A Flag for Sunrise (10 page)

The older of the two girls with McPhail was named Nancy.

“Haayy, Pablo,” she called as he walked toward them, “how’re you keepin’, keed?”

“Hey,” Pablo said.

“You want a drink, honey? Want a whiskey? A cocktail?”

“Just a beer be nice. Why don’t everybody have a beer?”

“
Gracias, amigo
,” Nancy said, and went to the cooler. Tabor pulled up a chair and sat down beside McPhail.

“What say, McPhail?”

McPhail had been in the hotel most of the night. He was tired and drunk, a huge balding man with a brown, lined face—sloped-shouldered, six-six or -seven. He glanced at Tabor with distaste. The girl with him watched them both with a spacy smile.

“Real good,” Tabor said. “Hey, you know,” he told them after a minute, “it’s such a nice morning I might just go after some birds. I got my Remington in the car. I might just go up back of the airport and get me a turk.”

The girl at the table looked down at Tabor’s feet.

“Gonna stomp through that old swamp with them pretty stitch boots on? Just get ’em all muddied up.”

“I don’t mind,” Tabor said.

Nancy brought the beers to the table and set them out.

“Don’t know about turkeys,” she said. “But I bet you could get you a alligator back there.”

“If I meet one I’ll rassle with him. Hey, you think I could rassle a alligator, McPhail?”

McPhail had been studying the bare wall beside him.

“How the hell would I know?” he said.

“You could bring me back a pocketbook,” Nancy said quickly. “But that’s against the law now, ain’t it? Alligator pocketbooks, they’re against the law now.”

“Ain’t no more against the law than what’s doin’ in here,” the younger girl said.

After a moment, McPhail stood up heavily and walked into the John. Tabor picked up his beer and drank half of it at a draw.

“Dry,” he said.

The girls laughed as though he had told a joke.

“Hey, Pablo,” Nancy said, “you goin’ hunting right away or you gonna hang around a while?”

“I don’t know,” Tabor said. He picked up his beer and walked into the men’s room after McPhail.

In the men’s room, he found McPhail flat-footed before the urinal, pissing contentedly. Holding the bottle in his hand, Tabor took up a position directly behind him and leaned against the wall.

“So I’m on report, huh, Chief?”

McPhail had turned his head as far to the side as he could, trying to see Tabor behind him.

“I did put you on report,” he said as though he had just remembered it. “Chit’s still on my desk. Straighten it out Monday.”

He left off pissing and hastened to zipper his fly.

“Sure,” Tabor said. “I’d really like to straighten it out, know what I mean, Chief?”

McPhail left quickly. When Tabor went back out, he found the chief radioman sitting on a barstool near the movable bar combing his thin black hair. Tabor watched him with what appeared to be good humor.

“What are you combing that with, McPhail? You combing it with piss? You didn’t wash your hands in there.”

The younger girl stood up at her place and walked straight out of the lounge into the lobby. McPhail struggled off his stool. His legs were trembling.

“I had just enough of you, you crazy son of a bitch,” McPhail said, advancing on Tabor. “You damn psycho.”

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 much 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.