A Flag for Sunrise (29 page)

Taking his bag once around the square, he paused on a guano-spotted bench to have his shoes shined yet again by a gaunt nine-year-old. It was a grim little plaza; the people lounging in it were as poor as any that Holliwell had ever seen. The interior of the cathedral, though it contained some good carved
santos
, was mainly a Babylonian horror with mindless rococo gilding and a curious encoffined Christ. When he had finished inspecting it, he carried his bag down a street of notaries and public letter writers to the clapboard riverfront.

The jeep was parked in the declining shade of the customs shed, its driver stretched out in the front seat with the brim of a Ralston Purina cap pulled down over his face. The ships at the adjoining wharf were loading sacks of coffee beans and the longshoremen working them wore sweatbands across their foreheads and machetes at their belts which gave them a piratical look.

The sleeping Paradise driver awoke to the whistle of a diesel launch from the interior which was pulling for its berth. He raised his hat and looked at Holliwell sympathetically.

“We goin’ to Paradise, you and me?”

“I guess we are. How much to go there?”

“Ten dollars,” the man said. “And I didn’t say pesos, did I? I said ten dollars U.S.”

Holliwell shrugged.

“The tourists always sayin’ I told ’em ten pesos,” the driver said as they turned to watch the arriving boat. “Never told anyone dat. Ten dollars. One with Mr. Hamilton on it.”

“I got you,” Holliwell said.

There were three gringos on the steamer, all going to the Paradise. A short rounded man with a deep tan, a gray goatee lengthening his thick jowls. His wife or girlfriend, gray-blond with a leathery brown face like a boot about to crack. A thin, florid man wearing a Yucatecan Panama.

The driver took their bags and everyone exchanged small nods. Holliwell sat in the back, beside the slight man with the Panama.

“Ralph Heath,” the man beside Holliwell said, as they drove over a straight dirt road through the mangrove swamp. The man held his Panama in his lap.

“Frank Holliwell.”

“Been here before?” He was an Englishman of about fifty, with a mean-featured hard little face. A drinker—the pouches under his eyes were the only slack part of him and distended veins ran down the sides of his nose.

“Never.”

“Alvarado’s a hole. But it’s a nice coast if that’s what you’re after. Coming place.”

“Are you down here often?” Holliwell asked him.

“Once or twice a year. Sometimes on business, sometimes just for the beer.”

“From England?”

“I live in Miami now,” Heath told him. “I have ever since our fruit company merged with yours. You’re American?”

“Yes,” Holliwell said. And after a moment, he shouted to Heath over the engine noise. “How do you like Miami?”

“Never looked back,” Heath said.

They drove under the mangrove wilderness opened to sandy beaches and palm groves; the road was only a packed sand track near the water’s edge. The cheerlessness of Puerto Alvarado fell away in the sunlight.

The drive took hours. They sped past clapboard fishing villages in the palm groves where nets were drying on poles along the beach and
brightly painted boats with cabined wheelhouses were hauled up, buccaneer fashion, on raked plank dry docks beyond the tide line. Almost every house had in front of it a small garden of plantains and an overturned double-ended skiff. Farther from the ocean were the miles of fruit company houses, numbered and painted yellow. A good half of them appeared to be unoccupied.

On the beach road they were constantly passing women carrying baskets or pots on their heads. From time to time, Holliwell would see a basket that looked to have the ghost of an African design or a pot inlaid with a highland Indian pattern. But for the most part they were factory-made, bought in Alvarado or from a passing Syrian. Between the villages or on the edge of them were some compounds of vaguely ecclesiastical design that looked as though they might be missions. Holliwell said something to Heath about its being a fine place to be a missionary in.

“Too damn many of them,” Heath shouted to him. “That was your company’s policy in the old days—the more of the bastards, the merrier. They’re regretting it now.”

“Why’s that?”

“Why? Because they’re a pack of reds. Why shouldn’t they be? They don’t work for a living like you and me. I’m assuming you work for a living.”

“I teach,” Holliwell said.

“Ah,” said Mr. Heath, and he fell silent for a while.

“It isn’t religion they need down here,” Heath declared after five minutes. “They’ve had plenty of that. It’s the Pill. If this coast had half the population it has it would be in damn fine shape.”

