A Flag for Sunrise (7 page)

She cleaned and scaled the snapper, washed the shrimp and showered in her own quarters. Changing, she put on a cool khaki skirt, a red checked shirt, an engineer’s red scarf over her hair. When she went back into the kitchen, she found Father Egan mixing cold well water into his rum.

“Are we friends today?” she asked him.

“There’s a level, Justin, on which we’re always friends. Then there’s a level on which we can’t be.”

Justin received this response in silence. Mystical as ever, she thought. She picked up the cleaned fish, stood holding it for a few moments, then set it down again.

“Sister Mary Joseph is after us to close. You probably know that.”

“Yes,” the priest said. “Of course it’s up to you.”

“Why is everything up to me?” she asked, wiping her hands on a towel. “I mean, what’s happening with you? It’s very worrying.”

“Don’t reproach me,” Father Egan said. “I’m reinforcing this mutiny with my frail presence. It’s up to you because you’re a sensible girl.”

“Must you keep drinking?”

“Never mind that,” Father Egan said.

She walked over to the kitchen table and leaned on her fist, watching him.

“You’ve been so darn irrational I can’t cope. And I know you’ve been worse since that night you had the boat out. I wish I knew what that was about.”

“Under the seal,” Egan said. “The rest is silence.”

Sister Justin shook her head to clear it of his madness.

“I don’t feel very sensible now,” she said. “I feel like a complete idiot.”

“Not at all,” Egan said. “Do you want to know what I think?”

“Yes, please.”

“I think you’re very intelligent and moral and all good nunnish things. You had an attack of self-righteousness and you decided to try the impossible. Nothing wrong with that, Justin. Fine tradition behind it.”

“You encouraged me.”

“Yes. Well, I wanted to stay too. And I respect you, you see. Believe it or not.”

“I thought I could pull it off.”

“Because you were always made much of by the order. They want to keep you. You’ve had things your own way. You’ve been spoiled, dear.”

“Oh, Lord,” Justin said. “Spoiled hell.” She folded her arms angrily and went to stand in the doorway with her back to him. “I’ve been on my hands and knees since college. I mean—I work for a living. I wouldn’t call this a cloistered life, would you?”

She heard his dry sickly laughter and turned.

“Is what I’m saying ridiculous?”

“You’ve been morally spoiled. There’s always been someone around to take your good intentions seriously—and if that isn’t being spoiled I don’t know what is.” He sniffed at his rum and drank it. “Religious women are always a good deal younger than their ages—Mary Joe’s an example. Religious men are worse. One’s always a kid.
The life is childish.” He shrugged. “Believing
at all
is childish, isn’t it?”

Justin looked at him surprised. Perhaps, she thought, he was snapping a paradox. They were all great Chestertonians in his generation.

“You haven’t been saying your office,” she said, realizing it for the first time. “You haven’t said it for ages.”

“I consider it wrongly written down.”

She smiled, watching him polish off the rum.

“Are you serious?”

“I will—if called upon—say Mass. I will administer the sacraments. But my office is strictly between myself and God and I won’t say it their way. It’s all wrong, you know,” he said, fixing her with an unsettling stare. “They have it all wrong. The whole thing.”

“I give up,” Justin said.

“Interesting my orthodoxy should make any difference to you. Surely you don’t believe?”

“I can’t answer that question.”

“Well,” Egan said, “you’re supposed to answer it every day.”

At the kitchen counter, she took up the fish again. The right thing would be to broil it, to make a sauce with peppers and onions and greens. But he would be more likely to eat it if she simply shredded it into the soup with some shrimp. It was such a shame. Red snapper.

It went into the soup and Egan faded back toward his quarters.

Justin found herself on the veranda again. Her hands were clenched on the rail as she leaned out toward the ocean, the ebbing tide. The sea’s surface was soft blue; the sun had withdrawn beyond the green saw-toothed hills above the station.

Utter total foolishness, she repeated silently.

