A Flag for Sunrise

Father Egan left off writing, rose from his chair and made his way — a little unsteadily — to the bottle of Flor de Cana which he had placed across the room from his desk. The study in which he worked was lit by a Coleman lamp; he had turned the mission generators off to save kerosene. The shutters were open to receive the sea breeze and the room was cool and pleasant. At Freddy’s Chicken Shack up the road a wedding party was in progress and the revelers were singing along with the radio from Puerto Alvarado, marking the reggae beat with their own steel drums and crockery.

As Egan drank his rum, his inward eye filled with a vision of the Beguinage at Bruges, the great sculptured vault overhead, the windows inlaid with St. Ursula and her virgins, the columns gilded with imperial red and gold. It had been many, many years since he had seen it.

The Coleman lamp cast the shadow of his desk crucifix across the piles of books, bills and invoices that cluttered the space around his typewriter. He took a second drink of rum and considered the cruciform shadow, indulging the notion that his office space suggested the study of some heterodox doctor of the Renaissance, a man condemned by his times but sustained by faith in God and the Spirit among men.

The work on which Father Egan was engaged would fail of imprimatur, would be publishable only by a secular house. When it appeared he would be adjured to silence. He would resist, appeal to Rome if only to gain a wider hearing. When Rome thundered condemnation, he would turn to the Spiritual Church, the masses so hungry for comfort in a violently dying world.

It was the composition of this work that had led to Father Egan’s intemperance in drink. For over thirty years as a Devotionist Father he had been a moderate man in that regard — but writing was hard for him and the cultural deprivations of his voluntary mission posting had rendered his life difficult by the day. He had rewritten the work six times and had reached the point where he could no longer endure it without alcohol. Yet without the work, he had found, life itself was not endurable. As for his faith — it was in a state of tension, the dark of his soul’s night was such that he could not bring it to bear. And if that faith seemed moribund, he could only hope that it had returned to the seed to grow, to be transmogrified, dried and hardened in the tropical sun, destined to rise like a brilliant Tecanecan phoenix from Pascal’s fire.

He had put by him the thought of a third slug and was halfway back to his desk when he heard the sound of a jeep’s engine on the beach below the mission buildings; he stopped to listen as the jeep drew closer. At length, he heard the brakes squeal and the engine die, and then a man’s ascending step on the stairs that led from the beach to his veranda.

“Oh my fucking word,” Father Egan said aloud.

He quickly took the bottle of Flor de Cana, put it in his shower stall and drew the curtain that closed off the bath. Then, popping a mint candy in his mouth, he stepped outside to the veranda.

It was the night of the full moon and the ocean before him was aglow. The tips of coral along the reef, the wind-driven whitecaps beyond were edged in silver shadow, the very grains of sand on the beach sparkled faintly. In the dispensary wing, an oil lamp burned behind Sister Justin Feeney’s bamboo shade.

At the foot of the steps a jeep had been parked, and a man was climbing toward the main house, humming along with the music from Freddy’s. He climbed very slowly, putting both feet on each step and shuffling to the reggae beat. On the last step, he raised both hands above his shoulders in a little flutter of stylized ecstasy and lurched onto the veranda. When he saw Father Egan in the moon-swept darkness, he stepped back, startled.

The man wore a white guayabera and dark trousers. There was a holstered pistol on his hip, hanging from a webbed guard belt which he had buckled casually over his loose shirt. His hair was combed slickly across his skull; he was not a man of the coast, but a mestizo from the interior. Egan saw that it was Lieutenant Campos, social agent of the Guardia Nacional, uncharacteristically out of uniform and thoroughly drunk. Recognizing Campos, he drew his breath in fear.

“Holy Father,” Lieutenant Campos said. He crossed himself and kissed his fingers as though Egan were an object of veneration. “Bless me, Father,” he said in Spanish. “Bless me, for I have sinned.”

Egan, having coiled a sentence of greeting, released it without enthusiasm.

“Good evening, Lieutenant, my friend. How may we help you?”

“Yes,” Lieutenant Campos said. “And now you have to come with me.”

Father Egan recoiled, in spite of himself. The words froze his heart. Campos was staring at Sister Justin Feeney’s lighted window. The two men stood bathed in the unrelenting moonlight, both of them swaying slightly with drink. At Freddy’s Chicken Shack, the beat went on.

“Where is the nun?” the lieutenant asked with distaste. “The earnest nun?”

“Gone to bed, I would suppose,” Father Egan said cheerily. God save us, he thought. We’re being arrested.

“No no,” Campos said. “Because, see, her light is on. She’s staying awake. And who knows what she’s thinking?” The lieutenant had raised his voice over the distant music but from Sister Justin Feeney’s room there was no sound or stirring. Campos belched sadly and turned his attention back to the priest.

“Come with me,” he said in his policeman’s voice. “We’re going.”

“It’s so late,” the priest said. “Does it have to be now?” He was aware of the lieutenant’s insane intelligent eyes smoldering in the moonlight.

Campos laid a hand on his arm.

“Come!”

“Lieutenant,” Egan said, “please. A moment.” He went inside to get his stole and breviary, in case there might be some emergency.

They went down the steps to the beach in silence. Campos stood by the side of his jeep and held the door open for the priest.

The road, such as it was, followed the packed sand of the beach, descending now and then into a sea-flooded hollow that splashed phosphorescence as they forded it. Egan sat with the stole in his teeth, the missal between his legs, holding fast to the sidebar of the jeep. The lieutenant drove as fast as the vehicle would move; now and then he muttered something in a low voice which the priest could not understand.

He did not brake for animals. If a cow, transfixed in the headlights, was too slow in heaving its flyblown bulk from the roadway, the lieutenant would unhesitatingly ram it bellowing into a ditch, throw the jeep into reverse and charge forward.

In twenty minutes or so they came to the peninsula on which the lieutenant maintained his residence. In a country of frenetically gregarious people, Lieutenant Campos lived alone, without family or servants. The turnoff that led to his compound was barred by a chain link fence, its gate secured with a padlock. Campos kept his jeep motor running as he opened it; when they were inside he got out again and locked it behind them.

Breathing deeply, Father Egan followed Campos from the jeep and stood by while he unlocked his front door. The lieutenant used more locks than one was used to seeing along the coast.

Egan went in first; the presence of Campos, entering behind him in the darkness, touched the priest with terror.

The lieutenant had electric light and his bungalow was very neat. There was a picture of the President of the Republic on one wall — the President appearing as the apotheosis of the nation-state, his full cheeks pink with retouching, his uniform inked in pastels, his peculiar ears unobserved — the whole swathed in the furled colors of Tecan. Beside it was a framed copy of the lieutenant’s commission, then a framed shot of a younger — perhaps a more reasonable — Lieutenant Campos, posing with his buddies at Guardia school.

Below the pictures were two bookcases. One held bound logs and law books; the shelves of the other were stacked with American detective magazines arranged by name. True, Startling, Inside, Master and Underground Detective—Egan thought there must be a thousand magazines in the stacks. On the other wall was a picture of John Kennedy, below it was what appeared to be an electric freezer and next to that the only glassed window between Puerto Alvarado and the frontier, overlooking the moonlit ocean. In an alcove near it was the Guardia’s Hallstadt radio transmitter. The circuit was open, now and then picking up a Caribbean voice.

“… up in Belize, mon.”

“… well, you know … dat de British port, mon … dey goin’ to come down haard …”

Egan turned toward his host and saw that the lieutenant had produced a bottle of Flor de Cana and was offering him a drink. He accepted with gratitude but the rum did little for him. Campos sat down in a wicker chair by the transmitter and asked him in strained English if he required another.

“Yes, please,” Father Egan said, ashamed.

Campos poured it slowly and as he proffered it, Egan had the sense that he might suddenly snatch it away again to torment him. Just as he was imagining the dreadful smile that might appear on Campos’ face if he did in fact snatch the glass away — the smile appeared.

Egan polished off his rum.

“You …” the lieutenant asked, “you are a queer? A maricón?”

Egan was jolted stone sober. He stared at the lieutenant in outrage. He had been in the country for ten years and never — never had anyone, not even a drunken Baptist — addressed him in that manner.

Yet the horrible word brought to his recollection a desperate sodden night. He had been in town, in Alvarado, and he had gotten tight. Something had happened in the bar of the Gran Atlántico hotel; he remembered the lights of the bar and the lights of the street outside — a boy in a death’s-head motorcycle cap, a European-looking boy with greasy long hair falling to his shoulders and the boy shouting at him scornfully—Maricón! Eres maricón!

Was it memory? Had such a thing happened? Egan was not clear.

“Lieutenant,” he asked humbly, “why are you speaking to me like that?”

“I know what I know,” Campos said. “I know you’re good. You’re O.K. I want to confess to you.”

Father Egan tried to clear his head.

“Now, Lieutenant.… Is this the time? When you’ve been drinking?” He attempted a sympathetic chuckle. “I think you should reflect a little.”

Lieutenant Campos raised his hand in a slow gesture that indicated the frivolousness of further conversation.

“No,” he said. “I want to confess to you. It will be under the seal.”

“I can’t …” Father Egan began. He had been going to tell the lieutenant that he could not give absolution to a man who was drunk. Contrition and resolve would be questionable. He took another drink.

Lieutenant Campos was standing up; he was staring at Egan with a dreadful intensity. He walked to the red freezer by the window and lifted its top door open. With a slight raising of his chin, he signaled Father Egan to draw near. The priest advanced slowly, his eyes fixed on Campos’ face. The lieutenant looked down into the open freezer with an expression of stoic grief.

Fearfully, Egan followed the lieutenant’s gaze and saw that the freezer contained an unplucked turkey and a great many bottles of Germania beer. Beneath them was a bolt of green cloth. Puzzled, he turned to Campos but the lieutenant had closed his eyes and was biting his lip, as though to control his emotions. Egan reached down, moved a few of the bottles of frozen beer and his eye fell on the maple-leaf flag of Canada. Father Egan was a native of Windsor, Ontario, and for the briefest moment he entertained the idea that Lieutenant Campos had devised some drunken ceremony of appreciation for him, some naïve filial gesture of esteem that might one day be the basis of a pleasant story. He glanced at the lieutenant and was confronted with the extreme unlikeliness of so innocent a notion.

He scanned the surface contents of the chest, amorphous cubes of ice, the enormous turkey, the bottles of beer with their peeling labels, and saw at last — in one corner, partially concealed by ice — a human foot. Looking more closely, he saw that it curved downward from a turned ankle on which there was a small cut gone black. The outer side of the foot was visible, its callused edge pressed against the top of a South American sandal. The thong of the sandal divided the darkly veined front of the foot; caught between two of the toes was a tiny cotton pompon of bright red. Father Egan looked down at the foot and understood only its beautiful symmetry, its functional wholeness, the sublime engineering that had appended its five longish toes. The top of it, he saw, was suntanned.

Then his knees buckled under him. As he reached out to steady himself, his hand clawed across the ice cubes and revealed a moist matting of yellow hair, then a tanned forehead. Then below, the freckled bridge of a nose and an eye — blue with a foliate iris — the whites gone dark, an eye so dull, so dead with sheer animal death that Egan received the sight of it as a spiritual shock.

He staggered back from the ice chest.

“Oh my God,” he said. He reeled to the wall and leaned under the picture of the President, trembling with disgust and fear.

A sad smile had appeared on the lieutenant’s face. He turned to Egan and the smile broadened until his features quivered to contain it. Looking back at him, Egan had the sense that he was in the presence of a man who, though obviously mad, understood him thoroughly.

“Father,” the lieutenant said, “do your duty. You have to be cool and brave. You have to have mercy.” He moved closer to Egan. “The power of Christ commands.”

Father Egan realized that he had no idea what the power of Christ was. Christ, it seemed to him, had no more power than he himself did and he had hardly the power to stand up. Panic rose in him like a sudden fever and he fought for his reason.

“What happened?” he heard himself ask.

Lieutenant Campos raised his eyes, yielding the question to heaven. Egan made himself go to the freezer. With a gentleness that he realized was only a studied part of his priestcraft, he moved some of the ice and beer from over the corpse.

It was a young blond girl in khaki shorts and a Boy Scout shirt with the maple-leaf flag sewn to the back of it. Jackknifed into the chest.

Egan’s revulsion was tempered by sorrow. He supposed she had been dead for a long time. Far from the lakes, he thought, trying to master his trembling, the tamaracks, the elm-lined streets.

“How did she die, Lieutenant?”

“I’ll tell you that,” the lieutenant said. “You’ll find out how.” He poured himself another glass of rum and extended the bottle toward Egan.

“No, thank you,” the priest said.

He saw his stole and breviary on a bookcase where he had set them and absently picked them up, and sat down in the rocking chair, clasping his forehead.

“Who was she?”

“She was a hippie,” Lieutenant Campos said solemnly. “Drugs. Whoring.”

You swine, Father Egan thought.

“But I mean her name, Lieutenant. Didn’t she have a passport? Surely you realize that she has a family?”

Campos went to his desk beside the transmitter, sat down at it and began to write. When he was done, he handed Egan a yellow message form with block letters on it.

JANET FOGARTY ALBERTA, the paper read.

The lieutenant pronounced the words with difficulty.

Egan fingered the edges of his stole. From her name the girl might well be Catholic. Yet first, he thought, glancing again at Campos, it would be necessary to minister to the living. He kissed the stole and put it around his neck.

“All right then, Lieutenant. Make your confession.”

To his embarrassment, Lieutenant Campos came and knelt on the floor at his feet. The lieutenant crossed himself and clasped his heavy hands prayerfully. Egan looked away.

“She was a hippie,” Lieutenant Campos declared, his hands clasped.

“I see,” Egan said in a quavering voice. The dreadful question lay squarely before him. Asking it, he was sure, would eventually cost him his life.

“Did you kill her?”

“No!” Campos shouted, startling the priest utterly. He climbed from his knees, brushed them off and began to pace the floor of his office.

“She was spearing fish, understand? That’s not allowed. Everyone knows it’s not allowed.”

“Of course,” Father Egan said.

“Listen,” the lieutenant said, setting his chair beside Egan’s, “listen to this! She hid the spear gun under the dock at Playa Tate. The mayor there told us. We went out and we saw her. She had the spear.”

“Yes,” the priest said.

“We called her to come in. She pretended to be afraid. She teased us like a little whore. We said O.K., if she’s going to act like that we’ll tease her back a little.”

Egan could see the scene quite clearly — the frightened girl in the water trying to ease over the inshore coral to the narrow shelf of sandy bottom, the drunken Guardia along the beach with their M-16’s unslung, Campos standing on the rotting pier, laughing at her.

“And she drowned?”

“She died,” Campos said vaguely.

“I see.”

“So I took command,” the lieutenant said. “It was my responsibility. I dismissed them. You see — I dressed her. These little clothes, they’re all she ever wore. I preserved her for ceremony.”

“What ceremony?” No ceremony else, he thought. Her death was doubtful.

Campos only laughed quietly, tears coming to his eyes.

“How long ago was this?” Egan asked, feeling that he had wasted a question.

“The winter.”

“It was certainly wrong of you,” Egan said, “to keep her here like this. Her family has no knowledge of her, so think how they must feel. As a policeman and especially as a social agent, you should reflect on the violation of your responsibilities involved.”

He looked into the warning that was composing itself in Campos’ eyes.

“Don’t believe,” the lieutenant said, “it was easy for me to have her here. It was hard. Listen — it was very hard to have her in there all the time.”

Egan found himself listening to the steady hum of Campos’ generator.

“Why did you keep her, then?” He felt that it was important to put the question correctly, reluctant though he was to impute to Lieutenant Campos any further suggestion of weakness or dereliction. “Was it loneliness?”

The delicacy of the priest’s question was lost on Campos. His features went cold.

“What do you know about it?”

Egan only nodded.

“When I ask you a question, Father, I require you to answer it. What do you know about it?”

While Father Egan was reflecting on what he knew about loneliness he saw Campos stagger toward him.

“You — you maricón, you know nothing about it! You maricón! How can you question me?”

“You’ve asked me to hear your confession,” Egan said mildly. “It’s necessary that I ask questions.”

“Confession is right,” Campos said. “It’s under the seal, understand? That means you keep your mouth shut. You keep it shut, understand me?”

“The law is plain,” Egan assured him. “What you tell me is privileged.”

“And don’t,” Campos said, “think I care a shit about priests and religion. I’m a man — not a woman or a maricón. You keep your mouth shut.”

“You can be certain of that,” Egan said. It occurred to him that the promise was a rash one.

“Look,” the lieutenant said, gentling. “I think it’s wrong for me to keep her here.”

“I agree,” Egan said.

