail and their mail-order luxuries from the capital. Unlike Compostela, Tecan had no highway between her coasts; east-west surface transportation was by boat along the river. It was a route much used by Forty-niners during the California gold rush to avoid the journey around Cape Horn; an arduous and malarial journey in those days that killed a quarter of the men who undertook it. Now the traffic moved by diesel-powered launches manufactured in Bremen, and the one moored at Tapa’s dock looked new and fairly well maintained. Holliwell, for the Zeccas’ convenience and his own impulse to flight, had booked passage on the night rápido and engaged a cabin.

  An Indian boy carried his bag aboard for a quarter; he found his cabin small but very clean, with a brass-knobbed wooden door opening on an interior passageway and a second, louvered door opening to the deck. The sheets on the bunk were starched and spotless; there was a ceiling fan, mosquito netting, even a glass and a jug of agua purificada. Holliwell took a bottle of the local rum from his suitcase and mixed himself a rum and water. When he finished it, he drew back the mosquito netting, lay down on his bunk and went to sleep.

  Rápido or not, the boat stopped many times during the night; so often that Holliwell within the first two hours of darkness was moved to rise and take his bottle out on deck. The night was clear. The mountain ranges rising close over the river on both sides cut off the moon from view but its deflected light lit the rocky peaks and cliffs, the treetops and the slow-seeming tawny river. Night birds and howler monkeys sounded from the banks, their calls echoing in the gorges. Holliwell sat down on a gear locker and looked up at the stars. According to his guidebook, there were jaguar in the valley.

  The finca landings were lit by the headlights of parked jeeps. The forks of white light would flash of a sudden from the bank ahead, lighting the dun river in their glow, and the boat would slow and ease toward the bank until the searching spotlight over the wheelhouse picked up the vehicle and the waiting men together with a thousand spinning moths, their bright wings flashing a thousand colors in the glare. Into this well of light, the Indian deckhands would toss the starboard hawsers and the men on the bank secure them to rusty weighted barrels while the vessel’s fantail swung completely around in the invisible current and her engines labored full astern. When the boat was steady against the bank, the engines still rattling astern, the deckhands would push a wooden gangway from cargo deck to bank and, running as though under fire, would commence to carry ashore a few dozen sacks and crates. These the finca’s peons would carefully load in the waiting jeeps. Within a few minutes it would be over, the hawsers cast back aboard and the boat under way again. Astern of them, the landing would quickly dissolve into jungle darkness, like a theatrical tableau suggesting dreams or fairy spectacle.

  In the Indian villages along the Río de la Fe there were no jeeps nor were there electric lights of any kind. The people on the bank would signal the boat with torches and the offloading would be lit by the pilothouse searchlight and a fire burning in an open pit beside the bank, with the hawsers secured around stumps. Handshakes and greetings would be exchanged on the run; the language of discourse was not Spanish. Boys would leap aboard from the outer darkness, prowling the decks like scavengers, accosting the few cabin passengers in sight with things to sell—feathered rattles, stuffed lizards, a live snake in a jar. Holliwell, ever conscious of thieves, would watch his unlocked cabin door, although there was little behind it worth stealing. At the last possible moment, the boys would leap ashore in the firelight and the boat continue its slow passage down the river.

  Although it was difficult to see in the darkness, the smoke and the confusion of lights, the Indian villages seemed to Holliwell as poor and mean as the slums of the capital. There was a distinct sour smell to them, not quite fecal, but like rust and congealed blood. And in spite of their size and remoteness, they seemed to him like some North American cities he knew in that what they brought to the landscape that surrounded them was not a sense of settlement and advance but of concentrated misery, despair.

  Between stops, he walked the upper deck—the few other cabin passengers were not in sight. For a while he leaned with his elbows against the rail and watched the men in the pilothouse. The helmsman was an Indian like the rest of the crew, wearing a wide Panama bent out of shape with the brim turned up and down to resemble an Australian bush hat, staring out into the darkness with a faint smile. Behind him the captain bent over a chart in the light of a desk lamp shielded from reflection by a tar-paper shade. The captain was a heavy red-faced man of some African blood with fair wavy hair, wearing a starched white shirt and narrow black necktie. Neither man appeared to speak to the other.

  In time the mosquitoes drove Holliwell back to his cabin, and he lay down on his bunk buried behind the netting, smoking. He was thinking about his wife and his daughters, and how, though he had stayed—would never leave now—he had lost them. He had thought to do everything right—he believed in love. There had been something, perhaps, that it was not possible for someone like himself to know and his not knowing it had lost them. The hard way, little by little, without an outcry of any sort.