Her soul extended along this meditation as it might in prayer. There was nothing. Only the sea, shadowed deeps, predatory eyes. Her heart beat quietly alone, its panicked quickening like a signal to the void, unanswered, uncomforted. It beat only for her, to no larger measure, a futile rounding of blood. The desire for death made her dizzy; it felt almost like joy.

She was still leaning over the rail, half stunned with despair, when she saw a young man walking along the beach from the direction of the village. He was barefoot and full-bearded, extraordinarily blond;
he wore a white shirt of the sort that required a detachable collar and faded bib overalls. When he drew closer she could see the filthy condition of his shirt and the dirt and dried blood that soiled his hands. His appearance bespoke need and for this reason she was vaguely glad to see him there. She assumed he was one of the North American kids who drifted up and down the Isthmus following the beach. They had first appeared in numbers the previous spring. Some of them were far gone with dope or alcohol. Her ready impulse was to have him come in and see if there was anything that might be done—before Campos and his men or the local
ratones
caught scent of him.

Justin had gone as far as the top step when the odd cut of his hair registered on her. It was crude cropping that one did not see on even the weirdest passing gringos, almost medieval, monkish. As she started down to the beach, he turned toward her and his face stopped her cold.

Although the man’s walk and carriage were youthful, his face was like an old man’s, the skin not tanned but reddened and weathered, deeply seamed around the features. The massiveness of his brows and cheekbones made his upper face as square as a box; his nose was long, thin and altogether outsized, upturned toward the tip. Elfin, she thought, staring at him, gnomish—but suggestive of carving like some sort of puppet, a malignant Pinocchio.

Two things about his small blue eyes impressed her—one was that they were not, she was sure, the eyes of an English speaker, another that they were the most hating eyes she had ever seen.

Justin had to remind herself that she was in lay clothes. But even people who thought nuns bad luck had never looked at her so.

Fascinated, she watched the man’s mouth open and she braced herself for a threat or an obscenity. His shout, though when it came it contorted his face, was absolutely silent.

It seemed that one of the words he mouthed at her was
Schwein
—the bared teeth savaging the lower lip. There were other words.
Du
was one. She had only known German as a tourist in Austria but she felt certain that German was his language.
Schwein, Du.

“Beast” was the word that came to her. She was quite frightened.

Then the youth walked on, toward Puerto Alvarado. He was very big. His shoulders under the stained white shirt looked broad as an ox yoke.

She went back into the kitchen, lifted the pot lid and stirred her red snapper and vegetable soup. The young man, she realized, must be a Mennonite—there were a few of their settlements in the south, inland. They were not numerous in Tecan and it was years since she had seen a band of them in the capital, in the central bus station there. They had seemed shy, cheerful people, very clean and friendly.

It was the time of late afternoon when the color drained out of the day. Sky and ocean gentled to temperate pastels and the jungle on the hillsides was a paler green. Wandering to the doorway, she savored the breeze.

Along the beach, from the grove at Freddy’s to the point southward, there was no one to be seen. Vanished, the passing youth seemed to be a creature compounded of her fears; the hatred, the Germanness were the stuff of nightmare and bad history. Somehow her despair had summoned him.

When Godoy and his jeepload of small boys pulled up at the foot of the station steps, she ran down gratefully to join them. The boys were black Caribs and there were six of them crowded into the jeep, some with the Indian cast of eye or the shock of coarse straight hair that marked the Caribs among the black people of the coast.

“
Buenas
,” she called to them and to Godoy.

“
Buenas
,” the boys said, and made room for her. Some of the younger boys smiled, the two oldest ogled her with grim elaborateness. She sat down next to the priest.

“We’re off,” he declared.

“Right on,” Sister Justin said gaily.

Along the roadside, plantation hands walked homeward cradling their machetes against their shoulders; children struggled along under loads of firewood for the evening meal. At every fresh creek there were women gathering up laundry from the rocks on which it had been drying in the last of the daylight, and other women were hurrying along balancing ocher jugs on their heads filled with cooking water from the public well. But most of the people on the road were walking toward Puerto Alvarado and what remained of the day’s fiesta.