“Very well,” Campos told him. “You can take her then.”

“What?”

“You can take her. Take her away.”

“I take her? But, my dear Lieutenant, how can I …”

“That’s the duty of the church!” Campos shouted at him. “That’s the duty of priests to take the dead!”

“Well, it’s the duty of the police …” Egan began, but the lieutenant cut him off.

“Don’t tell me my duty. You think I don’t know what goes on? That nun — she’s not a true nun. You think I’m stupid?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Campos suddenly smiled.

“Come on,” he said, touching the priest’s sleeve in an attitude of merry conspiracy, “we’ll give her to you. You’re the priest. You take her for me — that’s what’s right.”

Egan watched him bring a nylon sleeping bag from one corner of the room and drag it to the freezer.

“Come now,” Campos said. “We’ll get her out.”

“Look here,” Egan said, “I’m leaving.”

He stood up and marched out the front door into the moonlight. He was halfway down the steps when the lieutenant caught him.

“Get back inside,” the lieutenant said. “I’m telling you officially.”

Egan went back up the steps.

“For heaven’s sake,” he said pleadingly as Campos marched him inside, “you can dispose of a body better than I can. I mean, if you’re determined to keep the whole thing hidden.… I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“I am not an animal,” Campos said. “I believe there is a spiritual force. I believe in life after death.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Egan said.

“All right. For the relief of my heart — I give her to you.” He walked to the freezer and picked up an end of the bag. “And don’t try to run away again.”

Father Egan had collapsed in a chair. He listened with his eyes averted while Lieutenant Campos struggled cursing with the bag in the freezer.

“Very well,” he heard the lieutenant say, “now come and help.”

Turning, he saw the floor littered with ice and beer bottles. The sleeping bag was half out of the chest, looking like a squat brown serpent that had swallowed a lamb. The body, its fetal outline unmistakable under the quilted cloth, was propped against the metal edge while the twisted ends dangled fore and aft.

Egan walked toward it, a man in a dream.

Lieutenant Campos wiped the sweat from his eyes.

“Pick up the end.”

But the priest could not.

“Pick up the end!” Campos shouted. “You coward! You maricón!”

Egan stopped tugging at the limp end and put his hands under the human shape in the center. Through the ticking, it felt like a block of ice.

Together, they lifted the bag and carried it out — down the steps and into the back seat of the lieutenant’s jeep. Egan was so overcome that he thought he would faint at any moment. Besides, he was unused to exercise.

As they drove back along the moonlit beach road, he clung to the jeep rack in despair. The wind caught the stole around his neck and blew its strands taut behind him.

“I just can’t believe this is happening,” he said aloud to himself.

Lieutenant Campos heard him.

“Then,” the lieutenant said, “you shouldn’t be a priest.”

At the foot of the mission steps, they hauled the bag out and set it down on the hard sand. Freddy’s Chicken Shack was still wailing, the mellow barrel drums telling out life’s time, getting down.

Swaying a little, Lieutenant Campos put his hand on Egan’s arm.

“Do your duty,” he said. “Everyone must.”

Father Egan watched the jeep drive off; the bag at his feet was a dark shape on the luminous sand.

Down the beach from the mission steps was a gear shack with a small dock extending out over the ocean where the station’s fiberglass whaler hung at moor. Looking over his shoulder, Egan hurried to the landing and saw that the boat was secured to its customary piling and the outboard attached to the stern, the screws hauled up above the waterline. He went back to the bag, seized its ends and began to pull with the resolution of despair. It was a fearsome business of inches — the drums from Freddy’s mocked his panting breaths. When he had pulled the bag halfway to the boat, he looked up the beach and saw that two late-departing wedding guests had staggered out of Freddy’s and were approaching the dock. Quickly, he crouched down beside his horrid burden and stretched out beside it, his body pressed against the sand and rotting palm fronds.

The two men walked in step, carrying their shoes in their hands. Both of them wore dark suits with dress shirts and ties and as they walked they hummed softly in counterpoint. Passing the pier, perhaps a hundred feet from where Father Egan lay with the stuffed sleeping bag, one of the two stepped out on the pine slats and began to dance. With one hand, he waved the shoes he held in an arc over his head while the other snaked out at a right angle from his body gliding against the background of the moonlit ocean as his knees swayed. With his bare feet, he stamped the wooden surface of the pier to the beat of the barrel drums and at each stomp the water beneath the pier erupted in small bursts of glowing phosphorescence. When he had finished his dance, the man and his companion fell into step again and moved off toward the darkened clapboards of French Harbor.

Egan lay still until they were out of sight, then rose stiffly and hauled the corpse the rest of the way.

The gear shack was kept unlocked, according to the custom of the coast; from a shelf inside he took two heavy fish-head anchors and a coil of wire line. He dropped the anchors and the line into the boat, climbed in and set the outboard in the water. With a final effort, he dragged the sleeping bag off the pier — it fell into the boat at his feet with such force that for a moment he was afraid that it had stove the bottom in. Then he cast off the line and let the movement of the water carry the boat free.

Gritting his teeth, he pulled the cord to prime the engine and — not daring to look behind him — set a course for the outer reef. Five hundred yards from shore, he wheeled north to skirt the first wall of coral — he was grateful for the moonlight now — then turned north again until the boat had cleared the second reef. When he cut the engines, the whaler picked up the swell of open ocean and began to roll back toward the beach. After the second reef, the bottom fell away abruptly; the water beneath his keel was hundreds of fathoms deep.

Wide-eyed, Father Egan forced open the bag’s zipper and dropped both anchors inside, then looped the wire line around both ends of the bag, leaving the rest of the coil in snarled dangling confusion.

A short distance from the boat, two bonito jumped, their bodies glinting silver, avoiding a shark.

He put the light end over first, and then kneeling in the scuppers, with his hands as a scoop he eased the frozen mass of the girl’s body over the side. His great fear had been that the bag would not sink — but it sank quite readily, sliding down under the hull and disappearing utterly with hardly a bubble to mark its descent into darkness. The deck of the boat and the ocean’s surface held no trace of what they had borne a few seconds before.

Father Egan was amazed at the ease with which it had been done. He felt as though he had gained a thoroughly new insight into the processes of the world.

When he started the engine again, an impulse seized him to head for open sea, to let the sunrise find him miles from the mission landing and the coast of the Republic. But he mastered himself and headed the whaler for shore at trolling speed. Once the engine stalled on him, but he got it turning again without much difficulty. As he passed the inshore reef, he began to cry.

As the beach grew nearer, a moment of lucidity and calm hovered before him like a holy apparition and he gripped it desperately. Within the calm moment sounded his own voice, the voice of Christian humanist witness in a vicious world. Somewhere, in some reasonable, wood-paneled overheated room, he heard himself recounting what had happened and explaining it thoroughly. He made his voice repeat the explanation over and over lest it be lost and his reason overthrown.

I buried her myself, Father Egan heard himself explain. Of course, I couldn’t tell anyone.

On the day Holliwell left for Central America, his wife had volunteered to arrange the weekend outing of a brilliant young paranoid. Holliwell’s wife was a Master of Social Work at the state hospital. Before seven, she drove the girls to school and went on to the facility to pick up the paranoid and conduct him home to his nervous parents in the suburbs of Wilmington.

Holliwell finished his packing alone; he and his wife had taken leave of each other during the night. When his bag was locked and standing by the front door, he went into the kitchen and made himself a strong bloody mary. He drank it by the living-room window, looking out at the front yard where his magnolia hung snowbound and his mountain ash stood tortured and skeletal in an envelope of ice.

She was a little bit in love with this one, Holliwell thought — and the man was unquestionably dangerous. But she would almost certainly be all right. She was very sensible.

His plane left from Kennedy the following morning and he planned to pass the day in New York, first lunching with Marty Nolan, then checking into his favorite hotel to see what the evening might bring. He no longer knew anyone who lived in the city. At four or so, he would phone his wife to make sure that everything had gone well.

He finished the first drink and then had another, not bothering with breakfast. By the time he put his suitcase in the back of the Volvo, he was high enough to stop at the smoke shop in town and buy his first pack of cigarettes in a month. Driving to the turnpike, he smoked one cigarette after another.

The road to the pike — like the road his wife would drive to Wilmington — ran through pine forest and swamp. Each time he passed over a culvert, or the frozen course of a creek dividing one stand of pine from another, the picture would come into his mind of his wife lying dead in the woods, her red and white scarf knotted round her neck in a thin line, her bloodied fingers stiffening across a log.

After the turnpike entrance, he hit the radio and in a mile or two WWVA eased down from space, selling lucky crosses and Christian good fortune. Holliwell tuned it in carefully and between commercials heard a singular musical recitation, delivered in up-country dialect, about a young football player.

The youth on the record was his high school’s star quarterback; it was the Big Game against the school in the next hollow and at half time the home team was a couple of touchdowns behind. During the half-time break, the boy disappeared from the locker room and he was late returning for the third quarter.

“Where in the hell you been?” demanded the anxious hometown coach, who was decent but hard. He swore at the boy and shoved him toward the line of scrimmage.

There then commenced an astonishing display of unforgettable schoolboy ball. The kid played like a young man possessed, and the fans in the little country-and-Western town had never seen the like of him. The opposition was devastated, the coach awestruck and penitent. Amid the jubilation outside the showers, he drew the young quarterback quietly aside.

“Coach,” the youth explained, “my father was blind.”

The boy’s father had been blind and for a week had lain upon his deathbed. The boy had been phoning the hospital regularly and during half time had learned of his father’s death.

The coach cleared his throat. How then to explain the spectacle only just witnessed — the sixty-yard touchdown passes, the seventy-yard scoring runs?

“You see, coach,” the boy said quietly, “it’s the first time he’s ever seen me play.”

By the time WWVA faded out, Holliwell was aware of the tears streaming down his face, staining his tie, wetting his moustache and the stub of his cigarette. He eased the Volvo into the next turnoff, and sat, with the motor running, staring through the windshield at a row of green refuse cans until he had stopped sobbing.

So much for morning drinking. An hour and a half from home and he already had an anecdote for his wife, one that would engage her sympathy and attention, one to save for his return home — providing, of course, that both of them returned alive.

We’re getting pretty shaky, he told himself, wiping the foolish tears from his face with a Kleenex. It was being forty, marriage, soft suburban living.

She gets tougher and smarter, he thought, and I get shaky — a pattern of class and culture. Perhaps he might tell her about the country song but not about his breaking up at the wheel.

In the snowy woods beyond the paved rest area and the green garbage cans, a young black man in city clothes was carrying a paper parcel toward the road. He saw the parked Volvo with Holliwell at the wheel and turned quickly back into the maze of pines. Holliwell sighed, put the car in gear and rolled back onto the turnpike, headed for lunch and New York.

An hour later, he was crossing the Narrows bridge; the harbor and the Manhattan skyline were bright with January sunshine. Holliwell’s spirits had lifted in the wastes of Bayonne; except for a palpable desire for more alcohol, he felt that he was doing fairly well. It would be a drinking day — the morning stirrup cup had set off an old mechanism. But his habits had become so generally temperate that it seemed to him he could afford some reasonable indulgence in the field.

He took the Belt Parkway northward and fought his way into the traffic around the King’s County Courthouse. He had not been to Brooklyn for years and being there gave him the mild elation that came with a new and unfamiliar town. The restaurant was on Court Street; it had valet parking and a few sumac trees out back and he found it on the first pass. He brushed the cigarette ashes from his jacket, put his suitcase in the trunk and handed the keys to a uniformed Puerto Rican attendant.

McDermott’s was the name of the place, three huge rooms of cut glass, oak and dusty ceiling fans. McDermott’s, Holliwell decided, was great fun — and when he thought back on the business later, it seemed to him that it was largely the prospect of dining in downtown Brooklyn that had persuaded him to lunch with Marty Nolan in the first place.

A captain in a tuxedo escorted him among the seated landlords and deputy inspectors, leading him to a round table on which reposed a half-finished martini and a rumpled paisley napkin. He ordered a martini for himself and admired the huge mirrors on the paneled walls. The drink had arrived and Holliwell was taking his first sip when he saw Marty Nolan step out of the gents’ in the next salon and proceed nearsightedly across the hall.

As Marty walked, his left hand absently brushed an area below the belt of his double-knit trousers; he was checking to see if his fly was unzipped. When he saw Holliwell, his round face brightened. Holliwell stood up to shake hands with him.

“Herr Professor,” Marty Nolan said.

His hand was damp, his thick horn-rimmed glasses seemed almost about to steam and although it was not at all hot in McDermott’s there was a band of perspiration below the line of his fair curly hair.

“Good to see you, Marty,” Holliwell said.

It would be possible, he thought, to describe Nolan as fastidious — yet there was always something faintly gross about the man, the suggestion of unwholesome secrets.

Nolan raised his glass and they drank.

“I’m delighted that you made the time for lunch. I’m honored.”

“Not at all,” Holliwell said. “I looked forward to it.”

He was privy to a few of Marty Nolan’s secrets. One was that during the Tet offensive, the Viet Cong forces who overran Hue had buried him alive — and he had lain in the earth half conscious for six hours until a party of German medical missionaries dug him out.

And on one occasion, Holliwell, visiting from the Central Highlands, had found a manuscript sheet in Nolan’s portable typewriter with a single sentence at the top of the page and the sentence had read: “The Jew is at home in the modern world.” Whether or not this was a libel depended entirely upon one’s sense and experience of the modern world — but the business about “the Jew” was distinctly sinister. Can of worms there, Holliwell had thought.

But his ties to Nolan were old and strong. They had both gone to Regis in the fifties — it was a Jesuit high school that took in the smartest kids from the city’s parochial grade schools. They had both been released into the nineteen sixties from prestigious secular universities. They had both been to Vietnam on their government’s service.

Marty was peering over his glasses at the room in which they sat.

“I’m in transports of Brooklyn nostalgia,” he told Holliwell. “I come from Bay Ridge, you remember.”

“Of course I remember. What brings you up here? I thought you worked down in Washington.”

“Oh yeah,” Marty said, “in the Washington area. I’m visiting my mother.”

Holliwell inquired after Marty Nolan’s mother, wondering if he had ever married and whether or not to ask.

“Mom’s O.K. She gets around.”

“Well, it’s a great place, this,” Holliwell said. “It’s really old Brooklyn.”

They ordered more martinis, a bottle of Barbarousse. Holliwell asked for a steak and salad, Nolan the veal piccata.

“Did you know,” Nolan asked as a waiter opened the wine, “that Paul Robeson died this morning?”

“I thought he died in Russia about ten years ago.”

“This morning,” Nolan said. His eyes flashed a thick whimsy which Holliwell remembered very clearly from the past. “It was on the radio.”

“Well,” Holliwell said, cutting his steak, “I hardly know how to react.”

“I wasn’t trying to goad you to malicious satisfaction, Frank. After all, everybody dies. It just brings back old times. I’d like to go to his funeral.”

“You mean officially?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’d just like to go. To see it.”

“Think the FBI will be there? Taking everybody’s picture?”

“I wouldn’t think so. But who knows with those guys?”

Holliwell, chewing his steak, became aware of Marty’s eyes on him again.

“How’s your life, Frank? Quiet desperation? Self-fulfillment?”

Holliwell nodded and finished chewing.

“Last month,” he told Nolan, “my oldest daughter burned herself slightly. It was the winter solstice and she was jumping over a flaming log with her boyfriend.”

“Is that the way they get married now?”

Holliwell poured them both some Barbarousse.

“How about you, Marty? Ever get married?”

“I was married in Nam, didn’t you know that? In the Saigon cathedral.”

“It must have been after I left,” Holliwell said. “What’s the lady like?”

“Neat,” Marty said.

Holliwell found himself touched. “Is she Vietnamese?”

“From Worcester. We’re separated now. We don’t have any kids.”

Holliwell nodded to convey comprehension, sympathy, whatever might be called for.

“And you,” Nolan said. “You’re off to Compostela for a little something different.”

“I fiddled it. I invited my friends at the university down there to invite me. How did you come to hear about it?”

“I had a letter from Oscar Ocampo. He said you’d be coming down.”

Holliwell realized then that there would be a pitch. He must, he thought, have realized all along that there would be one. But it would not disturb him, he decided; it was part of a game, an artifact of his friendship with Nolan, a little fencing between gentlemen. Neither of them would take it too seriously.

“How come Oscar’s writing to you? I thought he was a leftist.”

“Sure he’s a leftist. But we’re not enemies. We have a dialogue going.”

Ocampo was a government anthropologist with a sinecure in the university at Compostela, a gambler and a great womanizer. Holliwell had always known him to be a passionate sympathizer with revolution.

