A Flag for Sunrise (61 page)

In the cover of the mission boathouse, he stopped and tried to spy out the state of things. Thin lines of light showed behind the fastened shutters of the dispensary wing but the rest of the building was dark beyond the span of lamps along the stairs. He could hear voices and laboring footsteps on the veranda. The arc of a tossed cigarette appeared for a second at the window of the priest’s apartment. There were two dark pickup trucks parked along the road out front.

He moved away from the boathouse and had started to advance along the beach when he saw two dead men at the water’s edge. One lay face up with his arms outstretched as though he had rolled off the dock; his chest was destroyed. The other was on his knees, a bloodied face half buried in sand. The two dead men wore the helmets and camouflage fatigues of the Guardia. Holliwell paused for a moment and then walked on. He would be visible from the building now. He took the chance.

Shadows appeared suddenly from the tree line by the mission garden. Someone shouted. A burst of machine-gun fire exploded from the edge of the veranda and he threw himself to the sand. The firing was in his direction but aimed high. Armed men were advancing from the woods around the garden, but they were civilians, he saw, not Guardia.

“May!” he shouted. He could feel a line of guns turn on him.

A lone man in dark slacks walked from the road and across the beach toward him.

“That you, Holliwell?” the man asked. It was Father Egan.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” the priest said.

Holliwell stood up and brushed the sand from his shirt.

“Want to talk with the boss?” Egan asked. “Come on.”

As he walked with Egan to the mission steps, sentries tracked him with their weapons. On the steps themselves, men in Guardia uniforms emerged from the darkness of the veranda, carrying cardboard
boxes. They were unarmed and without helmets; thus dispossessed, they did not seem to be Guardia any longer but only frightened young Indians. They carried their burdens in silence, moving carefully through the cruciform arrangement of lamps to stack the cardboard boxes in the parked trucks.

Holliwell looked up through the lamps’ glare and saw Justin at the top of the steps. Her hands were thrust in the pockets of her white smock; he could not quite see her face. For the first time since he had met her she seemed at ease. After a moment she came down to him.

“What happened?”

“They took me out of the hotel about seven o’clock. To the
justicia
. They have thousands of troops in Alvarado.” He brushed a loose hand toward the invisible mountains. “They’ve got choppers.”

“I know,” she said. She turned partly away, pivoting on a hip, her hands still in her pockets. He understood that she would not want to face him now and be undone, and have her pride of battle spoiled by intimacy with him, thoughts of the morning. “How did you get away?”

“We were coming … they were coming out to get you. We were ambushed.”

“Campos?” she asked.

“He was there. I think they got him.”

She gave a whispered gasp. There was a roll of automatic fire from the direction of town.

“I tried to get out,” Holliwell said. “Alvarado was closed down by noon. They just took me in.”

“You talked to them.”

“I was under some compulsion. I tried to make a deal with them. They told me you wouldn’t be hurt.”

“You talked to them.” There were men with guns watching them from both sides of the building as they spoke. Justin sighed and put her foot on the bottom step. “Oh, Frank. You betrayed me then, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Holliwell said. “I didn’t think so.”

“But you did,” she said calmly. “Imagine not knowing.”

“If you’d been there you might think better of me. Of course, it hardly matters now.”

“Doesn’t it matter to you?”

“What matters to me isn’t important,” he said.

He was suddenly impatient with her. Watching her stand cool and brave amid her war, he had been awed and moved at the measure of her courage and her delusion. He felt envy and admiration and love for her. He considered the tremor of concern he detected in her voice as she asked after his conscience unworthy of the moment.

“When I decide what happened,” he said, “I’ll decide to live with it.”

Apparently it was his fate to witness popular wars; Vietnam had been a popular war among his radical friends. As a witness to that popular war he had seen people on both sides act bravely and have their moments. Popular wars, thrilling as they might be to radicals, were quite as shitty as everything else but like certain thrilling, unperfected operas—like everything else, in fact—they had their moments. People’s moments did not last long.

“You can’t stay here,” she told him. “We’re pulling out of here when we get the trucks loaded.”

