Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“It’s the only meaning in all of things,” he said. “There aren’t any others.”

Pablo had lost sight of her face in the glare of the overhead work lights; she was standing by the rail stretching. He moved to the rail opposite and looked for the lights of the other boats he had seen working nearby. No other lights were in sight now.

They seemed to have shifted course. The angle of the wind was different and the low troughs came at them from a different quarter, making the sea seem rougher. He moved out of the glare of the lights, picked out the pointers at the top of the Dipper and lined up Polaris a little off the bow. The new course was northerly. A freshening wind made him feel cold.

“I’m tired,” he said. “I expect I’ll be earning my pay soon.”

She was smoking marijuana again. He smelled it as she went across the stern to sit down on her overturned basket. She never stopped. From her knit basket she took a straight cigarette and a bottle of Puerto Rican rum; she uncapped the rum and took a deep swallow.

“Won’t I be earning my pay soon?”

He could see her face well enough now. She was smiling at him in a way that made him feel as though she had never seen him before. He shivered and that seemed to make her smile the more. She stood up and brought the joint and the bottle across the deck to him.

“Soon, baby. That you will. Now have yourself a drink of this here.”

The rum was good, clear and light, much better than the thick stuff they drank in the cockpit. She pressed the joint on him and absentmindedly he smoked more of it than was good for him.

“Thing is,” Pablo said, “I don’t understand. Things been happening and I don’t understand. Like something was going on.”

“Something’s always going on,” she said. And while he was trying to read her look, all the lights went out together. Only the instrument lights in the cockpit showed, reflected in the windshield and the faint glow of the interior lights from between the louvered shutters over the saloon housing. The Cloud shifted course again and someone — Negus — came out on deck and opened the engine panel. When he slammed it shut again, the boat began to pick up speed. The whole frame of the vessel shuddered, a wind picked up where there had been little more than a steady breeze — the Cloud was running like a crash boat.

Negus had gone below again; he came out now wearing a slicker. The bars of light from the saloon compartment had disappeared. Negus was crouching in the forepeak, a pair of binoculars around his neck.

“Away we go,” Mrs. Callahan said.

The sensation of moving at such speed in what seemed an ordinary shrimp boat was dreamlike, almost comical. Pablo stared down at the white water that rushed under their bow.

Deedee sat on a basket near the lazaret hatch, hugging herself, the knit bag on her lap.

“Sit down before you fall over, Pablo,” she said. “We’re going faster than you think.” She lit a straight cigarette in the lee of the lazaret housing. “Let’s get out of this wind and Mama will tell you how it is.”

Following her down into the darkness of the lazaret, his first thought was that it was not right because their clothes were foul. They had been working shrimp. And because she was smoking and there were oil cans and engine rags.

When she sat herself down on the chafing gear he sat beside her. It was the first close touch he had of her since the night in the galley that seemed so long before. He was fighting to hold Pablo now, to hold within himself the thinking, calculating Pablo — because even as he sat with her, that self was being crowded out by lust and a shadow. The lust had a rubbery bubbly taste; the shadow, he knew well. It had few emotions but it was an angry frightened shadow.

She pushed his cap off and brought his head against her shoulder and put her chin on the top of his head.

“This is how it is, Pablo,” she began. Pablo closed his eyes to listen. Somehow he had the notion that his mother would tell him something.

“We have some boys to deal with on the coast here and we don’t know who they are. It could occur to them to take our goods, our boat, everything — and pitch us over the side. It’s happened. So we need a little display of sincerity. We need a crazy old boy like you who’s so mean and nasty looking they think he might feed them a few just to hear the funny noises they’d make. Then look at it from their side. Everything’s COD. Maybe it’s a little old-fashioned but that’s us, see, that’s the way we do it. They’ve got money for us. Now we might just take their money and do them in — that’s happened too.”

She ran her fingers along the back of his neck.

“So. So, honey …” Cuddling him. “So they come out in their boat and we load the stuff. You go along so everybody feels all right. They usually have to make more than one trip and going in they’ll feel better because even if they don’t have all of their delivery they have you. And you’ll be riding along looking so bad and crazy that whatever they’d like to do — they’ll decide it makes more sense to stick to the deal. So they bring you back with the last load. We take our money. Buena suerte and viva la causa , that’s it. It’s not a desperate situation even today. It’s got rules. You’re riding shotgun.”

He began to laugh or by now it was the shadow. He listened to her laugh as well.

Then he went after that wet fouled denim for the sweet flesh inside, peeled the sweat shirt off her and licked her breasts, the nipples, above them below and around, the nipples themselves again.

“Crazy stuff,” she said. “Crazy stuff.”

Her watch cap had fallen off and her hair spread out among the strands of chafing gear. She was thrusting her ass against him — soft, round, damp under the wet film of denim — unzipping his fly. She forced him back against the bale; she, him!

“No need you holdin’ me down,” he said. It was the shadow talking.

But by answer she bent and put her teeth against his penis. Then she raised herself on her hands and feet like a cat stretching and kicked off her shrimping boots, then peeled down the jeans that encased her. Naked, she lay facing him against the bale. Pablo took off his shirt and undid his belt until his dungarees were down about his ankles.

She was laughing still.

“Don’t you take off your boots when you have a lady, Tex?”

“Never you fuckin’ mind.”

She answered him by taking his right hand and putting it between her thighs and the skin there was as smooth as the surface of a glass of buttermilk on a summer’s day. She closed his hand over her, his thumb in the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers playing over the down and labia. He put his face into her neck, then sought out her shoulder where the arrogant tattoo was and then, wanting it without delays, put his face between the thighs and with his mouth and tongue took all such pleasures there as he could see or imagine. She had wriggled partway up the heaped bale until her body was above his, and with her posture strangely erect, her head thrown back, slipped down on him time after time, impaling herself, until they both had come.

Deedee was still moaning softly when he saw that the hatch at the top of the ladder was pried open. He could make out the stars.

“The hatch,” he said.

She reached out for her bag and the bottle.

“Scared of trouble?”

From the way she said it, he could not tell if it was challenge or consolation, so he did not answer.

“We’re not having trouble on this boat,” she told him, “not about you and me. And the reasons for that I cannot tell but in another day.”

So, warily, he settled down, and though he did not like the way she had spoken to him, presently he was hard again. Or it might have been the shadow’s lust. He took her once more, trying now to hurt her — but she could not be hurt in that way; every thrust he made she somehow met, met yielding, as though she were ready for every moment. So he could not hurt her, could not gentle or humiliate her. And when he started to come and to pull out, she held him, letting go little by little as it pleased her until he was seeing lights on the overhead and he thought he would pass out cold.