“Oscar and I used to have some great arguments,” Holliwell said. Apparently Oscar had stopped arguing. They had turned him — either with money or with the offer of a job in the States. It was a shame, Holliwell thought, and Oscar must feel very bad about it.

“I suppose,” Holliwell said, “that in a couple of years, you’ll be asking me to get him a job up here.”

“Frank — how about doing us a favor while you’re down there?”

Holliwell buttered some French bread and said what he had decided he would say.

“If you approach me with something like that, Marty, I’m supposed to publicize the approach. My professional association passed a resolution against doing favors for you guys.”

“Your professional association,” Marty Nolan said humorously, “is a bunch of long-haired disorderly persons. Pinkos, Frank. Red rats.”

“All anthropologists are brothers,” Holliwell said.

“Suppose I ask how you voted on that resolution?”

Holliwell put his bread down and set his fork beside it.

“I abstained. I was in favor of the resolution but I felt compromised. Because of what I did in Nam. The favors.”

“God,” Marty said soberly. “You’re an honest man, Frank.”

“Well,” Holliwell told him, “there it is. As they used to say. What do you hear from Ho Chi Minh City?”

Marty looked at him for a moment and finished his wine.

“Not much. They arrested the Hoa Hao. A lot of them were friends of ours and nobody bothered to get them out. Look — what can I say? You want to know if I’m bitter? I’m not. Neither am I repentant. The other guys fought hard, they earned it.”

“If you were bitter I wouldn’t blame you. You really came through the whole thing damn well.”

Nolan put his own fork down. They had both stopped eating.

“What should I do — run for Congress? Get myself a tent show in Orange County — I Know the Red Terror Firsthand? I’ll tell you something, Frank — the night they dug me out I was in a hospital compound with this old Spanish priest. The guy was walking up and down chain smoking and they’d had him under the ground longer than I was. He said to me — Hombre, this was nothing. They buried me alive in Murcia in thirty-eight and it was a lot harder.”

Holliwell laughed and shook his head.

“Frank,” Marty Nolan said, “let me tell you about what’s going on down south. I guarantee, you’ll love it.”

Holliwell shrugged; Nolan was leaning across the table at him, his eyes shining with good-natured intrigue.

“Down in Tecan, on the east coast, even as we sit here — some of our countrymen find themselves in a state of social and spiritual crisis.”

“Let’s let them work it out for themselves,” Holliwell said.

“All I want to know, Frank, is what they’re really up to.”

“Ask Oscar what they’re up to — he’s on the payroll, right? Speaking as an American taxpayer, I don’t give a shit.”

“Oh, Frank,” Marty said. He sat back in his chair as though scandalized. “Information is a positive force. It furthers communication. It reduces isolation and clarifies motives. The more everybody knows about what everybody else is doing, the less misunderstanding there is in the world.”

“I’m going to Compostela. I’m not setting foot in fucking Tecan. It’s a rathole and it gets on my conscience.”

“Nonsense,” Marty said, “it’s a wonderful place. They have American-style hardware stores and the President speaks English just like we do here on Court Street.”

“And he’s wonderful too.”

“He certainly is,” Marty said. “He’s a Rotarian.”

“Marty,” Holliwell said, looking around for the waiter, “get off my back. I’m not going there and I’m not doing you any favors.”

When the waiter came near, Nolan ordered them both a stinger. A busboy took their unfinished lunches away.

“On the Caribbean coast of Tecan there’s a little place the locals call French Harbor. A couple of clicks down from Puerto Alvarado. For the last thirty years the American Devotionists have had a mission there but they’re on their last legs now and they want to close it down. The only people left there are a priest in his sixties and an American nursing nun. Now the Devotionists have been asked about this and their provincial in New Orleans is being very cagey — but it seems that these characters won’t come back.”

The drinks arrived; Marty raised his glass in salute.

“There’s a lot of medieval church diplomacy going on. The provincial says he’ll cut off their funds but he hasn’t. The priest and nun say they’ll come back presently but they won’t. Also the Tecanecan government has become aware of their presence and the Tecanecan government is extremely paranoid.”

“And extremely murderous,” Holliwell said.

“O.K.,” Marty said, “they’re murderous troglodytes and we put them in. But there it is. The Tecanecans suspect that the two of them are somehow mixed up in subversive activities but it hasn’t got a line on them and it doesn’t want a hassle with the church.”

“And what do your sources say?”

“That these people are wrongos, Commies et cetera. That’s what they always say. You know, Tecan is a special situation — it’s still the fifties there. Our ambassador is a Birchite moron. The cops lock you up for reading Voltaire.”

“Another corner of the free world.”

“Don’t give me clichés, Frank. Save them for the meetings of your professional association and someday they’ll make you their president.”

He finished his drink looking pained.

“Listen, old chap — I want to know what these people are up to. They’re my compatriots and erstwhile co-religionists and they’re fucking with El Toro down there. Somebody may have to bail them out.”

“I’m not going down there to spy on them.”

“Spy on them? Are you crazy? They’re already being spied on seven ways from sundown by people who’d love nothing more than to mess with their private parts.”

Holliwell signaled for another pair of stingers.

“You’re going to Compostela. It would be the easiest thing in the world for you to get a Tecanecan visa and check out French Harbor. Go diving, go bonefishing. There’s even an Old Empire ruin a few miles from there for you to scramble around. The thing is,” he went on, before Holliwell could protest, “it’s me that wants to know about these people. Not so much the outfit as just me. And I’d like to get it not from some informer or right-wing spook — but from somebody with some sensitivity. Somebody who could give me a real insight into what they think theyre doing down there. You might be in a position to help everybody out.”

“The last time I thought I was in that position things didn’t work out very well.”

“So what do you want? A perfect world? Tell me something, Professor, have you stopped believing that people have to take sides?”

“No,” Holliwell said. “People have to take sides.”

“What side are you on then? Do you really think the other guys are going to resolve social contradictions and make everything O.K.? Worker in the morning, hunter in the afternoon, scholar in the evening — do you really believe that’s on, Frank?”

“No,” Holliwell said.

“Well, it’s them or us, chum. Like always. They make absolute claims, we make relative ones. That’s why our side is better in the end.”

“Is that what you believe?”

Marty shrugged. “Sure I believe it. You believe it too. Anyway I’m not recruiting you and it’s not some kind of hostile operation. I told you what I wanted — just a little insight. It could be that we have something to learn from these two people in Tecan.”

“Why don’t you just write them a letter. Ask them what it is they want down there.”

Nolan exhaled slowly and let his narrow shoulders sag.

“Give me a brandy,” he told the waiter. “Two brandies.” He turned from Holliwell to look around the room, at the wainscoted ceilings and the dwindling crowd of heavy-faced, hard-eyed diners.

“Jesus, I picked this place because I thought the atmosphere might discourage moral posturing.”

“It must be you and me, Marty. We’re spoiling the atmosphere.”

Nolan took his brandy without ceremony.

“This conversation depresses me,” he said, “because it reminds me that we live in the land of total vindication. T.V. T.V. or nothing. I mean twenty years ago we had the total vindication of William Jennings Bryan, and Father Flanagan and apple pie. Secularism”—he made a little equals sign in the air with his fingers—“was Communism. Modernism was godlessness. Bolshevism … All the eggheads were Commie stooges and you had to go to Fordham or Darlington, South Carolina, to find a loyal American. Then we get fucked up in Nam and Saigon falls and the whole card’s reversed. Hiss didn’t do it, the Rosenbergs didn’t do it, nobody fucking did it and Truman started the cold war. Total vindication.”

“Well,” Holliwell said, “there’s nothing like total vindication.”

“Exactly. See, it’s all a movie in this country and if you wait long enough you get your happy ending. Until somebody else’s movie starts. In many ways it’s a very stupid country.”

“Is this the patriotic approach?”

“Hell, no,” Nolan said, “the patriotic approach is out of date.”

They sat drinking in silence for a while. When the check came, Holliwell moved it to his own side of the table and kept it there.

“We’re at a very primitive stage of mankind,” Nolan declared, “that’s what people don’t understand. Just pick up the Times on any given day and you’ve got a catalogue of ape behavior. Strip away the slogans and excuses and verbiage, the so-called ideology, and you’re reading about what one pack of chimpanzees did to another.”

Holliwell paid the check with his BankAmericard and Nolan did not move to prevent him.

“Sorry,” Holliwell said. “Not this time.”

They walked to the front door together and stood beside the parking-lot fence. The brisk wind raised whirls of dust from the sidewalk and Nolan shielded his eyes with his right hand.

“When you’re down there you may feel differently. So if I may, I’ll ask you again through a third party.”

Holliwell only smiled and they shook hands. It was not until he was halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge that the suggestion of a threat in Nolan’s final words struck him, making him think of the man entombed beside the Perfume River, the involved observer of the modern world. A chill touched his inward loneliness. He was, he knew at that moment, really without beliefs, without hope — either for himself or for the world. Almost without friends, certainly without allies. Alone.

He drove toward Manhattan facing the squat brutality of the new buildings that had gone up around the bridge; he was depressed and too drunk for safety. The drive uptown left him tired and anxious. Gratefully, he turned the Volvo keys over to the hotel doorman and once upstairs ordered a bottle of scotch from room service. When the drink arrived, he sat with his feet on the windowsill looking out over the midtown rooftops. On a day in May, he and Marty Nolan had once walked from the library on East Seventy-ninth Street all the way down Second Avenue to the bridge and then across it, ending up in a bar on Clark Street. It would have been about 1955. Hour after hour, block after block of talk.

After a while, he moved over to the double bed, propped a pillow up behind him and dialed his home number. When he heard his wife’s voice on the line, he lit a cigarette.

“So you’re O.K.,” he said. “You got back all right.”

“I told you not to worry. He had his medicine at the hospital. He was half zonked.”

“So he didn’t rave and carry on?”

“He slept. When we got to his house he didn’t know where he was.”

“Does he ever?”

“Sure. He’s very aware.”

“What were his parents like?”

“Very middle-class. Quite well off, fancy house. They asked me in but I didn’t go. They’ll drive him back.”

“So that’s that.”

“Yep,” she said.

“I had my lunch with Marty. We drank a lot.”

“You sound like you’ve been drinking. What are you going to do with yourself now?”

Holliwell poured himself a little scotch and ice water. In the blue sky beyond his window, fleecy January clouds were speeding over Manhattan.

“Maybe I’ll walk over to Eighth Avenue. For some twenty-dollar fellatio.”

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“Well, I wish I was up there with you. And I wish I could go along.”

“Marty told me that Paul Robeson just died.”

“My God, was he gloating about it?”

“He was sort of gloating.”

“Listen,” she said. “Did he ask you to do any work for them?”

“He had something up his sleeve. I turned him down cold.”

“Did you let him know you were mad at him?”

“I wasn’t mad at him.”

“I think they have a hell of a lot of nerve,” she said.

“I love you,” Holliwell told her. “Take care.”

“I love you too. You take care too.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, drinking still more whiskey and thinking about his conversation with Nolan. Shortly he began to wonder what Marty had been writing in that hootch outside of Hue, what he had meant by the modern world and by being at home in it. And by “the Jew.”

A great deal of profoundly fractured cerebration had gone down in Vietnam. People had been by turns Fascist mystics, Communist revolutionaries and junkies; at certain times, certain people had managed to be all three at once. It was the nature of the time — the most specious lunacy had been conceived, written and enacted on both sides of the Pacific. Most of the survivors were themselves again, for what it was worth. No one could be held totally responsible for his utterances during that time.

The Jew was presumably the one who squatted on the estaminet, blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in Antwerp. Holliwell knew him; his name was Sy, he had once run a newspaper stand on the corner of Dyckman Street and Broadway. Sy had lived almost across the hall from Holliwell and his mother in a cheap hotel in Washington Heights for ten years and Holliwell still half suspected that Sy had been his mother’s lover. He had never asked.

For years, he had worked for Sy at the paper stand and they had conducted a running discourse on the state of the world at mid-century. Holliwell had learned the words of the “Internationale” from Sy but whenever Holliwell mentioned church or churchly things Sy would smile with lupine contempt.

“They pound that shit into your head. At that school you go to.”

Sy was a Communist, he had been an organizer in the merchant marine during the war. Holliwell had found Sy’s being a Communist appalling. He would bait Sy with the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Katyn massacre, forced-labor camps, the NKVD.

When the trucks brought bound stacked papers to the curb, Sy would cut the twine from them with a sharpened knuckle-duster, baring his teeth at the red banner of Hearst’s Journal-American.

“That school — they pound that shit into your head.”

They would stand hunched over the stacks, in ink-stained aprons full of sweaty change, their backs to the ice-cold sour wind from the Bronx breweries.

“What do you know about the Soviet Union?” Sy would ask. “You ever been there?”

Stung, Holliwell would play his trump.

“What do I know about Germany and Auschwitz and like that? I never been there either.”

Sy would stick his hands in his pea-coat pockets with the same wolfish grimace.

“Go ahead — be a Fascist. Be an anti-Semite. They pound that shit into your head.”

But he was not at home in the modern world.

On one of his last visits to New York — it had been a few years before — Holliwell had gotten drunk to the point of riotous indulgence and he had undertaken a sentimenal journey uptown. He had found himself walking around Fort Tryon Park in the fading light, feeling perfectly safe, and everywhere he turned he had seen vistas that were part of his interior landscape, all the scenes of his early adventures imaginary and real. Immediately, he had realized that the neighborhood had nothing for him anymore.

Then he had seen Sy on a bench along Broadway in a black overcoat too warm for the weather and a cloth cap out of The Grapes of Wrath.

Sy had asked after his mother. “Alive?”

She was dead, Holliwell had told him. She had gone back to Glasgow on her Social Security and died there.

He had said to Sy: “I thought you’d be in Florida.”

And Sy had said forget Florida. The fucking animals, they hunt me on the street. They want to break down my door and put a rope around my neck. The scumbags, they ruined the neighborhood, they ruined the city. Fucking Lindsay.

His broken nose was sprouting gray whiskers. He was old unto death.

Then Sy had told him the story of Press who ran the drugstore on Manhattan Avenue.

Press the druggist. Retired, closed the store — he was robbed so often. Visiting his brother on the Concourse. In a car — he wouldn’t dare walk. And the animals got him in his car. Just bang — fuck you, he’s dead. The cops stop the car, they catch the animals, one animal confesses. But Press, they put him in the city dump at Mott Haven — they don’t remember where. The cops can’t find him. The city says we can’t find him, the dump’s too big. A needle in a haystack. He’s there now, under the garbage. A religious Jew. Nice for his family. A fucking dog you bury in the ground.

While he told the story of Press, Sy looked across Broadway where a Hispanic woman in red boots was leaning against a squad car, talking to the cops inside. Holliwell’s last view of him was walking along behind the woman in the direction of the river, hurrying until he caught up in mid-block and they turned the corner together.

The hotel where Sy and Holliwell and his mother had lived was still standing. It was a welfare hotel now and the junkies were lined up on a metal rail outside, resting their scarred hams on the pigeon spikes, blowing their noses into Orange Julius napkins.

This time he would refrain from sentimental journeys and gestures. Sy would be dead now, like his mother.

He took his drink to the window to look down at the patch of Central Park that was visible from his room. The lights were going on; the lawns darkening. It was remotely possible, he thought, the depression and the war years being what they were, his mother being who she was — that Sy was his father. But it was unlikely. There had once existed, at least legally, a person called Michael J. Holliwell who was his father of record.

The thought of Sy made him feel like mourning, really like weeping. Drunk again, boozy ripe, ready to sniffle with promiscuous fervor over lost fathers and hillbilly songs. He put the glass down. The juice was turning on him altogether, softening him up; it was all catching up with him. His past was dead and his present doing poorly. In his briefcase was an unfinished address to the Autonomous University of Compostela but lie was too far gone, he decided, to even look at it.

Hunger made him feel ashamed; he experienced it as further evidence of his frail sensuality. He ate from room service and nearly finished the bottle.

When he had put the empty tray outside his door, he dutifully took up the briefcase and opened it on his night table. After a moment, he took out the address and set it aside face down. Beneath it in the case were his air tickets and a yellow file folder in which he kept a changing collection of notes and clippings, drawn from the long hours he spent in idle reading. At any one time, Holliwell’s file might contain bits from the Times and the news magazines, religious pamphlets, anything which seemed to him when he read it to have some relevance to the proper study of mankind. Often, when he reread the pieces in his file, he experienced difficulty in recalling why he had clipped them in the first place. If, after a while, he could not use the pieces in an article or introduce them into one of his classes, he would throw the entire stack away.

