A Flag for Sunrise (50 page)

It went easily. Pablo had been standing by with a gaff in case the netting or the body fouled the overworked engines. But the chain settled, the net spread out without bird’s-nesting and Mr. Callahan rolled off into the quiet ocean and disappeared.

Pablo rested then, nursing his throbbing leg, looking around for lights, for aircraft, for a wall of mountains against the sky northward. When he felt up to it, he went up to the cockpit to check the speed, the bearings and Fathometer. The speed was steady, the Fathometer read over eight fathoms and unchanging, the compass needle was fast on triple zero and the null as constant as Polaris.

Topside, he started up the Lister again to bring back the net to center line. A second time, like a diver, Pablo descended into the lazaret compartment, dragging chain line behind him. He found her easily enough and pulled her into the coils. Her death’s darkness smelled of suntan oil. The net hauling, he guided her up the ladder and out of the hatchway.

When the tri-net boom was lowered and the web offered her out she did not go readily as her husband had. The colorless hair, almost phosphorescent over the water, spread itself among the coils, her down vest was caught on a cross wire, her legs, akimbo, were wrapped in the chains. In the end, he had to bring his light to the rail and cut her free from the webbing. The chains snapped loose, and then upright, her hair held on its ends by the coils that enshrouded her like a veil, she fell. Wide-eyed, as though eight fathoms held some new curiosity—like a figurehead, dolorous, an image of destiny—feet first into the water.

So Pablo had done with his dead and he switched off the lights. The null tone and the engines went on throbbing and the pointers held their places. He smoked and took another pill. He felt that his unseen presence on the ocean was ceremony enough for them.

“The answer”—Father Egan was saying—“I think they have it on the prayer wheels. Do you know what it says on the prayer wheels?”

Most of them had gone to sleep. From among the group only the girl with the bandaged arm, the feverish girl and her boyfriend, the dark-bearded young man and the blond giant remained to listen. A few others had gathered around a fire at the base of the overgrown pyramid and were smoking marijuana and passing a bottle of colorless rum. Their laughter sounded a muffled echo off the ancient stone.

“On the prayer wheels it says, ‘The jewel is in the lotus.’ They turn the wheels round hundreds of times a day. The little flags flutter so the wind says it. The Jewel is in the Lotus.”

The feverish girl moaned and stirred in her lover’s arms. Egan stopped speaking and looked at her and saw that she had the dengue. He had had it himself several times. He would have to get her some medicine, he thought, and for a moment he forgot what it was he had been preaching to them. Then it came back to him. The girl, he thought, was like a lotus and the pain in her overbright eyes a jewel.

“The lotus,” he told her, “is sweet and fragrant, beautiful in life. But it’s fallible and it’s born for death. It’s sown in corruption. But the jewel—” He felt his arm go numb and when he tried to raise it he could not. “The jewel is undying and beyond time. Beyond measure. The jewel is the meaning, you see.”

A high-pitched cry sounded from somewhere in the deeper jungle, a cry that might have been human. Something surprised in the dark.

“You’re the lotus. Your dear bodies that you’re so fond of. You’re the lotus. The jewel is in you.” Egan laughed and brushed his sleeve across his mouth again. “The jewel’s in hock to you. And the whole world of mortality is the lotus. And the Living is the jewel in it. That’s the bright side.”

He looked for the drunken man who had heckled him, but the man had gone away.

“It is sown in corruption,” Egan declaimed, “it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power! On the bright side—everything’s fine. You’d think they’d have no business here whose place is on the bright
side. Here—it’s whirl.” He put out his hand and described a spiral with three fingers. “Whirl is King and it’s lonely and in shadow, but over there—well, that’s life over there, that’s where the Living belongs. But,” he said, and tapped his palm with his forefinger as though citing some father of doctrine, “the Jewel is in the Lotus! Why?”

He looked at them each in turn.

“Why, children?”

They were all still, watching.

“Because,” Egan thundered, “they’re as lonely as we are! The Living is lonely for itself. For the shard of itself that’s lost in us, the jewel in the lotus.” He paused to draw breath.

“Isn’t it wonderful after all? That we’re secret lovers? Because why else would the Living be concealed within this meat, in all these fears and sweats, the Holy One among the dead? Why would he hide himself in Whirl to give meaning to a pile of corpses? Why isn’t a
campesino
just an animal with a name? Why not? Why is there any meaning in a heap of dead? Or a lost kiddie. A sick little girl, a drowned …” A shudder ran through him and he paused again. “Because the Jewel is in the Lotus out of loneliness and secret love. He doesn’t have any choice.”

