A Flag for Sunrise (3 page)

“The law is plain,” Egan assured him. “What you tell me is privileged.”

“And don’t,” Campos said, “think I care a shit about priests and religion. I’m a man—not a woman or a
maricón.
You keep your mouth shut.”

“You can be certain of that,” Egan said. It occurred to him that the promise was a rash one.

“Look,” the lieutenant said, gentling. “I think it’s wrong for me to keep her here.”

“I agree,” Egan said.

“Very well,” Campos told him. “You can take her then.”

“What?”

“You can take her. Take her away.”

“I take her? But, my dear Lieutenant, how can I …”

“That’s the duty of the church!” Campos shouted at him. “That’s the duty of priests to take the dead!”

“Well, it’s the duty of the police …” Egan began, but the lieutenant cut him off.

“Don’t tell me my duty. You think I don’t know what goes on? That nun—she’s not a true nun. You think I’m stupid?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Campos suddenly smiled.

“Come on,” he said, touching the priest’s sleeve in an attitude of merry conspiracy, “we’ll give her to you. You’re the priest. You take her for me—that’s what’s right.”

Egan watched him bring a nylon sleeping bag from one corner of the room and drag it to the freezer.

“Come now,” Campos said. “We’ll get her out.”

“Look here,” Egan said, “I’m leaving.”

He stood up and marched out the front door into the moonlight. He was halfway down the steps when the lieutenant caught him.

“Get back inside,” the lieutenant said. “I’m telling you officially.”

Egan went back up the steps.

“For heaven’s sake,” he said pleadingly as Campos marched him inside, “you can dispose of a body better than I can. I mean, if you’re
determined to keep the whole thing hidden.… I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“I am not an animal,” Campos said. “I believe there is a spiritual force. I believe in life after death.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Egan said.

“All right. For the relief of my heart—I give her to you.” He walked to the freezer and picked up an end of the bag. “And don’t try to run away again.”

Father Egan had collapsed in a chair. He listened with his eyes averted while Lieutenant Campos struggled cursing with the bag in the freezer.

“Very well,” he heard the lieutenant say, “now come and help.”

Turning, he saw the floor littered with ice and beer bottles. The sleeping bag was half out of the chest, looking like a squat brown serpent that had swallowed a lamb. The body, its fetal outline unmistakable under the quilted cloth, was propped against the metal edge while the twisted ends dangled fore and aft.

Egan walked toward it, a man in a dream.

Lieutenant Campos wiped the sweat from his eyes.

“Pick up the end.”

But the priest could not.

“Pick up the end!” Campos shouted. “You coward! You
maricón!
”

Egan stopped tugging at the limp end and put his hands under the human shape in the center. Through the ticking, it felt like a block of ice.

Together, they lifted the bag and carried it out—down the steps and into the back seat of the lieutenant’s jeep. Egan was so overcome that he thought he would faint at any moment. Besides, he was unused to exercise.

As they drove back along the moonlit beach road, he clung to the jeep rack in despair. The wind caught the stole around his neck and blew its strands taut behind him.

“I just can’t believe this is happening,” he said aloud to himself.

Lieutenant Campos heard him.

“Then,” the lieutenant said, “you shouldn’t be a priest.”

At the foot of the mission steps, they hauled the bag out and set it
down on the hard sand. Freddy’s Chicken Shack was still wailing, the mellow barrel drums telling out life’s time, getting down.

Swaying a little, Lieutenant Campos put his hand on Egan’s arm.

“Do your duty,” he said. “Everyone must.”

Father Egan watched the jeep drive off; the bag at his feet was a dark shape on the luminous sand.

Down the beach from the mission steps was a gear shack with a small dock extending out over the ocean where the station’s fiberglass whaler hung at moor. Looking over his shoulder, Egan hurried to the landing and saw that the boat was secured to its customary piling and the outboard attached to the stern, the screws hauled up above the waterline. He went back to the bag, seized its ends and began to pull with the resolution of despair. It was a fearsome business of inches—the drums from Freddy’s mocked his panting breaths. When he had pulled the bag halfway to the boat, he looked up the beach and saw that two late-departing wedding guests had staggered out of Freddy’s and were approaching the dock. Quickly, he crouched down beside his horrid burden and stretched out beside it, his body pressed against the sand and rotting palm fronds.

