A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone Page B

carriage were youthful, his face was like an old man’s, the skin not tanned but reddened and weathered, deeply seamed around the features. The massiveness of his brows and cheekbones made his upper face as square as a box; his nose was long, thin and altogether outsized, upturned toward the tip. Elfin, she thought, staring at him, gnomish—but suggestive of carving like some sort of puppet, a malignant Pinocchio.
    Two things about his small blue eyes impressed her—one was that they were not, she was sure, the eyes of an English speaker, another that they were the most hating eyes she had ever seen.
    Justin had to remind herself that she was in lay clothes. But even people who thought nuns bad luck had never looked at her so.
    Fascinated, she watched the man’s mouth open and she braced herself for a threat or an obscenity. His shout, though when it came it contorted his face, was absolutely silent.
    It seemed that one of the words he mouthed at her was Schwein —the bared teeth savaging the lower lip. There were other words. Du was one. She had only known German as a tourist in Austria but she felt certain that German was his language. Schwein, Du.
    “Beast” was the word that came to her. She was quite frightened.
    Then the youth walked on, toward Puerto Alvarado. He was very big. His shoulders under the stained white shirt looked broad as an ox yoke.
    She went back into the kitchen, lifted the pot lid and stirred her red snapper and vegetable soup. The young man, she realized, must be a Mennonite—there were a few of their settlements in the south, inland. They were not numerous in Tecan and it was years since she had seen a band of them in the capital, in the central bus station there. They had seemed shy, cheerful people, very clean and friendly.
    It was the time of late afternoon when the color drained out of the day. Sky and ocean gentled to temperate pastels and the jungle on the hillsides was a paler green. Wandering to the doorway, she savored the breeze.
    Along the beach, from the grove at Freddy’s to the point southward, there was no one to be seen. Vanished, the passing youth seemed to be a creature compounded of her fears; the hatred, the Germanness were the stuff of nightmare and bad history. Somehow her despair had summoned him.
    When Godoy and his jeepload of small boys pulled up at the foot of the station steps, she ran down gratefully to join them. The boys were black Caribs and there were six of them crowded into the jeep, some with the Indian cast of eye or the shock of coarse straight hair that marked the Caribs among the black people of the coast.
    “ Buenas ,” she called to them and to Godoy.
    “ Buenas ,” the boys said, and made room for her. Some of the younger boys smiled, the two oldest ogled her with grim elaborateness. She sat down next to the priest.
    “We’re off,” he declared.
    “Right on,” Sister Justin said gaily.
    Along the roadside, plantation hands walked homeward cradling their machetes against their shoulders; children struggled along under loads of firewood for the evening meal. At every fresh creek there were women gathering up laundry from the rocks on which it had been drying in the last of the daylight, and other women were hurrying along balancing ocher jugs on their heads filled with cooking water from the public well. But most of the people on the road were walking toward Puerto Alvarado and what remained of the day’s fiesta.
    Each time they passed a settlement of sticks and palm thatch Godoy would sound his horn, a child would wave and the boys in the jeep display their privilege as passengers in a private vehicle.
    The road led them inland through banana and then pineapple, tothe top of Pico Hill, where they could see the ocean again and the wharves of the distant port, then down again past acres of yellow-painted, numbered company houses, finally to the tin-and-crate-wood shacks on the edge of town. From the town center they could hear the report of