The file which Holliwell was bringing with him to Compostela contained only two items — a National Geographic article on Port Moresby and a letter that had appeared in his local alternative newspaper.

Holliwell took the printed letter from the file and set it before him. “Dear Editor,” it began.

Now it is evening again and the metal bars that separate we poor shadows from the outside world have slammed shut with a soul chilling echo. Before me lies another night in which moon and stars are only a phantom memory on the ceiling of my cell. During the night I shall experience many things. Some will be the faces of those I have loved and lost, others will be the memories of hatred and violence. And during the long night ahead I will cling to my dreams, hoping to find in the peace of slumber a surcease from the rage that gnaws inwardly at my heart.

My convict’s world is a lonely one and I would be bold enough to ask of there is a reader (woman, race not important) who would share my lonely hours with me by writing and speaking to me of the outside world from which the so-called justice of our society has banished me.

Yours truly,

Arch Rudiger

#197–46

Box 56 G.F.

Farmingdale, Wash.

Holliwell had found the clipping in his daughter’s room. It had lain for something like a year between her book of the films of Rita Hayworth and her copy of The Last Unicorn until he had finally snatched it up and incorporated it into his collage.

Once he had read the letter aloud to his wife; she had looked at him, closely suspecting mockery.

“I hope she answered it,” his wife had said. She had helped to fashion Margaret’s sense of social and moral responsibility.

Holliwell was quite certain that she had not.

He lay back on the bed, holding the clipping between his fingers, indulging Arch Rudiger with the pity he felt for himself. It reminded him of a few nights of his own.

Holliwell had ended by feeling guilty about Arch and he had assuaged his guilt by fantasizing the ideal response.

Dear Arch 197–46,

I know that you are a young community male while I am a student at a privileged and elitist woman’s college in the East. My family’s immense wealth and status fill me with shame when I consider the cruel injustice which you have suffered.…

Holliwell threw the clipping into the wastepaper basket and then tossed the Port Moresby article in after it. He turned on the television set to watch the first part of a World War II movie and fell asleep in the flickering light of burning Germans.

“Well,” Sister Mary Joseph said, “I don’t believe for a minute that it all ends in the old grave.”

She and Sister Justin Feeney were sitting in the shade on the mission veranda drinking iced tea. Sister Justin frowned at the sunlit ocean. Mary Joe’s Bronxy certainties drove her to fury.

“Let’s not talk theology,” she said.

“Who’s talking theology?”

“You,” Sister Justin said. “Pie in the sky.”

Sister Mary Joseph had come down from the mountains around Lake Tapa to talk sense to Justin. Her own situation was very different; her order was strong and adaptable, her dispensary could measure its effectiveness in lives preserved. Arriving at French Harbor she had quickly surmised that the local people were staying away, that something was seriously wrong with Father Charlie Egan and the stories she had heard about the state of the Devotionists on the coast were at least partly true.

“You gotta have an element of pie in the sky, kiddo,” she told Sister Justin. “That’s part of the basics.”

Justin shaded her pale blue eyes from the glare of sky and ocean and leaned her chin on her fist.

Sister Mary Joe stood up and took their tea glasses.

“You want to talk pragmatism — O.K. we’ll do that.” Holding the glasses between her thumb and fingers, she waved them before Justin’s averted face. “You’re accomplishing nothing. You’re not needed. Am I reaching you now?”

These were words as hard as Mary Joe commanded and the satisfaction with which she flung them at poor Justin caused her immediate remorse.

She was rinsing the glasses in the kitchen when Father Egan came in, shuffling toward the icebox, holding a flyswatter absently in his right hand.

“How’s things, Father?” Sister Mary asked, looking him up and down.

“My dear Joe,” Egan said. “Things are rich.” He fixed himself a glass of water and gave her a vague smile. “How nice of you to come and visit us.”

“Beats working,” she told him. “Still going over your book?”

“Scribble scribble scribble,” the priest said, and retreated back to his room.

Mary Joe wiped the glasses and went to the refectory to get a stethoscope from her black bag. Then she rapped once on Father Egan’s door and let herself in.

She found him sitting by his window, the shutters thrown open to the green hillside below, a working bottle of Flor de Cana at his feet. Outside chickens picked among the morning glory vines, an old woman chopped at a stand of plantain with her machete.

Sister Mary settled her thick body on the window rail.

“We’re old friends, aren’t we, Father? We can speak plainly to each other.”

“Yes,” Egan said, “we’re old pals, Joe.” His smile faded and he turned his head to look over his shoulder. “And I won’t have her tyrannizing you. You don’t have to listen to her.”

“C’mon,” Mary Joseph said, “Justin’s O.K. She’s a good kid.” She opened one of the buttons of his white cotton shirt and pressed the scope over his breastbone. “Let’s talk about you.”

The beat was feathery and irregular. Egan was in his early sixties; to Mary Joe his heart sounded as though it should belong to a very old man.

“So how about laying off the sauce?”

“Ah,” Father Egan said. “You have me there.”

“Yeah, I got you there, Charlie. And from where I’m standing you look a little portly to me and what do you bet your liver’s enlarged? The right bug would knock you flat on your back.”

She bent down, picked up the rum and set it down on Egan’s desk beside the crucifix.

“You need to go home, Father. This kind of life — keep it up and it’ll be curtains.”

Father Egan scratched his ear and looked out of the window.

“I mean, what are you guys doing here anyway?” Sister Mary demanded. “Your instructions are to close this joint. This is the religion where people do what they’re told, right?”

“Yes, well,” Father Egan said, “you see, I thought I’d finish the book before we struck the flag.”

“Boo for that idea,” the nun said. “Because if you want to finish that book you better strike your flag or whatever — quick.

“Look,” she told him. “I’ll leave some pills with Justin for you. Take one every four hours instead of the joy juice. But don’t take them both or you’re dead.”

“Bless you, Joe,” Father Egan said. He said it in a far-off manner that Mary Joe found alarming.

“God bless you, Charlie,” she said. “Pray for me.”

She went back to the refectory, put the stethoscope away and carried her bag out to the veranda. Sister Justin was still in her chair, staring sadly out to sea, and Mary Joseph suspected she had been crying. Mary Joseph was not very sympathetic.

From time to time, up at Lake Tapa, Sister Mary had found herself with the obligation to comfort some of the younger and tenderer agents of the Peace Corps. She forgave them for their tears — Tecan was a hard place and they were young and American. First time away from their skateboards, she liked to say.

But the sight of a nursing nun in tears made her feel ashamed and angry. Tears were for the Tecanecan women, who always had plenty to cry about.

“Great day in the morning,” she declared, forgetting that she had repented her earlier hardness, “if I lived around here and I needed help I sure wouldn’t try to get it from this balled-up operation. I’d go right straight to the Seventh-Day Adventists or the LSA’s or to somebody who knows what the heck they’re doing.”

“The LSA’s!” Justin said savagely. “The LSA’s are a bunch of right-wing psalm-singing sons of bitches. They’ve got a picture of the President on their wall, they suck ass with the Guardia and they fink for the CIA.”

In spite of herself, Mary Joseph blushed.

“You got a lot of nerve,” she said, “to talk that.”

Justin looked down at the veranda deck and shielded her eyes. Mary Joe waited for her to calm down and then sat beside her.

“Look, Justin, the very fact that you have the leisure to sit around and brood should tell you that you’re not doing your job. I mean, great guns, kid — it’s no time or place for ego trips.”

“Am I ego-tripping?” Justin asked. “Isn’t it supposed to bother me that people starve so America can have Playboy Clubs and bottomless dancing.”

Sister Mary snickered. “Aw, c’mon,” she said.

“Maybe I’m putting it stupidly. Doesn’t it bother you?”

“If it’s true it bothers me. But what do I know? I’m just a pill pusher. So are you. Nobody elected us. You know,” she told Justin, “in many ways you’re a typical Devotionist. You all tend to be very bright and high-strung and short on horse sense.”

Sister Justin brushed the windblown hair under her checkered bandana.

“I’ve had it with the order and I’ve had it with my sister of mercy number.”

“Then it’s time you went home,” Sister Mary said. Justin’s words made her shudder. “Justin — something special is happening now. The church is really turning back to Jesus. It’s gonna be great and it would be a shame to miss out on it.”

Justin put her hand across her eyes.

“If I told you,” Sister Mary went on, “that you need to pray — that you need to ask God’s help — would you say I was talking pie in the sky again?”

Sister Justin had turned her face away and was pursing her lips to make her tears stop. Mary Joseph watched her young friend cry; she no longer felt it in her to be outraged.

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you anymore?”

Justin only shook her head.

She was a real beauty, Mary Joseph thought, the genuine article. In her own order they would never have let one so pretty and headstrong take final vows. But it was hindsight — Justin had soldiered on for six years, cheerful and strong, the wisest of catechists, a cool competent nurse. A little too good to be true in the end.

“This is no place for a personal crisis,” Mary told her.

“I know,” Justin said. She patted her cheek with a folded handkerchief.

“On the practical level — the fruit company repurchased the property — you can’t stall them forever. And there’s really a lot of negative talk. The Archbishop is starting to get upset.”

“That old creep,” Justin said. “He’s not even a Christian. He’s a cross between a Grand Inquisitor and an Olmec priest.”

Sister Mary sat stiffly for a moment and then dissolved in guilty laughter.

“Justin — you’re such a smart aleck.”

Even distraught Justin could not help smiling back at her.

“Well, he ain’t Bing Crosby,” Sister Mary said in a low-comedy mutter. “But he represents the church here and that means plenty. And believe it or not he’s protecting you from a government investigation.”

Justin Feeney rose from her chair and walked to the edge of the veranda.

“Give me a few days before you speak to anyone. I have to make some plans of my own.”

Mary Joseph frowned. She did not believe that one could plan in idleness.

“Now I want to hear from you in a week and I want to hear a date of departure. If you need extra help maybe I can sneak you some Peace Corps kiddos to pull and tote.”

“Thanks, Joe. Thanks for giving a damn.”

Mary Joseph picked up her black bag and went to the top of the steps. She had mastered an impulse to touch Justin on the cheek or to give her a hug. Such demonstrations were contrary to her training.

“Hey, listen, you did an A-1 job here for a long time. Don’t go feeling like a complete flop. Don’t let yourself get morbid. Just get busy and pack up.”

Justin nodded briskly.

“God loves you, Justin. You’re his special lady. He’ll help you.”

“O.K., Joe.”

On the first step down Sister Mary Joseph was smitten with dread. In Justin’s impatient goodbye smile she read the word “lost”—and the word sounded in her scrubbed soldierly soul with a grim resonance.

“Hey,” she said, turning round, “I got a thing for Charlie Egan, know what I mean? I really want to see him get home alive. Can you take care of it for me?”

“You bet,” Justin said.

Walking to her jeep, Sister Mary caught sight of another vehicle rounding the palm grove between Freddy’s Chicken Shack and the water’s edge. It was a four-wheel-drive Toyota and the driver she recognized as Father Godoy, a Tecanecan priest from Puerto Alvarado. She waited beside her Willys as he pulled up.

Father Godoy wore creased chino pants, a blue plaid shirt and expensive sunglasses. He was out of his Toyota shaking her hand and breathing English pleasantries before she could utter a greeting.

His long face lengthened further in a bony yellow smile; he was tall and angular, a tragical Spaniard of a man.

“Well, it’s going great, Father,” Sister Mary heard herself declare. “We have an OB now and some new hardware and God willing we’re going to have a real good year.”

He bobbed his head before her in hypothalamic agreement with everything in sight. Very sexy, she thought. She distrusted intellectual priests and the native clergy she generally regarded as soft, spoiled and unprogressive.

“Terrific,” he was saying, in the racy Stateside which he affected for people of her sort, “really great! What would they do without you up there?”

“Looking in on our friends here, Father?”

“Right, right,” he said, as though he had not understood her question.

“I hear,” she said, “you have a nut loose down the coast. Somebody killing little kids.”

“It seems that way,” Godoy told her. “The people think it’s a foreigner.”

“Yeah,” the nun said, “I’d want to think that too. I hope the word’s out to be careful.”

“Everyone knows,” Godoy said. “That’s how we are here.”

“Well, so long,” she said, climbing into her jeep. “Keep us posted.”

“All the best,” Godoy called to her. “All the best to everybody.”

When she had driven as far as the palm grove, she stopped the jeep with the engine idling and bent into the lee of the dashboard to the light a cigarette. Inhaling, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Godoy at the top of the steps beside Sister Justin. Both of them were looking out to sea.

“Oh, boy,” she said to herself as she put the jeep in gear, “a couple of stars.”

Father Godoy was complimenting Sister Justin on the beauty of the ocean and her good fortune in living beside it. His doing so made her feel guilty.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked.

“No, no, please.” He looked about him cheerfully, further embarrassing Justin with the station’s lack of activity.

“How’s Himself,” Godoy asked in a low voice.

She smiled at the missionary Irishism.

“Not well, I’m afraid. He’s rather crushed and not always rational. A while ago he had the boat out in the middle of the night. I can’t imagine why.”

“Strange,” the priest said. “A little worrying, eh?”

“Please have some tea.”

“I have to go. It’s the day of the procession in town.”

“Oh drat,” Justin said. “It just got away from me. I haven’t missed it once since I’ve been here and today I forgot.” She shrugged sadly.

“I can take you in tonight,” he said. “For the festival afterwards. You see, I’m coming back to take some children from the company school. So we’ll stop for you if you like.”

“That’d be great. Would you?”

“Yes, of course. Of course. In fact I came now to ask you.”

“Well,” Justin said, laughing, “yes, please.”

“Great,” the priest said. “I’ll go now and then after six we’ll pick you up.”

“Wonderful.”

“Well, until then,” he said, and went down the steps, leaving the image of his shy smile behind him.

“Wonderful,” she said.

Wonderful. “Wonderful wonderful,” she repeated dully under her breath. “Goddamnit, what a fool I’m becoming.”

As she watched Godoy get into his jeep, she felt mortified and panic-stricken. She hurried from the veranda before he could turn and see her.

For a while she busied herself with sweeping out the empty dispensary, spraying the stacked linens for mildew, poking in the corners for centipedes or scorpions. Within the hour a man came from the village with a red snapper and a basket of shrimp; Justin went down the steps to pay him. The man brought a message from the Herreras, a mother and daughter who did cooking and cleaning for the station, that they would not be coming for several days. They had not come for some time before — nor had the young women who worked as nurse’s aides, two girls from the offshore islands whom Justin herself had taught to read and write, her barefoot doctors. It was just as well since there was no work for them.

Somewhat later Lieutenant Campos drove by to give Sister Justin a quick glimpse of herself in his silvered sunglasses.

She cleaned and scaled the snapper, washed the shrimp and showered in her own quarters. Changing, she put on a cool khaki skirt, a red checked shirt, an engineer’s red scarf over her hair. When she went back into the kitchen, she found Father Egan mixing cold well water into his rum.

“Are we friends today?” she asked him.

“There’s a level, Justin, on which we’re always friends. Then there’s a level on which we can’t be.”

Justin received this response in silence. Mystical as ever, she thought. She picked up the cleaned fish, stood holding it for a few moments, then set it down again.

“Sister Mary Joseph is after us to close. You probably know that.”

“Yes,” the priest said. “Of course it’s up to you.”

“Why is everything up to me?” she asked, wiping her hands on a towel. “I mean, what’s happening with you? It’s very worrying.”

“Don’t reproach me,” Father Egan said. “I’m reinforcing this mutiny with my frail presence. It’s up to you because you’re a sensible girl.”

“Must you keep drinking?”

“Never mind that,” Father Egan said.

She walked over to the kitchen table and leaned on her fist, watching him.

“You’ve been so darn irrational I can’t cope. And I know you’ve been worse since that night you had the boat out. I wish I knew what that was about.”

“Under the seal,” Egan said. “The rest is silence.”

Sister Justin shook her head to clear it of his madness.

“I don’t feel very sensible now,” she said. “I feel like a complete idiot.”

“Not at all,” Egan said. “Do you want to know what I think?”

“Yes, please.”

“I think you’re very intelligent and moral and all good nunnish things. You had an attack of self-righteousness and you decided to try the impossible. Nothing wrong with that, Justin. Fine tradition behind it.”

“You encouraged me.”

“Yes. Well, I wanted to stay too. And I respect you, you see. Believe it or not.”

“I thought I could pull it off.”

“Because you 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 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, to the 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 exploding firecrackers and the blare of the sound truck the Syrian storekeeper had hired to publicize his holiday specials.

There was a block of paved street where the houses had carports and painted fences, then the Gran hotel, the Texaco station — and they turned into the crowded plaza. Godoy eased the jeep through the crowds and parked against the church wall, behind a barrier of bicycle stands. As soon as the jeep was stopped, the six Carib boys leaped out and disappeared among the crowd.

