A Flag for Sunrise (11 page)

Tabor’s trailer was in the last row, the one furthest from the road and the most expensive.

He parked beside it, in a little driveway of crushed shell with a sick banana tree at the end of it. He had taken his sunglasses off getting out of the car, and the sun on the streamliner siding of his trailer dazzled his eyes. As he put the glasses back on, he looked toward the sorry little playground that stood fenced between two rows of trailers and saw his son. The boy was lying belly down on one of the rusty miniature slides, his arms dangling to the ground. With one hand he was sifting the surface of shredded shell and dried mud under the slide.

Tabor went to the playground gate.

“Billy.”

The little boy started and turned over quickly, guiltily.

“How the hell come you ain’t in school? Whatchyou doin’ around here?”

Billy walked toward him ready to flinch.

“She didn’t get you up, did she?” Tabor shouted. Billy shook his head. Tabor stood tapping his foot, looking at the ground.

“Dumb bitch,” he whispered.

Hearing him, the boy wiped his nose, uneasily.

That could just do it, Tabor thought.

“Look here,” he told the little boy, “I’m gonna drive you in after a while. Meantime you stay right out here and don’t come in, hear?”

He went back to the trailer and let himself in. The living room had a sweet stale smell, spilled beer, undone laundry.

And it was just the sort of place you had to keep clean, he thought. Like a ship. You had to keep it clean or pretty soon it was like you were living in the back seat of your car.

Clothes were piled beside an empty laundry bag at one end of the pocket sofa—her blouses, work uniforms, Billy’s dungarees. Spread out across the rest of the sofa were the sections of the past Sunday’s paper. On the arm was a stack of Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets she had let some missionaries give her.

She was asleep in their bedroom, the end compartment.

Tabor went quietly into the kitchen and opened the waist-high refrigerator. There were three shelves in it—the bottom shelf held nothing except cans of Jax beer. On the two top shelves were row upon row of hamburger patties each on its separate waxed-paper square. She brought them home frozen in cardboard boxes from the place she worked.

As he looked at the rows of hamburger, a curious impulse came into his mind. He straightened up and took a breath—he had the sensation of time running out, of seconds being counted off toward an ending. Finally, he took a can of Jax out, opened it and sat down on the living-room sofa facing the plastic door.

If he allowed himself one more, he thought, he might coax another rush. On the one hand go easy because things are getting fast and bad; on the other hand fuck it. He took a Dex out of the bottle, bit off half and swallowed it with the beer. After a few moments he swallowed the other half.

In the kitchen again, he threw the empty beer can away and stood looking out of the little window above the sink. Miles of bright green grass stretching to the cloudless blue, the horizon broken here and there by bulbous raised gas tanks on steel spider legs, like flying saucer creatures. You could picture them starting to scurry around the swamp and they’d be fast all right, they’d cover ground.

He opened the refrigerator and took one of the hamburger patties out.

“Now that’s comical,” he said, holding it over the sink. His chest felt hollow.

His hand closed on the hamburger, wadding it together with the waxed paper. A fat, dirty, greasy fucking thing. He couldn’t stop squeezing on it. The ice in it melted with the heat of his hand and the
liquid ran down the inside of his forearm. He took a couple of deep breaths; his heartbeat was taking off, just taking off on him. He dropped the meat in the sink.

When he had washed his hands, he went into the compartment at the opposite end of the trailer from their bedroom, the place where he kept his own things. Everything there was in good order.

There was a locked drawer under the coat closet where Tabor kept his electronics manuals and his military forty-five automatic. He took the pistol out, inserted a clip and went back into the kitchen.

With the gun in his right hand, he gathered up as many of the hamburgers as he could manage with his left and went to the bedroom.

“Meat trip,” he said.

She had the blue curtains drawn against the morning light. The covers were pulled up over her ears; in the space between her pillow and the wall were a rolled magazine and a spilled ashtray that had fouled the sheet with butts. Tabor moved around her bed, delicately setting hamburger patties at neat intervals along the edge.

“Kathy,” he called softly.

She stirred.

“I killed the dogs,” he said.

“You did what?” she said, and as she came awake she saw the little circle of meat in front of her.

