Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“It’s the best thing, Frank. I was going to leave Pablo with Charlie but it’ll be better for both of them if he goes with you.”

“All right,” Holliwell said. “Let’s do it.”

While the Caribs stared their prisoners down, Justin and Holliwell set about gathering such supplies as would be needed for the passage out to sea. In the kitchen they loaded a crate with fruit: pineapples, papayas, a few dozen lemons. Half the canned food left in the larders went in with it, mainly the corned beef and beans on which Egan subsisted. They took turns laboring over the kitchen pump, bringing up enough water to fill a fifty-liter drum. When they had enough of everything, they pressed two of the captured troopers into service to help them carry the lot to the boathouse; one of the rebel gunmen posted on the road went along as escort. The small procession marched across the beach, past the corpses of the slain Guardia men and onto the small dock. With Holliwell standing in the whaler, they passed the provisions along hand to hand, feeling out each load from each other’s arms in nearly complete darkness. From the open boat-house, they took the last half-filled drum of gasoline, some kerosene, a plastic funnel.

When they got back to the road, the two pickup trucks stood loaded and the insurrectionist commander was bringing his men in from the surrounding woods to gather along the road. The commander was a bookkeeper in the employ of an Alvarado brothel and he was still in shock as a result of his earlier successful skirmish with the Guardia. His eyes were glazed with nervous fatigue, he continually ran his hand across his face in the manner of one disoriented. In fact his sense of reality had been subverted by the action; his upbringing had been gentle by the standards of Tecan and his only prior experience of massed weaponry and its effects had been at the cinema. He did not know what to make of Holliwell and consequently ignored him. The bookkeeper was a short heavy young man with a jowly spoiled-child’s face. Holliwell found him sympathetic.

As Holliwell stood by, he told Justin that there was not room in the trucks for his men, the medical supplies and the prisoners together. Justin suggested that the prisoners would have to walk. This made the bookkeeper unhappy; he had spoken eloquently to them and they had listened to him and enlisted under his command and he did not want to lose them. Nothing of the sort had ever happened to him before. Listening in, Holliwell envied him too. He had had a moment.

Justin and the bookkeeper agreed that it was necessary to abandon the mission now. The volume of fire from the direction of town seemed to have decreased but it was heavier in the hills behind them. And there was heavy firing now to the south, where there had been little before. It was the direction in which they were headed.

They went upstairs to the dispensary and the bookkeeper began to address his huddled prisoners. He told them what his job had been until the day before and how never before had he known who he was, but in the revolution he had found his freedom as they would find theirs. He hoped that they would keep faith with him and take their place in the revolution even though it meant they would have to walk to it and surrender all over again. If he were an evil man like their officers, he told them, he might simply have killed them. If he had been captured by them, he pointed out, they would certainly have been ordered to kill him and would have done so under compulsion. Saying so much, the bookkeeper seemed hardly to believe it, although it was true enough. He was an eloquent young man. He had been overqualified as a brothel’s bookkeeper but one often met over-qualified people in that part of the world.

While Justin went off to get a reserve of clean bandages and some antibiotics for Pablo, Holliwell walked to the young man’s bedside to see who it was he would be sharing an pen boat with. Father Egan was still sitting at the foot of the bed.

“You two haven’t really met, have you? This is Holliwell, Pablo. He’s an anthropologist. And this is Pablo.”

“How’re you feeling, Pablo?” Holliwell asked.

“Could be better,” Pablo said. Holliwell came to the disturbing conclusion that he was being sized up for a mark. It occurred to him that Pablo might not even realize what he was about, that it was simply his manner. “What you doin’ in this here shithole, cousin?”

“I was doing a study,” Holliwell said.

Pablo laughed, after a fashion. “Yeah?”

Holliwell walked away and met Justin halfway across the room, carrying Pablo’s medicine.

“Who is this kid?” he asked her.

“Nobody exactly knows. Charlie Egan says the law’s after him and that’s good enough for me. He’s probably off a boat.”

Holliwell said nothing.

He and Justin lifted the young man out of bed and stood him on his feet as the Indian prisoners and the bookkeeper watched. When he was upright, the young man turned to Father Egan.

“You think it’s gonna be all right?” He asked the priest. Holliwell was touched.

“Yes, it’ll be all right, Pablo. It’ll always be all right for you.”

Pablo smiled; he looked at Justin and Holliwell with what Holliwell would have sworn was triumphant malice. Then his features clouded.

“Where’s my knife?” he demanded.

Father Egan reached under the bedclothes to withdraw a huge diver’s knife in a plastic sheath.

Pablo took it from him.

“You gotta have a knife, right? To cut stuff with.”

“Want me to carry it?” Holliwell asked.

“That’s all right,” Pablo said, and took it.

The three of them walked down to the boat. From time to time, Pablo put his hand on Holliwell’s shoulder and leaned his weight on it. Behind them, the trucks started their engines. The bookkeeper and his prisoners descended from the dispensary, picking up the hurricane lamps as they came.

Holliwell and Justin helped Pablo down into the whaler. He crawled to the bow and worked the forward seat out of the bulkheads and lay down on a damp tarp.

“Can you … run it?” Justin asked Holliwell.

“Sure.”

“There’s a compass in it for what that’s worth. Keep to the right going out. There are reefs.”

“Do you think I betrayed you?” Holliwell asked her. “I didn’t mean it to be like that.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. I know you didn’t. Like you said, it doesn’t matter.” She touched him very lightly on the arm. “Who knows where we’re both going?”

“I’ll met,” he said.

“I have no regrets now. Not now.”

“Goodbye. Love.”

“Oh, Frank,” she said quickly, as though she were embarrassed. She turned away and he could hardly hear her. “Sure. Goodbye, Frank.”

When he started up the engine, he tried to watch her walk off, but the darkness swallowed her at once. Someone called to her, the headlights of the pickup trucks went on.

As he nosed the boat away from the dock, he thought of the reefs and swallowed hard. He could feel the young man, Pablo, watching him from the bow, seeing, somehow, through the darkness.

In the gathering heat of day, they brought May Feeney to the justicia . She rode beside a Guardia lieutenant with fair, freckled skin, light blue eyes and a tweedy brown moustache. The lieutenant said not a word to her but for the whole dreadful length of the ride he kept his hand under her skirt. Poking, idling there. She could only sit as far away from him as there was space in the seat and she kept her eyes down, from shame and so as not to see him.

In the square where everyone had come to see the waxen Christ, the vultures had come down from the treetops and were hopping delicately about the walks and lawns. There was a long line of them on the roof of the Municipalidad. They moved their necks from side to side like mechanical creatures to fix their bright bead eyes in turn on every aspect of the scene below. But the streets and the square were deserted now.