Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“You’re a friend of Sister Justin?”

“Not really. I had a minor accident in front of the mission the other day and she took a sea urchin spine out of my knee. So we’re acquainted.”

“She’s a nurse,” Soyer said vaguely. “Now you’re her patient, eh?”

“Yes.”

Holliwell accepted a piña colada.

“A very dedicated woman,” Soyer said. “We admire her here.”

“She’s very nice, isn’t she?”

“Yes, very nice. Very American. Una tipica. ”

“I suppose,” Holliwell said.

“I know North America well. Once I spoke English but I’m out of practice.”

Holliwell was reassuring. It was not his impression that Mr. Soyer had difficulty with the language. The three men with him held their silence.

“I was in school at Washington,” Soyer said. “At Georgetown University. I was preparing for the foreign service of Cuba when the Communists took power.”

“Ah,” Holliwell said.

“America is so free,” Mr. Soyer said. “That’s what I liked. So many opportunities.”

“But you chose to settle here.”

“The style is better for me. I like the quiet life, I think.”

“How’s business?” Holliwell asked.

“It’s not bad,” Soyer said. He was still looking toward the mission. “We hear that Sister Justin is leaving.”

“That’s what she says.”

“Then it must be true, eh?”

“Gosh,” Holliwell said. “I guess so.”

“Do you think she is a true idealist?”

“I assume so,” Holliwell said. There was a silence. “Do you mean,” he asked, “as opposed to a false idealist?”

Soyer slapped his knee and laughed loudly and vacantly.

“I’m misusing the language,” he said. “Forgive me.”

“I’m intrigued,” Holliwell said. “I wonder about the relations between the missionaries and the community here. Are they good? Are they cordial?”

“Why not?” Soyer asked. Then he said: “Why ask me?”

“I wondered,” Holliwell said, “what you thought about it.”

“I think they’re more than agreeable,” Mr. Soyer said. “But I’m a sucker for Americans.”

Holliwell supposed his smile appropriate and kept it in place.

“This mission,” Soyer said, “Sister Justin’s — I don’t know what they do now there.”

“She was telling me they feel kind of redundant. That’s why they’re going, I guess.”

“Ourselves and you,” Mr. Soyer said, “I speak as though I’m of Tecan because it’s my home now — ourselves and you, we have a great deal in common. We have common enemies.”

“Very true,” Holliwell said.

“The greatest enemy,” Soyer said, “is the enemy inside America. Do you think so?”

“We’re all our own worst enemies, aren’t we?”

“I don’t mean that,” Soyer said. “Not exactly.”

“American politics is rather frenetic.” Holliwell hesitated. “Fucked up.”

“From maybe too much comfort. Everyone is comfortable.”

“Not everyone.”

“I see,” Mr. Soyer told him. “I understand your point of view.”

“I’m not very political.”

“Sister Justin?” Soyer asked. “Do you think she is political?”

“No, I don’t,” Holliwell said. “Not at all.”

He watched Soyer frown. The Cuban grunted and shook his head as though he had been given information of significance. Holliwell turned toward the ocean and saw with some relief that Sandy was bringing the Paradise boat around the outer reef.

“I don’t see Mr. and Mrs. Paz,” Holliwell said.

“Gone home,” Soyer told him. “Only this morning.”

“Thank you for the cold drink, Mr. Soyer.” He got to his feet and nodded to Soyer’s three friends. They nodded back.

“Staying long?” Soyer asked him.

“No, I don’t think so. I only wanted a little rest after my labors.”

“Listen, Holliwell — don’t take the boat back. Come have a drink with us and we’ll take you.”

Holliwell explained that his foot was hurting and that he had writing to do.

“Ah,” said one of Mr. Soyer’s hitherto silent friends. “Writing.”

In fact, Holliwell was in some pain. He felt dizzy and he was thinking for the first time in a while about the telephone calls in Santiago de Compostela.

On the run back, Sandy spoke to him above the engine.

“How you leg now, mon?”

“Better,” he shouted. “I still can’t put a fin on.”

Sandy grinned. “Keep you outena trouble.”

“I think it’s too late for that,” Holliwell said.

With the sun below the green saw-toothed ridges of the coast, darkness gathered quickly. Venus was the evening star. She hung low over the eastern horizon and the unbroken sea beneath her transit was dulled to the color of lead. The wind rose in that quarter, setting a roll beneath the Cloud ’s counterfeit boards but nowhere breaking the skin of the sea’s expanse. Across the sky, Deneb and Vega twinkled beyond a calligrapher’s stroke of purple nimbus.

Freddy Negus, holding to the wheel, had pulled the night shade down behind the cockpit. Callahan, a drink in one hand, stood beside the wheelhouse hatch running his infrared binoculars along the coastline.

“How’s traffic?” Negus asked him. “I’m getting blips on my scope here.”

“Let’s light it up,” Callahan said.

Negus threw a switch that lit the running lights in the stabilizer mast and the work areas around the hatches. Callahan went forward to light a spot on the forepeak.

“We’re gonna be out in front of Port Alvarado presently, boss,” Negus said.

Callahan refilled his glass and bent to inspect the digits on the Raytheon and leaned over his chart table. He turned the Loran signal up so that it was audible and timed the tones on his watch.

“We’re getting there, Freddy. What’s your bottom like?”

“Bottom is marbles,” Negus said. “A couple of yards to starboard and we’d be sitting on them.”

Callahan hung in the hatchway, looking coastward.

“I got Puerto Alvarado light,” he told Negus. “I see the bastard. If you could get me a mite more speed, Freddy, I would love it. So we have a tiny bit of daylight when we drop the buoy.”

“I can get you twelve knots on just the main engine. That’s what you got.”

“Puerto Alvarado,” Callahan said, pronouncing the city’s name in careful Spanish. “I see the banana piers and I believe I see the national streetlight.”

“Some hole that place is,” Negus said. “Had to get some of my boys out of jail there once. No trouble either. Being a British subject meant something in those days.”

Callahan studied the harbor.

“They planted a few light buoys in these roads since I was here last,” he said. He glanced at the Raytheon scope. “Lot of boats around without lights.”

“That’s how it is out here,” Negus said. “Nothing faster than ten knots. Nothing coming our way.”

Callahan checked the Loran digits and his charts.

“Very shortly we’ll get on the CB. Right around the point.”

Callahan had taken the rum bottle from the galley shelf and was pouring himself another drink, easing the neck of the bottle against the glass so that Negus would not hear him, when Negus stood up in his chair and turned around.

“Look at this, Jack. I got a fucker on here bearing three-forty. He’s coming at us and he’s coming fast.”

Callahan put his drink in the galley rack, ran into the lounge to slam his wife’s door twice and ran out on deck with the glasses.

“I don’t see him,” Callahan said. “He’s not lit.”

“Bugger fucking all,” Negus said.

Deedee Callahan was standing beside her husband in the next moment, straining to see into the near darkness.