A Flag for Sunrise (20 page)

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 implore 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.

The trouble with the library, Veronica said, was partly old Mrs. Rand’s ignorance and partly the blessed Mormons and their vigilant censorship. As if the television wasn’t bad enough, they used their influence in Boise to force the really interesting network shows off the local stations. Justin could be sure they weren’t waning in power in that part of the country; still they weren’t as bad arid as bigoted as they’d been in the old days, in their parents’ days. And even if everything that people said about Catholics were really true about the Mormons, it shouldn’t be forgotten that they had their good points, that there were plenty of fine decent people among them, no one should ever call them hypocrites, though some did.

Like most of the Gentiles in Idaho, Veronica was forever damning the Mormons with one breath and commending their rectitude with the next. Justin herself had not been so even-handed. It had been her habit at home to refer to the tablets presented to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni as the Moronic tablets; in her junior year of high school a girl named Ada Bengstrom had had the wit to punch her in the mouth for saying it once too often. Ada Bengstrom, Justin reflected, was Veronica’s nearest neighbor now. Her name was Ada Parsons and she belonged to the Purple Sage Cowbelles.

When the stock were in summer pasture, if they took on help, Veronica hoped she might get Morton to take two weeks off and they might go to New York, which she loved—if not there then to Palm Springs, where they had spent their honeymoon, or even to Maui, where she had always dreamed of going.

It had been two years since Justin had seen her sister—during the last trip home. And Veronica had looked lovely with her tanned country face and her horsewoman’s slow grace and an expression of such despair in her light eyes that Justin could hardly speak to her without stammering. It was self-pity really, Justin thought, that made Veronica’s letters so oppress her. The forlornness she read into her sister’s life was as much her own.

Of the two of them perhaps Veronica was the plainer, the less ambitious, certainly the less arrogant. But it was she who had more knowledge of the world, at least in its North American manifestation.

She had worked in New York, as a publisher’s reader after college; she had spent three years working for a community newspaper in Los Angeles. But she was back home now—a rancher’s wife with too many kids, married to a good-natured incipiently alcoholic Finn whom she pestered toward Catholicism. Arrow’s own culture vulture who would drive most of the night to see a dance company, drive as far as Salt Lake for the national company of an O’Neill or a Chekhov play or a touring opera.

She could, Justin thought, indulging her own fantasies, have got herself a newspaperman. Or even a doctor, some kind of professional capable of conversation beyond cursing out the posy pickers in the Sierra Club or the price of feed.

Little enough she herself knew about that kind of thing. On one of the visits home, when Justin had been lecturing—handing out threadbare pastoral advice and textbook family counseling—Veronica had turned on her. “Christ, I wish I knew as little about it as you do,” Veronica had said.

Justin put the letter aside.

And what did either of them know and where had it gotten them? The promising, brainy Feeney sisters—May now called Justin playing Sister of Mercy in the crocodile isles and Veronica playing Carol Kennicott in Arrow, pop. 380.

Before her, the ocean rolled lightly against white sand, the plantain leaves hung still. The inaction after such elation, the delay, most of all Godoy’s intrusion into and subsequent disappearance from her life weighed her down. How stupid it was, she thought, how adolescent and egotistical to invest such promise in a single man when the suffering of Tecan had been before her so long and she had done nothing but simmer in indignation and go by the book: But she was lonely too, on one level it was as simple as that, she needed a friend, a guide. The blank soulless world she had confronted at twenty lay again before her like the limitless unmoving sea; she would have to reconcile herself to it again, as she had then, to find in it meaning and self-transcendence, to make the leap of faith. Again.

There had been child murders along the coast, cruel and gruesome. Local children called the undetected killer The Bad Monkey and that was what the cries of “
mono malo
” were about. Someone was killing children. She was alone, the sun rose and set over the
ocean. She picked up Egan’s mail and went inside to his quarters.

You can go along for years, she thought, walking dreamily across the kitchen toward Father Egan’s door, and you think you’re there—then sooner or later you realize you’ve got to make the jump. And this one—toward man or history, the future—call it whatever—was harder for her. She accepted the revolution, she had for years—but she was critical, arrogant, better at the forms of humility than the substance, not so good a lover of her neighbor as herself. So there it was at her feet, another death-defying leap.

For a moment, at Egan’s door, she thought about death and the defying of it. What was death, she wondered, and what did it mean to her? A proper essay for the novitiate, a nunnish reflection.

She rapped lightly on Father Egan’s door several times, then slowly pushed it open. Egan was sprawled across his cot, still dressed in his khaki work shirt and tan trousers, his Detroit Tigers cap on his head, the laced work boots on his feet.

Justin went toward his unconscious figure, slowed by dread. He’s dead, she thought. He’s really died. “Father?”

She stood over him looking for signs of life and after a moment she understood that he was breathing; she could see the slow heaving of his shoulders and hear the irregular wheeze of his exhalations against the mattress. His hands as well as his boots were soiled with black earth.

“Father Egan? Charles?”

She put her hand against his damp shoulder and shook him. Very slowly he raised his head from the mattress, even more slowly turned and looked at her with utter incomprehension.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

“Might I,” he asked, “have a paper?”

“A paper?” Justin asked in astonishment.

Egan had begun a cetaceous wallowing to right himself. Justin noticed that his pills were at his bedside and that the Flor de Cana bottle stood on his desk.

“You can’t mix those,” Justin pointed out to him. “You’ll kill yourself.”

Father Egan managed to place his feet on the floor and sat with his arms folded, head down.

“I can’t do anything about a paper,” Justin told him. “But I can
point out that we have a shower. And that there’s a change of clothes available.”

“Shut up,” Egan said sourly. “Just … shut up, Justin. There’s a good girl.”

She walked to the far end of the room and considered him.

“Did you mix those pills and rum?”

“No,” Egan said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You were out last night. Where on earth were you?”

The puzzled look on his face frightened her.

“Oh, yes,” he said presently. “Yes.”

“Well,” Justin said, “may one ask where?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Egan said.

Grim suspicions assailed her. Just how crazy is he? she wondered to herself.

“I might,” she said. “Try me.”

“I was out at the ruins.”

Justin watched him, holding her position at the farthest extremity of his cluttered room. “But why?”

“I can’t tell you that. Under the seal.”

Justin went out and put some coffee on for him. He preferred the Irish tea that sometimes came from home but that morning there was none available. When the coffee was ready she carried the pot and one cup on a tray to his quarters. Egan was still sitting on the cot, staring at the scrubbed wooden floor. She poured him out a cup of the thick native coffee.

“There’s fruit in the kitchen,” she said. “And there’s mail.” In her fright at his condition she had set the letters down on his desk. She handed them over. “We’ve got Fellowship if you want to look at it. There’s a letter for you. And we’ve got a flash from the provincial.”