A Flag for Sunrise (26 page)

The thought came to Holliwell that he had spent much of his life depending on a few local people, speaking some lingua franca, hovering insect-like about the edge of some complex ancient society which he could never hope to really penetrate. That was his relationship with the world. And he himself—more and more losing touch with the family he had made, a bastard of no family origin, no blood or folk. A man from another planet forever inquiring of helpful strangers the nature of their bonds with one another.

“I don’t know how I got into family structures,” he heard himself tell the Zeccas. Tequila. Insidious. “It was archaeology I liked. The ruins, the traces, you know. I would have liked, I think, to dive. To dive for galleons.”

“Maybe you will yet,” Marie said.

“The family,” Holliwell said. “It’s so strange, you know. I never had a family of my own to speak of. And the one I’ve raised I don’t
believe I understand at all. As far as other people’s families go—I’m absolutely ignorant.”

“Christ,” Tom Zecca said. He was relaxed now, merry with the end of the drive. “With guys like you in the shop no wonder we lost the goddamn war in Nam.”

They all laughed.

“No,” Zecca said, touching his arm to reassure him. “I’m kidding you, bro. You’re O.K. You’re a straight shooter.”

“I hope our friend Cole comes down O.K. He worries me a little.”

“How about it, Holliwell?” Captain Zecca asked. “You think he’s a spook?”

“You’d probably know more about that than I would,” Holliwell said warily.

“I’ll tell you something, Doc Holliwell … I don’t know much until I read my mail—that’s the situation we’ve got working here. Maybe there’s a line on him in the pouch tomorrow.”

And maybe, Holliwell thought, a line on me.

“Well,” Marie said, “he’ll be up there tomorrow wandering about among all those disgruntled
macheteros.
Feel for him, guys.”

“We do,” Holliwell said.

“Poor useless bastard,” Zecca said, pouring out his creamy margarita. “He doesn’t know who he works for and he doesn’t know what side he’s on. Even if he’s ours, he’s not a hundred percent sure. You take a dude like that and the next thing you know you’ve got a double agent, the most dangerous goddamn creature walking.”

“They have short life spans,” Marie said, “that’s one thing about them.”

“That’s the only good thing,” Zecca said.

Marie moved the second blender into position.

“But damnit, those people up there are screwed. They’re getting dumped on in the most incredible fashion.”

“You better believe it,” the captain said. “For untold fucking generations they’ve been living on beans and lizards to grow coffee for the bastards that run this country. Now we’ve found copper up there and the idiot greedhead generals who own it are throwing them off the land—sending them down here to beg or starve. Nah,” Zecca
said, “who am I to knock Cole? It’s no wonder they’re righting back.”

“Are they?” Holliwell asked him.

“Are they seriously fighting back? I wish I knew. I’m supposed to. I can’t depend on dip-shits like Cole. One of these days I’m going to have to exercise my ass and go find out. I go up there in a chopper and they’ve got the weaponry, I’ll know in a big hurry.”

“It’s not worth worrying about,” Marie said. “If this place goes, they know where to find us. We’re fatalists. That’s what you’ve got to be, see. You’ve got to be a fatalist.”

They drank from the second blender.

“How much do you know for sure?” Holliwell asked. “If you don’t mind telling me.”

“O.K.,” Zecca said. “There’s a basic, quite justified piss-off all over the country. It’s particularly strong up in the Sierra where the Atapas live and the Atapas have a history of banditry and trouble-making. They can handle modern weapons but we don’t really know if they have any or if they have, what sort. If they’ve got, say, ground-to-air missiles—El General is in big trouble. Likewise if they’ve got a big cache of AKA’s. Here in town, anyone with a brain or an honest buck to turn hates the government but probably won’t move. Here the trouble is students, rich kids most of them—they’re divided into factions, Fidelistas, Trots, Maoists—the usual spectrum. Over on the east coast people tell you time stands still, nobody expects trouble over there. In my opinion that’s complacent because if anybody lands armament it’ll be over there, not on the Pacific coast. And it’s hard to fly stuff in here because we gave them an outrageous air force and we trained them in radar detection.”

“Sounds sort of standard,” Holliwell said.

