A Flag for Sunrise (49 page)

She was shouting now, shouting for her husband in a choked nightmare voice. When he had forced the pistol from her right hand, he pressed his head down against her chest to keep it low and took Naftali’s Nambu from beneath his seabag.

There was true light in the space now. On the ladder someone with a flashlight was searching out the darkness. Pablo rolled her across his body—it was as though they were making love again—her teeth were sunk in his arm. As she passed over him, he jammed the barrel of the Nambu under her down vest and fired two of its eight shots upward. He felt her teeth release him, she was flung onto her knees beside the bale. Two shots came from the ladder, at least one of them striking the woman. She rolled over on her side, her knees still together. The compartment was spinning with illuminations; Pablo thought of fireflies, wet spark plugs. His ears were hammered shut. Against the flat lower section of the bulkhead he was unhurt. When he fired at the man who was on the ladder, he did so with confidence, as though he had nothing but time. And in a second, he knew he had been on target. He heard the shuffle, the groan, the gun strike the ladder’s bottom step and slide across the deck. The man fell behind the beam of his own flashlight, invisible and motionless. Pablo sat panting in the darkness, waiting for the figure behind the light to move. The moment he started to his feet, there was another flash;
Tabor’s leg went out from under him and his head struck the slanting overhead. He knelt and fired two shots into the space behind the light’s beam. There was a groan and a man spoke—it was Callahan—but Pablo could not make out what he said. Then Pablo discovered himself to be shot; there was a bleeding wound in the thick part of his calf, in the back. He ran his finger along the shin bone and found it unbroken. The bullet might only have cut him and passed through but it hurt. He would be all right, he thought. He had power enough to fox them all and live. There was another one.

From the open deck above, he heard Negus’ voice calling the Callahans by name. He began to go up the ladder backwards, sitting for a while on each step. Negus’ voice sounded far away, carried off by the wind. At last, he was sitting framed in the hatchway. There was no sign of a light. His head bent low, he glanced around his shoulder and saw Negus, holding a shotgun and crouching anxiously beside the after hatch.

“Jack?” Negus asked, and reached for a light he had set down on the hatch cover.

As Negus reached for it, Pablo turned full around, got off a shot, then flung himself out of the hatchway and scuttled across the slimy deck like one of the creatures that had swarmed there during the evening. His shot, he knew, had missed. His leg throbbing, he crawled for darkness, his steel-hearted killer’s trance deserting him. Negus was after him, rounding the hatch for a shot. Pablo, terrified now, cowered in the scuppers, he had two shots in the little Nambu and the light was bad. Then he saw Negus stumble backward, make two little capering backward steps and fall back against the hatch cover. The shotgun discharged heavenward.

Pablo, uncertain of what he was seeing, came to realize that Negus had slipped on the deck. It was a miracle of God. He hesitated for a moment, saw Negus try to bring the gun to bear and shot him. It seemed to him that he had missed again. Negus dropped the shotgun on the deck and was looking down at it, cursing softly. He turned toward Pablo.

“You stop, you hear! Just stop it!” There was a catch in his voice. He was hurt.

Pablo lowered his gun.

“Don’t yell at me no more, Mr. Negus. Get back there against the rail.”

When Negus stood clear, Pablo lowered himself on his good leg, and picked up the shotgun.

“Oh, you dirty monkey,” Negus said. “You little son of a bitch. What’d you do?”

He seemed furious. Pablo felt as though he had done something wrong.

“They’re down there,” Pablo said, pointing to the lazaret hatchway. “You look down there, you’ll see them.”

Negus walked stiffly to the flashlight on the hatch cover, took it and went to the top of the lazaret ladder. Tabor stood behind him, keeping him on the top step as he played the beam over the silent space.

“You dirty fucking monkey,” Freddy Negus said.

“They were turning me around,” Pablo explained. “You was too.”

“Well, they ain’t turnin’ you around no more, bucky,” Negus said. “They’re dead. You killed them.”

“Well, they were,” Pablo said. He felt remorse and disgust.

Negus sat down on the hatch, his arms folded over his stomach.

“I don’t know how the hell he took it in his head to hire you. You were just a wrong number.”

From the cockpit, they could hear the RDF’s steady null signal, sounding over and over, a noise from space.

