Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“And of course,” Bob Cole said, “they have our continual attention and assistance.”

No one answered him.

“Are you from Madison?” Holliwell asked Cole after a while.

“No,” the young man said. “Never been there.”

After a few more miles of bananas, Holliwell helped himself to the water jug in the car and went to sleep again.

When he drifted out of his whiskey doze, they were driving a curving road in uplands that might have been Colorado. The hillsides were pine-clad. There were meadows of rich green grass and wild-flowers intersected by fast-rushing streams that ran clear over smooth rock, trout streams they might have been, looking pure enough to drink. The roadside window carried a fragrance of sun-warmed evergreen.

“They must have looked for gold here,” he said dreamily.

The Zeccas turned and looked back at him.

“Welcome back,” Marie said.

Bob Cole was leaning forward in the seat, his face nearly pressed against the window.

“They did,” he told Holliwell. “It was a man called Martínez Trujillo, one of Alvarado’s captains. He used Alvarado’s techniques. He would gather the Indian leaders and give them until dawn on a certain day to produce the weight of his horse and armor in gold. If they didn’t he burned them alive. He never got any, of course, because there isn’t any up here. Never got a nugget but he kept on burning Indians. He burned thousands of them in these mountains.”

“The gold was all down in the swamps where it didn’t belong,” Zecca said. “Under the mud. No one’s ever found gold up here.”

“What became of Martínez Trujillo?” Holliwell asked.

“He burned a few too many Indians,” Cole said, “and he never had them baptized. The friars complained. Martínez Trujillo was a New Christian and the Inquisition got him in the end.”

“And burned him, we hope,” Marie said.

“The histories are vague. He appears and disappears. He was a minor unsuccessful conquistador. Impatient and cruel. Probably just stupid.”

“History is tough on guys like that,” Tom said.

Cole told them that was as it should be.

Cole, Holliwell thought, was a man who respected history. History was always affecting to be moral and to be just.

“Another loser, another prick,” Tom Zecca said. “You ever see the murals at Bonampak? These characters all deserved each other.”

“Well, you can’t really say that,” Cole said.

“What can you really say?” Zecca asked.

“It’s still going on,” Cole said. “The same thing. It’s unresolved.”

“Do you think,” Marie asked, “that the Indians knew where the gold was all the time?”

“Who knows?” Zecca said. “Who knows what they knew?”

A few kilometers further along the highway, they pulled off onto a freshly paved track that curved through the pine forests. A short distance in, a sign beside the track read: “Lago Azul Lodge, Global Fishfinders, Houston, Texas.”

“The bass lake,” Holliwell said. “I’ve heard about it but I’ve never been up here.”

“Well, I’ve done got some beauties out of here,” Tom Zecca said. “Biggest was over twenty pounds. God only knows what the record is.”

“Twice that,” Bob Cole said. “Maybe bigger.”

The paved road began a descent and, rounding a turn, they saw the lake itself, immense and truly blue, girded on the near shore by flame trees and then by sharply rising palisades. There were no boats in sight. Its uncanny blue surface shivered under the faintest of breezes; a flight of black ducks was crossing it at midpoint, flying in a V wedge inches above the shimmering water.

“Good God,” Holliwell said.

After twenty minutes’ descent they pulled into the grounds of the lodge itself; a cluster of neat huts with bamboo lattice windows. Near the lakeside, above a series of piers where aluminum boats were moored with their outboards up, was a large building, open on all sides, with wicker shades curled under its wide winged roof. Its decorative style was tropical-Bavarian and fixed to its walls were the mounted carcasses of outsized largemouths, some of them bigger than sand sharks. On the muddy strand beside the piers a few reed pole boats had been drawn up.

They parked beside the building and climbed out stiffly. The lakeside air was warm, the vegetation about them more tropical. There were palms near the shore and parakeets in the flame trees.

The open-sided building was a restaurant; it had a fireplace with German beer mugs on the mantelpiece above it and more, dozens, of the outlandish stuffed bass.

“Where are the global fishfinders?” Holliwell asked.

“Just be grateful they’re not here,” Tom told him.

They took a table near the lakeside and after a few minutes a black waiter came out to serve them. His English and his air of deference and bonhommie under pressure might have come from Houston with the fishermen.

Bob Cole and the Zeccas had bass. Holliwell called for beer and then for an omelette, which was huge and fishy.

“Everybody know the story of Lago Azul Lodge?” Cole asked them.

Holliwell had not heard it.

“Let’s hear your version,” Zecca said.

“This lake,” Cole said, “used to be called the Lago de los Camaidos. But back in the thirties an American airline bought it and the land around it with the lodge in mind. The airline figured that los Camaidos had too much bad history in it and they wanted their customers to feel more at home. So they named it Lago Azul and they stocked it with largemouths from breeding tanks in Louisiana. As you can see, the largemouths thrived, they grew to enormous proportions. Also they killed every native species in the lake. The Indians who lived by netting the native fish starved, their nets couldn’t hold big bass. A lot of the lake birds — some of them didn’t exist any other place on earth — died out completely because the monster bass ate their young.

“The only problem was that these big bass wouldn’t take a hook. They simply could not be caught on a line. So the tourism angle went by the board. After a while, the airline sold out to Global Fishfinders, who were a bunch of rich Texas doctors, and the Fishfinders developed some kind of Arkansas shiner that the bass would take on a hook. Now they’ll take plugs if they look enough like shiners. Eventually, the Indians learned to spear the bass. Some of the birds survived.”

Cole fell silent. Tom Zecca took up the tale. “So now — every few weeks, a planeload of gringos turns up in Santiago and they bus them out here. They make a few jokes about the country and the people, they go around yelling ‘ Sí, señor ,’ and ‘Hey, Pedro,’ and they fish. Every night they sit in here and get drunk and talk about the niggers back in Texas compared to the niggers down in here in Compostela. I tell you, this is the Forest Lawn of fishing, a bigger bunch of drunken bigoted assholes than these Fishfinders you couldn’t come across.”

“When we come,” Marie said, “we try very hard to avoid the times they’re around. It’s not much fun then.”

Zecca was watching the birds on the lake. Cole smoked one local cigarette after another.

“Marie had her fanny pinched by a Sun Belt executive type once when we were down here.”

“You should have let it pass,” she said.

“I sent him home in a neck brace to straighten his head out,” Tom told them. “That’s what diplomatic immunity is for.”

After lunch, they trudged back to the Honda and took up positions.

“There are jaguar in these mountains,” Tom said as they drove back to the highway. “Wouldn’t you like to see one of those babies?”

Westward, the land sloped downward, the pine forests thinned and they drove over high desert cut by steep barrancas. Within an hour, the Sierra was behind them, the land sandy and cactus-ridden, picked over by lean cattle and skeletal burros. They passed an occasional burro cart laden with cords of pine wood but there were very few people to be seen. It was an empty desert of a place. In the western distance the slopes of another range rose; these were the mountains along the Pacific coast, fleecy marine cloud hung over them.