“It’s not, though. Because now the morons who run this joint have given every anti-government faction a common cause with that copper grab. The unemployment rate is like sixty percent here. The streets are full of teen-age kids with nothing to do but rip off what-ever’s handy and go to the karate movies. You could make a tough little army out of those kids. Inept, disorganized, sure. But you’d have to kill whole bunches of them—they’d be the cannon fodder. El General would stink worse than usual in the nostrils of the world. Bad scene,” Zecca said. “The question is—does the Guardia stay loyal? Answer—probably.”

“And when the Guardia goes in—we advise them?”

“Mr. Holliwell,” Zecca said. “Doctor! We put this government in for our own interests. We trained the Guardia. Our ambassador thinks the Pres and his family are American-type people.”

“There’s a grain of truth in that,” Marie Zecca said.

“You’re a Communist,” Captain Zecca told his wife. “She sings ‘
Guantanamera
’ at embassy lawn parties.”

“Under my breath,” Marie said. “Fat Frank wouldn’t recognize it if he heard it anyway.”

“O.K.,” Zecca said, “the Guardia will have American weapons and support. The support will be mealy-mouthed and covert but it will be there.”

“And what do honest folk like ourselves do then, Captain Zecca?” Holliwell inquired.

Zecca put away another margarita.

“It’s too late. It’s too late, understand. The usual shit will go down. You and I, Doc, maybe we know something about the country. But it’s too late. If we don’t back them now, we’ll have a Russian submarine base in Puerto Alvarado—maybe a missile base this time. See how that goes over in Dubuque, in Congress, in the White House, for Christ’s sake.”

“Fucked again,” Holliwell said.

“I’ll be gone,” Zecca said. “My tour is almost up. Then they can send in the types who like the Guardia’s style. The headhunters, the Cubans, the counterinsurgency LURPS’s. And the guys who enjoy saluting animals in tailor-made pink uniforms.”

“And where will you be then?”

“I don’t know,” Zecca said. “Not some place like this. They owe me.”

“It’s not all one thing or another, you know,” Marie said. “It’s not us being bad guys all the time. Only assholes think that. Pious assholes.”

“Don’t call him a pious asshole,” Captain Zecca commanded his wife.

“I don’t mean him,” Marie said, and Holliwell thought she was beginning to cry. “I don’t mean you,” she assured him. “I agree with you. I don’t even mean Cole and Cole really is a pious asshole.”

“You have to go on hoping for the best,” Zecca said.

Marie nodded. “You have to have faith.”

“Only pious assholes have faith, Marie,” the captain said.

“Up yours,” Marie told him. Holliwell drank another margarita. It was all in fun.

“Let me tell you something,” the captain said suddenly to Holliwell. “In Nam I spent two years in combat intelligence. In that time I interrogated maybe hundreds of prisoners and
chieu hois
and I never once let the Arvins get away with torturing any. I’m speaking of torture in the strict sense. I never did, in any of the time I was in that place, anything I thought was cruel or dishonorable. You believe me?”

“Of course,” Holliwell said.

“I never sat still for shooting up civilians, not even up north. I never clipped an ear or set fire to a hootch and I never countenanced it. I conducted that fucking war honorably and so did my people. I did that to the greatest possible extent, sir, and it wasn’t easy in my position. Moreover, I thought it was a crock, a stupid hopeless crock. It was dumb and it was inhuman by its nature. But me,” Zecca said, turning his fingertips inward and tapping his heart, “I’m not. I make that claim.”

“It’s true,” Marie said.

“I don’t claim virtue,” Zecca declared. “I don’t claim to be a kindly man. I claim to be capable of honor.”

“I also claim that,” Holliwell said.

“I took an oath,” Zecca said. “I fulfilled it and I fucking fulfilled it without compromising myself. Takes a little working at.”

“Surely,” Holliwell said.

“The Army didn’t send me down here to be a chaplain to the peasantry or to feed the birds or conduct an agrarian reform. It sent me down because I’m supposed to know about the lay of the country from a military point of view. In terms of intercontinental defense.”

“Of course,” Holliwell said, “intercontinental defense. And you’re beginning to feel compromised?”

“No,” Zecca said quickly. “Not at this point.”

“Excuse me,” Holliwell said. “Do you expect to conduct your career in one American-sponsored shithole after another, partying with their ruling class, advising their conscripts in counterinsurgency and overseeing their armaments, and not compromise your oath or your honor? Because that sounds very tricky to me.”

“You don’t know the facts, mister,” Marie said.

