Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

Let one of these half-nigger gibrones try it on me, he thought in a sudden rage. Let one.

Let one and the strange metal figure would form under his hide and death be.

He looked around the darkened park in alarm; he had not checked it out when he sat down. There were a few rummies settled with their bottles on the guano-dappled benches. Two of them were watching him. He smiled at them. The smile seemed serene. Try it, scumbag, was what the smile said. Whatever you got, try it and see.

Son of a whore. Even my fucking dogs know it, he thought, and suddenly, absurdly, he was mourning his dogs, numb with grief, and in a moment he was crying for his son, smiling at the two rummies, waiting for a move. Try it and see. The two rummies stood up and wandered toward the pierside.

Pablo, son of a whore himself, now father to another one.

Well, Pablo thought, maybe he won’t know it or maybe he won’t care, he won’t think that way. Maybe the world will be different then. But it won’t, he thought, it won’t ever be except the way it is with people fucking you over and putting their handles on you to turn you around by. Mex mestizo mulatto nigger spic. Malinche. “Tell me, brudduh, you a black or a white mon?” Gypsy mongrel. Son of a whore.

Now, why, Jesus, Pablo asked from his bench in the Parco de los Heroes de la Marina, Puerta Vizcaya, Compostela — why in the fucking fire do you run it this way? In need of quietude now — the hard-bought speed rattling in his skull — he walked the half block to a tienda , bought a bottle of Flor de Cana and returned to the darkness of his bench. Brown-bagging it, only in this fucking country they didn’t give you no bag.

He drank his rum and watched the running lights on the little draggers that ran beyond the breakwater, and the freighters, lit like pinball machines along the wharves. The naval sentries before the gate of the naval barracks paid no attention to him.

What if the world got different? If it was different it wouldn’t have me in it, I’m nothing anybody wants and that’s for sure. I damn sure ain’t anything I want, he thought, so what the hell is the use of me? No use at all.

Unless maybe. He reached into his pocket and bit a piece off the little yellow pill; he was drunk enough, it seemed to him, for it not to send him spinning through the impending night in a state of whacked-out hyperanimation. Unless maybe something comes along. And he began to dream of a sunup when something had come along and the world was different and he was in it after all. There would be a great summoning of powers and dominations; Pablo himself would be a power and a domination, a principality, a mellow dude. Big easy Pablo, the man of power. It was a warm happy vision but it went funny on him as such things often did. For the first time in a while, however, he was not angry.

He stood up, waved to the sentries and marched with his bottle straight into the Paris Bar. Cecil looked unhappy with him. But the wariness, the genuine caution with which Cecil watched him sit down was pleasing. At the far end of the bar, a drunken man was playing a tape recorder he had somehow acquired.

“ Chinga ,” the drunken man said into his recorder and pressed the replay button. “ Chinga ,” the machine replied.

“ Maravillosa! ” cried the drunken man.

Pablo laughed and the man laughed back, unthreatening, unafraid. A happy thief.

“Hey, that’s good,” Pablo said. “You teach him how to work that, Cecil?”

Cecil only looked vexedly at him.

“Hey, Cecil,” Pablo said, “I want to ask you something, man. Promise you won’t get pissed?”

Cecil took the cigarette he was smoking out of his mouth and set it in an ashtray. He raised his boxer’s jaw toward Pablo.

“What do you think is the use of me?” Pablo asked.

For a long time Cecil stared at him, then slowly his shoulders sagged and a smile spread across his wide scarred face that lit it from chin to hairline.

“De use of you?” Cecil asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, man. What do you think the use of me is?”

Cecil, in a moment, was wary again but his smile held.

“You mean to me, brudduh?”

“No, no,” Pablo said. “The use — you know. The use of me.”

“Well now …” Cecil began. A throb of laughter trembled in his throat. “Dat be hard to say, you know.”

“Cecil, I’m the first fucker in the world knows that. But right off … what would you say the use of me was?”

“Oh, you just drunk,” Cecil declared. But he could not control himself. “De use … imagine askin me dat? De use … de use of you?” He slapped the bar and gave a quiet whoop.

Pablo shrugged and drank from his bottle. Reassured, Cecil brought him a glass. They poured one out for Pablo, one for the bartender, one for the thief with the tape recorder.

“De use of you, mon? Same as everbody. Put one foot to front of de other. Match de dolluh wif de day.”

“That’s all?”

“Sure dat’s all. Good times, hard times. Mos’ certainly dat’s all.”

“Don’t you think everybody got some special purpose?”

“Hey,” Cecil demanded, “what I look like — a preacher, mon? Purpose of you and me to be buried in de ground and das hard enough to do. Be buried in de sweet ground and not in dat ocean.” They drank their rum together.

“Dreamin’ be de ruin of you, sailor. Be de ruin. Old chap, you too young to be worryin’ after dose tings. Be burnin’ out your mind.”

“It is burning,” Pablo said. “Burning out.”

“Go to sleep, Pablo,” Cecil said, not unkindly. He handed Pablo a key across the bar. “Go upstairs and sleep it off, mon.”

Pablo took the key, surprised that Cecil did not charge him further for it. As he went up the narrow stairs, he heard Cecil in a low voice explaining to the thief in Spanish what it was that Pablo had asked him. The thief giggled.

“ Y yo? ” the thief asked after a moment. “ Para que sirvo ? What about me?”

As Pablo was prowling the rat-infested darkness over the bar, a door opened and a girl in a tight blue dress looked at him from her lighted doorway. There was a little statue of the Niño de Praha on a dresser beside her. Pablo stumbled toward her, then, mindful of his wallet, turned away.

“It’s a Walt fucking Disney true life adventure, sweetheart,” he told her. “That’s all it is.”

The mission’s mail that morning was wedged to the rail at the bottom of the steps leading up to the veranda. From the top step, Justin could see that among it was a letter with a Canadian stamp — for Egan from his nonagenarian mother, and the monthly newsletter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. This door delivery service was something new; until a month or so before it had been necessary to drive to Puerto Alvarado for mail. Justin suspected that the extension of postal convenience did not indicate any advance in the state services of the Republic, but rather that the Guardia, probably in the person of Lieutenant Campos, was opening and reading, however imperfectly, their mail.

Out beyond the road and the narrow beach, the ocean had assumed its winter’s morning contour — it was pale and flat, mild-seeming, without affect. Within two months, the spring winds would be up and there would be storms and rain. The days might be easier to get through.

It had been weeks since she had heard from Godoy. On the rare occasions when they met, they exchanged polite, ecclesiastical greetings. This might be sound strategy — but Justin, who was as prudent and sensible as anyone, found it wounding and frustrating. And there was no work at the mission. No one came. No one. They were not needed.

She went listlessly down the steps and gathered up the mail. In addition to the letter from Egan’s mother and Fellowship she found a second one for him, from the Devotionist provincial in New Orleans. There was also one for her, in a yellow flower print envelope, from her sister. The tab seal on the magazine was broken; all the letters had been opened and resealed with wads of soiled Scotch tape.