The two men walked in step, carrying their shoes in their hands. Both of them wore dark suits with dress shirts and ties and as they walked they hummed softly in counterpoint. Passing the pier, perhaps a hundred feet from where Father Egan lay with the stuffed sleeping bag, one of the two stepped out on the pine slats and began to dance. With one hand, he waved the shoes he held in an arc over his head while the other snaked out at a right angle from his body gliding against the background of the moonlit ocean as his knees swayed. With his bare feet, he stamped the wooden surface of the pier to the beat of the barrel drums and at each stomp the water beneath the pier erupted in small bursts of glowing phosphorescence. When he had finished his dance, the man and his companion fell into step again and moved off toward the darkened clapboards of French Harbor.

Egan lay still until they were out of sight, then rose stiffly and hauled the corpse the rest of the way.

The gear shack was kept unlocked, according to the custom of the coast; from a shelf inside he took two heavy fish-head anchors and a coil of wire line. He dropped the anchors and the line into the boat, climbed in and set the outboard in the water. With a final effort, he
dragged the sleeping bag off the pier—it fell into the boat at his feet with such force that for a moment he was afraid that it had stove the bottom in. Then he cast off the line and let the movement of the water carry the boat free.

Gritting his teeth, he pulled the cord to prime the engine and—not daring to look behind him—set a course for the outer reef. Five hundred yards from shore, he wheeled north to skirt the first wall of coral—he was grateful for the moonlight now—then turned north again until the boat had cleared the second reef. When he cut the engines, the whaler picked up the swell of open ocean and began to roll back toward the beach. After the second reef, the bottom fell away abruptly; the water beneath his keel was hundreds of fathoms deep.

Wide-eyed, Father Egan forced open the bag’s zipper and dropped both anchors inside, then looped the wire line around both ends of the bag, leaving the rest of the coil in snarled dangling confusion.

A short distance from the boat, two bonito jumped, their bodies glinting silver, avoiding a shark.

He put the light end over first, and then kneeling in the scuppers, with his hands as a scoop he eased the frozen mass of the girl’s body over the side. His great fear had been that the bag would not sink—but it sank quite readily, sliding down under the hull and disappearing utterly with hardly a bubble to mark its descent into darkness. The deck of the boat and the ocean’s surface held no trace of what they had borne a few seconds before.

Father Egan was amazed at the ease with which it had been done. He felt as though he had gained a thoroughly new insight into the processes of the world.

When he started the engine again, an impulse seized him to head for open sea, to let the sunrise find him miles from the mission landing and the coast of the Republic. But he mastered himself and headed the whaler for shore at trolling speed. Once the engine stalled on him, but he got it turning again without much difficulty. As he passed the inshore reef, he began to cry.

As the beach grew nearer, a moment of lucidity and calm hovered before him like a holy apparition and he gripped it desperately. Within the calm moment sounded his own voice, the voice of
Christian humanist witness in a vicious world. Somewhere, in some reasonable, wood-paneled overheated room, he heard himself recounting what had happened and explaining it thoroughly. He made his voice repeat the explanation over and over lest it be lost and his reason overthrown.

I buried her myself, Father Egan heard himself explain. Of course, I couldn’t tell anyone.

On the day Holliwell left for Central America, his wife had volunteered to arrange the weekend outing of a brilliant young paranoid. Holliwell’s wife was a Master of Social Work at the state hospital. Before seven, she drove the girls to school and went on to the facility to pick up the paranoid and conduct him home to his nervous parents in the suburbs of Wilmington.

Holliwell finished his packing alone; he and his wife had taken leave of each other during the night. When his bag was locked and standing by the front door, he went into the kitchen and made himself a strong bloody mary. He drank it by the living-room window, looking out at the front yard where his magnolia hung snowbound and his mountain ash stood tortured and skeletal in an envelope of ice.

