A Flag for Sunrise (47 page)

Someone giggled discreetly. Marijuana smoke floated on the still air.

“What are you doing here, children, a place like this?” He steadied himself, leaning on the stone. “You know when the Easter angel asked the woman at the tomb why she was crying she said: ‘Because they have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid him.’ ”

In the highest boughs, spider monkeys were singing out last reports, their sentries calling in from evening stand- to as the bands settled down for the night.

“Taken away,” Egan said. “Mislaid. No wonder she’s crying. Wouldn’t you? Don’t you?”

A few of the young people affirmed that they did.

“Of course you do. We all do. No matter how smart you are, some things are very hard to lose.”

A girl with a fever began to sing. She lay resting her head on her companion’s lap.

“This is a dead place,” Egan said. “It’s a boneyard, that’s why we’re here. It’s history,” he told them. “It’s the world.”

“Not my world,” said a man who was older than the others and drunk. “Not by a long shot.”

Egan ignored him.

“It’s another city on a hill, you see. An earthly historical city—very grand. Here we celebrate what dies. What fails. What is mislaid.”

“What about the bright side?” the man said. “Is there one?”

“Certainly,” Egan said. “But it has nothing to do with you. You’re not on it.”

Pablo and Deedee sat under the work lights aft of the ice hatches, mounted on upturned shrimp baskets, their backs against the lazaret. Over the open hatches the coiled net swung like a dun banner, anchored between the paired stabilizers and the chain drag line. The drag lay covered in a confetti of brightly colored chafing gear that was heaped over it; the pile looked like the wreckage of a carnival float. Before them, under the bright lights, was a living creeping jambalaya, a rapine of darkness and depth. In thousands, creatures of hallucination—shelled, hooded, fifty-legged and six-eyed—clawed, writhed, flapped or devoured their way through the mass of their fellow captives, the predators and the prey together, overthrown and blinded, scuttling after their lost accustomed world.

“Dig in, Pablo buddy,” Deedee said. “I guess you know a shrimp when you see one, right?”

Pablo stared silently into the mass of struggling life at his feet. Deedee stood up, walked carefully to the edge of the swarm and plucked from it in her gloved hand a two-foot barracuda. Grasping the struggling fish behind its row of teeth, she tossed it over the side.

“Poor baby,” she said. She worked with a joint between her lips. “Might be another one in there,” she told Pablo, sitting back down on the basket. “You want to watch where you stick your hands.”

Pablo leaned forward, picked up a shrimp and looked at it in his palm.

“There you go,” Deedee said, “that’s one right there. When you have a basket full of those little fellas you stick it down in the hold. If we were the honest folk we pretend to be we’d take their heads and legs off. But we’re not, so we won’t.”

He did not care for the way she watched him. She was smiling and high, but there was a guilty wariness beneath her chatter and high spirits. Pablo knew little about shrimping but he believed he knew rather a lot about female anxiety. How they looked when they were turning you around. How they smiled when they were scared.

He crushed the shrimp he was holding in his right fist and with the fingers of his left hand, pulled its head off. The gesture of petty violence seemed in no way to alarm her. She went on looking him happily in the eye but he knew she had seen and interpreted his vague threat. She was very tough, he thought, she was different from other women. And they were playing a game. The thought of games was hateful to him now, it savored of Naftali’s whisper.

“The rest of these beasties—the non-shrimp—just let them lie. We’ll hose them off the deck later.”

He kept his gaze fastened on her and she looked back at him until he felt foolish. She was better at games than he was. He was beginning to hate her. He was beginning to be afraid of her, of her more than the others.

“The first time I ever did this,” she told him as they filled their baskets, “a man threw a barracuda at me.” She took the joint from between her lips and let it die on the wet deck.

“Huh,” Pablo said, keeping his eyes on his work

“I was going to throw that one at you. But then I thought better of it—indeed I did.”

“It might have bit me,” he said.

“It might have. And then where would I be?”

What he wanted, he realized, was to fuck and to kill her. The realization made him even gloomier because he believed that such impulses were particular to him alone. It touched his self-respect. Moreover, he could not be sure whether she was only teasing him or really coming on now. It was like it kept changing. Confused and increasingly angry, he could think of only one strategy and that was to listen and wait and sound her.

