Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“That’s Tecan,” Deedee told him.

And he recalled that she had been around all through the night, smart-talking and boozing, coming on. He had paid her no mind. She was lying across the hatch cover now, in jeans and no shirt at all, leaning her chin on her hands. Pablo felt for the diamond in his shirt pocket and found it over his heart.

He saw Freddy Negus come out of the wheelhouse and engage the windlass engine. They were settling down for the day. Negus never looked in his direction; he felt that the man was trying not to see him.

“So,” Deedee Callahan asked him, “you believe in the invisible world?”

It was just smart talk, but the words troubled him. He turned over the leeward rail to piss.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“You don’t sleep much, do you?”

“I don’t feel the need of it much.”

“In the Navy they say, ‘All time not spent in sleep is wasted.’ Don’t they say that in the Coast Guard?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They do.”

He saw that in the smooth flesh of her shoulder there was a miniature tattoo, the links of a chain. It was tiny and elegant, a beauty. She saw him looking at it.

“Chain of Cashel,” she told him. “It stands for eternity. On and on and on and on and you don’t know where she starts from and you don’t know whither she goes. So you string along.”

She was smoking a reefer. It seemed to him that she had been smoking through the night; he had been smelling it in his dreams.

She rolled over and he looked quickly at her breasts; they were small and round, young, a paler tan then her shoulders.

“This is Praisegod Reef,” she said.

Looking over the side, he saw no reef; the water under the boards looked as deep and blue as the expanse around them. He turned to look at the coast again, wondering if it could be the same coast they left three days before.

“I spent so many mornings here,” she said, offering him the joint. He shook his head. “So many mornings I wonder how many. Mornings.”

“On this thing?” Pablo asked.

It seemed to take her a moment to realize that he meant the boat.

“Hell, no.” She was looking toward the coast with a melancholy vacant smile. “On the real Cloud. The real article.”

“What was that?”

Deedee raised the joint to her lips and drew from it. “That was,” she said slowly, “that was a schooner, boy. Seventy-footer, two masts. She was built in Halifax, she was a Lipton Cup racer and you could smell her teak before you saw her coming. That was the real Cloud. ”

“Where’s she at now?”

Deedee shrugged, pouted her lips and opened them with a little groan.

“She’s in times past. Sailing along in past perfect.”

Pablo snickered at her. He told her she was stoned.

“I been staying awake on this dope,” she said. “It’s good for that.”

“How come you been staying awake?”

“How come you have?” she asked. She got no answer from him.

“The We Never Sleep Shrimp and Shit Corp., right? Eternal vigilance is the price of parsley.”

Pablo was watching the anchor chain grow taut as they drifted to windward. The hook was fast on bottom.

“How come he put the hook over?” Pablo asked.

Deedee flipped the end of the jay overboard and rolled onto her stomach.

“Better ask him that, Pablo.”

In the cockpit, Negus maneuvered the dial on the Cloud ’s VHF receiver; the cabin hummed with submarine static and faint Spanish voices. He and Callahan looked at each other and sat back to wait. Callahan glanced at his watch.

Quite shortly, what might well have been an American voice came in loud and clear.

“Waterbrothers, this is Marie Truman, you copy? Over.”

“Well, well,” Callahan said. “There he is now.” He picked up the mike.

“Marie Truman, Waterbrothers. Copy real well. What kind of night you have up there?”

“Waterbrothers, Marie Truman. Slow night. Scraping the rocks. We got us a sawfish bill. Over.”

Callahan grinned at Negus.

“Marie Truman, Waterbrothers. Don’t throw that away, hear? It’s worth forty bucks on the beach. Over.”

“Waterbrothers, Marie Truman. We’ll see you-all up to Gracias a Dios tomorrow. Have a nice day. Over.”

“Marie Truman,” Callahan said, “this is Waterbrothers. You have a good one too. Out.”

“Isn’t he a darling?” he asked Negus. “He’s playing he’s a Texas boat. And he’s got what we want and we have what he wants.”

“We still got all day,” Negus said.

“If we have him on VHF he’s within seventy miles of here.” Callahan went to the chart table and brushed a worn copy of Bow-ditch from on top of his coastal charts. “By his coordinates he’s coming out from a place called French Harbor. Coming out over a reef.” He took a pair of reading glasses from the breast pocket of his tennis shirt and bent to the chart. “There’s supposed to be a church tower there. Anyhow it’s just a hair down from Puerto Alvarado and they have all kinds of lights. So we’ll run past him around dusk. See what we got to work with and take a sight bearing.”

“You get the weather?”

“Beautiful weather, Freddy. Fair. Light northerly. And no moon until after midnight.”

“That guy speaks gringo awful good,” Negus said. “God help us if that’s the Guardia we’re talking to. You know,” he said, “they got a lot of Yankee know-how behind them.”

“Ah, Fred,” Callahan sighed, “if they had him they’d want me. And here I am right on their front porch.”

“Maybe they got you and they want him.”

“Then how would they have his codes? Use your head for Christ’s sake.”

“Negus went on deck and swept the coastward horizon with his binoculars.

“Nothing happening,” he told Callahan when he came in. He set the glasses down in their box beside the windshield.

“The thing is, Fred,” Callahan told him, “you do a thing or you don’t. Now we are doing this thing, so let’s carry on and do it without bitching all the time.”

“I was thinking,” Negus said. “Our people could be just a nice bunch of good patriotic Spanish boys. Probably just pay up and take their hardware. Probably wouldn’t give us trouble at all.”

“Then we could get rid of Pablo right now, couldn’t we?”

“That’s right,” Negus said.

“But it’s more likely they’re a bunch of fucked-up ratones. You don’t get a good class of Spanish boy on this coast anymore. Not since the cocaine boom.”

Negus put his head out of the cabin hatch and looked aft at Pablo, who was propped against the lazaret with his hat over his eyes.

“Goddamn that guy,” he said.

She was driving in from Alvarado with two ten-pound sacks of beans and a few kilos of fruit when she saw Campos in the road before her. His jeep was parked so that it blocked passage to any other vehicle and he stood in front of it, languidly waving her down, his Foster-Grants ablaze in the afternoon sun. Although she had firmly made up her mind not to be afraid of Campos, the positioning of his jeep troubled her. Someone would have to back off — a minor matter on the face of it but a confrontation, charged with suggestions of authority, confidence and guilt. She stopped her own jeep in the middle of the road and stayed behind the wheel.

Lieutenant Campos came forward and looked her body up and down. His attitude was not in the least jocular or flirtatious.

“Sister Justin” was all he said. She tried to find his eyes behind the reflecting glass.

“Good afternoon, Lieutenant.”

He passed by her and examined the provisions in the rear seat.

“We understand you’re leaving our poor country.”