Exhausted, he leaned on the stone. Then he thought of something that he had once read. Or perhaps he had written it himself.

“It’s hard to see,” he told the young people. “You never know when you see the Living. The eye you see him with is the same eye with which he sees you.”

The girl with dengue put her hands on her companion’s shoulders and pulled herself upright.

“The bands broke,” she said, half singing. “The bands broke on Faithful John’s heart.” The boy who was with her tried to ease her back down; she fought him. “The bands broke on the heart of Faithful John,” she screamed.

Egan had sunk to the ground and lay resting against the stela. It seemed to him that he had made it come out all right. His hand was on his briefcase, over the bulge of his bottle of Flor de Cana.

“No, no,” he told the girl kindly. “That’s not the same at all. That’s a fairy tale.”

Justin had spent the morning making inventory and talking to a man from the shipper’s office in town. They had told her that it would be easier and more economical to load the mission’s promptuary equipment on shipboard at Puerto Alvarado than to ship it by way of the capital. He would have a ship with available holding space quite soon.

A short time after noon she was standing in the kitchen when she turned and saw the young Tecanecan woman to whom she had spoken on the beach the week before. The young woman had come up the front steps without a sound. Justin had never learned her name.

“I don’t think I can come here again,” the young woman said. “Only in emergencies.”

Justin led her into the kitchen.

“You’re right. You shouldn’t risk coming here. I sent you a note through the sexton.”

“I have an answer for you from those in charge,” the young woman said. “They agree that you can’t be involved further. They say only continue to leave the dock lights on, this is all they ask.”

“That’s not much to ask.”

“They say it’s well you’re preparing to leave. We’re all in great danger now. If things don’t happen soon we’ll have to go for the mountains.”

“Will it be soon?”

“I think so but I know very little. Only those in charge know.”

“Well,” Justin said, “I suppose I’m out of it now.”

“You’re out of it. But listen—when it starts, nobody is going to be safe. There are medical supplies here and they’ll be wanted.”

“When we go I’ll lock up as much as I can in the building. They’re at your disposal.”

“If it should be that you’re still here when it comes, you might be safer with us. You can make your own decision. I’ll try to get word to you beforehand but there may not be time.”

“Thank you,” Justin said. “I’ll be all right.”

“They also say thanks. Those in charge.”

“Yes,” Justin said.

As the girl was leaving, Justin went a step after her.

“How’s Father Godoy?”

“Gone,” the girl said. “Gone to the Montana.”

When the girl was gone, Justin felt desperate. Desperate to leave, to be gone—because their idleness and uselessness seemed more shameful than ever now that they could not actively help. Her work now would consist in persuading Charlie Egan to leave with her.

Thinking of Egan put her in mind of the man she had seen at Playa Tate and who was supposed to be taking the priest to dinner. He was a very self-confident man, very assured, rather arrogant. It seemed to her that she came very close to disliking him. For some reason, she did not altogether. It might be that he reminded her of someone, she thought.

Then the weight of things came down on her. The six years, everything that had happened since the day of the fiesta, Godoy, the child killings. A storm broke inside her, leaving her feeling for all the world as she had felt sometimes as a child—ashamed of her own triviality and insignificance, ashamed above all of her own body and its gross necessities, its rankness, its sinfulness, its carnality. She had stopped eating then, hoping to die. She found now that she couldn’t stay still, couldn’t put one thought in front of another, couldn’t cry. She stood in the kitchen staring through the open door at the rectangle of raw mindless sky and waiting, more alone—and more lonely—than she had ever been.

Holliwell had had a hard day and he spent a large part of it trying not to get drunk. Finless, he had been going back and forth between the hotel beach and his bungalow. The hotel was suddenly full of people who described themselves to each other as contractors, and although they reminded him in some ways of the contractors he had known in Vietnam, they seemed to him at once more sinister and less colorful. Pale and foul-mouthed, they were everywhere—drinking beer at the water’s edge, crowding the bar; they talked about Bogotà, Managua, Zihuatanejo and what they called Cancún City. Many of them seemed to be old acquaintances of Heath and Señor Soyer, the Cuban hardware man. Others were friends of Olga and Buddy. When they were
quiet it meant they were on about coke or emeralds. It was as though there was some convocation of evil elements, a jar culture oozing out and discovering itself.