Godoy watched them go and looked at his watch.

“Now,” he told Justin with a sad smile, “the trick will be to get them back.”

The two of them went past a line of helmeted Guardia and along the edge of the church steps.

In the center of the square, a ceiba tree had been hung with paper garlands and an elderly band in black uniforms was ranged beneath its branches. There were Japanese lanterns strung between trees at two sides of the plaza and the square itself was jammed with people. Men of property stood with transistor radios pressed against their ears, teen-aged parents in cheap cotton dress-up clothes clung to their several tiny children — and lone children by the hundreds puzzled their way through the crowd’s legs. The shoeshine boys had given over their space by the fountain and sat together with their boxes at the park edge, watching for flung cigarette butts, fallen change, loose wallets.

The sailors’ girls had marched uptown from the waterfront brothels and occupied their own space on one lawn where they sat on open newspapers, singing along to the music of the nearest radio and trading comic books with each other.

Along the fountain there were teen-agers, arranged according to social class — the boys watching the prostitutes and the girls, more or less demurely, watching the boys.

There were girls in hip-huggers and “Kiss Me, Stupid” tee shirts and girls whose fancy dress was their school uniforms. There were nearly white boys who wore Italian-style print shirts and looked bored, stiff self-conscious mestizos in starchy white sport shirts, blacks who broke their Spanish phrases with “mon” and “bruddah,” practiced karate moves, swayed, danced with themselves in a flurry of loose wrists and flashing palms. Across the street, at the gate of the Municipalidad, a few Guardia leaned against the pillars and watched the crowd. They were given all the space they might require.

A little boy with an inflamed eye chased two smaller girls toward the church.

“Mono malo, mono malo,” he shouted after them. “Bad monkey.”

It occurred to Justin that she had been hearing children shouting “mono malo” at each other for weeks, and calling it also at such of the ragged wandering anglos who were still about. She had never heard an epithet like mono malo before.

In the street at the foot of the church steps, a squad of local technicians was struggling with an enormous antiaircraft searchlight, adjusting the dogs and swivels, playing out the wire that led up the steps and into the church interior. Nearby there were men and boys in the purple hoods and cassocks of the Holy Brotherhood, those who had carried the images in the afternoon’s procession.

Justin and Father Godoy stood together near the ceiba tree, facing the church. The air smelled of frangipani, of perfume and hair oil, above all of the raw cane liquor, barely rum, that was being passed in Coke bottles among the sports in the crowd.

At the stroke of darkness, the band broke into a reedy paso doble and the great searchlight sent forth an overpowering light. The light broke up the foremost ranks of the crowd, sending the people there reeling back, forcing them to turn away, hands to their eyes. Then it swept around the square, ascending until the beam was pointed straight upward, a pillar of white fire heavenward. A great gasp of joy broke from the crowd.

Spinning again, the column of light descended on the plaza, catching each second a dozen transfixed faces, dazzled the old men in their wicker chairs in the Syrian’s shop and the lounging Guardia, electrified the posters of Death Wish in front of the cinema. It made the whores’ beads sparkle, shone on the balloons and patent-leather shoes of the better-off children and on the slick flesh of the banana plants. As it whirled, the crowd screamed and applauded.

The beam came finally to rest on the steps of the church, centering on a glass-and-mahogany coffin which four men in the purple robes of the Brotherhood had carried out during the display. Prone in the coffin was the figure of Christ, which was the occasion of Puerto Alvarado’s rejoicing.

Christ wore a burial shift of waxy linen and worn lace; his hands, clutching a lily, were folded across his chest. Around his brow was a crown of thorns and his long hair was matted with blood. Both the hair and the blood had the appearance of reality and Sister Justin, who had seen the figure many times before, had always wondered about them. The eyelids were also quite authentic; one felt they might be pulled back to show dark dead eyes beneath.

A hush settled as the light fell on the dead Christ — but only for a moment. As the plaza beheld its murdered redeemer, a murmur rose from the crowd that grew louder until it drowned out the dirge of the band, swelled into moans and cries of women, hoarse Viva el Cristo’s, drunken whoops of devotion.

As he lay under the light in his glass box, he looked for all the world as though he had died the same day, in Tecan, of meningitis like the overseer’s daughter who went at Christmas, of an infected scorpion bite, of undulant fever, of a knife on the docks. So the crowd began to cheer, the children of the early dead, the parents of perished angelitos, secure in their own and their children’s resurrection — cheering the sharer and comforter of death.

Around Justin there were people on their knees. Some steps away, a woman holding a balloon in one hand and her infant daughter’s hand in the other was weeping for the deceased — out of courtesy perhaps, or habit.

Justin turned to Godoy and in the shadowy light saw a look of patient detachment on his face. When he realized that she was looking at him, he said: “See, it’s all done with light. Like the movies.”

She thought that it was something very like what she might say, although what she felt at the moment was very different. It made her wonder whether he said it only for her benefit, from embarrassment for his country.

After a few minutes, the searchlight was turned off and the encoffined savior carried inside and placed at the side altar where he reposed except during procession days and Holy Week. A number of people stood chatting in the church doorway, and among them Justin recognized Father Schleicher, an Oblate Missionary from the Midwest. The other clerics there were two Tecanecans, or rather Spaniards — one the vicar of the cathedral and the other a monsignor from the capital, a representative of the Archbishop.

“We should go up there,” Father Godoy said, when they had done a round of the square. “I have to at least.”

Together, they climbed the church steps, and while Godoy made his obeisances to the senior clergy, Justin endeavored to converse with Schleicher and a young Tecanecan woman who was with him.

Father Schleicher was young, and was said to be politically engaged. Sister Justin had heard also that he had unofficially purchased a colonial press edition of the Quixote from a clerk at the Catholic university in the capital and that he paid plantation workers to bring him such pre-Columbian artifacts as they might find. Although none of this was quite illegal, although it was practically innocent hobbyism and a mark of his cultivation, Justin held what she heard against Schleicher’s account. She disliked him; he was chubby and blond, and it seemed to her that his face was set continually in an expression of thick-lipped self-satisfaction. A creep, was what she called him.

They talked for a while about American politics and Schleicher introduced the girl with him as a community planner. When their conversation ran thin, they all turned toward the interior of the church to look for more to talk about.

Inside, a great many people were crowded in a semicircle around the dead Cristo, kneeling on the floor.

“It’s an incredible statue,” Justin said. “Isn’t it strange to see him presented like that — I mean laid out?”

“When I first saw it,” Schleicher said, “it reminded me of Che. You know, the picture taken after he was killed? It still makes me think of him.”

The Tecanecan girl smiled slightly and nodded.

“I wonder what it’s made of,” Justin said.

The Tecanecan girl laughed, a bit too merrily for Justin, and turned to Schleicher.

“It’s such a North American question,” the girl said. “What’s it made of?”

Schleicher laughed as though he thought it was such a North American question too.

“I’m like that,” Sister Justin said. “When I saw Notre Dame Cathedral I wondered what it weighed. We’re all like that where I come from.”

The girl’s laughter was a little less assured. Father Schleicher hastened to ask her where it was that she came from, but Justin ignored him. She had told him often enough before.

“Did you study in the States?” Justin asked the Tecanecan girl.

“Yes. Yes, in New Orleans. At Loyola.”

“That must have been fun,” Justin said. “Community planning.”

“Yes,” the girl said warily.

Godoy disengaged himself from the old Spaniards and joined them for a moment’s stiff exchange of pleasantries. Then he and Justin said their goodbyes and went back down the steps to the square. Justin found herself wondering whether the hip Father Schleicher might be sleeping with his young community planner. She sighed, despising her own petty malice. That night she was against anyone with a purpose to declare, anyone less lonely and beaten than herself.

The plaza was emptying as she and Godoy walked across it. Men approached them in the shadow of the trees, begging, calling for a blessing against bad visions from the cane alcohol. A youth warbled a birdcall after them and a woman laughed.

The crowds, the lights and the music were on the other side of the church now, where they had set up a market and a fun fair for the children. The trees had been stripped of garlands and lanterns by the crowd and the central street ran deserted toward the harsh bright lights of the company piers.

“Hungry?” Godoy asked.

Justin was not at all hungry but she supposed that he must be. She nodded pleasantly.

“We’ll give the kids some time at the games,” the priest said, “before we go and arrest them. Now we can go to the Chino’s if you like.”

The Chino’s was a restaurant that called itself the Gran Mura de China. It had a small balcony section with two tables that overlooked the harbor.

The lower floor of the Gran Mura de China was empty when they arrived; the Chino’s wife and daughter sat at a table stringing firecrackers. Justin and Godoy smiled at them and went upstairs to the balcony. They sat down and Godoy lighted a Winston.

“Do you know what Father Schleicher said about the image?” Justin asked Godoy. “He said he thought it looked like Che.”

Godoy looked at her evenly, unsmiling.

“Father Schleicher said that? Was he joking?”

“Not exactly joking. I think he had a point to make.”

“Iconography,” Godoy said vaguely, tapping his ash and looking out over the pier lights at the dark ocean.

After a minute the Chino’s daughter came up to serve them. Under her apron, the child wore a white party dress; she had been up to the plaza.

Godoy asked for shrimp and rice; Justin a bottle of Germania.

“You may have heard about our troubles,” Justin said, when they had ordered. She found the puzzled look Godoy gave her disingenuous. It was impossible, she thought, that he had not heard.

“I’m going to close us down and go home. I’m tired of arguing with the order and I don’t believe we’re getting anything done.”

“It’s a shame you had no support. It must be difficult.”

“Yes, it’s difficult to make a fool of yourself to no good purpose. But of course it’s a lesson.” She was beginning to grow quite irritated with Godoy. “Yet another goddamn valuable lesson.”

“I have to tell you,” the priest said as he watched the little girl serve his dinner and their beer, “that I’m very sorry to hear that you’re closing.”

“Really?” Justin said impatiently. “Why, thank you.”

He’s downright super-serviceable, she thought.

“Please excuse me,” Godoy said. “I haven’t yet eaten today.”

“Please go ahead,” Justin said. She decided that he was dandified and vain. Frightened of, and therefore hostile to, women. For a long time it had seemed to her that Godoy had a difficulty in comprehending plain English that went beyond any unfamiliarity with the language.

“You know,” Godoy said, tasting his shrimp, “I think you stayed this long because I wanted you to.”

“Are you kidding?” Justin demanded.

“Just a superstition of mine.”

“If you wanted us to stay you were very subtle.”

“It wasn’t only because I like you,” the priest said. “And not because I thought you were the very model of a Yankee missionary. Obviously you are not that.”

The bluntness of his language startled her. “Then why?” she asked.

“Because I know how you think. I know your attitudes. I even know the books you own.”

Justin watched him delicately take his shrimp.

“Then everyone must,” she said. “So I’m probably in trouble.”

He shrugged.

“You are North American and that protects you. The Archbishop in his way protects you.”

“Campos,” she said.

“Don’t worry about Campos for now.” He kept his eyes on his plate as he said it.

“Really,” Justin said, “it was stupid of me to try to keep the station open.”

Godoy gave her a quick amused glance.

“I don’t know what you were thinking of. But I admire you for it. And I sympathize.”

“I was being naïve as usual.”

He looked up from his plate again and held her with the look.

“You were never as naïve as I was,” he said, “and I was born here. You think you’ve failed? Of course you failed. There’s nothing but failure here. The country is a failure. A disaster of history.”

“That’s very hopeless talk,” Justin said.

“It’s where we begin,” Godoy said. “We start from this assumption.”

His meal finished, the priest took a sip of beer and lit another Winston. The beer seemed to bring a faint rosiness to his pale pitted cheek.

“When I was in the Jesuit college here I wrote a letter of which I was very proud. I wrote to your President Eisenhower.”

“Good Lord,” Justin said. “To dear old Ike.”

“Yes, to Ike himself. And I sent the same letter to the leader of our opposition — his name was Enrique Matos, of the great Liberal Party. In this letter — which I covered with tears — I told them that if the free world was to conquer Communism it must not follow the way of greed and narrow self-interest but the way of the Great Redemptor. He whom we saw dead tonight.”

Godoy crushed his Winston out in an ashtray and put another in his mouth.

“I told Ike and Matos — I was only a kid, you understand — that their leadership must be spiritual. Also that they were overlooking the evils of our country, that we were suffering because of the government and the rich and the North American attitude.

“In the same week my father disappeared. Not for long and he came back alive. You see, he was a watchmaker in the capital, an immigrant from Spain. He wasn’t hurt badly but he was very frightened. He told me not to write any more letters.

“A little later there arrived a message from the White House in Washington. I can tell you that it was an occasion of terror in my house, my parents were quite unsophisticated in some ways. It was a perfectly amiable letter. It thanked me. It was signed by an assistant. A typical letter.”

“A form letter,” Justin corrected him.

“Yes, a form letter.” He lit his Winston and blew the smoke upward. “Under that government people often disappeared. When our great hope Matos became President it was the same. It’s the same now. When Matos was President there was a man from your country in the capital — he was the head of your intelligence here and Matos’ great friend. Last year his name was in the papers a little because of the scandals in Washington. We believe now that he knew a great deal about who disappeared and why. It was strange to read about him in the newspapers. He seemed a foolish, trivial man, almost likable.”

Justin said nothing.

“I’ll call you Justin,” Godoy said.

“It’s been my name so long,” she said, “I guess it’s my name.”

“If you tell your superiors that you agree to leave — how long can you keep the mission station?”

“Well,” Justin said, “it’s company property to start with and they’ll take it right back. There are medicines there and furniture, so I guess they’ll reoccupy it and we can be out in a week.”

Godoy shook his head in exasperation.

“No good,” he said. Before she could ask what he meant he asked her: “What will you do in the States?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to laicize anyway. I suppose I’ll look for a job.” She touched her hair in confusion. “I’m afraid to think about it.”

“I want you to keep the station open. For a month anyway. You can stall. Say that Father Egan is too ill to travel.”

“Father Egan will die if he stays.”

“All right then, send Egan back. But keep open any way you can. I’ll help you to keep open.”

“But why?” she asked him.

“Because,” Godoy said, “I have friends who are doing illegal work. They are going to make a foco in the mountains. They need a place on the coast for a while.”

“They’re going to fight?”

“Not here. But not so far away. You see, for years it’s all been smoke.” He permitted himself a quick smile. “But it’s time now.”

“Oh, my gosh,” Justin said. Her heart soared.

“So we need you if you can help us. If you want to.”

“Thank you for asking me,” Justin said. “For trusting me.”

“I have good reasons to trust you,” Godoy said, “and it’s easy to ask.” He watched her, and she knew that he was measuring her hesitation.

“It’s not only for the use of the station. We need you too if you think you can help. If you feel you can’t — well, I understand.”

“I will,” Justin heard herself say. “I’ll help you any way I can. Not only with the station. There’s nothing I want more.”

“I don’t try to seduce you in this,” Godoy said. “You have to make your own decision.”

“I have no family,” Justin told him, smiling. “No special home. Where people need me that’s where I go. See, I’m lucky that way.”

She could not read his look. Suddenly she wanted him to reach out and touch her in some way, clap her on the shoulder, shake her hand, give some human token of what they had entered into. But he did not move and neither did she.

“This is work of armed struggle, so people may get killed. I won’t deceive you.”

“I don’t come from a pacifist tradition,” she said. Immediately it struck her as a cold and pedantic thing to say. She kept wondering how she must appear to him. That he would ask, that he would say that she herself could help — it meant he must esteem her. Surely, she thought, he must.

Godoy looked at his watch.

“We’ll go,” he said.

She walked beside him toward the dark square; somewhere beyond it there was music, uncertainly amplified, and the noise of a crowd.

“Maybe,” he said as they walked, “we can arrange your status within the church if you stay. It would be better.”

“Whatever you think.”

“We won’t talk about it anymore now. During the week — we can meet and talk further.”

Justin nodded; she felt lonely again, and frightened.

As they started across the plaza, Godoy stopped and turned to her.

“In the work we’re doing,” he said, “one has to change a little. You develop and you become a slightly different person. It’s hard on the ego but it’s for the best.”

“I understand,” she said. She understood thoroughly. His message was the one she had been receiving all her adult life, the one she had always lived by.

I’ll be right at home in this outfit, she thought. It would have cheered her up to say it aloud to him but she did not — because it would be boastful and presumptuous and because he would not have understood her. As far as she could tell, he was without humor.

Immediately, she reproached herself for reflecting on his lack of humor. It was judgmental and perhaps a little racist. Look to your own seriousness, she told herself.