She started to turn over; Tabor let her see the barrel of the gun and forced her back down on the pillow with its weight.

“Pab,” she said, in a small broken voice. He held the gun against the ridge of bone beside her eye and let her listen to the tiny click the safety made when he released it.

She had begun to tremble and to cry. Her nose was scarcely two inches from the waxed-paper edge of the hamburger in front of her.

“You want to go out on a meat trip, Kathy? Just you and all those ratburgers all over hell?”

“Oh, God,” she whispered. “Oh, Pab.”

He was thinking that when he had pressed the safety the thing was as good as done. If I moved, he thought, it would be like the dogs.

“Shall I count off for you? You want to read one of them Jehovah books before you go out?” He reached behind him and pulled a little
chair nearer the bed and sat down on it. “No use in getting out of bed, baby. ’cause it’s good-night time.”

He watched her mouth convulse as she tried to breathe, to speak. Like the dogs, he thought.

A fecal smell rose from the covers; he lifted them and saw the bottom sheet soiled with bile. He covered her again.

“You fuckin’ little pig,” he said wearily.

The voice broke from her trembling body.

“Baby,” she said. “Oh, baby, please.”

He stood up and put the gun down on the chair. From his wallet he took two singles and dropped them on her covers.

“That there’s for all the good times,” he told her, and picked up the gun and put it in his pocket.

She was still screaming and sobbing when he went out with his bag. It was like a bad dream outside—the traffic on the highway just shooting on by, the derricks across the highway up and down up and down. Craziness. He was weak in the knees; he put the bag in the back seat and walked to the playground to call his son.

“Hey, you gonna drive me now, Daddy?”

“Looks like I ain’t today. I gotta go somewhere, so you can just hang out and play.”

“Neat,” the boy said. “You ain’t goin’ to sea, are ya, Daddy?”

“Yeah, I am,” Tabor said. “The South Sea.”

He leaned on the wire fence and took a deep breath.

“You be good to your mother, hear? She needs you to be real good to her.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy said.

At Miami Airport, Holliwell had a change of planes.

Inside he found the Gateway to the Americas number in full January ripeness. It was not a gloomy scene; the crowds of tourists were cheerful enough. There were
abrazos
and reunions, an unselfconscious flaunting of native pottery and palm straw hats. But under the fluorescent vaults, Holliwell began to sniff out the old curse, to see around him the gathering of a world far from God, a few hours from Miami.

He spied it in small things. A purple jewelry bag lying among butts and spittle in an urn ashtray. A Cuban checking the wall clock against his Rolex. Actual fear in the eyes of a chic South American woman, as she clutched at the sleeve of her plump young son, to the pocket of whose preppy blazer a Parker pen was neatly clasped.

Of course it was all in the mind. He was tired and anxious. But as he made his way through the crowds toward the Aerochac desk, the brightly lit corners began to reek of poverty and revenge, the drawling Spanish in the general din to sound of false-bottomed laughter.

On the wall behind the Aerochac desk was the mask of a Mayan rain god, unsoundly engineered into a pair of wings. The desk was deserted. Holliwell set his bag down and turned to face the passing crowd.

He was seeing the lines go out, past the carved coconuts and the runways, from the Gateway to the lands of stick shack and tin slum, to the small dark man with the hoe, upon whose back, as in a Mayan frieze, Miami Airport rested. To the contrabandist and the grave robber, the mule, the spook, the
esmeraldo
, the agent.

On the edges of the crowd, hippies with yellow eyes passed—and raw-faced contractors, up for toothpaste and the dog races. Beside a litter bin, some sport had dumped his pennyworth of moldering funny money. The soiled notes lay faded red and blue, each one displaying some full-jowled exemplary of the Republican ideal in braided uniform and tricorn hat, on each obverse some arcane fit of Napoleonic heraldry—the National Bird, Aborigine, Volcano. Thirty cents’ worth of bad history, waiting for a black man with a broom.

When the Compostelan clerk appeared and confirmed his reservation, Holliwell carried his bag to a changing room off the toilets and changed from his Stateside clothes into a seersucker suit and a navy sport shirt. His carry bag repacked, he went to the bar and sat in its midday darkness drinking bloody marys.