“I can’t go back. I was seen at the
justicia
by your friends.”

“My friends,” she said, “my friends will be where we’re going.”

“I hope so, May, for your sake. The government’s out in force here and you may not win this round. They claim you’re surrounded.”

She had started up the steps, Holliwell following. As she stooped to pick up one of the hurricane lamps she glanced at him over her shoulder; on her face in the flickering light was the immanence of a smile.

“We were never surrounded. We disarmed the Guardia force that came out.” She raised her chin toward the defanged troopers loading the trucks. “We killed some,” she said when she had turned away.

In the dispensary, the lights were on behind the shutters. Beds had been crowded to one end of the room; against two of the walls sat a dozen or so more men in Guardia fatigues. Across the long room, two black Caribs in sport shirts and Guardia helmets watched the prisoners with Uzi’s across their knees.

The bed in which Holliwell and Justin had made their gesture at love was occupied by a dark, hard-faced young man who was sitting up in it, smoking. His leg was wrapped in clean bandages, there was an anchor tattoo on his left arm. Father Egan, who had followed them up, sat down on the foot of the young man’s bed. Holliwell
looked about the room and his gaze fell on two small bottles of the medicinal brandy which were under the bed behind Egan’s feet. Happily and without ceremony, he reached down past the priest’s soiled, sandaled feet to grab them. Father Egan sighed.

He opened one of the brandy bottles and put the second in his trousers pocket. Justin watched him drink. He looked back at her, thinking to see her look away. He remembered now how her eyes had no edge to them, behind them she was naked.

“Well,” he said, when he had finished drinking, “a terrible beauty is born.”

She held his look steadily, then her sober fateful expression broke into a bright young smile, unexpected and unashamed.

“Isn’t it something?” she said.

“Yes, it is.”

“What am I supposed to do with you now?” she asked. “You’re in it.”

“I guess that’s not your problem. I’m not in it with you.”

“You’ll just have to keep talking, won’t you? Explaining yourself.”

“If I had explanations left,” Holliwell said, “I would make all of them to you. If it mattered.”

“And I would believe them, Frank. You could get me to believe them all, if it mattered. But I’m the only one who would.”

“I’m going to lose another war all by myself,” he said. “This is the second.”

Justin looked at the floor while he emptied the brandy bottle. Seconds passed before she spoke.

“You’re a good loser,” she said. “You’re a lucky man. You’ll live longer than you deserve if you help me out.”

“So now we’re tough guys.”

“That’s right,” she said, and smiled a little. Her smiles were like mercy. “We have to be tough guys now. I’m going to give you the mission’s boat. This kid”—she nodded toward the wounded young man—“is named Pablo and he’s American.” Pablo in the bed mumbled something inaudible and tried to smile. “I want you to get him down to the boat and get the two of you out to sea. Get clear of the coast before daylight.”

Holliwell looked at the young man on the bed and back at Justin.

“Would we really have a chance?”

“I think you’d have a very good chance,” she said.

Pablo stirred himself.

“That’s the truth,” he said. “The weather’s nothing but beautiful. I could get a good sound boat mostly to Florida.”

“Inside of a day,” Justin said, “you should run across one of the steamers coming up from the canal. We can see them right off the beach here every day of the week. If you meet rough weather you can turn south and if you still have enough gas you might make Limón in Costa Rica.”

“I don’t have much choice, do I?”

“I don’t think so, Frank. You’re lucky. You’ll make it.”

“Me, too,” Pablo said. “Always been.”

“Christ,” Holliwell said. He glanced at the priest at the foot of Pablo’s bed. “What about you, Father?”

“I’m not as lucky as you two. Anyway I’m staying here.”

“It’s the best thing, Frank. I was going to leave Pablo with Charlie but it’ll be better for both of them if he goes with you.”

“All right,” Holliwell said. “Let’s do it.”

