A Flag for Sunrise (36 page)

“Watch where you’re sitting, sir. There are sea urchins all around you.”

The man turned on his side and eased toward her, feeling the way before him with his swim fin. She put out a hand and he took it in his, leaning his weight on her, dragging the injured leg. His mask was up on his forehead.

Justin guided him out of the water and had a look at his leg. Sure enough, his left knee was swollen and purple with small spine ends visible through the skin. Justin poured some of the ammonia solution over his knee and rubbed it in with a cotton swab.

“You can also piss on it,” Justin explained.

“It’s not so easy to piss on your knee sitting down,” the man said.

He was looking grateful and embarrassed. He was a tall well-built man; his face, in Justin’s eyes, bespoke softness and self-indulgence. But perhaps it was only the pain and his being a tourist.

“I’m really sorry to be trouble. Are you from the mission here?”

“Yep.” She took a hemostat from a kit and lifted a spine end off the mottled flesh of his knee. “Hey,” she said, “I got the end out.”

“I’m sure you have more important things to do.”

“Oh, stop it,” Justin said. She went after the second spine and pulled it out. “That’s gonna be sore for a while but the real bad pain will stop very soon. It’s nothing serious.”

“I guess I was lucky.”

“I guess you were. When you doubled up I thought a shark had hit you.”

“A shark? Right here?”

“There are sharks in the channel here. And a carpet of sea urchins. And the water’s polluted. It’s like a harbor.”

“I’d better restrict my snorkeling to Playa Tate then.”

“You should,” she said. “This is a lousy place for it.”

And what now? He should be given an aspirin, put in the shade. He did not appear to be in shock. Nursey business for the tourists.

She helped him across the dirt road, sat him under a ceiba tree and went back up to her dispensary for aspirin.

“Poor fellow,” Egan said as she passed through the kitchen to replace her bucket. “A nice chap.”

“Yep,” she said.

As she went down to him, two young loafers from town walked by along the road and paused briefly to mock him. He was indeed mockable, she thought, with his swim fins in his lap and the mask and snorkel still fitting on the front of his skull and his Day-Glo kneecaps. An absurd and unnecessary person.

“Have an aspirin,” she said. “Have two. Forgot the water.”

He took the pills and swallowed them. Some color was coming back to his face. In the scattered afternoon sunlight that shone through the great ceiba’s branches, she noticed that there were two identical and very nearly invisible scars on his right earlobe and that a small piece of the lobe itself was missing.

“My name is Frank Holliwell,” the man said. “I was just talking with your Father Egan.”

“Is that right?” When the man’s ear was out of the sunlight the small scar disappeared. “How will you get back now?”

“The boat will pick me up.” He looked at the angle of the sun through the ceiba leaves. “They should be by anytime.”

“You O.K. now?”

“I feel a lot better.”

“Good. Take care now.”

“I understand I’m coming to dinner on Friday.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Justin said, blushing. “I think Father Egan means to go into town with you. If he’s well enough.”

“I see.”

“We’re in a state of disarray. We’re closing down soon.” There was something in the man’s affectless stare that made her uneasy. She glanced quickly at the scar, visible again in the sunlight. “They’ll have to get along without us.”

“You’re a nun?”

“That’s right,” she said.

He asked her what order she was and she told him. He went on nodding as though the Devotionists were familiar to him. Catholic.

“They used to rap you on the knuckles, right?” she asked lightly.

“Not on my knuckles. I had Jesuits for that.”

“Oh, I see. Well, that’s … classy.”

“Are you coming to dinner with us too?” he asked. She was startled by the manner in which he put it. It was as though he was flirting with her. What’s the world coming to? she thought. And how would I know?

It sometimes happened to Justin that she would relax a bit and speak earnestly and directly to a man and the man would think she was becoming flirtatious. It was annoying. It had something to do with the way she looked.

“No, I can’t,” she said. “I’ve got a whole dispensary to pack.”

“What’s it like being a nun these days?”

“Oh,” she said, “well, there are all kinds of nuns.”

He
is
, she thought, he’s coming on. He probably can’t help himself. That’s what that softness in his face is all about.

