A Flag for Sunrise (24 page)

“Sergeant,” Tom Zecca said, “I’m sure you know how women are. My wife here is disturbed by the misfortune of that cow. Can something be done?” His Spanish was effortless, unashamedly American in accent.

“
Capitano
,” said the Guardia, smiling with Zecca, “
claro que sí.
”

He walked over toward the ditch, drawing the automatic pistol from the web belt at his waist as he went. Bracing his legs, he fired the weapon three times, a few inches above the hairline of the tallest boy. The gringo youths in line recoiled at the firing. The boys dropped their stones and scattered crouching, diving for cover. Some cringed along the shoulder of the highway, sad-eyed waifs awaiting the sensitive photographer, their hands clasped over their heads.

The cow was so startled at the burst of fire that it freed itself from the wire in an awkward lunge, gained its feet and succeeded in hauling
itself out of the ditch. Liberated, it trotted up to the Pan-American Highway, eluded a charge by the cursing Compostelan customs cops with a bovine end run and took off down the center line, headed for the capital.

Zecca waved his thanks.

“
Que le vaya bien, capitano
,” the sergeant called, and returned to the line of quaking travelers. The Honda and its passengers drove past their wistful glances.

“It’s lousy about these kids,” Zecca said. “But I can’t interfere in that.”

“They can’t all be carrying dope,” Holliwell said.

“No, he just got one or two. He’ll let the rest out when he’s had his fun.”

“They really are pigs, the Guardia,” Marie said. “Actual pigs.”

“What happens to the ones with the dope?” Bob Cole asked.

“Best not to think about it,” Zecca said. “It was very dumb of them to buy it here. They were probably turned by the guy who sold it.”

“I didn’t know you were a captain,” Holliwell said after a while.

“That’s because I didn’t tell you. But I am. U.S. Army. I’m with the military mission in San Ysidro.”

Bob Cole stared at him.

“Don’t you feel a little …” Cole let the question die.

“A little what, Mr. Cole? I feel just fine.”

“O.K.,” Cole said. He turned to Holliwell. “Can you imagine what that feels like—especially for a college kid? Standing there, taking that abuse, waiting for those bastards to go through your stuff?”

“I know what it feels like,” Holliwell said. “I dream about it.”

“That was no dream back there.”

“No,” Zecca said, “that was an average day at the gates of Tecan.”

As they drove south, the wind carried dust clouds that sometimes forced them to close the car windows. With every kilometer the land seemed more brown and infertile, the cattle fewer, the corn scantier and more stunted. A squat brown volcano came into view in the southwest; the wind whipped its faint smoke trails into the lowering sky.

“I’ll tell you a Guardia story,” Tom Zecca said. “Our Caudillo in the capital lives in a house with a hundred and fifty rooms. The grounds take up about twenty-five city blocks square and there’s a wall of cactus against the fence. The whole complex is patrolled by German shepherds, real ones—from Germany. When the old man bought them he was told that they had to have steak every night to be happy and alert—so the palace is serving up steak dinners for over a hundred of these huge mutts. The dogs probably eat more meat than the population of Tecan.

“One morning, El Caudillo arrives at his desk to find eight guys from the palace Guardia detachment on their knees in front of it. The palace commandant is his little brother Arturo and Arturo is wailing on these guys, yelling and carrying on and beating on them with the butt of his sidearm. It turns out they’ve been stealing the dogs’ steak, sneaking it home to their families. Arturo’s beside himself, making points with big brother. A breach of the President’s trust. Treason to the nation. A disgrace to the most honored branch of the service. And so on. One of the Guardia is already half dead from Arturo’s beating on him.

“Now this is a thorny problem. These characters know all the security arrangements for the presidential palace. They know where all the bodies are buried—we’re in Tecan now, so I’m speaking literally. You can’t fire these men, you’ve got to shoot them or forget about it.

“Amid the weeping and the dull thuds, El Hombre considers the scene and ponders deeply. Finally he tells Arturo to knock off and let them go. From now on he says, all the Guardia and their families get steak every night just like the dogs. AID will pay for it somehow. The Guardia crawl over to El Hombre, they cry on his cuffs, they lick his boots. He’s got their loyalty for life. They’ll all walk over their grandmothers for him.