“Goddamn foibles and human error,” Negus said, “you got such a little margin anyways and them two always overplayed it.” He coughed and spat thickly on the deck. “Figured you were fun or something.”

“Well, I can’t live for fun,” Pablo said. “Some people can afford to but I can’t. A lot of times people try and turn me around and they always find that out about me.”

Negus stood up and started forward, paused and went on, holding to the rail.

“I’m not walking well,” Negus told Pablo.

“Me neither. But you’re gut-shot.”

When they reached the wheelhouse hatch, Pablo started in; Negus stayed him with a hand.

“I don’t want no blood in there.”

Pablo understood. Negus sat on a gear locker and looked out to sea; Tabor leaned on the rail. There were no lights in sight, or ridges to block the great field of stars. The pointers and Polaris were over the starboard quarter.

“You got no sense, son,” Negus said. “Why’d you ever come aboard?”

“I needed to. Thought you needed me.”

Negus spat again. “But we didn’t, did we? No need on anybody’s part.”

“Guess not,” Pablo said. “But that’s the breaks.” He was beginning to think there might be a way in which he was going to make out after all. Most of all, he was wondering if there was any more speed on board.

“Now what we got, kid, is a Mexican standoff. You know what I mean?”

“No,” Pablo said. But he was intrigued and encouraged to hear things put that way.

“I’m hurting. I got a slug in my gut. I don’t know but that …” He let it go. “But you’re hurting too, kid. You can’t get nowhere from here. Nothing on that coast for you now. You’ll pile her up or the Guardia’ll get you or the pirates will. You’re bleeding, boy, you’re drawing sharks, you see what I mean now?”

Pablo listened in silence to the beat of the null tone.

Negus stood up and leaned on the rail a few feet away from him.

“I can take this vessel anywhere. I can get us anywhere. Clear.”

“How?” Pablo asked.

Negus grew enthusiastic.

“Oh, by Jesus Christ, boy, why, plenty of places. San Ignacio. Colombia. One of the islands there. I got friends in all them places. I can get us a doctor. We can sell our goods, man. Emeralds. We can get them.” He was trying to see Pablo’s face in the faint light that came from the cockpit. He was smiling.

“What would you tell them there? If we got to Colombia—one of them places?”

“Well, a thousand things. A thousand things, hell …” He was talking faster and he began to laugh. “They don’t give a goddamn
what you done or where you been if you got cash or goods. We’d have it made.”

Pablo was straining toward hope. That it might all be true. There were moments when they both believed it all.

Negus drew his breath painfully, and encouraged, went on.

“Listen, Pablo. You’re using twenty gallons an hour out here. More than that. More. You goin’ to be sailing in circles.”

When Pablo did not reply, he grew more heated.

“You be out here, boy, you’ll see things day and night. Stuff that ain’t there. I know what I’m talking about. You don’t ever want to be alone out here because the stuff you’ll see sometimes it ain’t there and sometimes it is. When it is it’s worser. I know. I’m the one that knows. And me takin’ us in, old shoe, we’ll be home free. Home. Free. They know me, man. They don’t care.” He laughed and ran out of breath, and Tabor saw that the man was lying to him, talking for his life as though to a child. Turning him around.

Years before in a town Pablo knew, the bootleggers had chained an old boy to an anchored oil barrel at low tide, chained him up for the high water to come in on him. There happened along this young child out where he had no business and the man talked to the child and begged and hollered at him to go for help. But the child forgot or his parents told him better not to say and the tide came in over the man four feet and they only found out about the child afterwards.

Pablo looked at his weary enemy and was sorry.

“Well, O.K.,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Negus’ delight was so great that, sorry as he was, Tabor couldn’t keep from laughing. The old dude was whooping and shouting like the drunkard he was, going on about emeralds and cocaine and private villas and his face was happy as Christmas morning when Pablo blew him away. It was necessary to hold the dead old man up against the rail so that he would not become a burden. Holding him up hurt Pablo’s injured leg, so the two of them leaned over the rail side by side for a while. Fellow travelers. Then Tabor bent down, took hold of Negus under the knees and pitched him over. The null tone went right on sounding.

He remained at the rail, his elbows resting there, his hands clasped, and looked up the Dipper. He had been watching it edge around Polaris through the night. Perhaps because of the wound, he
felt cold. Now he and the creatures in the ice hold were the only living things aboard.