“I know a few,” Holliwell said. “Beyond that I know what you tell me.”

“I know what you know,” Zecca said. Holliwell folded his hands on the metal table. In the circumstances, he had gone too far. “And this is what I tell you—that when they evict those people over the mineral rights, I hope to Christ we’ll be on our way to another posting. O.K.—that’s a cop-out, it’s a quease. But you’ve got to think in terms of the larger scale, the …”

“The Big Picture.”

“The Big Picture,” Zecca said with a grim smile. “Thank you, sir. But you don’t know what’s really going on here. Neither does Cole. He thinks he does but he doesn’t. He knows more than me but I know more than him, do you follow me?”

“I think we went to the same sort of schools,” Holliwell said.

“Tom and I both went to St. Bonaventura,” Marie told him. “In Olean, New York.”

Captain Zecca was drunk. So was Marie. So, to his own reckless satisfaction, was Holliwell.

“I’m sorry,” Holliwell declared. “I don’t approve of the American presence here.”

“Someday,” Captain Zecca said, “I’m going to work with the Chinese. Someday somewhere the conditions are gonna be right and me and the Chinese will get something going—I don’t care if it’s Africa—maybe even China.”

“Wouldn’t that be great,” Marie said.

“I’m a fucking master of destiny,” Zecca said. “My family is related to Napoleon’s. I’m gonna get down with those Chinese.”

“Listen to him,” Marie said. “I hope you realize we’re all drunk here.”

“I realize it,” Holliwell said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“But, Jesus,” Marie went on a little sadly, “I wish we could trust you. I mean, we don’t even know who you are and here we’re talking about the Chinese.”

“You know who I am and you can trust me,” Holliwell said. “Personally, I enjoy talking about the Chinese.”

“Well, one day,” Zecca said, “this army will get me and the Chinese together and together we are gonna be the fucking Yellow Peril.”

“Include me in,” Holliwell told him. “As far as possible.”

“There have been Chinese for five million years, man,” the captain said. “I don’t know how long there’s been Zeccas but I know there’s one thing that Zeccas and Chinese have in common. We know how the world goes.” He took a little salt from the edge of his margarita glass and rubbed the grains between his fingers. “We know the price of salt. The Americans forget, if they ever knew. But Zeccas and Chinese will always know.”

Holliwell toasted the ancient wisdom of the Zeccas and the Chinese.

“Cole doesn’t know shit. Fat Frank doesn’t know shit. El General—well, he’s an ape. You, sir,” he said, addressing Holliwell, “I don’t know what you know. I won’t presume to speculate. But things don’t work the way people think.”

Holliwell shrugged. “I know that my redeemer liveth,” he said. The Zeccas stared at him. It was too Protestant a text.

After a moment, Tom laughed.

“We have a proverb, sir, in my grandfather’s country. In his island. I’m positive they have the same proverb in China. It goes ‘To trust is good. Not to trust is better.’ ”

“A
salute
,” Marie said, and they drank the last of the margaritas.

“To Sicily,” Holliwell said.

Captain Zecca’s face seemed suddenly drained of good feeling. In the light from the living room, the shadow of his thick brows masked his eyes, high cheekbones and the arch of his nose covered the play of his thin lips.

“To the price of salt,” he said, “and the ten pains of death. Which is all we really know.”

Marie sighed. Holliwell held his seat until Captain Zecca rose from the table. He had seen such drinking parties in Vietnam and sometimes they ended badly. Zecca had begun to “sir” him rather a lot, a bad signal.

“Next month,” Captain Zecca said, as they all staggered off to show Holliwell to his quarters, “we have to have twenty barrels of green beer. The way things get done in this country we better get on it now.”

The room to which Holliwell was shown was small and comfortable, typical of the house; a touch of suburbia, a touch of Spanish formality. It had its own bath.

“Green beer!” Marie said. They shook hands all round.

“Good night, Doc,” the captain said. “Great ride.”

“Really,” Marie said.

Holliwell thanked them profusely, excessively.

Washing up in the small neat bathroom, he could hear them plainly when he turned off the tap. They were in the kitchen.

“St. Patrick’s Day,” Captain Zecca was telling his wife. “It’s in March.”

“Oh, you’re kidding,” Marie said.

“Like hell I’m kidding. I’ve got to locate this individual who can dye beer green without poisoning the whole station.”

“That’s too goddamn ridiculous,” she said.