Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

The distant ship was still miles away and hardly any bigger on the horizon. He felt like shouting.

“You ain’t gonna make it,” Pablo said to him.

The words froze his blood but he kept his eye on the ship.

“What do you mean by that, Pablo?”

“He changed course is what I mean,” Pablo said. He was looking past Holliwell at the freighter. “You won’t cut across him now.”

Holliwell could almost make out the company signature painted in yellow letters across the sky-blue superstructure. She was such a pretty thing, he thought.

“Maybe he can see us,” Holliwell said.

“If he can, he’s not stopping.”

“He must see us.”

“Well, it’s funny down here,” Pablo said. “Anywhere at sea these days. Just because a man sees you don’t mean he’s gonna come your way. And if he does, that ain’t always good.”

Holliwell kept watching the ship; her angle had shifted so that the letters under the fantail that spelled out her name and port of origin were partly visible. In desperation, he looked to other quarters. There were two other ships in view but they were very far away. He looked at his watch; the hands showed half past noon. The watch seemed a foolish thing, a little tin register of the immensities that surrounded them. And there was only so much daylight. So much fuel, so much water.

Pablo was peeling an orange. Holliwell watched him, mastering his own anger and revulsion.

“We’re in a spot, Pablo, don’t you think?”

Pablo passed him half of the peeled orange and nodded toward the east.

“Look there.”

“What is it?” Holliwell was aware of the faint quaver in his voice. “Is the weather changing?”

Pablo smiled comfortably.

“Islands,” he said. “If we don’t see one today, we will tomorrow. Real pretty islands, too.”

Holliwell made one last attempt to persuade himself of Pablo’s rationality; it failed. He could see nothing but delusion and menace in the animal eyes.

“Well,” he said after a minute, “I’ll take us out for another hour. Then we better wait and see.” He had the sense that Pablo found his firm reasonableness amusing. “If we don’t get any help by four o’clock, I’ll head north and see if we can get a start toward the coast of Compostela.”

“That’s against the wind,” Pablo said. “We’ll never get up there. We’re going to the islands.”

Holliwell put the orange section in his mouth, chewed the pulp and spat it out.

“I don’t understand why you’re so sure of that.”

“Because it’s meant to be,” Pablo told him. “That’s why.”

He made no reply but Pablo seemed disappointed in his response.

“You better take it easy, Doc. A man as smart as you, you oughtn’t to be so antsy.”

“I’m fine,” Holliwell said. “You take it easy.”

Pablo’s eyes went cold. A little ripple of anger flashed across their surface, a knife glint.

“Maybe you ain’t who I thought you were,” he said to Holliwell.

“I’m the other guy in your boat,” Holliwell said. “That’s got to be good enough.”

Pablo watched him unhappily for a while and then eased himself aft.

“Take a break,” he told Holliwell. “I’ll steer for a while.”

Holliwell could not bring himself to let go of the throttle.

“What the hell’s the matter?” Pablo said. “Afraid I’ll run us off the road?”

Holliwell gave over and let Pablo replace him in the stern. When they had crossed he spread his shirt over his face and lay back, resting his head on the tarp. He was exhausted but afraid to sleep.

“I thought you were one of those people,” Pablo was saying to him. “I figured you were all right.”

“What people?”

“One of those people from that place there. I thought you were part of it.

“Just passing through,” Holliwell said.

“You got to understand something, Holliwell. There’s a process and I’m in the middle of it. A lot of stuff I do is meant to be.”

Holliwell was not surprised by this declaration; he had been expecting something of the sort and he was ready. The loathing he felt braced his blood like an antitoxin. He would stay ready. In spite of the sun and the heat he would not lose consciousness. He lifted the shirt from his face and, turning on his side, looked across the bow. Another ship had passed them by, gone north.

“You know what I’m talking about,” Pablo said. “I know fucking well you do.” Then he cut the engine and lapsed into silence.

Gradually, Holliwell gave in to his weariness and let his mind spin out of focus. His dreams, if dreams they were, came as salted and sun-drenched as the waking world around him. He saw ships where there were none. One seemed to loom above them less than an arm’s span away; he saw it in the clearest detail, red lead on the rails, rust under the waterline when she rolled, paintwork and polished brass on the flying bridge.

When he came out of it, some of the heat and light had ebbed from the day. Heavy ridges of cloud were forming ahead and a steady wind had come up that drove the boat before it, misting them with spray at every fifth wave and hurrying them ever farther from the coast. There were no more ships in sight.

Pablo made a sea anchor of a bucket to hold the stern out of the wind and dry his clothes for the coming night. Without speaking, he took Holliwell’s shirt and spread it out beside his own.

“You faked me out, mister,” he said. “If you ain’t part of it you better not fuck it up. You fuck it up — that’s turning me around and I don’t permit that.”

“You have to trust me,” Holliwell said. “We need each other out here.”

“I don’t need anybody,” Pablo told him. “Not no more. Boy, I could tell you the shit trusting people has got me into. I don’t even like to think about it.”

“I’m on your side,” Holliwell said. “Where else could I be?”

As the sun declined, color returned to the sky. A thin green haze seemed to float over the surface of the ocean.

“I don’t feel good,” Pablo said suddenly. “My leg … I got fever, I think.”

Holliwell took heart; he was all concern. He wet his handkerchief in the fresh water and gave it to Pablo for a salve. They traded places and Holliwell took back the tiller. The wind was noticeably cooler now. Pablo put his shirt on and lay back in the bow, resting on the tarp and his folded trousers.

“You’ve got penicillin there,” Holliwell told his shipmate. “You ought to take it.”

Pablo found the pills and Holliwell observed that his fingers trembled as he lifted the plastic top from the tube. He followed the penicillin with one of his other pills, the ones that made him talkative.

“I’m hurting for sure,” Pablo said.

Glancing at the boat compass, Holliwell saw that their drift was dead east. Pablo was probably right then, Compostela would not be for them. Whatever was in store would reveal itself in unbounded ocean.

Pablo struggled up and propped himself on an elbow.

“You wouldn’t try and turn me around, would you, Doc?”

“Of course not,” Holliwell said.

“ ’Cause that’d be the last goddamn thing you ever tried, Jim. You better believe it.”

“Just take it easy, Pablo.” Holliwell’s chest was spongy with fear. The wind chilled him and he began to shiver. Pablo sank back down to his rest and seemed to sleep. Holliwell eyed the knife strapped to his leg; it was held in the sheath by a rubber noose that circled the handle. Getting it loose would be a delicate and extremely dangerous operation. And the little bastard never properly slept, Holliwell thought. His eyes stayed open.

He was no better than an animal. He was an animal.