“What’s it like for you?”

“It’s medieval,” she said. “And otherworldly.”

She was pleased when he laughed, in spite of herself. “What’s that business on your ear, Mr. Holliwell?” Put him on the defensive.

The question seemed to surprise and embarrass him.

“It’s a tribal scar. I got it in Southeast Asia.”

“Really? Where?”

“Indonesia,” he said quickly. “Celebes. I’m an anthropologist.”

“And you were being one of the gang.”

“Yes,” he said, “one of the bunch. I asked for their smallest size.”

The buzz-saw whine of a large outboard sounded on the ocean; they both turned to see the Paradise dive boat on its way to Playa Tate.

“Well,” she said, “take care of your foot. Be thankful you knelt down on a baby one or we might have had to open up your leg to get the spines.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“And try to keep it clean.”

“What?”

She laughed at him. “Your knee.”

“Oh … yes. Look, maybe I’ll see you again. At the ruins or somewhere. I’d like very much to talk.”

“I’ll be pretty busy.”

“Packing and telling your beads.”

She smiled at him and turned away. He was impertinent and patronizing and for all she knew, depraved. He was the kind of man she thought of as “cheesy.” But he was sort of nice. And not just a tourist, she thought; Justin was innocently snobbish in the extreme.

Back on the veranda, she felt a little high. The very recognition of her exhilaration was enough to depress her; she was shortly guilty and ashamed. Air-headedness. Petty foolishness. The thought of waiting through another night was dreadful. But she would have to. She would have to go on believing in them.

She leaned on the rail, gripping it until her knuckles were white.

“Christ, it’s impossible,” she said.

Egan was in the kitchen. Drunk.

“Now, now,” he said. “There’s a good girl.”

Pablo opened the hatch to dazzling sunlight and stepped out on the hot boards of the afterdeck, barefoot and shirtless. The
Cloud
was tied up by a cement pier in a town of red-tiled roofs. The streets, unlike those of Palmas, were paved, the walls of the harborside buildings were whitewashed. Over the port captain’s shed was a double-masted flagstaff displaying a banner with a white cross on a star-dappled blue field and the horizontal tricolor of Holland. Beyond the town was desert, grown with cactus and thorny acacia. Across a sparkling bay lined with limestone palisades, a low white peak rose like a cone of salt.

The water lines were over; Pablo picked up a hose and laved his head and face with a jet of fresh water. The water was good and cold. Spring water. Wiping it from his eyes, he saw Tino approaching.

“Like to start d’ day wid some beer?” Tino asked pleasantly.

“You kidding me?”

Tino motioned him toward the rail. Stacked up on the dock were a dozen cases of Amstel beer. A yellow-haired Creole driving a forklift was lowering more beside it.

“You go get ’em, sailor,” Tino said, slapping him on the shoulder.

Pablo took his morning Benzedrine; a barbed wave of resentment
ran through him. Fucking pull and tote. He climbed over the rail and took a closer look at the town.

At the end of the pier was a market square dominated by a gabled stone building with “Perreira Brothers” lettered over its central doorway. To the right of it, behind a garden wall enclosing royal palms and banana trees, was a government building marked by the same two flags.

Two seagoing tugs were berthed at the adjoining pier, one flying U.S. colors, the other Dutch. Beside the tugs were two small Venezuelan freighters. As far as Pablo could see, there were no other craft in port.

He lifted a crate of Amstel, carried it aboard and set it down beside the forward hold. After a while, he fell into the rhythm of hauling; the speed, the sweating, the sun on his body made him feel powerful. When the beer was aboard, there were cartons of frozen meat for the reefer, then greens and fruit.

Each time Pablo shouldered a box past the shuttered main cabin, he heard the voices of the people conferring inside and although he could not make out what was being said there was something about the very tone in which they spoke that made him think of high fortune and the big-time score. He began to take less pleasure in his donkey work and to feel turned around.

After a little more than a half hour, he decided that he would take a break, let the cartons pile up on the pier for a while and get out of the sun. Tino was down in the engine space, working on the diesel.

