Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

They drove in silence through the brief dusk and into the night. The ghostly sparkle of the sea was on their right; on their left the darkness compounded itself into the mass of the Sierra. It was a ride on the edge, among half-seen and unseen things, an increasingly tense and uneasy-making ride for Holliwell. He caught glimpses of wood fires through slat doorways, of fires in the cane fields. Beside him at the wheel, a frozen-faced female stranger possessed of some taut strength he felt himself to be somehow taxing. But it was beautiful there; the wind was what God had meant the wind to be, fresh from the ocean, unsullied by time. Smaller breezes stirred against the sea wind’s breast, carrying an iodine smell, a smell of jacaranda, of flowers he knew by half-forgotten, six-toned names from across the world— me-iang, ving, ba —the smell of villes in Ban Me Thuot, cooking oil, excrement, incense, death. The smell of the world turning. War.

It was wrong for him to be there. He had chosen to live where the world turned wrapped in illusions of peace, where all odors startled, the soul slept and dreams were only dreams. This fate-scented night brought up his wariness, his body tensed, he watched from behind the lights with the rapid eye movement of nightmare. It was war here; his nerve ends shivered like the polyps of the reef, vibrating to guns which he could almost hear.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said to her, as they turned inland and the jeep labored up a grade to the low cliffs over the delta.

“I guess it is,” the strange young woman said. The nun.

Over the dim lamps and the encircled glare of Alvarado’s naked lights, he could make out, far out to sea, a tiny beacon. It would be Camarillo, the nearest of the Corazón Islands. It was a sweet island. He had friends there once. He knew that he would not be seeing it this time around.

Descending toward the streets of town, he looked at her from time to time, trying not to let her catch him at it. She seemed, superficially, to have thrown every grain of her energy into the driving; she sat erect and rigid and the expression of mild shock in which her face was set never changed. She was stone beautiful, he thought; to his eye outrageously and provocatively beautiful, an impossible nun. And stone fierce now, her beauty suggested steel to him, steel that drew blood, the Queen of Swords.

“Not a bad town as they go,” he called to her above the engine’s whine. She nodded without looking at him, and showed her white upper teeth between the soft parted lips. He could not make himself look away from her then. She was the only person in the world. He needed to find her out and love her. Bad luck, he thought. Bad luck for both of them.

She guided him along mud streets, past square cement houses to the Gran Mura de China. It was a lime-green wooden building beside the river, the interior done up with a little halfhearted chinoiserie. There were plastic tables and fringed lanterns and a three-dollar dragon tapestry over a counter where a pale middle-aged Chinese woman leaned beside her abacus. A party of four Greek ship’s officers were eating steak and eggs at one end of a long table in the back of the room.

Justin exchanged a few pleasantries with the Chinese woman and then took Holliwell up a flight of stairs to a balcony where there was a table with a window overlooking the slightly fetid harbor. The breeze was fresh enough to make it the most pleasant table in the place. Dragons notwithstanding, there was nothing to be had that night except tough steak and eggs and jalapeños. They started out with Germania beer, served them by a Chinese girl of twelve or so.

“You must have been very young when you came,” Holliwell said.

“I was twenty-two,” she said. “I did my last year of nursing with them — the Devotionists.”

He wanted to ask if she had desired to go where springs failed not.

“Why them?”

“It must have been a newspaper ad,” she said. “Isn’t that silly?”

He thought it was very peculiar. He was silent.

“I was in Los Angeles at Cedars Hospital. I came from the country, you see, from Fairfield, Idaho. I didn’t like Los Angeles. I was after God, all that. They wanted me.”

God. All that. Yes, indeed, he thought. Life more abundant. More.

“I always thought of them as being in another century. I mean more than the others.”

“No,” she said, “no more than the others. They have lots of good women doctors.”

He nodded enthusiastic agreement.

“A lot of religious used to think of them as low Irish. Still do, I guess.”

“I know that to be true,” Holliwell said. “Part Jesuit as I am. There is a grain of truth in it, is there not?”

“I’m a grain of truth in it,” Justin said.

Her voice made him think of clear water, running over smooth stones. Gold-flecked pebble bars in the south fork of the Salmon. The fool’s gold and the real stuff.

“Why a nurse and not a doctor? I mean … not that there’s anything wrong with nursing.”

“The status side of it doesn’t really worry me. I don’t guess it occurred to me then that I could be a doctor. I was a girl, right? You think they had women doctors up there in Zion?”

“I suppose not when I was younger,” Holliwell said. One of us, he thought, has got to calm down. “I thought maybe by your time they had.”

“No,” she said. She sipped her beer and touched the paper napkin to her lips, staring all the while. “You know,” she said, “you look a bit spaced. Are you all right?”

“I’m perfectly well,” he said very slowly. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you look a little spaced yourself.”

“Oh,” she asked, “do I?” She tried to laugh. “Well, I am.” She tried again. “Because we’re moving out. And we’re so busy.”

“We should take things easy now. We’re not working at the moment.”

Holliwell called to the child for more beer.

“It’s terrible beer,” Justin said.

“Yes, it certainly is.”

Somehow, he thought, he was going to have to tell her about the whole business — Marty Nolan, Ocampo, all of it. He would have to explain himself and that would be the hard part. His presence did not explain well. He had followed disordered circumstance, coincidence, impulse and urging so heedlessly that the logic of his to-ings and froings had evaporated. He made no sense. Except as an agent of Nolan’s.

If he did not tell her, it might be more dangerous for her. She was in some danger already. If he did tell her, it would quite likely be dangerous for him.

“I’ve heard talk of you around,” he said to her. “You’ve apparently made an impression here.”

“What have you heard?”

“There are people who think you’re a radical of some kind.”

“Who?”

“Local people. I met a man at Playa Tate the other day after I spoke with you. He didn’t seem to like you.”

She seemed neither surprised nor alarmed.

“There are people here who hate my guts. They’re all I have to show for being here. The local Guardia, for instance.”

“That’s interesting,” Holliwell said. “Why’s that?”

“Oh,” she said, “because when the mission was open I was running some projects they didn’t like. I was training women in some basic nursing and it got sort of political. There were other things too. Anything like that gets them uptight. And I was friendly with some church people who were suspected of being anti-government. I still am.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“Maybe not to you. But it’s enough for the Guardia.”

“I thought it was dangerous to have misunderstandings with the Guardia.”

“I’m leaving, see, so my war’s over. They win. I quit.”