Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

By the time she was most of the way along the beach road, the sun was out of sight behind the mountains. Justin parked her jeep beside the ocean, climbed out and walked to the water’s edge. For a long time she looked out over the ocean before her, still in sunlight and deep blue.

In all the working systems, she thought, the weakness was always yourself — that spot of gristle in the gears. It applied on every level — even the act of getting through a day could be performed with gusto and dispatch if you kept out of your own way. Justin believed that she knew as much as anyone about self-struggle. But if I win, if I crush myself, she wondered, what will be left of me? She was not so much afraid as curious. Would what was left be useful? And if so, in what way? Would what was left be happy? And there I am again, she thought. Me.

The self was only a girl, a young thing, brought in arsy-varsy. A One True Church was a One True Church, a scientific system was a scientific system, a Revolution, no less, was a Revolution, but a broad was only a broad. It was all so obvious.

I am unworthy, she thought. You are. We are. They are. We are all fucked flat unworthy, unworthy beyond belief, unworthy as a pile of shit. Help us there, you — help us crush ourselves out of recognition, help us to be without eyes without pudenda without any of those things. Most of all make us without childish feelings. Because it’s that kid inside that makes us so damnably unworthy. We’ll scourge ourselves, we’ll walk in the fiery furnace, we’ll turn ourselves around.

To do penance and to amend my life, amen. To struggle unceasingly in the name of history. Gimme a flag, gimme a drum roll, I’m gonna be there on that morning, yes I am. And it won’t be the me you think you see. It’ll be the worthy revolutionary twice-born me. The objective historical unceasingly struggling me. The good me.

And if I’m not there on that morning, she thought, I won’t be anywhere at all.

She walked a few steps into the mild surf, wetting her chino trousers to the knee, and cupped two handfuls of salt water to pour over her face. When she started back to her jeep it was a few minutes before twilight and the hillside across the road had started to settle into evening. The first howler monkeys were awake and signaling their alarms, the diurnal birds settling down to cover among the thickest boughs, trilling the last calls of the day.

Something was in the road ahead; Justin stopped in her tracks. It was an animal running along the inshore shoulder, but it did not run so much as prance. And it was not an animal, it was a kind of man. The light was still strong enough for her to make out some of its colors — a topping of flaxen hair, white garments that were stained.

Back behind the wheel, she could not be certain that the stains were red. They were bright, of that she was sure. No fruit she knew would stain that brightly. She could not make the stains be anything but blood.

And she understood then that the creature she had seen was the young Mennonite who had passed the mission weeks before. The hillside now was darkening and apparently deserted, the road empty of traffic. Justin shivered, turned her headlights on and started the jeep for home.

Holliwell hobbled along a rutted pathway lined with frangipani toward the dining hall. The stars were out, the wind easy.

The half dozen working tables in the Paradise’s utilitarian refectory were lined up along the seaward edge of the hall. Japanese lanterns hung from the rafters above them and from wire stays in the palm grove between the tables and the beach. On the other side of the huge floor space, some officers of the Guardia were lined up at the bar, drinking rum and listening to old Lucho Gatica records on the jukebox. Looking over the line of tables, Holliwell saw Mr. Heath sitting by himself over a gin and a dish of peanuts. Heath looked up and called him over.

“Hurt your foot, did you?” he asked. His face was florid in the lantern light, his nose and the skin under his eyes marked with swollen veins.

“I kneeled on a sea urchin over by the Catholic mission. There was a nun standing by to pull the spines out for me.”

“Good luck. Was that sister Justin?”

“I never asked her name. I think she’s the only one there.”

“Yes,” Heath said. “What brought you over that way?”

Holliwell shrugged. “Nothing special.”

“What do you make of them over there?”

“I don’t know what to make of them,” Holliwell said. “What do you make of them?”

“They’re quite pleasant, didn’t you think?”

“Yes,” Holliwell said. “Yes, they are.”

Heath and Holliwell dined on fresh dorado. As they took dinner Mr. Heath said that he had been offered a position in the fruit company’s new resort enterprise.

“Old hands like me are redundant since the blight,” he told Holliwell. “The profits are in tourism. So it’s take that up or retire.”

“And which will you do?”

Heath smiled vaguely. At that moment, Holliwell realized how drunk the man was.

“When I first came out here,” Mr. Heath said, “ten bandits and myself were the only force of law in two hundred miles of mountains. Great days they were.”

Holliwell nodded.

“We could put a company blanket on a tree stump — leave it for weeks and no one would dare touch it. We were respected. We respected ourselves as well. Every morning I could get up and say— Yo sé quien soy. Understand?”

“Sure,” Holliwell said.

“My men were able to say that because I made them able. And I didn’t do it by avoiding their eyes and tipping them ten shillings for smiling at me. D’ye see?” He did not wait to be encouraged. “It reflected my training.”

Holliwell was about to ask him where his training had been acquired.

“Nineteen years of age I was in the legion — the Légion Etrangère. Sidi Barras. Christ, great days!”

“And you came here after that?”

For his question, Holliwell received a momentary glance of dark and profound suspicion. It was a look to stay the timid and was obviously meant to be.

“After that I was in the Ceylon police. Had a bit of trouble there … a damn religious procession in Kandi. I was shown the instruments, you might say. Drove off in superintendent’s car after a party and that was that. Then I came out here.”

“Do you ever go back to England?”

“Can’t,” Heath said. “She’s not there, bless her. Not my England. Of course, I was home for the war. I was with the Second Army.”

“Montgomery … wasn’t it?”

Heath laughed. “Yes. Monty. Teetotaler.”

When the server took their plates, he called for more gin. Holliwell, who was fighting a wave of fatigue, would try to counter it with another small rum.

“We’re going to have tourists coming down here at the rate of a few thousand a month. We’re going to have me spying through keyholes so the hotel staff doesn’t pinch their Minoxes. We’re going to teach the people to steal and we’re going to teach them contempt for us.”

Holliwell began to say something about jobs for the populace. About giving them a share.

“These people don’t like being poor, Holliwell. No one does. We’re going to teach them to be ashamed of being poor and that’s something new, you see.”

“That’s the American way,” Holliwell said.

Heath sniffed. “Don’t like to see a man run his country down. Not abroad.”

“I’m not doing that. I think what’s best about my country is not exportable.”

Mr. Heath did not hear him. “We’re all wringing our bloody hands, that’s it. We’ve been doing it since the war. Apologizing and giving in and giving over and not one black, brown or yellow life have we saved doing it. We want to be destroyed, you see. So we will be.”