Heath was speaking at the top of his voice, conceding their driver only the virtue of some necessity. The couple in the front seat stirred and half turned round in embarrassment.

“Then who would pick the fruit?”

“Hardly any fruit to pick these days. Less than half the crop there was ten years ago. We package coffee and bananas now—we’ve lost most of the bananas to blight. The next thing we need to package is tourism and we don’t need all these imported Jamaicans for that. The other way round—we need less of them.”

The couple in the front seat cringed visibly. The driver, one arm resting on the back of his seat, looked with an amiable countenance at the track before him.

“In the old days,” Heath said, “when the bananas had a few bad years the pickers moved on. No more. The sensible thing for us to do is to airlift the lot to the Pacific coast where we’re bloody crying out for pickers. It’s the sensible thing, so naturally these psalm singers are determined to stop us doing it. They turn the people against us and against the government. They’re masters of propaganda.”

“Really?” Holliwell asked.

“God, yes. Down here they’re meek and mild. Lambs. Then they go abroad and thunder for blood and revolution. They’ve got powerful friends, you know, and they use them to the hilt. Dignity of man,” Heath said sourly. “Where I stand a man’s got dignity or he hasn’t, rich or poor the same. You can’t bestow it on him. You can’t send it to him in a
CARE
package.”

“I don’t really know the situation,” Holliwell shouted back. “So I can’t say.”

“Fair enough,” Heath told him. “You’re one among many.”

The hotel called Paradise was neither as transcendent nor as banal as its name. It consisted of a number of simple wooden bungalows around a well-tended garden. At some distance from the bungalows was what appeared to be a disused airplane hangar but which revealed itself on closer inspection to be a terraced dining room, open to the beach. Where the tool shops might have been there was a kitchen and a crescent-shaped bar; an old nineteen-forties jukebox stood at the edge of the large cement floor between the bar and the decks of tables, blasting Freddy Fender’s rendition of “El Rancho Grande” into every square foot of covered space. At the water’s edge was a dock with a couple of numbered boats tied up to it and a shack with a diver’s flag painted on the roof.

Not paradise but nice enough. In the office bungalow a hefty Spanish woman registered the guests and dispensed keys to the bungalows.

Holliwell stowed his bag in the plain bungalow and took a cold shower, the only kind available. When he had changed clothes, he poured himself a drink and went outside to sit in the shade of an arbor of bougainvillea.

After he had been sitting for a while, a dark-skinned young man came up from the bar, where he had been drinking a beer with the driver, and asked Holliwell if he wanted to go diving.

Holliwell looked at the young man and then at the placid ocean.
The question aroused in him a thrill of fear and also a longing for the depths, for the concealment and oblivion of blue-gray light at sea level minus seventy.

“It’s been a while,” he said.

“If you want,” the young man said, “we run you through a checkout in the morning. Bring it back. You been certified?”

“Yeah,” Holliwell said. A reliable-looking kid, he thought. Undersea images flashed in his mind, fans and parrot fish, silvery barracuda. Things being what they were, why not?

The young man gave him a card with the diving package rates. Holliwell put it in his pocket. As the young man walked back toward the dive shop, Ralph Heath came by carrying a glass of white rum and soda.

“Going diving, are you?”

“I’m thinking of it. I haven’t in a long time.”

“Nor have I. I got thumped on the head in Bogotá eight years ago and I haven’t been able to dive since. Only wish I could.”

“Did you ever dive around here?”

“Oh, yes. Here and in Jamaica. Malta. Yap in Micronesia. I was very fond of it.”

“How did you come to get thumped?” Holliwell asked.

“Accident,” Heath said. “I’ll tell you—Playa Tate’s a good place for a dive. That’s about six miles south of here. There’s a reef close inshore—then she drops off about three quarters of a mile out. It’s a wall—a real chiller-diller, that one. Grand Canyon.”

“Many sharks?” Holliwell asked sheepishly. It was a question one was not supposed to ask.

“Well,” Heath said, “this is the eastern Carib, chum. You’re likely to see the odd shark out there.”

“I suppose,” Holliwell said.

“Another good place is near there. By the American Catholic mission. There’s one reef that starts in about eight feet of water, then slopes down to forty, then flattens out and drops a mile out. Good snorkeling there as well.”