He parked his rented jeep beside the road, mounted the mission steps and walked straight into her in the kitchen. She looked ominously solemn.

“You know I don’t know your name?” Holliwell said.

“Justin Feeney,” she said. Perplexed, he thought, and weary.

“Is Father Egan around?”

She shook her head.

“He’s back in the ruins. I’m sure he forgot about dinner with you. I should have told you he would.”

“Maybe I should go back and talk to him.”

“It’s too far,” she said. “It’ll get dark and you’ll lose your way. And he won’t go with you. He’s out of it.”

Holliwell turned to look at the sky’s light.

“He’s in a bad way,” Justin Feeney told him.

“So be it,” Holliwell said. “I sure would like a look at those ruins once.”

“How’s your leg?”

“Fine,” he said. He looked at her; it seemed she had not moved at all since his coming in.

“You must have rented that jeep and everything,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Nothing to be done, I guess.”

“Do you like brandy?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She went into the dispensary wing and came out with a small bottle of medicinal brandy and a bottle of
agua mineral
.

“You have some,” Holliwell said, when she had opened them. She seemed not to hear.

“I’d take you back to the ruins myself if there was time,” she said. “But there isn’t. It’ll be too dark to see anything.”

“Another time.” He felt her eyes on his face as he drank.

“Listen,” he said when he had finished the brandy, “how about you coming in to town with me? I’d just as soon not go back to the Paradise.”

“No,” she said, and laughed nervously. “No, it’s not possible.”

“Sure?”

“No,” she said firmly. “Not possible.”

“O.K.,” Holliwell said. He wanted not to leave. “Do you suppose I could have another brandy?”

“You shouldn’t,” she told him. “Your system’s been poisoned.”

“My leg’s fine. The rest of me could use a little bracing.”

“You shouldn’t,” she told him.

“Well, hell,” Holliwell said. “Checked at every turn.”

“All right,” Justin said. She went back into the dispensary and when she came out she had two bottles of brandy, together with the bottled water. When she poured his, she poured one for herself.

“Is something wrong?” Holliwell asked, seeing her.

“I’d like to go into town for dinner,” Justin told him. “I will.”

“You will?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, please.”

Holliwell was smiling uncertainly.

“Fine,” he said after a moment.

“We could go,” the nun said, “to the Chinese restaurant in town. It’s not too bad.”

“That’s fine,” he said.

There was something wrong, he decided. It was not the bad atmosphere he had brought from the hotel, or his disorientation or the pain in his knee, which burned now with the liquor. The woman was on wires, her eyes were wide open and staring, her mouth slightly open as though she had received a blow. She had the most beautiful eyes, he thought.

“Why don’t I drive in,” Justin said. “You can leave your jeep here if you like.”

“You’re afraid I’ll pass out at the wheel?”

“You might well,” she said. “But I just thought you’d be more comfortable.”

“That’s kind of you,” he said. “I would be.”

She was trying very hard to be cool, he thought, enjoying herself a little; she seemed to really want to come along with him. But she could not quite get it together. She was up to something. Drinking his drink, watching her, he felt a certain regret at having come. He was thinking that there was going to be trouble and that she knew it and was afraid. And although he was certainly neither a spy nor an informer, although his visit was an innocent one—he was not the company she should be keeping.

They drove in silence through the brief dusk and into the night. The ghostly sparkle of the sea was on their right; on their left the darkness compounded itself into the mass of the Sierra. It was a ride on the edge, among half-seen and unseen things, an increasingly tense and uneasy-making ride for Holliwell. He caught glimpses of wood fires through slat doorways, of fires in the cane fields. Beside him at the wheel, a frozen-faced female stranger possessed of some taut strength he felt himself to be somehow taxing. But it was beautiful there; the wind was what God had meant the wind to be, fresh from the ocean, unsullied by time. Smaller breezes stirred against the sea wind’s breast, carrying an iodine smell, a smell of jacaranda, of flowers he knew by half-forgotten, six-toned names from across the world—
me-iang, ving, ba
—the smell of villes in Ban Me Thuot, cooking oil, excrement, incense, death. The smell of the world turning. War.