“All except the dude little brother’s been beating on too much. He’s too punchy to be properly grateful, so they shoot him.”

Marie uttered a soft vibrating wail, indicating fear and loathing.

“Life in Tecan,” she said.

“But observe the craft,” Tom said. “Observe the crude but sound statesmanship. The bastard hasn’t been in power all this time for nothing.”

“Have you been inside that palace?” Holliwell asked Tom.

“
Claro.
Many times. Even partied there.”

“The parties,” Marie said, “are ghastly. It’s like a Dracula movie but without the class.”

“The last party I went to,” Tom said, “was after I’d been out to the islands, so I’d been peeling. I mean my skin was peeling from sunburn. Up to me comes Arturo—drunk out of his gourd, as is customary. He grabs a fistful of skin off my nose and calls me a gringo.”

“You didn’t tell me about that,” Marie said. “What did you do?”

“What did I do? I smiled and saluted. Is Arturo a sadistic little creep? Should I have cold-cocked him and rubbed him into the carpet?
Claro.
But I represent the flag,
comprende
? In my small way, I represent Policy. I had my dress whites on and two years in grade.”

“He’ll get his,” Marie said.

“Not if we can help it, my dear. If we can help it, he’ll be the next President.”

“There must be someone better than that,” Holliwell said. “Someone acceptable.”

“Well, Arturo’s a stopgap. While Policy decides what to do next. Mind you, Fat Frank really likes the guy. He likes the whole family. He thinks they’re American-type people.”

“That’s a quote,” Marie said. “ ‘American-type people.’ Because they speak English to him.”

“Fat Frank?” Holliwell asked.

“Ambassador Bridges. Some people call him that.”

“But not us,” Tom said.

Bob Cole was staring out at the hills to their left. The desert ended where they rose toward the Sierra and the further hills showed dark green.

“That’s coffee up there,” he said after a while. Holliwell thought that Zecca was glad to hear him speak. Cole’s silence had been making him uneasy.

“That’s right,” Tom told him. “Good grade and low price, they tell me. But what do I know?”

“Then there’s probably an insurgency in progress up there,” Cole said. “Given the situation.”

“Yeah?” Tom Zecca asked him coolly. “Why do you say that?”

“The way I understand it,” Cole said, “wherever you’ve got coffee in this country, you’ve got an insurgency. They go together.”

“There’s a degree of truth in that,” Tom said.

“Is there one going on up there?”

“What do you hear?” Zecca asked him.

“I hear there is. That it’s centered around Extremadura. Among the Indians there.”

“Who says that?”

Cole looked on Captain Zecca with a sagging smile, his mossy yellow teeth briefly displayed.

“There was a piece in the international edition of the Miami
Herald
last week. It was off the AP wire—I think the dateline was San José. You must have seen it.”

“I saw it,” Zecca said. “Might be something to it.”

“Well,” Cole said, turning his gaze back toward the hills, “I’m thinking of going up there.”

“I wouldn’t,” Zecca said.

“You oughtn’t to,” Marie told Cole. “I’ve been around there. If I were you I wouldn’t go up there right now.”

“I’m just doing my job. Like you folks are. Like Mr. Holliwell.”

What job? Holliwell thought. What does he mean?

“If I know you’re up there,” Zecca said, “I’m going to worry about you. The Atapas don’t like strangers around in the best of times and they’re not nearly as tranquil as they look. Especially these days.”

“Do you suggest I register my presence with the embassy in San Ysidro?”

“Honest to God, Mr. Cole,” Zecca said, “I don’t know what to suggest. Except that you not go.”

“I understand,” Cole said.

They drove on in silence over the dusty plateau. The coastward volcano was abreast of them, a second, larger rose ahead. To Holliwell, they seemed freakish mountains; only malignant gods could inhabit or inform them. They rose solitary out of featureless tableland, bare, without harmony, unbeautiful enough to appear exactly what they were—burst excrescences on Tecan’s pocked dusty hide. A geology lesson, he thought. They communicated a troubling sense of the earth as nothing more than itself, of blind force and mortality. As
mindlessly refuting of hope as a skull and bones. The landscape was a memento mori, the view ahead like a dead ocean floor.

“Scary,” Holliwell said.

Tom and Marie laughed.