She was a little bit in love with this one, Holliwell thought—and the man was unquestionably dangerous. But she would almost certainly be all right. She was very sensible.

His plane left from Kennedy the following morning and he planned to pass the day in New York, first lunching with Marty Nolan, then checking into his favorite hotel to see what the evening might bring. He no longer knew anyone who lived in the city. At four or so, he would phone his wife to make sure that everything had gone well.

He finished the first drink and then had another, not bothering with breakfast. By the time he put his suitcase in the back of the Volvo, he was high enough to stop at the smoke shop in town and buy his first pack of cigarettes in a month. Driving to the turnpike, he smoked one cigarette after another.

The road to the pike—like the road his wife would drive to Wilmington—ran through pine forest and swamp. Each time he
passed over a culvert, or the frozen course of a creek dividing one stand of pine from another, the picture would come into his mind of his wife lying dead in the woods, her red and white scarf knotted round her neck in a thin line, her bloodied fingers stiffening across a log.

After the turnpike entrance, he hit the radio and in a mile or two WWVA eased down from space, selling lucky crosses and Christian good fortune. Holliwell tuned it in carefully and between commercials heard a singular musical recitation, delivered in up-country dialect, about a young football player.

The youth on the record was his high school’s star quarterback; it was the Big Game against the school in the next hollow and at half time the home team was a couple of touchdowns behind. During the half-time break, the boy disappeared from the locker room and he was late returning for the third quarter.

“Where in the hell you been?” demanded the anxious hometown coach, who was decent but hard. He swore at the boy and shoved him toward the line of scrimmage.

There then commenced an astonishing display of unforgettable schoolboy ball. The kid played like a young man possessed, and the fans in the little country-and-Western town had never seen the like of him. The opposition was devastated, the coach awestruck and penitent. Amid the jubilation outside the showers, he drew the young quarterback quietly aside.

“Coach,” the youth explained, “my father was blind.”

The boy’s father had been blind and for a week had lain upon his deathbed. The boy had been phoning the hospital regularly and during half time had learned of his father’s death.

The coach cleared his throat. How then to explain the spectacle only just witnessed—the sixty-yard touchdown passes, the seventy-yard scoring runs?

“You see, coach,” the boy said quietly, “it’s the first time he’s ever seen me play.”

By the time WWVA faded out, Holliwell was aware of the tears streaming down his face, staining his tie, wetting his moustache and the stub of his cigarette. He eased the Volvo into the next turnoff, and sat, with the motor running, staring through the windshield at a row of green refuse cans until he had stopped sobbing.

So much for morning drinking. An hour and a half from home
and he already had an anecdote for his wife, one that would engage her sympathy and attention, one to save for his return home—providing, of course, that both of them returned alive.

We’re getting pretty shaky, he told himself, wiping the foolish tears from his face with a Kleenex. It was being forty, marriage, soft suburban living.

She gets tougher and smarter, he thought, and I get shaky—a pattern of class and culture. Perhaps he might tell her about the country song but not about his breaking up at the wheel.

In the snowy woods beyond the paved rest area and the green garbage cans, a young black man in city clothes was carrying a paper parcel toward the road. He saw the parked Volvo with Holliwell at the wheel and turned quickly back into the maze of pines. Holliwell sighed, put the car in gear and rolled back onto the turnpike, headed for lunch and New York.

An hour later, he was crossing the Narrows bridge; the harbor and the Manhattan skyline were bright with January sunshine. Holliwell’s spirits had lifted in the wastes of Bayonne; except for a palpable desire for more alcohol, he felt that he was doing fairly well. It would be a drinking day—the morning stirrup cup had set off an old mechanism. But his habits had become so generally temperate that it seemed to him he could afford some reasonable indulgence in the field.

He took the Belt Parkway northward and fought his way into the traffic around the King’s County Courthouse. He had not been to Brooklyn for years and being there gave him the mild elation that came with a new and unfamiliar town. The restaurant was on Court Street; it had valet parking and a few sumac trees out back and he found it on the first pass. He brushed the cigarette ashes from his jacket, put his suitcase in the trunk and handed the keys to a uniformed Puerto Rican attendant.