Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“Den you be O.K. wid dis man. Because I suspect he don’t want colored for his crew.”

He’s just sensible, Tabor thought.

“Lemme put dis to you, bruddah. You lay ten bills on me I make arrangements wi’ dis chap. I tell him you my old times fren’. Squared away sailin’ mon.”

“How come he goes to you looking for crew?”

“Because I know everybody, mon. I help him out in de past.”

“Ten bills,” Tabor said, “that’s a hell of a lot. What if he turns me down?”

“Take it or leave it, mon.”

Pablo leafed through the bills in his wallet, covering the top with his palm, glancing over his shoulder suspiciously. Cecil watched him with amusement. Pablo found a U.S. ten and handed it over.

“This better not be a rip-off,” he told Cecil.

“Put you mind at rest, my fren’,” Cecil said with a contemptuous smile. “Come roun’ after three o’clock and you be talkin’ to de commander.”

He went out and sat in the little square across from the navy base where there was a statue of Morazón. Cecil’s words stayed in his mind; they savored to him of treachery and double cross.

I already talked to enough commanders, he thought. He suspected Cecil of betraying him to American body snatchers.

They were turning Pablo around again. Within the same hour, he had been humiliated by cocksuckers and practically called a nigger to his face. He doubled up on the bench and ran his hands through his hair. The crazy birds in the trees along the Malecón hooted down at him.

Grim and frantic, Pablo set out through the siesta quiet for the drugstore. The druggist was waiting for him, leaning against the shutters of his shop with a singularly geek-like expression. He had taken off his green smock and was wearing a dark sport coat with three or four ball-point pens in the breast pocket. When Pablo walked by, the druggist fell into step with him. They crossed to the shady side of the street.

“Ritalin?” the druggist asked.

“Uh-uh,” Tabor said. “Gotta to be amphetamine, pure and simple.”

“Dexamil?”

Pablo nearly snarled with exasperation.

“No downers in it.”

“Benzedrin’,” said the druggist.

It was the most beautiful Spanish word Pablo had ever heard.

“Benzedrino,” he said. “Fuckin-A.”

“Twenty dollars,” the druggist said as they walked.

“Are you kiddin’ me? For how many?”

“For cincuenta. Fifty tablets.”

“Jesus Christ,” Tabor said. “Shit, O.K.” He was in no mood to bargain.

They turned into a narrow dirt street bounded on both sides by corrugated-iron fencing on which there were a great many posters celebrating the party in power. The druggist gave Pablo an unmarked bottle with the tablets inside. Pablo handed over the twenty. The morning’s financial exchanges were making him dizzy.

All anybody cares about in this fucking country, he thought, is money.

When he opened the bottle to inspect the pills inside, the druggist began to hiss and flap at him to put it away.

“Aw, fuck you,” Pablo said, but he stuck the bottle in his trouser pocket.

At the corner, the pharmacist turned away and waddled purposefully back toward his drugstore. There was no one else in sight.

Pablo caught sight of a Coke sign at the end of the next block and trucked on toward it, imagining the rush, hoping to Christ he had not, been taken.

The sign stood over a little flyblown tienda , where there was a counter with some pastries and a coffee machine. Pablo went inside and whistled between his teeth. After a while a sleepy old woman came out from the back of the shop to sell him a Coke.

He gave her one of the coins with the general on it — five ratones, gibrones , whatever — and stared her down in case she decided to fox him out of the change. Nervously, the old woman counted coins into the upturned palm which Pablo held imperiously before her.

Then he went outside, propped the Coke under his arm and took out the bottle the geek had sold him. They were Benzedrino all right, little yellow tablets, three hundred migs.

Hot shit, Tabor thought; he swallowed two of them with his warmish Coke and leaned back in the shade of the corner building.

On his empty stomach, he began to get the rush fairly early on and it felt like the real thing.

“Thank you, Jesus,” Tabor said. His being began to come together. When he had rested against the wall for several minutes, a little boy appeared and approached Tabor with his hand out. Tabor happily doled out a handful of cabrones. But the boy did not go away — he planted himself before Tabor and pointed at the Coke bottle in his hand.

Just as he was about to hand the boy the bottle, Tabor experienced his true rush. He was moved almost to tears.

As the boy watched him wide-eyed, Pablo wound up like Dizzy Dean and sent the bottle hurtling into the wall of the building across the street — where it smashed magnificently, sending thick shards of bottle glass in all directions.

“Ay,” the kid said.

“Ay,” Tabor said. “Aye aye aye.” He gave the kid a thumbs-up sign and set out for the docks with music in his heart.

“Well, he’s gorgeous,” the blond woman said to her companion, “but don’t you think he’s a thug?” Cecil had pointed Pablo out to them at the bar.

The man with her was about fifty, his face deeply tanned and fine-featured. His haircut made him look like a boy in a magazine ad for a military school, gone gray.

He shrugged and lighted a cigarette.

“They’re all sort of the same. If you think he’s gorgeous that’s good enough for me.”

“Cecil is doing one of his Cecil numbers on us,” the woman said. “He’s pissed off because you wouldn’t hire his cousin.”

“Hell,” the man said, “I’m sure he never set eyes on this dude any earlier than last week. I’d just as soon have it that way.”

“You know, he thinks it’s racial. He heard you make that remark about being born on the dark side of the moon.”

“I don’t care what Cecil thinks. If I keep hiring those no good ratones Cecil says are his cousins I’ll really be in trouble.”

“Damnit,” the woman said. “Whatever happened to the carefree college boy we always dreamed of?”

“I don’t want a carefree college boy,” the man said. “I want a bad guy I can keep in line.”

The woman glanced over at Pablo and worried the lime in her Cuba Libre with a candy-striped straw. “But don’t you think this cat looks a little demented?”

“Could be he’s high on something,” the man said, without looking over. “That could be bad. On the other hand — as long as he can work — it could make him easier to handle.”

“Are you sober enough to talk to him? I’d like a closer look.”

“Sure,” the man said. “Let’s run him past.”

The woman picked up her straw and waved it languidly until Cecil caught her signal. He walked over to Pablo, who was beginning to fret over his beer, and leaned toward him.

“O.K., bruddah. Front and center for de mon. I tell dem we know each other from New Orleans.”

Even being ordered front and center did not stay the surge of optimism that flooded Pablo’s heart. He swung off his stool and marched confidently toward the table where the couple sat. He had been watching them, a little greedily. They looked rich and heedless, the lady sexy and loose. They aroused his appetites.

“My name is Callahan,” the gray-haired man said when Pablo stood before him. “This is Mrs. Callahan.”

“Right pleased to meet you,” Pablo said. “Pablo Tabor.”

“Well, we’re right pleased to meet you too, Pablo,” Mrs. Callahan said. “Please have a seat.”