“You gotta be crazy,” he said. “I mean you gotta be crazy, a good-looking woman like you out here on this turkey.”

“That makes two of us,” she said. “At least.”

“Yeah,” Pablo said. “But I’m just passing through.” So saying, he shuddered. He felt a nearly prayerful hope it might be true.

“Cast a cold eye,” Deedee said, “on life, on death. Horseman, pass by.” She was weirdness itself.

Within forty-five minutes they had enough filled baskets to cover the ice completely in one hold and to cover half of it in the second. Pablo stood on the ice bars receiving the baskets from Deedee as she passed them down. When the shrimp were stowed, she got the stabilizer engines going and he helped her spread the drag line again. They sat down on their baskets and drank some rum. It was good light Puerto Rican rum, better than the stuff they usually brought out.

“A very fine place for shrimping,” Deedee Callahan said. “If we’re ever in that line again well have to remember it.”

Pablo looked out at the surrounding ocean. There were other boats in sight now, four or five of them, lit and working.

“Could be the fisheries patrol come down on us any minute,” Pablo said. He said it to have something to say, bitching to bring her down and to make himself feel better.

“I wouldn’t worry about that, Pab, we’ve never been boarded, ever. They check out the numeral and the colors. When they’re close enough to see you’re gringo they leave you alone. Unless of course they’re looking for you.”

“But that won’t happen, will it?”

She took a drink of rum and passed him the bottle.

“Well, I haven’t said anything. And the boss hasn’t and Freddy hasn’t. Have you?”

“That’s a joke, ain’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, “ain’t it?”

“They don’t trust me,” he said sullenly, nodding toward the wheelhouse, “I know that.”

“If they don’t trust you they must have a reason. What would the reason be?”

“You playin’ cop or somethin’, Missus Callahan?”

“We’re playing Pirate,” she said. “I have to trust you. So do they. Otherwise you’d be walking the plank. That’s how it is in Pirate.”

“What about that nigger stayed back in St. Joost?”

“You mean Tino?” He was trying to stare her down again; she was looking back at him, easy-natured. “We don’t usually refer to Tino as a nigger,” she told him pleasantly. “He’s an old friend of
ours. We’re a little concerned that he’s not with us but we’re quite sure he won’t talk to anyone.”

“Everybody’s a snitch sometime.”

“That’s a word I don’t like,” she said. “I dislike it and I dislike the way you say it. It makes you sound like a punk.”

Pablo was genuinely surprised.

“Nobody never called me punk,” he said savagely when he had mustered the force.

She smiled and sighed. “Nobody never? In your whole life?” In the next moment she was coming on. “You’re a fine figure of a man,” she told him. “Cultivate your higher qualities.”

While he was thinking of an answer, by the time he had decided to say he guessed he was quality enough for her, Mr. Callahan came aft and looked at the catch in the holds.

“Real good, shrimp people,” Mr. Callahan said. “Now let’s bring the nets up again. We’re running out of time.”

There were not so many shrimp in the second catch and they had to pad the baskets with chipped ice and junk fish to get the second hold covered. Negus came out and worked with them until the nets were secured and the hatches tight over the holds. Pablo observed that Callahan was drunk again. Even Negus in his silent dispatch did not seem altogether sober.

“We’re gonna lose these other boats,” Callahan told them. “Then we’re going in without lights and fast.”

“And he’ll be there,” Deedee said.

“I like it,” Callahan declared, “it’s going well.” He smiled at Tabor. “Is it going well for you, Pablo?”

“Sure,” Pablo said.

Deedee leaned on his shoulder.

“We’re happy back here. We’re a team.”

When Callahan and Negus went back to the cockpit, Deedee stayed where she was, cuddled against Tabor. They both watched as Callahan made his way forward, a little more unsteadily than the roll of the
Cloud
demanded. Pablo reached in his pocket and swallowed the last of his Benzedrine.

The drug’s action when it came was disappointing and curious. For a fraction of a second he could not remember where he was and he was overcome with fear. But the rush passed and then he was better. He asked her for more rum and while he drank it she held to
his arm. For a while he was calm and sad and grateful to have her beside him.

“You’re a good man,” she told him soothingly. “You’re O.K. and you’re going to be even better.”

“I like the sound of that,” Pablo told her, and then he laughed. Almost giggled. She seemed sympathetic; she laughed with him.