  Thoughts of loss could be cauterized with drink. The alcohol he had been consuming since the start of his jou
rney was a regular part of his metabolism now; he was half drunk, almost at peace. He nearly slept.

  When he went out on deck again it was getting light, the sun rising over flat jungle and grassland where lean cattle grazed. The mountains were behind them to westward, rising abruptly in a massive escarpment that burst into bright green with dawn. Within minutes they were coming into a town of sorts—a city. Unpainted wooden houses with slant roofs stood on stilts above a black beach where gulls picked at piles of refuse and open clay gutters emptied a viscous stream into the brown river. Puerto Alvarado.

  As the launch pulled for the right bank, Holliwell could see ahead a line of tin-roofed warehouses where two freighters stood at moor, and beyond that the river widening into a delta bordered with mangrove swamp, and beyond all, almost motionless in the morning light, the expanse of pale green ocean. While they tied up, Holliwell worked on his expense records, then gathered up his luggage.

  The hustlers on the deck, offering to carry his bag or shine his shoes, spoke Caribbean English and required eye contact of him.

  Holliwell’s shoes were already polished to a high gleam. He attempted to oblige with the eye contact but his eye was uneasy; he was scanning the dock for menace. The most menacing presence he could detect was that of the Guardia Nacional—four troopers and an officer, who exuded a floral aroma and regarded him in an unfriendly fashion. A few yards behind the Guardia pack—at the edge of the dockside street—a tall black man in a white shirt stood beside a Willys jeep of World War II provenance.

  “Paradise?” the man asked Holliwell.

  “Lovely,” Holliwell told him.

  The man took Holliwell’s bag from him with a sure hand and placed it in the back of the jeep.

  “Wait,” Holliwell said to him, “there must be some misunderstanding here.”

  The black man frowned at him.

  “Mon, I just as’ you if you goin’ to Paradise. You tol’ me O.K.”

  “No,” Holliwell said. “I’m not going to Paradise.”

  The man turned toward the boat in no particular hurry. Holliwell retrieved his bag lest he incur some manner of fee. At the dock, the last Tecanecan passengers were disembarking under the Guardian’s glare. There appeared to be no other gringos aboard.

  “Where you want to go then?” the tall man asked Holliwell.

  Holliwell looked at him and at his jeep.

  “Well—to the Islas Airlines office. And the airport.”

  “Jolly good,” the man said, taking the bag back. “I take you to the office.”

  He climbed in beside the driver and they started up. The riverfront streets had little Spanish about them. The peeling wooden houses, the tin roofs, might have been in Kingston or Belize.

  “How about the airport?” Holliwell asked.

  “You not goin’ there today, mistuh. Nor tomorrow neither.”

  “How come?” Holliwell asked, feeling a bit alarmed.

  “Because Islas got only one plane and she’s over in Respina and she not about to fly. They got to get some parts from up San Ysidro. Carry dem over on de boat when they feel like.”

  “Christ,” Holliwell said. The streets and the people in them were more Latin American as they approached the center of the city. Indians with marriage bands around their sombreros carried slaughtered turkeys and heaps of faggots over the cobblestones.

  “If it was my airline,” the driver said, “I run it differently. But it’s not.”

  “I guess I’ll check in at the office anyway.”

  “Humm,” the driver said. “Want me to wait?”

  Holliwell thought about it.

  “No, don’t wait. I might be a while and maybe I’ll get lucky.”

  “Thas a good way to think,” the Paradise driver said. “Thas the way I think.”

  In front of the Islas office, he paid the price demanded and took his bag.

  The office was in a part of the city off the central plaza, across from the government technical school. It was decidedly Spanish America here. The high curbs were set with ancient paving stones; the cathedral he saw through the jacaranda trees of the plaza was at least as old as the late eighteenth century. There was an old stone building beside it of about the same date, with Guardia sentries at its doorway. The judicia.

  Behind a desk in the airline office, an Oriental woman sat listlessly on a high stool, projecting inexpressible melancholy—Masha Kuligina with another life to mourn, upon whom karma had bestowed exotic rebirth and strange displacement. Holliwell realized at once that there would be no good news from her. In the most decorous and formal Spanish at his command, he inquired the state of transportation to the islands. She answered him, as he knew she would, in English.

  Things were more or less as the driver from Paradise had described them. The plane was in Respina. Another plane had been dispatched to the capital to obtain needed parts but had not yet returned. There was no question of alternative arrangements because the government regulations about the franchise were very rigorous. The islands and the coast were a military district and could not be overflown by any aircraft other than those authorized. There was indeed a boat that ran to the islands but it ran only on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the same days for which the plane was scheduled. A boat had left that morning. The journey was over ten hours because it stopped at several places along the coast as well as at each of the five offshore islands. One waited on the quay in the morning for a place, it was always very crowded.

