Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

He leaned back against the boards and let his eyes roll heavenward.

“I mean there’s more stuff, man … nobody knows.”

Holliwell shivered in spite of the heat. He took a Dramamine from his own pill bottle.

“Well,” he told Pablo after a while, “I’m going to start the engine up. Maybe we can get ourselves out in the shipping lane. If they see us that close up, maybe they’ll stop.”

Pablo nodded, smiling ambiguously. How mad can he be? Holliwell wondered. Doesn’t he care?

The engine declined to turn over. For nearly a quarter of an hour Holliwell labored over it without effect, then, covered with sweat, he sank back against the side of the boat. Pablo crawled aft, removed the engine cover and wiped the inside with the edge of a tarp. He checked the hose connections, squeezed the pump and returned to his space in the bow.

“Try it now, Doc.”

Holliwell pulled the cord; the Evinrude roared to life.

“Points were wet,” Pablo said. “That’s all.”

“Thanks,” Holliwell said. He felt as though his bad luck with the engine would make him seem more vulnerable and quicken Pablo’s madness. They exchanged looks. Pablo had never stopped smiling. Holliwell was learning to hate him.

“You know about those Indian carvings, right?”

“No one understands them completely. Only a few things about them.”

“Tell me,” Pablo said.

“Well,” Holliwell said with a thin smile, “a lot of them are about a rain god we call God Seven.”

“God Seven? That’s all?”

“We don’t know how to say his name.”

“Not even you?”

“No.”

Pablo looked thoughtful.

“That old man back there,” he said, “I bet you he knows.”

“There’s a king on some of the stones — well, maybe he’s a god too — but we think he’s a king. Somebody had it in for him because everywhere he’s represented they’ve chipped away his face. Nobody knows who he really was. We call him Stormy Sky.”

“Stormy Sky,” Pablo said, and then repeated the words under his breath. “Hey, tell me about those human sacrifices. What were they about?”

“Whatever they’re always about. The Indians didn’t invent human sacrifice.”

“I understand why they did it,” Pablo told Holliwell. “I can feel inside me why. I think it’s in my blood.”

Holliwell watched the young man and said nothing.

“You know about the magic they got there?” Pablo asked.

Holliwell reached for the jug and took a swallow of water.

“What magic?”

“I don’t mean the old-time stuff,” Pablo said. “I mean the bad shit that goes on now. The sacrifices.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Holliwell said.

Pablo shrugged. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, mister. But you might as well know the old man talked to me. I know what goes on in that place. The Demiurge and that.”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” Holliwell said. He had come to realize that Pablo affected to regard him as party to some freemasonry of his own imagining. He could not decide whether the wiser course was to let him continue in that impression or to try and set him straight.

“I guess you’ll talk to me when you’re ready,” Pablo said. “When the times comes. We could be a long time in this boat.”

Holliwell interpreted Pablo’s statement as threat. He figured the young man’s weight at about a hundred and fifty pounds — but a hard case, sinewy and mean with enough concentrated malice and nervous energy to make him more than difficult. Moreover he was young and crazy and Holliwell growing weak with the sun and the lack of sleep. Holliwell avoided looking at him, trying to be ready and to hope for the best. They might yet be picked up.

Surely, he thought, they must have known at the mission that this boy was mad and dangerous? It might be that he was not as deranged as he seemed. He could not be sure; they were do-gooders there, bien pensants . There was a terrible justice in it that he was not in the mood to savor.

A small freighter had come up on the southern horizon, taking what seemed to be an inshore course. Holliwell licked his lips and fixed his concentration on the ship, holding the throttle on full.

“They say what you don’t know can’t hurt you,” Pablo said, “but that’s not so. You get turned around when you don’t know anything.”

“Right,” Holliwell said.

“Man, I’ll tell you, I found out so much since I come down this way I can’t believe it. The world ain’t anything like I thought it was.”

Holliwell was intrigued. “Is it better or worse?”

Pablo’s face broke into an adolescent smile.

“Uh … let’s see.” He thought about it for a moment. “Better and worse, I guess. There’s more to it. For me, better.”

“Good,” Holliwell said.

“I see what you’re doing,” Pablo said slyly. “You’re playing me along. I’m supposed to learn from you.”

Holliwell looked at him then, studied the spare contours of his brown face, his overheated eyes. It was like looking into some visceral nastiness, something foul. And somehow familiar.

“You know a hell of a lot more than you’re letting on, mister. I can tell that by now.”

As the sun’s force flattened out over the subject ocean, Pablo took off his shirt and pants, dipped the shirt in sea water and wrapped it around his head like a turban. He stretched himself out across the forward part of the boat and it seemed as though he were enjoying himself, enjoying the sun. Holliwell saw that the diver’s knife was strapped to his leg.

The freighter Holliwell had singled out was still coming on. He fixed his eyes on its black hull now, trying to capture the ship with his will. He could see the faint diesel smoke above her funnel. His hand ached as he gripped the engine’s throttle; he was trying to wrestle the boat beyond flank speed.

Pablo was watching him.

“We’re gonna be O.K.,” he told Holliwell.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Holliwell said.

“I’m tellin’ you, man, you got nothing to worry about. We’re going home. At least I am.”

For more than an hour, Holliwell fixed his concentration on the freighter, trying to get some measure of its bearing and speed. Only when his eyes flooded with sweat did he turn away, steadying the throttle with the crook of his arm, to clean his sunglasses and wet his face with a little fresh water. Fresh water afforded only the briefest relief. He could feel his face swelling, heat and salt were marinating his exposed flesh. Lifting the jug, he drank sparingly, thinking of the wasted water. He felt sick and afraid.

Pablo had gone into something like a sleep. His yellow eyes were blank, half covered by twitching lids and shaded by the fold of the shirt tied over his brow. Though Holliwell tried his best to put Pablo’s presence from his mind, it was hard for him not to look at the knife that was secured to the young man’s calf. The knife had a plastic hilt and handle and a wide heavy blade. To Holliwell’s mind, there was something of Pablo himself about it.

In the depths of his sun-stricken panic, a monster image began to form compounded of Pablo and his blood-guttered, Day-Glo knife. For hours he had been hearing the slurred slow speech, trying to read the murky hooded eyes, watching the muscles tense and relax in his companion’s lean brown face. It was as though he had been cornered after a lifelong chase by his personal devil. All his life, he thought, from childhood, the likes of Pablo had been in pursuit of him. But he had not come so far to be trapped like this, at noon, in a lonely place. He resolved that although the ocean might get him, the sun, thirst or starvation, Pablo would not. He would see them both dead first. The resolution gave him a bitter satisfaction that was, after hope, his only comfort; he knew he would hold to it.