They found the little fun fair on the far side of the church, behind the ruined eighteenth-century wall. In the space between the old church wall and the river, a traveling carnival from the capital had parked its bright machines. There were two carousels, a small loop-the-loop with pink and purple cockpits and a whirly ride called the Carretera de Fortuna. Two ice-cream sellers had brought their wagons up from the square, there was a man with balloons, a man with a fortune-telling parrot and an Oriental in a kimono demonstrating karate strokes to an audience of teen-agers and cane cutters. A stand sold soda and beer and black or white rum.

The Syrian’s sound truck was parked beside a mobile generator with its sale signs still aloft but it was empty and silent. The carnival machines made their own music as they turned, music as peeled and rusted at the seams as the machines themselves. The fairground was surrounded by colored lights and around each bulb was a little cloud of insects drawn from the riverbank.

As Justin and Godoy walked toward the fair, beggars crept out of the shadow of the church wall to intercept them. In the darkness, they were tiny, barely human figures, small wads of cloth appended to upturned palms, uttering soft wails. Justin handed out some ten- and twenty-centavo pieces, Father Godoy gave them nothing.

One of the machines played “La Cumparsita” as the two of them strolled out on the little midway. The light there was fantastical, compounded of rainbow colors. Children’s faces were unearthly shades, the grass underfoot looked painted.

The men in the crowd were drunk and somber but there were mainly women and children about. A few groups of teen-agers huddled beyond the light like predators around a camp, some of them smoking marijuana. In the darkness by the river, a drunk or a madman was screaming but his cries were drowned by the music.

People greeted Father Godoy as he passed among them; stony Indian faces softened toward him, there was some quick whisking off and clutching of straw sombreros. Both he and Justin towered over the crowds.

“A fair was a great thing once,” Godoy said. “There were a great many tents and tricks. Today it’s not so much because the movies come here now.”

“It’s still a great thing,” Justin said.

Four of Godoy’s schoolboys were waiting in line by the larger carousel. Justin watched him apprehend them and point to his watch. The boys waved little red ticket stubs up at him. He shrugged and then stood looking about him over the heads of the crowd. Justin thought of having a beer but decided it would not be right for her to approach the stand and the drunken men there.

“I’m missing two,” Godoy said to her. “It’s a nuisance.”

“It’s fine,” Justin said. “I’ll wait by the merry-go-round.”

While Godoy combed the shadows, Justin found herself some space by the rail to watch the carousel. Around her were women whose children rode and women who stood with their children around them, watching the others.

He sees me as a fool, Justin thought fearfully. He sees my foolishness.

Under the lights, her face fixed on the whirl before her, she contemplated her inward place. It was a foolish place, of course, but orderly. Like a corridor in some worthwhile institution, the walls and floors all spotless, the suffering and the flesh behind white screens. A virgin’s place, a bit of a whited sepulcher.

It was dim and Lenten, its saints were shrouded and if it held any tabernacles they were open and empty. It was very far away.

The notion frightened her. Far, she thought — far from where?

It was fearful and a prison and so was the world. She looked at the crowd across the lights from where she stood; she and they were separated by miles.

But she had been in prison before and she had been afraid. Marched through the cicada din of a Mississippi night, to a place where the cotton fields were ringed with hooded watch lights and barbed wire under a million stars, to a blockhouse smelling of drains and urine. And then they turned out the lights in the block and the matron came out to tell ghost stories in the dark. It was the torment reserved for outside agitators that night, the treatment the guards had smirked about all the way to Parchman. No prods, no bucket across the skull, not that night — but darkness and ghost stories.

Somebody said boy, if Folkways Records was here. They were in a black block because the white girls would kill them. In the dorm outside their jammed segregation cell, the black girls laughed or moaned and cried; some of them were sisterly, some insane and armed with razors.

The matron’s dusty little voice demanded “Who Got Mah Golden Ahm?”

The jughead innocence had its own horror. And nuns were bad luck there.

Goddamn it, Justin said to herself, I’m not a fool. He must know that.

She had seen the guns and the dogs; she knew well enough the difference between real wounds and painted martyrdoms. She had courage — her parents had it and she had it from them. All her life she had worked and soldiered with the best; wherever work and soldiering were required she could pay her way. We are not afraid today, she thought. What am I getting myself into? She shivered.

Then she looked up and saw that Father Godoy had taken a place opposite her along the carousel rail and, with the lights behind her, she felt that she could look at him unembarrassed. The two older boys whom he had sought stood, looking annoyed and drunk, behind him. Godoy was watching the children on the carousel.

The machine was playing a march from an old operetta; the children, with their eyes full of lights, were reaching out to snatch the brass ring that was suspended by a strap from a stanchion beside where Godoy stood. They circled past his gaze, undersized, rickety, plenty of them dwarfed or scabrous, the sixty-five percent, the survivors of birth and infancy in Tecan — on their painted horses. He looked at them as no father she had ever seen looked at his own children. His gray eyes shone like theirs, with such fierce love that she trembled to see him.

She felt then that all the companionship, all the moral recognition she had ever required from the universe reposed in the eyes of this priest. Between them the children went round and round, children of the campesinos, rojos, jíbaros—the wretched, the pobrecitos. She could not take her eyes from his face as he watched them.

At 0401 Pablo Tabor signed himself off the circuit and put out the last cigarette of his watch. On his way through Search and Rescue to the Coke machine, he saw the sky through the Operations Room window, it was alight and clear, pale yellow.

“Ah me,” he said softly.

Breedlove, the Operations yeoman, was watching him.

“Ol’ Pablo must have smoked about a thousand cigarettes tonight,” Breedlove told his yeoman striker. “I been watchin’ him and he’s smokin’ the shit out over there.”

“Leave me alone, Breedlove,” Tabor said. “I already told you.”

“Air,” Breedlove said, winking at the striker. “Ay-er — that’s what you need, Tabor.”

“Give him air,” the striker said busily.

Pablo was listening to his change rattle in the machine, to the bottle zip down its tin track. He picked it up, icy in his hot hand, and opened it.

“You know, you’re just a couple of fucking noises in my head.”

The striker smiled.

“That’s all you are.”

“We’re all a deck of cards,” Breedlove said.

“Hey, good night, Tabor,” he called down the corridor when Tabor walked out. “Sleep well, hear?” He leaned over the Operations desk to see that Tabor was out of hearing and addressed himself to the striker.

“Don’t think he ain’t scoffin’ those pills again. Tell by the little tiny eyes.” He narrowed his own eyes to a squint. “Speed-freak sparky. When he moves — it’s jit jit jit.” He moved the flat of his hand in little jits.

“Jitters,” the striker said.

“Don’t think they won’t nail him,” Breedlove said complacently.

“With this old man? Shit sure they’ll nail him.”

Some morning, Tabor thought, walking into the locker room, I’ll kill that skinny prick. Except he wants me to so much, I won’t.

He changed out of the dungaree uniform in which he had stood his watch and into civilian clothes. That morning he had brought a silky Western shirt, twill pants, a leather-like jacket and seven-stitch fancy boots. In the pocket of the jacket was a large aspirin bottle of Dexedrine and when he had changed he set the aspirin bottle beside his Coke and sat down on the wooden bench with his head in his hands.

Lord, he said to himself, the shit I sit still for. Make you weep, Jesus. He stood up suddenly and hit the tin grill of his locker with his left elbow and followed through with the palm of his right hand.

Just anybody calls me anything and I sit still for it. I don’t know the fucking difference. He sat down again, unscrewed the cap on the aspirin bottle and tucked two Dex tabs in the pocket of his shirt. He swallowed two more with his Coke.

Now Breedlove, he thought, I’ll tell him again and that’ll be it. Breedlove’s old lady worked in the supermarket, a good-looking head.

Gimme a break, God, Tabor prayed going out. Gimme a rush and ease my mind. A little good feeling.

On his way to sign out with JOD, he remembered the Coke bottle in his hand, so he went back around to Search and Rescue to stack it in the rack that held empties. When he left the bottle off, he saw Breedlove watching him.

He walked over and leaned on the Operations counter until Breedlove came over.

“I want to tell you something, Breedlove,” he said, leaning close to the counter and speaking so softly that Breedlove had to incline his own head to hear him. “I want to tell you get off my case, man. Now if you don’t do it I’m gonna transport your ass over to Gulfstream Plaza and I’m gonna beat the living shit out of you in front of that big old supermarket window. So your old lady can watch from the cash register.”

Breedlove walked away pale, shaking his head.

Tabor checked out and went down the magnolia-lined walk that led to the gate and the parking lot. The lemon light was spreading across the sky, coloring the flat waters of the Gulf and the white hull of the fishery protection cutter that was tied up at the end of the pier. Eastward, night lights burned on the steel coils of the Escondido refinery and in the highway distance beyond it westbound headlights glowed snake eyes against the dawn.

“Gimme a rush, Jesus,” Tabor said. He walked to his Chewy with the keys in his hand. He put the key in the door lock, smiled and licked his lips. One of these times, he thought, I’ll have a car where you don’t turn the key upside down. “Contact,” he said. He was getting off a little and he turned to look at the sky over his shoulder.

“Gimme a rush, Jesus.” He put the car in gear and rolled to the edge of the highway. “If you want me for a sunbeam.”

A truck full of melons went by the gate and he smiled after it.

Gimme a rush if you truly want me for your personal sunbeam.

Once out of the gate, he ran in front of the drug, passing the melon truck with a grin.

Good morning, boys. What nice watermelons, yes indeed.

He cooled it at the town line, drove past the line of shrimp boats at the commercial pier, the fish market, the ceviche restaurant. First light hit the wide oily sidewalks of the main drag; a few Mexican women in tailored jeans walked toward the cannery.

He parked his Chevvy just down the block from the Sullivan hotel. The Sullivan was a three-story building with rounded corners of frosted glass and a sign beside the door that said “Locker Club, Servicemen Welcome.” Tabor went in and across the small dusty lobby to the lounge out back. In the lounge there was a bar on rollers and a few plastic tables and chairs but the jukebox was the treasure of the Sullivan; it dated from World War II like the “Locker Club” sign by the street door. Linda Ronstadt’s “Heart Like a Wheel” was spinning on it.

At one of the tables Mert McPhail, the station’s chief radioman, was sitting with two girls in pants suits. The girls were drinking Jax; McPhail had a bottle of bourbon and a cardboard cup of ice beside his glass. They all looked up when Tabor walked in.

The older of the two girls with McPhail was named Nancy.

“Haayy, Pablo,” she called as he walked toward them, “how’re you keepin’, keed?”

“Hey,” Pablo said.

“You want a drink, honey? Want a whiskey? A cocktail?”

“Just a beer be nice. Why don’t everybody have a beer?”

“Gracias, amigo,” Nancy said, and went to the cooler. Tabor pulled up a chair and sat down beside McPhail.

“What say, McPhail?”

McPhail had been in the hotel most of the night. He was tired and drunk, a huge balding man with a brown, lined face — sloped-shouldered, six-six or — seven. He glanced at Tabor with distaste. The girl with him watched them both with a spacy smile.

“Real good,” Tabor said. “Hey, you know,” he told them after a minute, “it’s such a nice morning I might just go after some birds. I got my Remington in the car. I might just go up back of the airport and get me a turk.”

The girl at the table looked down at Tabor’s feet.

“Gonna stomp through that old swamp with them pretty stitch boots on? Just get ’em all muddied up.”

“I don’t mind,” Tabor said.

Nancy brought the beers to the table and set them out.

“Don’t know about turkeys,” she said. “But I bet you could get you a alligator back there.”

“If I meet one I’ll rassle with him. Hey, you think I could rassle a alligator, McPhail?”

McPhail had been studying the bare wall beside him.

“How the hell would I know?” he said.

“You could bring me back a pocketbook,” Nancy said quickly. “But that’s against the law now, ain’t it? Alligator pocketbooks, they’re against the law now.”

“Ain’t no more against the law than what’s doin’ in here,” the younger girl said.

After a moment, McPhail stood up heavily and walked into the John. Tabor picked up his beer and drank half of it at a draw.

“Dry,” he said.

The girls laughed as though he had told a joke.

“Hey, Pablo,” Nancy said, “you goin’ hunting right away or you gonna hang around a while?”

“I don’t know,” Tabor said. He picked up his beer and walked into the men’s room after McPhail.

In the men’s room, he found McPhail flat-footed before the urinal, pissing contentedly. Holding the bottle in his hand, Tabor took up a position directly behind him and leaned against the wall.

“So I’m on report, huh, Chief?”

McPhail had turned his head as far to the side as he could, trying to see Tabor behind him.

“I did put you on report,” he said as though he had just remembered it. “Chit’s still on my desk. Straighten it out Monday.”

He left off pissing and hastened to zipper his fly.

“Sure,” Tabor said. “I’d really like to straighten it out, know what I mean, Chief?”

McPhail left quickly. When Tabor went back out, he found the chief radioman sitting on a barstool near the movable bar combing his thin black hair. Tabor watched him with what appeared to be good humor.

“What are you combing that with, McPhail? You combing it with piss? You didn’t wash your hands in there.”

The younger girl stood up at her place and walked straight out of the lounge into the lobby. McPhail struggled off his stool. His legs were trembling.

“I had just enough of you, you crazy son of a bitch,” McPhail said, advancing on Tabor. “You damn psycho.”

Tabor stood his ground, his hands by his sides.

“Don’t let nothing hold you back but fear, McPhail.”

Nancy moved between them, looking as though she were ready to duck.

“C’mon, now,” she said. “C’mon, you all.”

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Tabor?” McPhail demanded. “You lost your goddamn marbles or something?”

“Maybe a lot the matter from your point of view, Chief,” Tabor said. “But I don’t appreciate your point of view. You don’t even wash your hands when you go to the toilet.”

McPhail stared at him, blank-eyed, silent, a head taller than Tabor.

“You’re just nuts,” the chief said finally. He took a step toward the door and lumbered on out, like an oversized old man. “You better see a doctor,” he said.

Nancy fixed Pablo Tabor with a wise little mother look.

“Everybody’s gonna be pissed at you, Pablo. Not just the Coast Guard but everybody.”

“Well, that’ll be too bad,” Pablo said, and drank the rest of his beer. “I don’t give a shit. I’m getting out here. Got to.”

“You gonna request a transfer?”

“I’m gonna transfer myself,” Tabor said. “This damn station is draggin’ me down.”

“Where would you go if you had a choice?”

“I’d wait for a message. When I got that message — goodbye. Could be any time. Maybe today.”

“Well,” Nancy said, “I hope you work it out O.K.” She lowered her voice a little and glanced toward the door that led to the lobby. “Hey, Pablo — you wouldn’t have any extra speed around, would you?”

“Nope,” Pablo said, and went out.

He drove to the inshore end of Main Street and turned west, through a neighborhood of old frame houses with peeling shutters and unfenced gardens gagged with kudzu. After a few blocks the houses and the paving ended and the road ran a course of sandy islands in the mud and saw grass that stretched to a distant line of pines. At the end of the roadway was a small square bungalow with some wooden dog pens beside it. Tabor parked in the muddy yard by the pens; as soon as he was out of his car, the dogs set up a barking.

“Hello, dogs,” he said. His own two shorthairs were in the nearest pen, beside themselves at the sight of him, pressing their noses against the chicken wire, rearing and scratching against the boards of the pen gate.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Tabor said.

He took his twelve-gauge Remington from its cardboard box in the trunk, assembled it and stuffed his pockets with shells. The disc of the sun was over the horizon; he put his sunglasses on.

Freed, the shorthairs made a lightning circuit of the yard and hurried back to Tabor, bounding at his shoulders, climbing his legs until he put a knee up to force them down.

“Get down, fuckers,” he told them. “What you think you’re doin’? What you think you’re doin’, huh?”

An old black man came out of the bungalow holding a coffee pot in his hand.

“Gonna take ’em out?” he asked, glancing at Tabor’s Saturday-night clothes.

“Sure am,” Tabor said. He gave the old man three dollars, the dogs’ boarding fee. Tabor lived in a trailer court where they didn’t allow dogs.

“They been good dogs,” the old man said. “Good dogs.”

He followed the old man into the kitchen and accepted a half cup of coffee.

“See any birds?” Tabor asked.

“Le’see — I seen one, two up the other side of the airfield. That dry ground. Brush up there. Didn’t have my gun at the time.”

“Too bad,” Tabor said.

The old man watched him take two pills from the aspirin bottle and swallow them with his coffee.

“I might have a shot at one of them airplanes back there,” Tabor said. “Piss me off with the noise they make. Scaring the cows. And the dogs.”

“Don’t do that now.”

