Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“I feel fine,” Tabor said, “just fine.” But it was not true. “They’re fucking with my head this morning,” he said.

He was walking away from the dogs, making himself not look back, when he caught sudden sight of two heads above the line of saw grass at the edge of the beach.

Stopping, he saw a boy and a girl in the grass not forty feet away from him. They stood in a peculiar crouch as though they had just stood up or were about to duck. He walked over to them.

The boy was blond, with a red bandana tied around his head; the girl almost as tall with shorter, darker hair. Tabor saw that she was crying.

“Had to be done,” he told them. “They was sick, know what I mean? They had heartworm, had it real bad.”

The young people seemed to relax a little. The girl wiped her sunburned cheek.

“Jeez,” the boy said. “They were pretty dogs.”

Tabor looked away from him.

“What the hell you know about it?”

He saw the girl’s sad blue eyes on his shotgun.

“Don’t you be crying over my dogs,” he told her. “I’ll cry over my own dogs.”

They fell silent. The boy swallowed and twisted his mouth slightly.

“You want to chant with me?” Tabor asked them.

“I don’t believe we know any chants,” the boy said, with something like a smile. The girl clung to his arm.

“You think I’m gonna hurt you, don’t you?”

“I hope not,” the boy said softly. “We didn’t mean any harm. We were just sad about the dogs.”

You little bastard, Tabor thought, you got it all figured out. Humor the crazy man with the iron. Be gentle. Save your own and your girl friend’s ass. Smart boy, Tabor thought. Smart boy.

“You’re good kids,” Tabor said. “I can see you are. You go to college, don’t you?”

The boy nodded warily.

“Well I ain’t gonna hurt you,” Tabor told him. He turned from their frightened faces toward the sun. “Go ahead and have a nice day.”

He walked off toward the water and they called “You too” in unison after him. As he passed between the corpses of his dogs, he turned back toward them and saw that they had not moved.

Cold to the marrow of his bones, he drove through town again and onto the Interstate, traveling west. The trailer court where he lived was beside an old canal, padded with water hyacinth. Across the highway was a brown slope where a billboard advertised a beach hotel and three derricks stood, their pistons rising and falling in perpetual motion.

Tabor’s trailer was in the last row, the one furthest from the road and the most expensive.

He parked beside it, in a little driveway of crushed shell with a sick banana tree at the end of it. He had taken his sunglasses off getting out of the car, and the sun on the streamliner siding of his trailer dazzled his eyes. As he put the glasses back on, he looked toward the sorry little playground that stood fenced between two rows of trailers and saw his son. The boy was lying belly down on one of the rusty miniature slides, his arms dangling to the ground. With one hand he was sifting the surface of shredded shell and dried mud under the slide.

Tabor went to the playground gate.

“Billy.”

The little boy started and turned over quickly, guiltily.

“How the hell come you ain’t in school? Whatchyou doin’ around here?”

Billy walked toward him ready to flinch.

“She didn’t get you up, did she?” Tabor shouted. Billy shook his head. Tabor stood tapping his foot, looking at the ground.

“Dumb bitch,” he whispered.

Hearing him, the boy wiped his nose, uneasily.

That could just do it, Tabor thought.

“Look here,” he told the little boy, “I’m gonna drive you in after a while. Meantime you stay right out here and don’t come in, hear?”

He went back to the trailer and let himself in. The living room had a sweet stale smell, spilled beer, undone laundry.

And it was just the sort of place you had to keep clean, he thought. Like a ship. You had to keep it clean or pretty soon it was like you were living in the back seat of your car.

Clothes were piled beside an empty laundry bag at one end of the pocket sofa — her blouses, work uniforms, Billy’s dungarees. Spread out across the rest of the sofa were the sections of the past Sunday’s paper. On the arm was a stack of Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets she had let some missionaries give her.

She was asleep in their bedroom, the end compartment.

Tabor went quietly into the kitchen and opened the waist-high refrigerator. There were three shelves in it — the bottom shelf held nothing except cans of Jax beer. On the two top shelves were row upon row of hamburger patties each on its separate waxed-paper square. She brought them home frozen in cardboard boxes from the place she worked.

As he looked at the rows of hamburger, a curious impulse came into his mind. He straightened up and took a breath — he had the sensation of time running out, of seconds being counted off toward an ending. Finally, he took a can of Jax out, opened it and sat down on the living-room sofa facing the plastic door.

If he allowed himself one more, he thought, he might coax another rush. On the one hand go easy because things are getting fast and bad; on the other hand fuck it. He took a Dex out of the bottle, bit off half and swallowed it with the beer. After a few moments he swallowed the other half.

In the kitchen again, he threw the empty beer can away and stood looking out of the little window above the sink. Miles of bright green grass stretching to the cloudless blue, the horizon broken here and there by bulbous raised gas tanks on steel spider legs, like flying saucer creatures. You could picture them starting to scurry around the swamp and they’d be fast all right, they’d cover ground.

He opened the refrigerator and took one of the hamburger patties out.

“Now that’s comical,” he said, holding it over the sink. His chest felt hollow.

His hand closed on the hamburger, wadding it together with the waxed paper. A fat, dirty, greasy fucking thing. He couldn’t stop squeezing on it. The ice in it melted with the heat of his hand and the liquid ran down the inside of his forearm. He took a couple of deep breaths; his heartbeat was taking off, just taking off on him. He dropped the meat in the sink.

When he had washed his hands, he went into the compartment at the opposite end of the trailer from their bedroom, the place where he kept his own things. Everything there was in good order.

There was a locked drawer under the coat closet where Tabor kept his electronics manuals and his military forty-five automatic. He took the pistol out, inserted a clip and went back into the kitchen.

With the gun in his right hand, he gathered up as many of the hamburgers as he could manage with his left and went to the bedroom.

“Meat trip,” he said.

She had the blue curtains drawn against the morning light. The covers were pulled up over her ears; in the space between her pillow and the wall were a rolled magazine and a spilled ashtray that had fouled the sheet with butts. Tabor moved around her bed, delicately setting hamburger patties at neat intervals along the edge.

“Kathy,” he called softly.

She stirred.

“I killed the dogs,” he said.

“You did what?” she said, and as she came awake she saw the little circle of meat in front of her.

She started to turn over; Tabor let her see the barrel of the gun and forced her back down on the pillow with its weight.

“Pab,” she said, in a small broken voice. He held the gun against the ridge of bone beside her eye and let her listen to the tiny click the safety made when he released it.

She had begun to tremble and to cry. Her nose was scarcely two inches from the waxed-paper edge of the hamburger in front of her.