“We thought it was only us,” Marie said.

“The Tecanecans are very big on their volcanoes,” Tom told Holliwell. “They’re on the flag and the national seal. They run up and down the country along a fault. First thing a local will ask you when you come in-country is whether you’ve seen the volcanoes or not.”

“Key-to-the-country kind of thing?”

“I never had it put that elaborately,” Tom said. “I don’t think anyone here thinks they’re the key to the country. They’re just big things for
turistas
to gawp at. I mean they’re there and they’re huge and uniquely Tecanecan, so the Tecs are proud of them. It’s their duty to be.”

“What does the national poet say? Is he on about them?”

“They don’t have a national poet to speak of. They never had a Rubén Darío in Tecan. Never saw the need of one.”

“There’s a verse about the volcanoes in the national anthem though,” Marie said. “I can’t remember how it goes. It’s pretty trite.”

“The first movement of Brahms’ First,” Tom told them. “That’s the national anthem. Moving as hell. In the old days before the Marines came the Tecanecan Army could goose-step to it. The Marines made them knock it off.”

They began to pass more buses on the road. The number of dirt roads with signs indicating villages off the road increased.

Tom slowed down, wary of children and cattle on the highway, sounding his horn at turns to warn the burro carts that appeared more and more often now as they approached the capital. From time to time, they passed a lone Indian bent under a load of firewood. People looked down at the dirt as the car sped by them.

“What I wonder,” Bob Cole said in his strange tremulous voice, “is whether the people down here have to live this way so that we can live the way we do.”

“I’m just a soldier,” Zecca said. “But I think the answer to that is no. It sounds too simple to me.”

“But it’s not a simple question,” Marie said brightly. “It’s a really complicated one.”

Cole turned to Holliwell.

“How about you, sir? You’re something of an expert. What do you think the answer is?”

“I have to confess,” Holliwell said, “that I haven’t figured that out. There are lots of gaps in my expertise. I don’t know what the answer is.”

“We have to believe it’s no, don’t we?” Cole asked. “We couldn’t face up to it otherwise. Because if most of the world lives in this kind of poverty so that we can have our goodies and our extra protein ration—what does that make us?”

“It makes us vampires,” Holliwell said. “It makes us all the cartoon figures in the Communist press.”

“What if you found out it were true?”

“Me? What I do doesn’t matter. I’d go on doing what I’m doing.”

“How about you, Captain?”

Zecca took one hand from the wheel and turned partway around toward Cole. Marie kept her eyes on the road.

“What are you, Mr. Cole?” Captain Zecca asked. “Some kind of an agitator?” He asked the question humorously, with more of Toledo in his voice than he usually permitted.

“Not at all,” Cole said.

At the approaches to the Tecanecan capital of San Ysidro, the Pan-American Highway wound down in switchbacks from the high desert into a lush tropical plain beside a great lake. As they started the descent, the sun hung over the low hills of the coffee country and the contours of the two visible volcanoes softened to show Holliwell a more insidious menace. They were running late. After sundown, the inter-capital truck traffic would be on the road—a mortal risk.

“When you were in Vietnam,” Holliwell asked Cole, “what did you do there?”

In the expectant silence that filled the car, Cole seemed to force an answer.

“I was in the Army,” he told them. “In the Army there for three years because I extended.”

“Is that right?” Zecca said.

“I started with an infantry platoon, a second lieutenant. Then I was on staff, with intelligence. Then later … I went back. With AID. And then I went back again as press, free-lancing.”

“You must have liked it there,” Zecca said.

“In a way,” Cole said, “I liked it very much.”

The captain smiled thinly.

“It held a fascination for you. A kind of moral fascination, am I right?”

“Well …” Cole began. “Yes,” he said.

“I can understand that very well. Right, Marie?”

“Sure,” Marie said. “A lot of our friends were like that. We were a little like that too, weren’t we?”

“We sure were,” Tom said. “And we were courting, so that lent color to our moral fascination.”

“I never found time to go courting,” Cole told him.

“Too bad,” Zecca said. “You find time to get laid? Or weren’t you interested?”

“Sexist talk,” Marie hissed softly. “Jeez.”

Holliwell asked Cole if he had been much in the delta. He had been. He had been out to the island and met the coconut monk.