Tabor set the cup down and picked up his gun.

“I been wasting my time around this place,” Tabor told the old man. “Wasting the best years of my life, no shit.”

“You got that feelin’, huh?” He sat waiting for Tabor to take his dogs and go. “I s’pec’ that’s ’cause you a young man. Be restless. Nervous in the service, heh-heh.”

“Nervous in the service,” Tabor repeated in a lifeless voice. “Well, I’ll see you.”

“Sure enough,” said the old man. “You might could get one outen that dry brush.”

He set off along a raised trail through the swamp, the dogs running ahead, the sun behind him.

Nervous in the service. O.K., Tabor thought, he didn’t mean nothing by it. Just an old nigger, shooting the shit.

The dogs closed over a rabbit scent, their snouts poking into the saw grass, haunches low and quivering, stub tails wagging out of control. Tabor kicked at the male.

“Get along, Trouble. Goddamn, it’s a fucking rabbit.”

The dogs, who dreaded his anger, took off through the grass, circled back to the trail and ran ahead looking busy. They had been good dogs to start with but they were too rarely hunted, gone to seed.

“Fucking morning,” Tabor said.

From the airport off to his right, a Cherokee rose on a roar of engines and shot over his head toward the Gulf. Bound for the islands or Tampico, maybe Villahermosa, maybe Yucatán. There were clearings back in the swamp where the dope pilots landed their grass or Mexican brown — thousands of bills for a few hours’ hauling. The dogs barked after the plane; Tabor watched the sunlight on its bright yellow wings as it gained altitude and settled in southwesterly.

“Very far from God this morning,” he said. The second rush of speed began to jangle him. “Very far from you this morning, God.”

The morning sun was raising the sweat beneath his shirt but his limbs felt cold and unconnected.

If I were God, Pablo Tabor thought, I wouldn’t have mornings like this. The sun up on a swamp, two worthless dogs, a sparky with his blood full of speed and gasoline. No such morning could have a God over it.

If I were God, he thought, if I made mornings I wouldn’t have no Pablo Tabor and his dogs in ’em.

“You do this, God?” he asked. “You operate and maintain mornings like this?”

He came to a fork in the raised trail and the dogs ran off to the right, toward the deeper swamp where the game was. Tabor turned left toward the shore. After a few minutes, the puzzled dogs fell in behind him; then, scenting the carrion of the beach, they whipped forward, running together.

The sun was partly in his eyes, his rush came up speckled, buzzing in his brain, old rages rose in his throat. Tasting the anger, he clenched his teeth.

Where the fuck to begin? he thought. But these people — there was hardly any getting at them.

“Usin’ me,” he sang out, “usin’ me usin’ me. Turning me arid turning me and turning me around.”

His mind’s eye started flashing him shit — death’s-heads, swastikas, the ace of spades. Dumbness. Dime-store badness. His anger rolled along, cooling and sharpening on the Dex. Before long he was standing on the beach, the sunlit Gulf spread out before him, coarse sand clinging to his wet cowboy boots. The dogs nosed along the waterline.

He walked down the beach, away from the sun, then stood with his eyes closed, his shotgun resting on his neck and shoulders, his forearms curled over it. His heart was throbbing in his side, in his temple, under his jaw. He eased the gun down and propped the stock against his thigh; from the jacket pocket he fished out two of the red and gold cartridges, forced them into the magazine of his shotgun, pumped them into place. Then a third — inserted it and pumped it forward.

The dogs had found the shell of a horseshoe crab and were worrying it, trying to lift it from the sand with their soft retriever’s teeth. Tabor watched them.

If I moved, he thought, it would be like this.

The anger fell away from him as he raised the gun. He felt as though he were a metal image of himself, cool, without much reality.

Like this.

The charge drove the male dog’s head down into wet sand, sent the rest of its body swinging on the pivot of its nearly severed neck to splash in the ebbing of a faint Gulf wave. Blood on the shimmering regular surface of the washed sand.

Tabor pumped the spent shell out. The female stood quivering at the shot, confused at what she saw, almost, it seemed, about to run. His second charge sent her into the air and she fell, still quivering, across a bough of flotsam mangrove.

He pumped the second shell out and licked his dry lips.

You happy now, you fool, you just murdered your dogs?

“I feel fine,” Tabor said, “just fine.” But it was not true. “They’re fucking with my head this morning,” he said.

He was walking away from the dogs, making himself not look back, when he caught sudden sight of two heads above the line of saw grass at the edge of the beach.

Stopping, he saw a boy and a girl in the grass not forty feet away from him. They stood in a peculiar crouch as though they had just stood up or were about to duck. He walked over to them.

The boy was blond, with a red bandana tied around his head; the girl almost as tall with shorter, darker hair. Tabor saw that she was crying.

“Had to be done,” he told them. “They was sick, know what I mean? They had heartworm, had it real bad.”

The young people seemed to relax a little. The girl wiped her sunburned cheek.

“Jeez,” the boy said. “They were pretty dogs.”

Tabor looked away from him.

“What the hell you know about it?”

He saw the girl’s sad blue eyes on his shotgun.

“Don’t you be crying over my dogs,” he told her. “I’ll cry over my own dogs.”

They fell silent. The boy swallowed and twisted his mouth slightly.

“You want to chant with me?” Tabor asked them.

“I don’t believe we know any chants,” the boy said, with something like a smile. The girl clung to his arm.

“You think I’m gonna hurt you, don’t you?”

“I hope not,” the boy said softly. “We didn’t mean any harm. We were just sad about the dogs.”

You little bastard, Tabor thought, you got it all figured out. Humor the crazy man with the iron. Be gentle. Save your own and your girl friend’s ass. Smart boy, Tabor thought. Smart boy.

“You’re good kids,” Tabor said. “I can see you are. You go to college, don’t you?”

The boy nodded warily.

“Well I ain’t gonna hurt you,” Tabor told him. He turned from their frightened faces toward the sun. “Go ahead and have a nice day.”

He walked off toward the water and they called “You too” in unison after him. As he passed between the corpses of his dogs, he turned back toward them and saw that they had not moved.

Cold to the marrow of his bones, he drove through town again and onto the Interstate, traveling west. The trailer court where he lived was beside an old canal, padded with water hyacinth. Across the highway was a brown slope where a billboard advertised a beach hotel and three derricks stood, their pistons rising and falling in perpetual motion.

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.

He stepped off the plane into what felt like June sunlight; the air was clear as sweet water, the sky mountain blue. Three-thirty in the afternoon at seventy degrees.

The customs search, under the guns of young Indian soldiers in blue fatigues, was long and wearying. It reflected the American AID training of the inspectors modified by local conceptions of official dignity and foreign vice. There was a man in his dotage who asked everyone, banker, missionary, elderly tourist, if they had any marijuana. There was a young madman, someone’s unemployable relative, who wore extremely thick glasses, talked to himself during the inspection and laughed openly at the contents of people’s suitcases.

Compostela was an odd place. It enjoyed a reputation for progressive politics which alarmed conservatives in the United States. Local malcontents, if they were naïve enough to be confused by the official rhetoric into any form of organized activism, were quickly dissuaded, sometimes terminally, by the police or by mysterious, widely deplored auxiliaries with names like the Knights of Mary or the Brotherhood of the Holy Ghost.

Occasionally, the government voted against the United States at the UN and entertained a Bulgarian vice-premier. The octogenarian national poet was periodically dispatched to Havana for cigars. But the Compostelan honchos were hustling arrivistes for whom a buck was a buck; the rest was bullshit and Bellas Artes. The foreign business community regarded their government as sound.

Compostela’s reserve of international goodwill was funded mainly by the fact of its contiguity with Tecan, where, as even the most flint-hearted Compostelan cacique would gravely admit, everything was perfectly dreadful.

The porter who carried Holliwell’s bag from customs stood by while he waited at the currency exchange counter. The notes in Compostela were yellow and brown and were officially called grenadas although the people called them pesos, sometimes morenos. The singles carried the picture of a Negro doctor whom the Compostelans claimed had discovered the quinine treatment for malaria.

Holliwell put one in the porter’s hand — they were worth forty cents. The porter grunted — times had changed — and left him to carry his own bag through the glass doors of the terminal and to dismiss the boys who sought to take it from him.

Oscar Ocampo was leaning against his little Toyota in the nearest parking row. Walking toward him, Holliwell saw that he had gone fat. There was a bulge of gut over his belt and under the green cloth of his tennis shirt. His hard Indian face was softened and blurred by jowl.

Holliwell threw him a salute, still marveling at how different he looked under the extra weight. Much more European; with his little pointed beard, like an Italian tenor made up for Otello.

He was smiling broadly as he reached out for Holliwell’s bag; he looked somehow relieved. When the bag was safely in the car, they embraced.

“How does it feel to be here again?”

“Good,” Holliwell said. The volcano and the glacial peaks above the town always surprised. They made a man smile to see them. “It always feels good.”

“La dulce cintura de América,” Oscar said. So Rubén Darío had called Central America, the sweet waist of the joined continents, every schoolchild there knew it, everyone recited it, often without irony. With Oscar it was always a little ironic, always genuinely felt.

“May we speak English?” Oscar asked.

“Sure,” Holliwell said. He would have preferred practicing his Spanish on a friend. His address to the university would be in that language.

“How are things?”

“With me,” he said, “pretty much the same as always. Everyone’s well, thank God.”

“Good,” Oscar said. “And they gave you tenure?”

Holliwell laughed at his question. In fact, it annoyed him.

“Oh yes. I have tenure in my life too. But I’m not sure it’s the right one.”

“Don’t complain to me,” Oscar said, starting up the car. “That’s a stylized demurrer. You’re very lucky.”

“How about with you?”

They drove off down the airport road and turned onto the stretch of the Pan-American Highway that led to the capital. Oscar smiled straight ahead at the road.

“A long story. The moral is that nothing is free.”

Holliwell resisted an urge to ask him at once about Marty Nolan.

“Laura and I are split,” Oscar told him. “We are pffft.”

“That’s bad news,” Holliwell said. “Am I wrong?”

“I wish I knew,” Oscar said.

The Pan-American Highway took them past stock corrals and unfenced fields where lean cattle grazed. After a few miles they passed the steel-rolling mill, the flagship of Compostelan industry; there was a neat, trim government clinic beside it, then a village of square concrete houses and crate shacks.

At the edge of the city there was a floral clock surmounted by the statue of an Indian chieftain who had resisted the Conquest. Beyond that the carretera became the Avenida Morazón, an imitation of the Reforma and Compostela’s bright daydream of itself. On one side was the central park with its thousand eucalyptus trees, on the other the public buildings with Buck Rogers ramps and reflecting pools full of papaya rinds and mosquito larvae. Beyond the park was the National University, which had employed Oscar, and the Museum of Anthropology. To the left of the Avenida was a neighborhood of middle-class houses with small lawns enclosed by low cement walls; behind it one could see the shanty towns that climbed the inward slopes of Compostela’s twin hills.

A mile or so from the central square stood the Panamerica-Plaza hotel, its fifteen stories of steel and tinted glass defying Compostela’s unquiet crust, surrounded by parkland in which there were lawns and ceiba trees and tame parrots.

Oscar eased the car out of the Avenida traffic and into the Panamerica-Plaza’s driveway.

“I made a reservation for you here,” he told Holliwell. “We don’t have the house anymore.”

“Well,” Holliwell said. He had always disliked the hotel. It was a resort of the high rollers who had battened on the country; the shoeshine boys, the hustlers who lurked at the end of its palm-lined driveway made him feel ashamed. “Well,” he said, “I’ve never stayed here.”

When they had parked, Oscar took up Holliwell’s suitcase, and shaking off the doorman, advanced aggressively into the lobby with it. Holliwell followed him to the desk, where he was demanding evidence of Holliwell’s reservation in a peremptory manner. The reservation was in order.

“Listen,” Oscar said, “when you finish here I’ll take you over to the apartment for a drink. Would you like that?”

“Sure,” Holliwell said. “That’ll be fine.”

“Good. Then I’ll wait down here for you.”

Waiting for his key, Holliwell watched Oscar drift across the pale gray lobby. The lobby of the Panamerica-Plaza had a fine banana tree at the foot of its mezzanine stairway and a fetching interior waterfall. Beyond that, it was a spiritual extension of Miami Airport.

Oscar had gone to the desk of a tour agency beside the gift shop and was in conversation with the man behind it, a tall man in a lightweight Italian suit who appeared to be a European. As Holliwell watched, they both took a quick look at the area around them — and then Oscar slipped a parcel across the desk. The tall man examined its contents beneath his counter. Oscar sauntered off in the direction of the door and lit a cigarette.

While Holliwell and the hotel bellman rode up to the sixth floor, the elevator played the theme from The Godfather for them. The bellman smiled unceasingly.

He was shown to a pleasant balconied room over the pool. When the bellman had set his bag down and turned on the air conditioning, Holliwell gave him two grenadas. Two turned out to be enough.

Ocampo was waiting by the elevator.

“I don’t like it here,” he told Holliwell as they walked to the car. “Not at all.”

“Did you think I did? Never mind,” he told Oscar, cutting off an apology. “It’s comfortable. It’s different.”

Oscar got behind the wheel. Holliwell gave the hotel lackey who opened the door for him a grenada.

“Look, I’m mortified by this,” Oscar said. “My place is small and I’m not alone there.”

“Come on, Oscar. It’s fine. And you have more important things on your mind.”

It was strange, he thought. Laura Ocampo had put up with so much for so many years. Was there female consciousness raising even in Compostela? Had she someone else? It was all so un-Compostelan.

They drove past the cathedral square. Beggars and lottery vendors swept by the car. Holliwell patted his vest pocket, checking his wallet.

“What about the kids?”

“The kids are with Laura. They won’t let me see them.”

“Who won’t?”

“Her family. My brother-in-law threatened to shoot me.”

“Obviously they’re taking this very badly,” Holliwell said.

“Claro,” Oscar said. “Very badly.”

His apartment was in an old and elegant section of the city, on the lake side of the hill called Colucu. It was a neighborhood of cobbled streets and colonial houses with mahogany gates and barred windows. Here and there were new apartment buildings in the California style and Oscar lived in one of these. It was a nice building, three stories of dark wood that blended well with the ancient houses around it. Oscar parked his Toyota in a garage behind the building and they went up the back stairs. In the rear of the building was a garden with fig trees, but it was enclosed by a wall like a prison’s.

Inside Oscar’s apartment, a stereo was playing Purcell; there was a smell of whiskey about. Everywhere there were stacks of books, some still in boxes. There were also a great many pre-Columbian pieces around the apartment — more than Holliwell had ever seen in Oscar’s possession. In the little dining area off the kitchen, clay statuettes from the Pacific coast were lined up like toy soldiers beside rows of jade animals. Against one wall there were bone carvings that appeared to be Mayan, opal grave ornaments and three unbroken chacmools of varying size — the largest a full two feet in length, from the recumbent god’s elbows to his toes. The groupings had a businesslike lack of decorativeness that made it unlikely they were reproductions.

In the past, as far as Holliwell knew, Ocampo had always been very scrupulous about the antiquities that passed into his possession. He had never maintained a collection of his own, only kept the odd piece of jade, or a small necklace for his wife or a girlfriend to wear abroad.

Holliwell stood looking at the ranks of artifacts as though by doing so he were being polite. Oscar seemed to be looking for someone in the apartment.

“Frank,” he said suddenly, “have a drink.”

“With pleasure,” Holliwell said.

Oscar went to the kitchen doorway and stood in it for a moment.

“Patrick?” Holliwell heard him call. At first he could make no sense of the word.

When Ocampo came back, he was carrying two glasses full of ice and a bottle of scotch. He made a small circuit of the room and rapped on the bedroom door with the bottom of the bottle.

As Holliwell was taking his filled glass, a tall thin youth came out of the bedroom, brushing long light-colored hair from his face.

“This is my friend Frank Holliwell,” Oscar said to him. “And, Frank, this is Patrick Ventura.”

Holliwell held out his hand. The boy gave him a soft continental handshake. He was no older than twenty, Holliwell thought, and spaced out — as though he were drunk or on pills.

“Where’s mine?” the boy said to Oscar. He looked at both of them in turns with a mannered wariness that Holliwell found distasteful. Oscar handed him the scotch bottle, and he disappeared into the kitchen.

On the wall across from where Holliwell stood was a picture of Oscar and his sons, the boys on ponies, Oscar standing between, holding the bridles.

When Patrick Ventura came back into the room, he held a water glass full of whiskey.

“You’re from the States?” Holliwell asked him.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Hastings-on-Hudson,” the boy said, fixing Holliwell with the same sidereal coyness.