The bar he had chosen was filled with Swedes and from such of their conversation as he could make out he surmised that some of them had been to Cuba. They were talking about Havana and Matanzas and sugar. As his eyes became accustomed to the light, he saw that the Swedes sneered a great deal at what was around them—great equine Nordic sneers that distended their fine nostrils. They addressed the Cajun waitress in Spanish and ordered juicy fruit booze
concoctions. Holliwell drank beside them until nearly plane time. The drink encouraged him.

His frisk at security made him think of Tecan.

By the time he had settled into his seat in the compartment of Aerochac’s hand-me-down DC-8, he was pleased to be under way. The compartment smelled of duty-free perfume and bug spray. The stewardesses fingered their eye makeup and phonetically recited their English greetings and instructions. The other passengers were Compostelan ladies returning from their shopping trips, a few young tourists and bankers—there were always plenty of bankers traveling to Compostela.

Flying out over the Keys, Holliwell had another bloody mary and went to sleep; somewhere between the Gulf and the Belizean coast, he had a dream.

The dream took place in a house that was large and old, a cold northern house in which there was only one lighted room. He himself was standing in a shadowy hallway and beside him was a woman colleague with whom he had once had an affair and who had killed herself in Martha’s Vineyard nearly five years before. They were whispering together; they were afraid and guilty as they had been in fact.

In the lighted room was a fireplace where no fire burned and on the mantelpiece above it a metal letter file full of opened envelopes and the letters that had been inside.

“What is there to be afraid of?” Holliwell asked the woman beside him.

“You don’t understand,” she said.

As they watched from the dark hall, a middle-aged black man in a postman’s uniform walked into the lighted room and began leafing through the letter file.

Holliwell walked forward; he felt cheerful, amused, almost high.

“I think that’s my mail,” he told the postman.

“Is this your house, too?” the man asked him.

Holliwell became annoyed and confused. He denied that it was, but he felt uncertain.

“Talk to that man,” the postman told him.

The man to whom he was directed to talk was not in sight, but Holliwell knew who it would be. A navy cook he had seen in Danang;
he remembered the man’s apron and service hat but the face was a blank. He had a great reluctance to talk to that man, or even to see him. He was afraid.

Somewhere in the house a dog began to bark.

“They think I’m a Communist,” Holliwell called to his friend.

“Of course they do,” she said. Alive, she had a habit of smiling in exasperation when people did not understand something she considered obvious.

The dog kept barking

“If they raid the place,” Holliwell said in alarm, “they’ll shoot the dog.”

Then he woke up and they were circling Belize City, preparing to land. From the air, the city looked much more pleasant than it actually was. The sea beside it was a gorgeous light green; the sparkling beaches down the coast were crescents of summery sunlight.

Holliwell frowned out at the tropical abundance, recalling his dream. It was a variation on one he had been having, intermittently, for several years. It always felt the same.

At the airport, the Union Jack flew over the terminal building; shirtless, red-necked gunners lounged beside emplacements covered with camouflage netting. When the cabin door was opened a warm wet wind sifted through the compartment—and looking out at the palm trees and the guns and the lines of parked deuce-and-a-halfs it was impossible for him not to think back. But of course it was not at all the same, only the comic rumor of a war that would never be fought between the Sherwood Foresters and a phantom army of Guatemalan conscripts.

Two men with fishing-rod cases got off at Belize. The DC-8 took off again and the sea fell away behind it; it climbed over a floor of rain forest and cleared the wall of the cordillera—range after range broken by sunless valleys over which the clouds lowered, brown peaks laced with fingers of dark green thrust up from the jungle on the lower slopes. And in less than an hour—in a slender valley refulgent and shimmering—the white city of Compostela, on twin hills, walled in by snow peaks and two spent volcanoes.

From the air, the city was one of the great sights of America, but it was a frightening place to fly into if one knew the stories and the statistics. There was a sign at the airport that marked off the number of days since the last fatal accident. The Compostelans meant it to be
somehow reassuring; they were always picking up North American-type public relations notions and getting them slightly wrong. On Holliwell’s last trip down the sign had marked off one hundred and eight days.