A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone Page A

were always made much of by the order. They want to keep you. You’ve had things your own way. You’ve been spoiled, dear.”
    “Oh, Lord,” Justin said. “Spoiled hell.” She folded her arms angrily and went to stand in the doorway with her back to him. “I’ve been on my hands and knees since college. I mean—I work for a living. I wouldn’t call this a cloistered life, would you?”
    She heard his dry sickly laughter and turned.
    “Is what I’m saying ridiculous?”
    “You’ve been morally spoiled. There’s always been someone around to take your good intentions seriously—and if that isn’t being spoiled I don’t know what is.” He sniffed at his rum and drank it. “Religious women are always a good deal younger than their ages—Mary Joe’s an example. Religious men are worse. One’s always a kid.The life is childish.” He shrugged. “Believing at all is childish, isn’t it?”
    Justin looked at him surprised. Perhaps, she thought, he was snapping a paradox. They were all great Chestertonians in his generation.
    “You haven’t been saying your office,” she said, realizing it for the first time. “You haven’t said it for ages.”
    “I consider it wrongly written down.”
    She smiled, watching him polish off the rum.
    “Are you serious?”
    “I will—if called upon—say Mass. I will administer the sacraments. But my office is strictly between myself and God and I won’t say it their way. It’s all wrong, you know,” he said, fixing her with an unsettling stare. “They have it all wrong. The whole thing.”
    “I give up,” Justin said.
    “Interesting my orthodoxy should make any difference to you. Surely you don’t believe?”
    “I can’t answer that question.”
    “Well,” Egan said, “you’re supposed to answer it every day.”
    At the kitchen counter, she took up the fish again. The right thing would be to broil it, to make a sauce with peppers and onions and greens. But he would be more likely to eat it if she simply shredded it into the soup with some shrimp. It was such a shame. Red snapper.
    It went into the soup and Egan faded back toward his quarters.
    Justin found herself on the veranda again. Her hands were clenched on the rail as she leaned out toward the ocean, the ebbing tide. The sea’s surface was soft blue; the sun had withdrawn beyond the green saw-toothed hills above the station.
    Utter total foolishness, she repeated silently.
    Her soul extended along this meditation as it might in prayer. There was nothing. Only the sea, shadowed deeps, predatory eyes. Her heart beat quietly alone, its panicked quickening like a signal to the void, unanswered, uncomforted. It beat only for her, to no larger measure, a futile rounding of blood. The desire for death made her dizzy; it felt almost like joy.
    She was still leaning over the rail, half stunned with despair, when she saw a young man walking along the beach from the direction of the village. He was barefoot and full-bearded, extraordinarily blond;he wore a white shirt of the sort that required a detachable collar and faded bib overalls. When he drew closer she could see the filthy condition of his shirt and the dirt and dried blood that soiled his hands. His appearance bespoke need and for this reason she was vaguely glad to see him there. She assumed he was one of the North American kids who drifted up and down the Isthmus following the beach. They had first appeared in numbers the previous spring. Some of them were far gone with dope or alcohol. Her ready impulse was to have him come in and see if there was anything that might be done—before Campos and his men or the local ratones caught scent of him.
    Justin had gone as far as the top step when the odd cut of his hair registered on her. It was crude cropping that one did not see on even the weirdest passing gringos, almost medieval, monkish. As she started down to the beach, he turned toward her and his face stopped her cold.
    Although the man’s walk and