Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

He was very high, higher than he had ever been. His thoughts twisted off into spools, arabesques, snatches of music.

Deedee was putting her clothes on. Automatically, he buckled his trousers.

“Don’t you have any gentleness in you, boy?” she asked.

He looked toward her unseen face. Fear sat on his chest, its talons in the muscles of his breast. He had seen a shadow pass the hatch. He was certain.

“You mustn’t be afraid,” she told him softly.

Hearing her say it was a terrible thing for him.

“Someone’s up there,” he said.

“That could be, Pablo. It’s all right.”

All right. And he was in a rank-smelling trap at a loss to understand how he had got there. Beside him in the darkness his soft-bodied enemy soothed him in a voice like gold wire.

“Hey, hey,” she said, nudging him slightly, “it’s all right, my man.”

All right. But they were going to kill him. He had been through the question before and that was the way it had come out.

“You set me up,” he told her.

“Don’t be silly,” she said firmly.

As she said it, he stopped trembling. She had set him up and there was no more to it. He was among crazy people, in an empty landscape tasting of salt rubber, smelling of scale and death. They were about killing him. He sat very still waiting for her to move, listening for sounds on the deck above.

“Settle down now,” she said, as though she were talking to a horse.

He was quite settled down now. There was no more reality to him than to the blossoming bougainvillea he thought to see in the darkness or to the music that he heard. Things were inside out but he was strong.

He made a loop of the chafing line and by a blind stroke caught her around the throat. One of her hands came up to struggle with the noose but the other was reaching into darkness. Pablo, twisting the line with all his strength, his mind serene, took a moment to react. Deedee brought up the butt of the pistol she had taken from her bag and cracked him hard across the upper lip, nearly getting the underside of his nose. He let go the line and went after the pistol; he could not see what had hit him but he knew it must be one.

She was shouting now, shouting for her husband in a choked nightmare voice. When he had forced the pistol from her right hand, he pressed his head down against her chest to keep it low and took Naftali’s Nambu from beneath his seabag.

There was true light in the space now. On the ladder someone with a flashlight was searching out the darkness. Pablo rolled her across his body — it was as though they were making love again — her teeth were sunk in his arm. As she passed over him, he jammed the barrel of the Nambu under her down vest and fired two of its eight shots upward. He felt her teeth release him, she was flung onto her knees beside the bale. Two shots came from the ladder, at least one of them striking the woman. She rolled over on her side, her knees still together. The compartment was spinning with illuminations; Pablo thought of fireflies, wet spark plugs. His ears were hammered shut. Against the flat lower section of the bulkhead he was unhurt. When he fired at the man who was on the ladder, he did so with confidence, as though he had nothing but time. And in a second, he knew he had been on target. He heard the shuffle, the groan, the gun strike the ladder’s bottom step and slide across the deck. The man fell behind the beam of his own flashlight, invisible and motionless. Pablo sat panting in the darkness, waiting for the figure behind the light to move. The moment he started to his feet, there was another flash; Tabor’s leg went out from under him and his head struck the slanting overhead. He knelt and fired two shots into the space behind the light’s beam. There was a groan and a man spoke — it was Callahan — but Pablo could not make out what he said. Then Pablo discovered himself to be shot; there was a bleeding wound in the thick part of his calf, in the back. He ran his finger along the shin bone and found it unbroken. The bullet might only have cut him and passed through but it hurt. He would be all right, he thought. He had power enough to fox them all and live. There was another one.

From the open deck above, he heard Negus’ voice calling the Callahans by name. He began to go up the ladder backwards, sitting for a while on each step. Negus’ voice sounded far away, carried off by the wind. At last, he was sitting framed in the hatchway. There was no sign of a light. His head bent low, he glanced around his shoulder and saw Negus, holding a shotgun and crouching anxiously beside the after hatch.

“Jack?” Negus asked, and reached for a light he had set down on the hatch cover.

As Negus reached for it, Pablo turned full around, got off a shot, then flung himself out of the hatchway and scuttled across the slimy deck like one of the creatures that had swarmed there during the evening. His shot, he knew, had missed. His leg throbbing, he crawled for darkness, his steel-hearted killer’s trance deserting him. Negus was after him, rounding the hatch for a shot. Pablo, terrified now, cowered in the scuppers, he had two shots in the little Nambu and the light was bad. Then he saw Negus stumble backward, make two little capering backward steps and fall back against the hatch cover. The shotgun discharged heavenward.

Pablo, uncertain of what he was seeing, came to realize that Negus had slipped on the deck. It was a miracle of God. He hesitated for a moment, saw Negus try to bring the gun to bear and shot him. It seemed to him that he had missed again. Negus dropped the shotgun on the deck and was looking down at it, cursing softly. He turned toward Pablo.

“You stop, you hear! Just stop it!” There was a catch in his voice. He was hurt.

Pablo lowered his gun.

“Don’t yell at me no more, Mr. Negus. Get back there against the rail.”

When Negus stood clear, Pablo lowered himself on his good leg, and picked up the shotgun.

“Oh, you dirty monkey,” Negus said. “You little son of a bitch. What’d you do?”

He seemed furious. Pablo felt as though he had done something wrong.

“They’re down there,” Pablo said, pointing to the lazaret hatchway. “You look down there, you’ll see them.”

Negus walked stiffly to the flashlight on the hatch cover, took it and went to the top of the lazaret ladder. Tabor stood behind him, keeping him on the top step as he played the beam over the silent space.

“You dirty fucking monkey,” Freddy Negus said.

“They were turning me around,” Pablo explained. “You was too.”

“Well, they ain’t turnin’ you around no more, bucky,” Negus said. “They’re dead. You killed them.”

“Well, they were,” Pablo said. He felt remorse and disgust.

Negus sat down on the hatch, his arms folded over his stomach.

“I don’t know how the hell he took it in his head to hire you. You were just a wrong number.”

From the cockpit, they could hear the RDF’s steady null signal, sounding over and over, a noise from space.

“Goddamn foibles and human error,” Negus said, “you got such a little margin anyways and them two always overplayed it.” He coughed and spat thickly on the deck. “Figured you were fun or something.”

“Well, I can’t live for fun,” Pablo said. “Some people can afford to but I can’t. A lot of times people try and turn me around and they always find that out about me.”

Negus stood up and started forward, paused and went on, holding to the rail.

“I’m not walking well,” Negus told Pablo.

“Me neither. But you’re gut-shot.”

When they reached the wheelhouse hatch, Pablo started in; Negus stayed him with a hand.

“I don’t want no blood in there.”

Pablo understood. Negus sat on a gear locker and looked out to sea; Tabor leaned on the rail. There were no lights in sight, or ridges to block the great field of stars. The pointers and Polaris were over the starboard quarter.