His work done, Pablo became afraid. An unfamiliar emotion oppressed him which he came to recognize as loneliness; a loneliness deeper than he had ever experienced.

“Jesus help me,” Pablo said aloud.

He missed them, that was it. A crazy way to feel, because they were low-down people, they were just shit as people and they had certainly been turning him around. Not the way he missed Naftali—Naftali was all right. But them being dead now, all of them, it was hard to take. It put a strain on him. Cecil, he thought, that black bastard was the root of it.

Then he thought of speed and how that would be the ticket. On his way to the sleeping quarters he stopped in the cockpit and looked over the navigational gear. The compass bearing was set for zero-zero-zero and the constant null tone signified that this was where it should be. They had gone out on one-eighty from the marker and were headed straight back in—no problem there. On the chart table he found Callahan’s rough line-of-sight chart; in one corner Callahan had written the Loran digits he had noted at the spot. For the moment things were all right but later, up near the reef, he would have to do his own steering and find the market in darkness. And there would be the men on the coast, those money-crazy bird-talking people. Perhaps his mother’s people.

He took a light and went into the head where the shower was and found an unlocked cabinet under the small sink. Up front there were first-aid kits and soap and every kind of downer, all of them prescribed for a Dolores Callahan. In his impatience he swept them aside; he found aspirin, aloe powder, ginseng, exotic shampoos. Not until he was on the edge of despair did he find, on the bottom shelf under the pipe, a small bottle containing six Desoxyn. He clutched the Desoxyn bottle and bent his head against the shelf in gratitude. Less impatient now, he looked through the rest of the scattered bottles and found a jar of pain-killing tablets. He recognized the gray half-moon pills and their brand name because they were the things that Kathy took for menstrual cramps and he had used them as speed back home.

Pablo sat on the deck of the head, swallowed two Desoxyn and
one of the pain-killers and made a bandage for his wounded leg. There were no exit or entry holes, only a scythe-cut wound along the side. It did not seem serious; there was not much blood. He would do.

With the light at his feet he sat in one of the lounge chairs of the saloon to let the speed and the pain-killer do their work. A ridiculous place it was, the saloon, with its teak and rattan and Spanish table. He recognized it now as a third hold, the sort they had on the big Texas boats. The Callahans had made it into a floating parlor. And it suited them, he thought, it was their idea of fun and high living. The wooden louvered shutters at deck level could keep it cool at sea but it was really just a hidey-hole, set everywhere with fans and as cramped in its fancy way as the lazaret.

When he felt better he went to Deedee’s compartment and opened the teak door. There was a wide bunk bed against the bulkhead and a steel bookcase with a great many books. On top of it was a picture of both Callahans on a lawn with a lot of tables and lawn umbrellas behind them. Callahan, looking young and thinner, was standing behind a bench upon which sat his wife, who looked very much the same. Her blond hair was tied back severely and her smile was sweetness itself; her legs, in tight breeches and gleaming boots, were crossed in comfortable self-assurance. Callahan’s hand was on her jacketed shoulder. Her own hand, in a string glove, rested on his.

Pablo turned the picture face down. The room smelled of saffron.

The Callahans would have to go with Negus now.

Tabor hobbled up on deck, bringing two stationary flashlights with him. Scanning the night horizon, he saw no lights in view; he would have to risk some light of his own to get the thing done. But to bring the bodies up from the lazaret by main force was more than he could manage. He switched the flashlights on—one beside the hatchway to light the compartment, the other beside an after hatch to light his work space. Then he engaged the tri-net motor and swung the bar amidships; the chain line, coils and chafing gear spread out around him like a collapsed circus tent. From among the heap, he seized an end of chain line and, grasping it under his arm, eased himself painfully down the ladder, pulling a web of coils behind him.

He came to Callahan first and linked two sections of chain line under the dead man’s fleshy shoulders. When he thought the links
were secured, he went topside and set the tri-net bar to hauling upright. The coils and chain with their burden rattled up the hatchway like a receding tide; Pablo stationed himself at the top of the ladder to ease the corpse through. With Callahan netted and swinging above the deck, Pablo loosened the chain from under his shoulders, swung the bar outboard and lowered away.