“How long you been with that man?” he asked her.

“Forever,” she said, and they both laughed again.

She rolled a joint and they drank a little more.

“If you been with him forever,” Pablo asked, “how come you’re coming on to me?”

“Heavens to Betsy,” she said, “I thought you’d never ask. I didn’t think you noticed.”

They laughed at that too. They were smoking her heavy Jamaican weed. But then he decided there was something wrong with what she had said or the way she had said it. Things got tricky for him again.

In the cockpit, Negus put the wheel on manual and they steered north, the compass needle over the Raytheon fluttered. The other boats fell away southward.

“God grant it goes easy,” Negus said. “It’s been such a damn …”

“Gonna stay ashore now, Freddy?”

“Oh, crikey,” Negus said heartily, “you’d best believe it. I’m too old and brittle for this sort of thing anymore. You said a true thing when you said that.”

“I will grant you,” Callahan said, “that this one was difficult. Without Tino and with Tabor. I will grant you that. But I told Deedee … I told her I need a bad guy I can keep in line.”

“I been telling you for years, Jack, you can’t just pick up any dingbat these days for something like this. You’re bound to get wrong ones. Must say I think you drink too damn much for a man of business.”

Callahan did not dispute him.

“What you got Deedee to aft yonder?”

“Taking care of him. She’s a smart girl.”

“With all due respect and up to a point that’s a true thing about her,” Negus said. Then he looked over his shoulder from the chair and lowered his voice. “He goes, don’t he? Afterwards?”

“I’m not without principles,” Callahan said. “I propose to do
my duty by the world and the international shipping lanes. He goes.”

“And Deedee knows that?”

“She knows.”

“Just so we’re clear on that,” Negus said. “Because she’s soft on him in a way. Taking care of him, you know, that could mean anything to her.”

“I know what it means to her, Freddy, and so do you. Soft on him isn’t quite the word, is it? Dee isn’t sentimental in the least.”

“No, hell no. She ain’t sentimental. She’s … like we know she is.”

“Perverse.”

“However you want to say it.”

“She likes edges. She thinks he’s a stud. He’s got shit between his toes and he’s going to be dead tomorrow. That’s what she likes.”

“Yep,” Negus said. “That’s the way I see it. That would be her way of looking at it.”

“Me, I think she’s splendid. One-of-a-kind kid. She suits me.”

“Yep,” Freddy Negus said, “she does. You and her—you’re adapted to each other naturally.”

“Not exactly made in heaven,” Callahan said. “But we like it. Edge players as we are. You suppose he could possibly figure out why she’s breathing on him?”

Negus laughed. “Well, I couldn’t if I was him. And I think I seen about everything.”

“But what’s right and what’s wrong, eh, Fred? You can’t have sex without mortality. That’s a biological fact.”

He began to pour himself another drink. Negus lifted the glass from his hand.

“No more, boss. Not until afterwards.”

Callahan watched Negus throw the full glass over the side.

“Right,” he said “It’s getting time to darken ship and get on triple zero. Another couple of minutes.”

“I’ll be on the forepeak when we go in. We ought to check on Dee from time to time.”

“She’ll handle it,” Callahan said. “She has a gun. Let me do the checking, Freddy. It’ll work out better.”

“Sure,” Negus said. “That’d be more your job than mine.”

“You know,” Father Egan said, “I’m reminded here of another city.” He uttered a reflective clerical chuckle. “When I was preparing to be whatever it is I’ve become I was sent to work in a hospital. Comfort the dying. I remember the mortuary there—it was very Victorian. Neo-Renaissance. In the foyer there was an inscription in Latin. ‘Let smiles cease,’ it said, ‘let laughter flee. This is the place where the dead help the living.’ ”

The older man in the group got to his feet muttering.

“Bummer!” he shouted at Egan. His heavy face grew red with anger; he raised cupped hands to amplify his voice, and screamed. “Bummer!”

“I’ll describe a picture to you,” Egan told his congregation. “I’m sure you’re familiar with it. A group of men are standing over a pile of corpses. They’re smiling and they have guns. Some of them have tied handkerchiefs across their faces but not to give themselves the raffish air of banditti—because of the smell.” His eyes went vacant. “What are they looking for in that pile? Has one of them dropped his watch? Never mind.”