Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

Holliwell stowed his bag in the plain bungalow and took a cold shower, the only kind available. When he had changed clothes, he poured himself a drink and went outside to sit in the shade of an arbor of bougainvillea.

After he had been sitting for a while, a dark-skinned young man came up from the bar, where he had been drinking a beer with the driver, and asked Holliwell if he wanted to go diving.

Holliwell looked at the young man and then at the placid ocean. The question aroused in him a thrill of fear and also a longing for the depths, for the concealment and oblivion of blue-gray light at sea level minus seventy.

“It’s been a while,” he said.

“If you want,” the young man said, “we run you through a checkout in the morning. Bring it back. You been certified?”

“Yeah,” Holliwell said. A reliable-looking kid, he thought. Undersea images flashed in his mind, fans and parrot fish, silvery barracuda. Things being what they were, why not?

The young man gave him a card with the diving package rates. Holliwell put it in his pocket. As the young man walked back toward the dive shop, Ralph Heath came by carrying a glass of white rum and soda.

“Going diving, are you?”

“I’m thinking of it. I haven’t in a long time.”

“Nor have I. I got thumped on the head in Bogotá eight years ago and I haven’t been able to dive since. Only wish I could.”

“Did you ever dive around here?”

“Oh, yes. Here and in Jamaica. Malta. Yap in Micronesia. I was very fond of it.”

“How did you come to get thumped?” Holliwell asked.

“Accident,” Heath said. “I’ll tell you — Playa Tate’s a good place for a dive. That’s about six miles south of here. There’s a reef close inshore — then she drops off about three quarters of a mile out. It’s a wall — a real chiller-diller, that one. Grand Canyon.”

“Many sharks?” Holliwell asked sheepishly. It was a question one was not supposed to ask.

“Well,” Heath said, “this is the eastern Carib, chum. You’re likely to see the odd shark out there.”

“I suppose,” Holliwell said.

“Another good place is near there. By the American Catholic mission. There’s one reef that starts in about eight feet of water, then slopes down to forty, then flattens out and drops a mile out. Good snorkeling there as well.”

“How’s the shop here?”

“Quite good actually. Sandy’s a good boy. I used to dive with his father ten years or so ago. Nice family they are. Head and shoulders above the rest of them around here.”

“I think I will go out,” Holliwell said. “I’ll go look up Sandy in the morning.”

“You’ll have a jolly good time, Holliwell,” Heath said.

Pablo leaned idly on the rail as they cleared the harbor, the rubber work gloves still in his back pocket. His want of a bath was bothering him acutely now and he wished that he had asked them about it while the boat was still hooked up to a dockside water line. If there was a woman aboard, he reasoned, the Cloud must have a head and shower somewhere.

No harm in asking, he thought after a while; there might be enough water from the evaporators or a fresh-water supply somewhere aboard. They seemed to have everything else. He went forward to the wheelhouse and leaned his head through the hatch. Negus and Callahan were in the cockpit chairs.

“If we got some time now and there’s water enough, could I clean up? I ain’t shaved nor showered for a while.”

Negus looked from Pablo to Callahan.

“There’s enough,” Callahan said. “Right behind the galley. Knock first.”

He went back to the lazaret to get some fresh clothes and his toilet kit and then up to the galley. Behind it was the door to the dim compartment into which Mr. Callahan had earlier disappeared with his drink. He knocked twice on it.

“Hello,” called the voice of Mrs. Callahan.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Come on in.”

He opened the door just as Tino, out on deck, was hauling away the hatch covers that closed off the windows of the compartment from the outside. As the space filled with light he saw that the compartment had the same dark paneling as the forward passageway, that there was a striped chaise longue, some captain’s chairs with brightly colored cushions, even a bookcase. In the center of the stateroom was a round table with metal studs, an electric fan resting on it. Mrs. Callahan was sitting in one of the captain’s chairs under a lighted wall lamp, a book on her lap.

“On your right, Pablo,” she told him. She pulled the terry-cloth robe she was wearing a little farther down over her tanned thighs. It was all she had on, Pablo thought.

“I’ll go easy on the water.”

In the pocket of Mrs. Callahan’s robe, Pablo espied a bottle of pills. There was a small swelling distorting the patrician contour of her high cheekbone and long jaw.

“Yes, do,” she said.

Pablo had him a shit, shower and shave; his thoughts were carnal. Soaping down, he sang to himself.

“I ride an old paint

I ride an old dan

I’m going to Montana for to have a hooly-an.”

The water was warm, hand-pumped out of an overhead pipe through a rubber nozzle. He shaved slowly and deliberately, his shoulder propped against the bulkhead beside the mirror, riding with the slow roll of the boat, still singing.

When he came out, Mrs. Callahan was watching him, leaning her head on an elbow, her hand covering her mouth. When she took her hand away, he saw that she was smiling.

“Do you play the guitar?” she asked him.

“No,” Pablo said, feeling surly and put down.

“What a shame,” Mrs. Callahan said.

He climbed out of the fancy compartment, the kit and soiled clothes under his arm, and went out on deck. Low even seas slid westward under the light wind, over the horizon was a thin line of cloud, nearly pink in the fading light. Big bitch thinks I’m comical, he said to himself. She thinks I’m the fucking entertainment.

Tino was checking out the net’s chain line as Pablo tossed his things down into the lazaret.

“Callahan bring his old lady every trip?”

“Mostly does.”

It was not his custom to speak of white women with dark people but resentment and desire made him uneasy and perverse.

“She spread it around any?”

“Lister engine,” Tino said, nodding toward the casing of the outrigger’s auxiliary motor. Pablo watched him drop the chain line on the deck and walk over to slap the top of the casing. “You can work it from right here or from the cockpit. Can haul it up by hand on the windlass if you needs to.”

Pablo fixed his eyes on the tall St. Joostian and leaned against the upright outrigger. He was being turned around again. He watched the other man’s eyes and thought of the den tided palm.

“We ain’t fishin’ tonight,” Tino said, “but I tell you in case like. Over dere—” He pointed to a rolled-up smaller net against the port rail. “Dat’s de tri-net. We haul her up every half hour maybe on a lay line. You ever been shrimping before?”

Pablo only stared at him.

“Well,” Tino said, meeting his stare, “you best be told so you know what you doin’. Got to know what you doin’ out here.”

“Is that right?” Pablo asked him.

“Believe it,” Tino said, and picked up the chain line again.

“That’s real good of you, Tino.”

“ Para servile ,” Tino said softly.

During the next two days, the Cloud ran the coast of the Isthmus. Most of the time they were out of sight of land, in the seas between the Swan Islands and Serrana Bank. Pablo watched and listened, made himself useful and kept his nature to himself. It was like a breakdown cruise; they were testing the electronics gear and the auxiliary diesels; making plans to which he was not party. Mainly, he realized, it was he himself that they were observing. Tino, Negus, both of the Callahans would engage him from time to time in strained quiet conversations that varied in nature according to their several styles. He made it his business to be pleasant, incurious and resourceful in small matters. He had a turn at the wheel, he replaced a Raytheon tube and sunned himself on the hatches. Once, when they were anchored off Gracias a Dios, he had a skinny dip and was confirmed in the conviction that Mrs. Callahan had eyes for him. The swim also gave him a chance to study the boat’s dynamics from the business end, and although he was no engineer he could see that even in basic construction the Cloud was not what she appeared. She had what the Coast Guard would call a false hull; a squat duck of a shrimper at first and even second glance above the waterline, her lines were modified to make her capable of formidable speed with the diesels engaged. A contrabands, as he had assumed.