Each time they passed a settlement of sticks and palm thatch Godoy would sound his horn, a child would wave and the boys in the jeep display their privilege as passengers in a private vehicle.

The road led them inland through banana and then pineapple, to
the top of Pico Hill, where they could see the ocean again and the wharves of the distant port, then down again past acres of yellow-painted, numbered company houses, finally to the tin-and-crate-wood shacks on the edge of town. From the town center they could hear the report of exploding firecrackers and the blare of the sound truck the Syrian storekeeper had hired to publicize his holiday specials.

There was a block of paved street where the houses had carports and painted fences, then the Gran hotel, the Texaco station—and they turned into the crowded plaza. Godoy eased the jeep through the crowds and parked against the church wall, behind a barrier of bicycle stands. As soon as the jeep was stopped, the six Carib boys leaped out and disappeared among the crowd.

Godoy watched them go and looked at his watch.

“Now,” he told Justin with a sad smile, “the trick will be to get them back.”

The two of them went past a line of helmeted Guardia and along the edge of the church steps.

In the center of the square, a ceiba tree had been hung with paper garlands and an elderly band in black uniforms was ranged beneath its branches. There were Japanese lanterns strung between trees at two sides of the plaza and the square itself was jammed with people. Men of property stood with transistor radios pressed against their ears, teen-aged parents in cheap cotton dress-up clothes clung to their several tiny children—and lone children by the hundreds puzzled their way through the crowd’s legs. The shoeshine boys had given over their space by the fountain and sat together with their boxes at the park edge, watching for flung cigarette butts, fallen change, loose wallets.

The sailors’ girls had marched uptown from the waterfront brothels and occupied their own space on one lawn where they sat on open newspapers, singing along to the music of the nearest radio and trading comic books with each other.

Along the fountain there were teen-agers, arranged according to social class—the boys watching the prostitutes and the girls, more or less demurely, watching the boys.

There were girls in hip-huggers and “Kiss Me, Stupid” tee shirts and girls whose fancy dress was their school uniforms. There were nearly white boys who wore Italian-style print shirts and looked
bored, stiff self-conscious mestizos in starchy white sport shirts, blacks who broke their Spanish phrases with “mon” and “bruddah,” practiced karate moves, swayed, danced with themselves in a flurry of loose wrists and flashing palms. Across the street, at the gate of the Municipalidad, a few Guardia leaned against the pillars and watched the crowd. They were given all the space they might require.

A little boy with an inflamed eye chased two smaller girls toward the church.

“
Mono malo, mono malo
,” he shouted after them. “Bad monkey.”

It occurred to Justin that she had been hearing children shouting “
mono malo
” at each other for weeks, and calling it also at such of the ragged wandering anglos who were still about. She had never heard an epithet like
mono malo
before.

In the street at the foot of the church steps, a squad of local technicians was struggling with an enormous antiaircraft searchlight, adjusting the dogs and swivels, playing out the wire that led up the steps and into the church interior. Nearby there were men and boys in the purple hoods and cassocks of the Holy Brotherhood, those who had carried the images in the afternoon’s procession.

Justin and Father Godoy stood together near the ceiba tree, facing the church. The air smelled of frangipani, of perfume and hair oil, above all of the raw cane liquor, barely rum, that was being passed in Coke bottles among the sports in the crowd.

At the stroke of darkness, the band broke into a reedy
paso doble
and the great searchlight sent forth an overpowering light. The light broke up the foremost ranks of the crowd, sending the people there reeling back, forcing them to turn away, hands to their eyes. Then it swept around the square, ascending until the beam was pointed straight upward, a pillar of white fire heavenward. A great gasp of joy broke from the crowd.

Spinning again, the column of light descended on the plaza, catching each second a dozen transfixed faces, dazzled the old men in their wicker chairs in the Syrian’s shop and the lounging Guardia, electrified the posters of
Death Wish
in front of the cinema. It made the whores’ beads sparkle, shone on the balloons and patent-leather shoes of the better-off children and on the slick flesh of the banana plants. As it whirled, the crowd screamed and applauded.