In the shade of a hatch cover, Pablo contemplated the scheme of things. He kept thinking of the old man called Naftali who was with them in the cabin now, and who lived in a hotel room amid piles of hundred-dollar bills.

He had made his move, he thought. He had put a thousand miles between himself and the life of petty day-by-day. McPhail and his like, the crummy trailer, the chickenshit, that bitch and her rat-burgers. He was out where it mattered; out here, he thought, you made it big or you went under. He would go under or go back and let them put the irons on him and do the time. But if he made it big, he might go back and no one could touch him. Or he might settle down, on some island, a better island than this one—and be like the men you read about in
Soldier of Fortune
, men who had lived the life of
adventure in hot countries and by their strength and cunning made it big, gotten rich, and who lived exquisitely in plantation houses high above the harbor with beautiful native wives.

People liked to get you thinking you were small-time. That way, they made out and you got fucked. It was that way now, he thought, they were in the cabin talking big-time scores and he was hauling groceries for them. They might pay him or they might not; he was a yo-yo to them. One of life’s little yo-yos.

But the fact was, they were old and soft. They were making it big, they had made their move, but they were soft. Callahan was a rummy. What were Negus and Callahan together compared to him? Surely, he thought, their day was over. It was someone else’s turn now, someone smarter and tougher. And it was all in your mind; if you let weak people buffalo you, they would keep you down. He had been letting them do it all his life and it was time to call them on it. He was young, he was strong, a soldier of fortune. He had seen them up close, they were nothing much.

Naftali with the room full of money, he had not seen. But Naftali was an old man, was losing his grip. Was he as bad as all that? He, Pablo, might see about that; you had to take risks, there was nothing for free. It was a new ball game on this ocean. He began to suspect that things were going his way.

Then Tino came up and yelled at him—the black son of a bitch actually cursed him out in front of the other niggers on the dock; he was put back to his loading. As he labored under the bales of netting and the boxes full of spare parts, a chain of recall ground against his memory and every insult and humiliation he had ever been forced to bear flashed before him, as bright and hurtful as though he were enduring each again.

When the last of the stores were aboard, he took another Benzedrine and shortly thereafter made up his mind. They would never pay him, he realized. They took him for a fool. It was time for another move. A man doesn’t live forever, he thought. You don’t make out playing it safe. He had tried being Joe Citizen and he had ended up sharing a trailer with an ignorant whore and a kid he couldn’t support. No more. If you let yourself be anybody’s man you ended up like everybody.

In the afternoon, Tino sent him to the port captain’s office to get
the
Cloud
’s papers stamped and the fishing permit renewed. By the time he got back aboard, the conference was over. The cabin shutters were lifted and Naftali had departed unseen. The Callahans were in bathing suits.

Pablo asked if he could take a shower.

“Go ahead,” Callahan told him. “We’re finished here.”

Callahan looked pretty good, Pablo thought, harder and trimmer than he ought considering his age and the amount he seemed to drink. The sight of Mrs. Callahan in her bikini stirred Pablo’s resentment and strengthened his resolve. He noticed that Negus had started in drinking beer.

“We’re going to the beach,” Deedee said. “Up at the new hotel. Anybody else want to come?”

Pablo shook his head.

“Tino,” she said, “you come. I want to see if you’ll show your legs.”

“Oh no,” Tino said. “Not me.”

“I don’t think he can swim,” she said to her husband.

“I de bes’ swimmer,” Tino told her with a sad smile.

“You’ll find Naftali at the Hollandia if you need him,” Callahan told Negus. “He’ll probably sack out, I don’t think he’s feeling well.” He looked over his men with an air of good-natured proprietorship. “Think you boys can stay out of trouble until we get back?” As he asked the question, Pablo noticed that a gear locker beside the galley was swinging open. Its upper drawer was piled with tubes and radio parts—various things that might be worth keeping under lock and key in port. His automatic pistol was in the lower drawer still in its leather holster. On the locker handle hung an open padlock.

“Guess I’ll wash up now,” Pablo said. He went back to the lazaret to get his towel and clogs and some clean underwear. The space was close and airless without a seaborne wind to cool it; the boards enclosed each hour of the day’s heat.