“How’s the shop here?”

“Quite good actually. Sandy’s a good boy. I used to dive with his father ten years or so ago. Nice family they are. Head and shoulders above the rest of them around here.”

“I think I will go out,” Holliwell said. “I’ll go look up Sandy in the morning.”

“You’ll have a jolly good time, Holliwell,” Heath said.

Pablo leaned idly on the rail as they cleared the harbor, the rubber work gloves still in his back pocket. His want of a bath was bothering him acutely now and he wished that he had asked them about it while the boat was still hooked up to a dockside water line. If there was a woman aboard, he reasoned, the
Cloud
must have a head and shower somewhere.

No harm in asking, he thought after a while; there might be enough water from the evaporators or a fresh-water supply somewhere aboard. They seemed to have everything else. He went forward to the wheelhouse and leaned his head through the hatch. Negus and Callahan were in the cockpit chairs.

“If we got some time now and there’s water enough, could I clean up? I ain’t shaved nor showered for a while.”

Negus looked from Pablo to Callahan.

“There’s enough,” Callahan said. “Right behind the galley. Knock first.”

He went back to the lazaret to get some fresh clothes and his toilet kit and then up to the galley. Behind it was the door to the dim compartment into which Mr. Callahan had earlier disappeared with his drink. He knocked twice on it.

“Hello,” called the voice of Mrs. Callahan.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Come on in.”

He opened the door just as Tino, out on deck, was hauling away the hatch covers that closed off the windows of the compartment from the outside. As the space filled with light he saw that the compartment had the same dark paneling as the forward passageway, that there was a striped chaise longue, some captain’s chairs with brightly colored cushions, even a bookcase. In the center of the stateroom was a round table with metal studs, an electric fan resting on it. Mrs. Callahan was sitting in one of the captain’s chairs under a lighted wall lamp, a book on her lap.

“On your right, Pablo,” she told him. She pulled the terry-cloth robe she was wearing a little farther down over her tanned thighs. It was all she had on, Pablo thought.

“I’ll go easy on the water.”

In the pocket of Mrs. Callahan’s robe, Pablo espied a bottle of pills. There was a small swelling distorting the patrician contour of her high cheekbone and long jaw.

“Yes, do,” she said.

Pablo had him a shit, shower and shave; his thoughts were carnal. Soaping down, he sang to himself.

“I ride an old paint

I ride an old dan

I’m going to Montana for to have a hooly-an.”

The water was warm, hand-pumped out of an overhead pipe through a rubber nozzle. He shaved slowly and deliberately, his shoulder propped against the bulkhead beside the mirror, riding with the slow roll of the boat, still singing.

When he came out, Mrs. Callahan was watching him, leaning her head on an elbow, her hand covering her mouth. When she took her hand away, he saw that she was smiling.

“Do you play the guitar?” she asked him.

“No,” Pablo said, feeling surly and put down.

“What a shame,” Mrs. Callahan said.

He climbed out of the fancy compartment, the kit and soiled clothes under his arm, and went out on deck. Low even seas slid westward under the light wind, over the horizon was a thin line of cloud, nearly pink in the fading light. Big bitch thinks I’m comical, he said to himself. She thinks I’m the fucking entertainment.

Tino was checking out the net’s chain line as Pablo tossed his things down into the lazaret.

“Callahan bring his old lady every trip?”

“Mostly does.”

It was not his custom to speak of white women with dark people but resentment and desire made him uneasy and perverse.

“She spread it around any?”

“Lister engine,” Tino said, nodding toward the casing of the outrigger’s
auxiliary motor. Pablo watched him drop the chain line on the deck and walk over to slap the top of the casing. “You can work it from right here or from the cockpit. Can haul it up by hand on the windlass if you needs to.”

Pablo fixed his eyes on the tall St. Joostian and leaned against the upright outrigger. He was being turned around again. He watched the other man’s eyes and thought of the den tided palm.

“We ain’t fishin’ tonight,” Tino said, “but I tell you in case like. Over dere—” He pointed to a rolled-up smaller net against the port rail. “Dat’s de tri-net. We haul her up every half hour maybe on a lay line. You ever been shrimping before?”