While the Caribs stared their prisoners down, Justin and Holliwell set about gathering such supplies as would be needed for the passage out to sea. In the kitchen they loaded a crate with fruit: pineapples, papayas, a few dozen lemons. Half the canned food left in the larders went in with it, mainly the corned beef and beans on which Egan subsisted. They took turns laboring over the kitchen pump, bringing up enough water to fill a fifty-liter drum. When they had enough of everything, they pressed two of the captured troopers into service to help them carry the lot to the boathouse; one of the rebel gunmen posted on the road went along as escort. The small procession marched across the beach, past the corpses of the slain Guardia men and onto the small dock. With Holliwell standing in the whaler, they passed the provisions along hand to hand, feeling out each load from each other’s arms in nearly complete darkness. From the open boat-house, they took the last half-filled drum of gasoline, some kerosene, a plastic funnel.

When they got back to the road, the two pickup trucks stood loaded and the insurrectionist commander was bringing his men in from the surrounding woods to gather along the road. The commander
was a bookkeeper in the employ of an Alvarado brothel and he was still in shock as a result of his earlier successful skirmish with the Guardia. His eyes were glazed with nervous fatigue, he continually ran his hand across his face in the manner of one disoriented. In fact his sense of reality had been subverted by the action; his upbringing had been gentle by the standards of Tecan and his only prior experience of massed weaponry and its effects had been at the cinema. He did not know what to make of Holliwell and consequently ignored him. The bookkeeper was a short heavy young man with a jowly spoiled-child’s face. Holliwell found him sympathetic.

As Holliwell stood by, he told Justin that there was not room in the trucks for his men, the medical supplies and the prisoners together. Justin suggested that the prisoners would have to walk. This made the bookkeeper unhappy; he had spoken eloquently to them and they had listened to him and enlisted under his command and he did not want to lose them. Nothing of the sort had ever happened to him before. Listening in, Holliwell envied him too. He had had a moment.

Justin and the bookkeeper agreed that it was necessary to abandon the mission now. The volume of fire from the direction of town seemed to have decreased but it was heavier in the hills behind them. And there was heavy firing now to the south, where there had been little before. It was the direction in which they were headed.

They went upstairs to the dispensary and the bookkeeper began to address his huddled prisoners. He told them what his job had been until the day before and how never before had he known who he was, but in the revolution he had found his freedom as they would find theirs. He hoped that they would keep faith with him and take their place in the revolution even though it meant they would have to walk to it and surrender all over again. If he were an evil man like their officers, he told them, he might simply have killed them. If he had been captured by them, he pointed out, they would certainly have been ordered to kill him and would have done so under compulsion. Saying so much, the bookkeeper seemed hardly to believe it, although it was true enough. He was an eloquent young man. He had been overqualified as a brothel’s bookkeeper but one often met over-qualified people in that part of the world.

While Justin went off to get a reserve of clean bandages and some
antibiotics for Pablo, Holliwell walked to the young man’s bedside to see who it was he would be sharing an pen boat with. Father Egan was still sitting at the foot of the bed.

“You two haven’t really met, have you? This is Holliwell, Pablo. He’s an anthropologist. And this is Pablo.”

“How’re you feeling, Pablo?” Holliwell asked.

“Could be better,” Pablo said. Holliwell came to the disturbing conclusion that he was being sized up for a mark. It occurred to him that Pablo might not even realize what he was about, that it was simply his manner. “What you doin’ in this here shithole, cousin?”

“I was doing a study,” Holliwell said.

Pablo laughed, after a fashion. “Yeah?”

Holliwell walked away and met Justin halfway across the room, carrying Pablo’s medicine.

“Who is this kid?” he asked her.

“Nobody exactly knows. Charlie Egan says the law’s after him and that’s good enough for me. He’s probably off a boat.”

Holliwell said nothing.

He and Justin lifted the young man out of bed and stood him on his feet as the Indian prisoners and the bookkeeper watched. When he was upright, the young man turned to Father Egan.

“You think it’s gonna be all right?” He asked the priest. Holliwell was touched.

“Yes, it’ll be all right, Pablo. It’ll always be all right for you.”

Pablo smiled; he looked at Justin and Holliwell with what Holliwell would have sworn was triumphant malice. Then his features clouded.