Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“You got no sense, son,” Negus said. “Why’d you ever come aboard?”

“I needed to. Thought you needed me.”

Negus spat again. “But we didn’t, did we? No need on anybody’s part.”

“Guess not,” Pablo said. “But that’s the breaks.” He was beginning to think there might be a way in which he was going to make out after all. Most of all, he was wondering if there was any more speed on board.

“Now what we got, kid, is a Mexican standoff. You know what I mean?”

“No,” Pablo said. But he was intrigued and encouraged to hear things put that way.

“I’m hurting. I got a slug in my gut. I don’t know but that …” He let it go. “But you’re hurting too, kid. You can’t get nowhere from here. Nothing on that coast for you now. You’ll pile her up or the Guardia’ll get you or the pirates will. You’re bleeding, boy, you’re drawing sharks, you see what I mean now?”

Pablo listened in silence to the beat of the null tone.

Negus stood up and leaned on the rail a few feet away from him.

“I can take this vessel anywhere. I can get us anywhere. Clear.”

“How?” Pablo asked.

Negus grew enthusiastic.

“Oh, by Jesus Christ, boy, why, plenty of places. San Ignacio. Colombia. One of the islands there. I got friends in all them places. I can get us a doctor. We can sell our goods, man. Emeralds. We can get them.” He was trying to see Pablo’s face in the faint light that came from the cockpit. He was smiling.

“What would you tell them there? If we got to Colombia — one of them places?”

“Well, a thousand things. A thousand things, hell …” He was talking faster and he began to laugh. “They don’t give a goddamn what you done or where you been if you got cash or goods. We’d have it made.”

Pablo was straining toward hope. That it might all be true. There were moments when they both believed it all.

Negus drew his breath painfully, and encouraged, went on.

“Listen, Pablo. You’re using twenty gallons an hour out here. More than that. More. You goin’ to be sailing in circles.”

When Pablo did not reply, he grew more heated.

“You be out here, boy, you’ll see things day and night. Stuff that ain’t there. I know what I’m talking about. You don’t ever want to be alone out here because the stuff you’ll see sometimes it ain’t there and sometimes it is. When it is it’s worser. I know. I’m the one that knows. And me takin’ us in, old shoe, we’ll be home free. Home. Free. They know me, man. They don’t care.” He laughed and ran out of breath, and Tabor saw that the man was lying to him, talking for his life as though to a child. Turning him around.

Years before in a town Pablo knew, the bootleggers had chained an old boy to an anchored oil barrel at low tide, chained him up for the high water to come in on him. There happened along this young child out where he had no business and the man talked to the child and begged and hollered at him to go for help. But the child forgot or his parents told him better not to say and the tide came in over the man four feet and they only found out about the child afterwards.

Pablo looked at his weary enemy and was sorry.

“Well, O.K.,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Negus’ delight was so great that, sorry as he was, Tabor couldn’t keep from laughing. The old dude was whooping and shouting like the drunkard he was, going on about emeralds and cocaine and private villas and his face was happy as Christmas morning when Pablo blew him away. It was necessary to hold the dead old man up against the rail so that he would not become a burden. Holding him up hurt Pablo’s injured leg, so the two of them leaned over the rail side by side for a while. Fellow travelers. Then Tabor bent down, took hold of Negus under the knees and pitched him over. The null tone went right on sounding.

He remained at the rail, his elbows resting there, his hands clasped, and looked up the Dipper. He had been watching it edge around Polaris through the night. Perhaps because of the wound, he felt cold. Now he and the creatures in the ice hold were the only living things aboard.

His work done, Pablo became afraid. An unfamiliar emotion oppressed him which he came to recognize as loneliness; a loneliness deeper than he had ever experienced.

“Jesus help me,” Pablo said aloud.

He missed them, that was it. A crazy way to feel, because they were low-down people, they were just shit as people and they had certainly been turning him around. Not the way he missed Naftali — Naftali was all right. But them being dead now, all of them, it was hard to take. It put a strain on him. Cecil, he thought, that black bastard was the root of it.

Then he thought of speed and how that would be the ticket. On his way to the sleeping quarters he stopped in the cockpit and looked over the navigational gear. The compass bearing was set for zero-zero-zero and the constant null tone signified that this was where it should be. They had gone out on one-eighty from the marker and were headed straight back in — no problem there. On the chart table he found Callahan’s rough line-of-sight chart; in one corner Callahan had written the Loran digits he had noted at the spot. For the moment things were all right but later, up near the reef, he would have to do his own steering and find the market in darkness. And there would be the men on the coast, those money-crazy bird-talking people. Perhaps his mother’s people.

He took a light and went into the head where the shower was and found an unlocked cabinet under the small sink. Up front there were first-aid kits and soap and every kind of downer, all of them prescribed for a Dolores Callahan. In his impatience he swept them aside; he found aspirin, aloe powder, ginseng, exotic shampoos. Not until he was on the edge of despair did he find, on the bottom shelf under the pipe, a small bottle containing six Desoxyn. He clutched the Desoxyn bottle and bent his head against the shelf in gratitude. Less impatient now, he looked through the rest of the scattered bottles and found a jar of pain-killing tablets. He recognized the gray half-moon pills and their brand name because they were the things that Kathy took for menstrual cramps and he had used them as speed back home.

Pablo sat on the deck of the head, swallowed two Desoxyn and one of the pain-killers and made a bandage for his wounded leg. There were no exit or entry holes, only a scythe-cut wound along the side. It did not seem serious; there was not much blood. He would do.

With the light at his feet he sat in one of the lounge chairs of the saloon to let the speed and the pain-killer do their work. A ridiculous place it was, the saloon, with its teak and rattan and Spanish table. He recognized it now as a third hold, the sort they had on the big Texas boats. The Callahans had made it into a floating parlor. And it suited them, he thought, it was their idea of fun and high living. The wooden louvered shutters at deck level could keep it cool at sea but it was really just a hidey-hole, set everywhere with fans and as cramped in its fancy way as the lazaret.

When he felt better he went to Deedee’s compartment and opened the teak door. There was a wide bunk bed against the bulkhead and a steel bookcase with a great many books. On top of it was a picture of both Callahans on a lawn with a lot of tables and lawn umbrellas behind them. Callahan, looking young and thinner, was standing behind a bench upon which sat his wife, who looked very much the same. Her blond hair was tied back severely and her smile was sweetness itself; her legs, in tight breeches and gleaming boots, were crossed in comfortable self-assurance. Callahan’s hand was on her jacketed shoulder. Her own hand, in a string glove, rested on his.