  “You speak English very well,” Holliwell told the woman. “Do you speak French also?”

  The woman looked at him sadly. In his irritation, the observation and question had been a bit patronizing, an impertinence to a Vietnamese woman of culture such as this lady unquestionably was. She allowed him to realize this and smiled without a trace of good humor.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Of course, Holliwell thought. Bien sûr. Our worlds have touched before and we both know it, don’t we?

  In any case the small opportunity he had offered himself for second thoughts on the spot seemed just about removed. Now he would be obliging Ocampo. He was there; he was being seen, as Oscar had put it, to be there. He glanced about the broken streets and wondered by whom.

  Taking his bag once around the square, he paused on a guano-spotted bench to have his shoes shined yet again by a gaunt nine-year-old. It was a grim little plaza; the people lounging in it were as poor as any that Holliwell had ever seen. The interior of the cathedral, though it contained some good carved santos, was mainly a Babylonian horror with mindless rococo gilding and a curious encoffined Christ. When he had finished inspecting it, he carried his bag down a street of notaries and public letter writers to the clapboard riverfront.

  The jeep was parked in the declining shade of the customs shed, its driver stretched out in the front seat with the brim of a Ralston Purina cap pulled down over his face. The ships at the adjoining wharf were loading sacks of coffee beans and the longshoremen working them wore sweatbands across their foreheads and machetes at their belts which gave them a piratical look.

  The sleeping Paradise driver awoke to the whistle of a diesel launch from the interior which was pulling for its berth. He raised his hat and looked at Holliwell sympathetically.

  “We goin’ to Paradise, you and me?”

  “I guess we are. How much to go there?”

  “Ten dollars,” the man said. “And I didn’t say pesos, did I? I said ten dollars U.S.”

  Holliwell shrugged.

  “The tourists always sayin’ I told ’em ten pesos,” the driver said as they turned to watch the arriving boat. “Never told anyone dat. Ten dollars. One with Mr. Hamilton on it.”

  “I got you,” Holliwell said.

  There were three gringos on the steamer, all going to the Paradise. A short rounded man with a deep tan, a gray goatee lengthening his thick jowls. His wife or girlfriend, gray-blond with a leathery brown face like a boot about to crack. A thin, florid man wearing a Yucatecan
Panama.

  The driver took their bags and everyone exchanged small nods. Holliwell sat in the back, beside the slight man with the Panama.

  “Ralph Heath,” the man beside Holliwell said, as they drove over a straight dirt road through the mangrove swamp. The man held his Panama in his lap.

  “Frank Holliwell.”

  “Been here before?” He was an Englishman of about fifty, with a mean-featured hard little face. A drinker—the pouches under his eyes were the only slack part of him and distended veins ran down the sides of his nose.

  “Never.”

  “Alvarado’s a hole. But it’s a nice coast if that’s what you’re after. Coming place.”

  “Are you down here often?” Holliwell asked him.

  “Once or twice a year. Sometimes on business, sometimes just for the beer.”

  “From England?”

  “I live in Miami now,” Heath told him. “I have ever since our fruit company merged with yours. You’re American?”

  “Yes,” Holliwell said. And after a moment, he shouted to Heath over the engine noise. “How do you like Miami?”

  “Never looked back,” Heath said.

  They drove under the mangrove wilderness opened to sandy beaches and palm groves; the road was only a packed sand track near the water’s edge. The cheerlessness of Puerto Alvarado fell away in the sunlight.

  The drive took hours. They sped past clapboard fishing villages in the palm groves where nets were drying on poles along the beach and brightly painted boats with cabined wheelhouses were hauled up, buccaneer fashion, on raked plank dry docks beyond the tide line. Almost every house had in front of it a small garden of plantains and an overturned double-ended skiff. Farther from the ocean were the miles of fruit company houses, numbered and painted yellow. A good half of them appeared to be unoccupied.

  On the beach road they were constantly passing women carrying baskets or pots on their heads. From time to time, Holliwell would see a basket that looked to have the ghost of an African design or a pot inlaid with a highland Indian pattern. But for the most part they were factory-made, bought in Alvarado or from a passing Syrian. Between the villages or on the edge of them were some compounds of vaguely ecclesiastical design that looked as though they might be missions. Holliwell said something to Heath about its being a fine place to be a missionary in.