Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“All right then, Lieutenant. Make your confession.”

To his embarrassment, Lieutenant Campos came and knelt on the floor at his feet. The lieutenant crossed himself and clasped his heavy hands prayerfully. Egan looked away.

“She was a hippie,” Lieutenant Campos declared, his hands clasped.

“I see,” Egan said in a quavering voice. The dreadful question lay squarely before him. Asking it, he was sure, would eventually cost him his life.

“Did you kill her?”

“No!” Campos shouted, startling the priest utterly. He climbed from his knees, brushed them off and began to pace the floor of his office.

“She was spearing fish, understand? That’s not allowed. Everyone knows it’s not allowed.”

“Of course,” Father Egan said.

“Listen,” the lieutenant said, setting his chair beside Egan’s, “listen to this! She hid the spear gun under the dock at Playa Tate. The mayor there told us. We went out and we saw her. She had the spear.”

“Yes,” the priest said.

“We called her to come in. She pretended to be afraid. She teased us like a little whore. We said O.K., if she’s going to act like that we’ll tease her back a little.”

Egan could see the scene quite clearly — the frightened girl in the water trying to ease over the inshore coral to the narrow shelf of sandy bottom, the drunken Guardia along the beach with their M-16’s unslung, Campos standing on the rotting pier, laughing at her.

“And she drowned?”

“She died,” Campos said vaguely.

“I see.”

“So I took command,” the lieutenant said. “It was my responsibility. I dismissed them. You see — I dressed her. These little clothes, they’re all she ever wore. I preserved her for ceremony.”

“What ceremony?” No ceremony else, he thought. Her death was doubtful.

Campos only laughed quietly, tears coming to his eyes.

“How long ago was this?” Egan asked, feeling that he had wasted a question.

“The winter.”

“It was certainly wrong of you,” Egan said, “to keep her here like this. Her family has no knowledge of her, so think how they must feel. As a policeman and especially as a social agent, you should reflect on the violation of your responsibilities involved.”

He looked into the warning that was composing itself in Campos’ eyes.

“Don’t believe,” the lieutenant said, “it was easy for me to have her here. It was hard. Listen — it was very hard to have her in there all the time.”

Egan found himself listening to the steady hum of Campos’ generator.

“Why did you keep her, then?” He felt that it was important to put the question correctly, reluctant though he was to impute to Lieutenant Campos any further suggestion of weakness or dereliction. “Was it loneliness?”

The delicacy of the priest’s question was lost on Campos. His features went cold.

“What do you know about it?”

Egan only nodded.

“When I ask you a question, Father, I require you to answer it. What do you know about it?”

While Father Egan was reflecting on what he knew about loneliness he saw Campos stagger toward him.

“You — you maricón , you know nothing about it! You maricón! How can you question me?”

“You’ve asked me to hear your confession,” Egan said mildly. “It’s necessary that I ask questions.”

“Confession is right,” Campos said. “It’s under the seal, understand? That means you keep your mouth shut. You keep it shut, understand me?”

“The law is plain,” Egan assured him. “What you tell me is privileged.”

“And don’t,” Campos said, “think I care a shit about priests and religion. I’m a man — not a woman or a maricón. You keep your mouth shut.”

“You can be certain of that,” Egan said. It occurred to him that the promise was a rash one.

“Look,” the lieutenant said, gentling. “I think it’s wrong for me to keep her here.”

“I agree,” Egan said.

“Very well,” Campos told him. “You can take her then.”

“What?”

“You can take her. Take her away.”

“I take her? But, my dear Lieutenant, how can I …”

“That’s the duty of the church!” Campos shouted at him. “That’s the duty of priests to take the dead!”

“Well, it’s the duty of the police …” Egan began, but the lieutenant cut him off.

“Don’t tell me my duty. You think I don’t know what goes on? That nun — she’s not a true nun. You think I’m stupid?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Campos suddenly smiled.

“Come on,” he said, touching the priest’s sleeve in an attitude of merry conspiracy, “we’ll give her to you. You’re the priest. You take her for me — that’s what’s right.”

Egan watched him bring a nylon sleeping bag from one corner of the room and drag it to the freezer.

“Come now,” Campos said. “We’ll get her out.”

“Look here,” Egan said, “I’m leaving.”

He stood up and marched out the front door into the moonlight. He was halfway down the steps when the lieutenant caught him.

“Get back inside,” the lieutenant said. “I’m telling you officially.”

Egan went back up the steps.

“For heaven’s sake,” he said pleadingly as Campos marched him inside, “you can dispose of a body better than I can. I mean, if you’re determined to keep the whole thing hidden.… I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“I am not an animal,” Campos said. “I believe there is a spiritual force. I believe in life after death.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Egan said.

“All right. For the relief of my heart — I give her to you.” He walked to the freezer and picked up an end of the bag. “And don’t try to run away again.”

Father Egan had collapsed in a chair. He listened with his eyes averted while Lieutenant Campos struggled cursing with the bag in the freezer.

“Very well,” he heard the lieutenant say, “now come and help.”

Turning, he saw the floor littered with ice and beer bottles. The sleeping bag was half out of the chest, looking like a squat brown serpent that had swallowed a lamb. The body, its fetal outline unmistakable under the quilted cloth, was propped against the metal edge while the twisted ends dangled fore and aft.

Egan walked toward it, a man in a dream.

Lieutenant Campos wiped the sweat from his eyes.

“Pick up the end.”

But the priest could not.

“Pick up the end!” Campos shouted. “You coward! You maricón! ”

Egan stopped tugging at the limp end and put his hands under the human shape in the center. Through the ticking, it felt like a block of ice.

Together, they lifted the bag and carried it out — down the steps and into the back seat of the lieutenant’s jeep. Egan was so overcome that he thought he would faint at any moment. Besides, he was unused to exercise.

As they drove back along the moonlit beach road, he clung to the jeep rack in despair. The wind caught the stole around his neck and blew its strands taut behind him.

“I just can’t believe this is happening,” he said aloud to himself.

Lieutenant Campos heard him.

“Then,” the lieutenant said, “you shouldn’t be a priest.”

At the foot of the mission steps, they hauled the bag out and set it down on the hard sand. Freddy’s Chicken Shack was still wailing, the mellow barrel drums telling out life’s time, getting down.

Swaying a little, Lieutenant Campos put his hand on Egan’s arm.

“Do your duty,” he said. “Everyone must.”

Father Egan watched the jeep drive off; the bag at his feet was a dark shape on the luminous sand.

Down the beach from the mission steps was a gear shack with a small dock extending out over the ocean where the station’s fiberglass whaler hung at moor. Looking over his shoulder, Egan hurried to the landing and saw that the boat was secured to its customary piling and the outboard attached to the stern, the screws hauled up above the waterline. He went back to the bag, seized its ends and began to pull with the resolution of despair. It was a fearsome business of inches — the drums from Freddy’s mocked his panting breaths. When he had pulled the bag halfway to the boat, he looked up the beach and saw that two late-departing wedding guests had staggered out of Freddy’s and were approaching the dock. Quickly, he crouched down beside his horrid burden and stretched out beside it, his body pressed against the sand and rotting palm fronds.