Being suckled by wolves, Holliwell thought. He glanced at Oscar. Oscar was nervous and proprietary.

“My mother’s family lives there. But I come from Chile.”

“Ah,” Holliwell said. “Chile.”

“Chile today and hot tamale,” Patrick Ventura said. “That’s what they say in Hastings-on-Hudson. The South American weather report. Have you heard that, Oscar? Chile today and hot tamale?”

Oscar had never heard it.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “You were taunted with this?”

“Like, constantly,” Patrick Ventura said.

“It’s strange,” Oscar said brightly to young Ventura. “You and I have never spoken English before.”

“Well,” Holliwell observed, “Santiago used to be a nice town.”

“It’s still a nice town,” Patrick Ventura said.,

“A lot of people have left. Or been arrested.”

“Patrick is not political,” Oscar said.

“Oscar used to be a Marxist-Leninist,” Patrick Ventura told them, “but now he’s a hippie.”

Holliwell turned away quickly so as not to have to look at Oscar, and walked his drink to the full-length balcony window.

“Well, that’s what you said to me, Oscar,” Ventura was insisting petulantly.

Then they were in the kitchen, speaking in Spanish, fighting over the bottle. Oscar was cutting Patrick Ventura off. For his part, Holliwell hoped devoutly it could be done without some kind of scene. If there was one — if the kid went into some kind of fit — he would leave at once, he decided. He drank deeply of his drink.

Oscar came into the living room holding the bottle.

“We need this more than he does,” Oscar said. “Let’s go and sit outside.”

The boy was leaning against the back of the sofa, his eyelids fluttering. Holliwell was afraid that he might fall. Oscar turned off the stereo and with the whiskey in his hand led Holliwell outside to the balcony.

When they had settled in the lounge chairs, they heard the sound of glass breaking in the apartment behind them. Oscar did not turn around. The sun was down behind the peaks; edges of shadow softened in the picture-book street below them. Holliwell buttoned his jacket. Sounds of evening traffic drifted up from the distant Avenida Central.

“I’m in a bourgeois crisis,” Oscar said. He poured them both another drink.

“Well, you’re talking to the right man.”

“That’s whom I live with now.”

“You mean he’s your lover?” Holliwell understood that henceforward the ground would be uncertain.

“My wife calls him my ‘catamite.’ ”

Holliwell felt himself closely watched. He drummed on the arm of his chair.

“You’re embarrassed,” Oscar said.

“No, no. Only … you know me, Oscar. I’m a conventional man.”

“You? Never!”

“I hope you understand that I don’t think badly of you.”

Oscar nodded. It had not been quite the right thing to say. Finding the right thing to say now would be difficult and saying too little would be resented.

“And this is why your brother-in-law is threatening you?”

Oscar shrugged and raised his hands.

“What about you, Frank?” Ocampo asked after a moment. “Have you never had a homosexual experience?”

Now he’s keeping score, Holliwell thought. In spite of himself, he blushed at the question. He was careful not to laugh.

“Never.”

“Never in your life?”

Holliwell began to understand that Oscar would never forgive him for receiving this confidence. He himself hated losing friends. In his regret he veered in the direction of plain candor.

“Look, Oscar — do you want me to tell you I’m homosexual too? I’m not, as far as I know. I haven’t had such an experience. I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

Holliwell finished his drink.

“I guess I could have picked a better time to come down.”

“Why?” Oscar asked.

For Christ’s sake, Holliwell thought.

“Isn’t it a little difficult to try and entertain me while you’re dealing with all these upheavals in your life? Don’t you need … something other than people visiting?”

“I need a friend,” Oscar told him.

And so he did. There were few people in that country to be a friend to him now. Everyone knew everything there. Oscar himself, Holliwell thought, in spite of his aestheticism was a thorough Compostelan, a man of the mountains, a cowboy. In his own circle, the most educated circle in the country, he would be surrounded with contempt. In his deepest self, he would share that contempt.

“Then I’m glad to be here,” Holliwell said. “I’m proud to be your friend and I’d like to remain your friend.”

Oscar’s face looked somber and blank to him. It was an Indian face again, and he could not read it. He’s off, Holliwell thought, he’s closed down on me and gone off to God Seven with our cultural reference point. Instant abyss, veil of centuries. If people are always doing that to us, he thought, surely we are always doing it to them?

He had meant what he had said. Maybe it had been patronizing. Maybe it would have sounded better in Spanish, or in proto-Mayan. In the dim light, he saw that Oscar had begun to cry.

“Thank you, my friend,” Oscar said.

“I wish I could help you,” Holliwell told him.

“You know, Frank — he’s very difficult, my Patrick Ventura. He gets drunk. He takes all kinds of pills. It’s very tough on me.”

“He’s just a kid,” Holliwell said. “Christ, he can’t be over twenty, right?”

Oscar had not heard the question. He was staring over the opposite rooftops with a fond expression.

“Do you know the German film Der blaue Engel?”

“Christ,” Holliwell said, writhing. “I mean … sure I know it.”

He stared down at the tiles of the balcony floor; he was reflecting on the fact that he was about to hear a Central American intellectual compare himself with the professor in The Blue Angel. More of the dynamics of contrasting culture.

“Sometimes I feel like the old professor in that film.”

“Movies are movies, Oscar. This is your life.”

He finished his drink. “This is your life,” he had said.

“Because it costs me very much to manifest my love for him. But there is more to it than sexuality, Frank. This boy is very beautiful — not only in the physical sense. But he is also spiritual.”

Holliwell shakily reached out for the bottle beside Oscar’s chair. When he looked up, he saw that Oscar had closed his eyes.

“ ‘De que sirve la hermosura,’ ” Oscar was reciting.

“ ‘cuando lo fuese la mía

si me falta la alegría

si me falta la Ventura.’ ”

Oscar opened his eyes and there were more tears there.

“ ‘Si mi falta la Ventura,’ ” he repeated.

“I don’t know it,” Holliwell said.

“Calderón,” Oscar told him. “El principe constante.” He lifted his glass and drank from it. “Spoken,” he said, smiling sadly, “by the beautiful but melancholy Fénix, spoiled princess of Fez.”

Holliwell smiled back and shook his head.

Oscar watched him. “A strange turn of fate, eh? For me?”

“Very strange, Oscar.”

“Frank, I want you to see some of the poems he’s written. I want you to see that side of him. Will you read them?”

“All right,” Holliwell said.

He stood up and went back into the apartment; Holliwell half turned to look inside. Oscar stood for a while over the sofa, leaning on the back of it. Patrick Ventura’s bare feet were crossed in repose over the armrest.

Holliwell turned back toward the darkening street. In the downtown distance a red neon sign flashed on. He could see lighted windows in his hotel miles away, on a floodlit hillock.

The extent of Ocampo’s ruin became clear to him. He had lost more than even his family — his wife’s connections had kept him employed and out of trouble, so that in all likelihood he would presently be out of his job and on the police shit lists. But his political days would probably be over too. Because his self-respect was gone; he saw himself as a maricón, mariposa, crowing clown and princess of Fez. And no clown, no mariposa, could be a true revolutionary.

Holliwell fingered the edges of his whiskey glass. The man was a corresponding associate of Marty Nolan’s friends in Compostela. He was destroyed and dangerous. A desperado.

In a few minutes, Ocampo came back to the balcony with a thin sheaf of papers in a tan binder. He switched on the reading light beside Holliwell’s chair.

“Here, Frank,” he said, thumbing through the sheets. “Read only a few, they’re all short. Start with this one.”

Holliwell took the binder and looked at the page to which it was opened.

The first poem there was called “Belvedere Fountain.”

BELVEDERE FOUNTAIN

Drums of love

And hate

Drive the tambourine man

To spread ebony wings

And my claws too

Clutch

Sweet Puerto Rican bodies

Swing with mango sweetness

The rich weed makes my brain

A slave

To the torn toms beat

And so I dance

Footless Footloose

Eye less in Gaza

There was a second poem.

ECSTASIS

Ecstasis isn’t static

It’s not advertisements

And it’s not the news

Ecstasis can be little and

Bound in a nutshell

Or big enough to fill even me

My zodiac, my milky way

Decans of time imploding

“What do you think, Frank? Publishable?”

Holliwell eased the folder gently down to the floor. He kept his eyes fixed on a potted plant near the sliding door.

“ ‘Ecstasis isn’t static’ isn’t bad.”

“He is creative as can be, Frank. The most thoroughly, the most purely artistic of souls.”

Holliwell nodded gravely.

“We can’t stay here. If we were in the States everything would be different. He could get himself straightened out. He could get into school. Also it would be better for me. Here it’s impossible.”

Holliwell felt in his pocket for a cigarette.

“Oscar — before I came down I had a call from a man named Marty Nolan. He mentioned you. He said you were in touch.”

Oscar looked past him.

“I know who he is,” Oscar said. “But I’ve never met him.”

“That hardly matters, Oscar.”

“I’ve examined my conscience,” Ocampo declared. “I don’t like them — you know I don’t like them. But what choice do I have?”

“What choice?” Holliwell asked. “I don’t know.”

“They say they can help me. Frank — I must have a job up there. And there are hardly any jobs today — you know it yourself. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“They can’t help you as much as you think. They may tell you they can.”

“Ah,” Oscar said, “you’re naïve, Frank. You don’t know how your own government works. They can get anything done.”

“Even if they got you a job you could never come back. You’d never see your kids again. You’d be compromised everywhere in America. Those guys have no secrets.”

“Frank, listen …” Oscar put out his hand and closed his fingers over his palm as though he were crumpling a piece of paper. “They have me.”

“They’re paying you?”

“Yes. Discreetly.”

Holliwell lit his cigarette and shook his head.

“I’d ask you what you’re doing for them,” he said, “but I suppose I don’t want to know.”

“You worked for them,” Oscar said suddenly. “In Vietnam you worked for them.”

“You know I worked for them in Vietnam. I know you’re working for them here. That’s how discreet they are, Oscar.” He put the cigarette out and leaned forward to pick up the bottle. “I went to school with Marty Nolan. And Vietnam was a long time ago.”

“I can do this without compromising anyone. I can turn it to my advantage and no one will get hurt.”

“Allow me to say,” Holliwell said, “that this is the logic of desperation.”

“I am desperate,” Oscar said. “But I can be …” He paused to think of the word and when it came to him, he looked pleased. “Shrewd.” He pronounced the word as though it had an umlaut. “More shrewd than you believe.”

Holliwell turned away from his friend’s boyish, unhappy smile.

“You’d do better selling chacmools to tourists.”

“I do,” Oscar said. “I buy from the huaqueros and I sell. Top dollar. I am also available through your hotel as a guide.” He stood up, walked to the balcony rail and leaned over the quiet street. “Every weekend I take your compatriots out to the ruins at Uxpan and I present to them Mayans. The wonderful thing about our Mayans is that they can be anything to anybody. I always try to give my gringos the Mayans I think they deserve.”

“It’ll be you that gets hurt, Oscar.”

Oscar shook his head wildly and took up the bottle.

“It’s only a dialogue. An exchange of views. Gossip. I can make it up if I like.”

Holliwell extended his glass and Oscar poured them both another.

“I’m not judging you,” Holliwell said. “I’m afraid for you. The people involved are fighting a war.”

“I wish there were no wars on,” Oscar said.

“Amen to that.”

“You think I’m only an informer for money. But I think that even in war there’s room for dialogue. I know my own poor country. I know your country also. If I make communication — what is morally wrong with that?”

Holliwell smiled.

“You’re not persuaded?”

“Sure. But I’m easy to persuade.”

“We require war,” Oscar said. “The advancement of society requires it. Art requires it.”

“I’m going back to the hotel,” Holliwell said. “I’m out of it.”

“They want me to go to Tecan.”

Holliwell said nothing.

“For years I’ve wanted to go down there to photograph the stelae on the north coast. These are very interesting stelae, you see, because they look very Mayan but they aren’t. We don’t know who the people were. We think they may have spoken Mayan but ethnically they were something else.”

“A cover.”

Oscar shrugged. “There is a mission there. They want an opinion. A second opinion. You see — they’re not all stupid. They’re being careful.”

“Do you propose to go?”

“Before now I could never get a visa. The Tecanecan police know well my politics. Now the friends of Nolan say they’ll get me one.” He put his drink down and gripped the balcony rail with both hands. “But it would look all wrong and I told them that. Besides I’ve always hated priests and nuns. Since school.”

Holliwell stood up and rubbed his face.

“You’ll be at the lecture?”

“I can’t, Frank. I can’t face them. And it wouldn’t be good for you.”

“But you set it up.”

“I’m sure they’ve forgotten that,” Oscar said.

“Then meet me afterwards at the hotel.”

“Yes, I’ll try.”

Back in the apartment, Holliwell dealt with Oscar’s rash offer to drive him back and paced up and down beside the sleeping Patrick Ventura while Oscar telephoned for a taxi. It took quite a long time. Oscar walked him down the back stairs.

At night the rear of the building looked like a fortress. There were tinted lights with wire guards around them along the walkways; floodlights shone on the high back wall.

On the slope behind the house, television sets glowed behind the picture windows of an apartment block. Above, on the higher ground, kerosene lamps flickered among the tin shacks.

They walked across the dry grass to the rear wall and Oscar unlocked a door that led through it to the pitch-black street beyond.

“You condemn me,” Oscar said when they were out in the street. “There are things I could say to you that I won’t say. You don’t know how it works down here.”

“I think it works the same everywhere,” Holliwell said. “Maybe I know more about that than you.”

“Ah, yes,” Oscar said. “Vietnam.”

A car turned into the street and slowly cruised the wall. As Holliwell stepped forward to hail it, he noticed that Ocampo had moved back from the roadway, as though seeking darkness. But the wall against which he leaned was thoroughly illuminated.

The car was a five-year-old Chevrolet with a taxi sign on the windshield and a plastic Sacred Heart on the dashboard.

“Meester Holawal?” the driver asked.

“Vietnam, no?” Oscar called softly from against the wall.

“Vietnam,” he said again, as Holliwell climbed into the cab.

When they pulled out, Holliwell pronounced the name of his hotel. He felt ashamed of it.

The driver repeated the hotel’s name with respect.

As the car sped away, Holliwell turned to look behind him. Oscar had disappeared. The lighted wall met the street at a hard empty angle and stretched to the edge of vision. Spotlights shone on the spears of broken glass atop it.

Three blocks from the piers in the port of Vizcaya was an American-style farmacia with a green cross over its doorway. Pablo visited it twice to inveigle some speed from the druggist. Twice he was turned away. He concluded that he must be handling it wrong.

At ten o’clock on the morning of his third visit, Pablo found himself aboil with rage and sweat, glaring into the druggist’s thick horn-rimmed spectacles in an attempt to engage the dead bug eyes behind them.

“What the fuck’s the matter?” Pablo demanded, holding up his Stateside prescription bottle. “I got a script for it back home.”

The pharmacist ignored the bottle and gave Pablo not so much as a shrug. Two young female assistants in green smocks watched them over the stacks of medicated shampoo.

“I’m overweight,” Pablo said grimly. He was not in the least overweight and in any case the druggist did not understand him. “I’m fucking depressed, dig? How about it?”

When the druggist extended a hand to urge Pablo toward the door, Pablo prepared to belt him. Only at the last minute did he realize that the man’s attention was focused on the pink bank note he clutched in his left hand.

The druggist was trying to escort Pablo discreetly outside, an urbane effort which Pablo’s nature resisted.

“Tiene que volver a la tarde,” the man said softly, trying to speak beneath the hearing of his assistants. “Más tarde, comprende? Ahorita no.”

By the time they reached the street, Pablo was able to understand that he was being dealt with.

“O.K.,” he said. Passers-by were observing his exchange with the pharmacist. Glancing at his reflection in the drugstore window, Pablo saw that if he did not appear particularly fat and low-spirited, he did look rather like a bad-news gringo who might shortly be in jail.

“Más tarde, right?” Pablo asked the druggist. The professional man turned hurriedly inside.

It was hard to be cool. For one thing, the birdcalls were driving him bananas; they kept sounding like someone making fun of him. Pablo reflected that he had been strung out in some shitty places but that none of them seemed quite so shitty as Vizcaya, where even the birds in the trees weirded you out. He wiped his brow and turned down the Calle Catorce de Mayo, toward the piers and Lana’s.

Lana’s establishment was called the Pensión Miramar, a little stone barracks of a building that gave two rows of barred windows to the street. It centered on a small interior courtyard with a dying jacaranda tree from which ten low wooden doors led to the girls’ apartments. A baby was crying in one of the rooms as Pablo came in; there was always a baby crying somewhere in Miramar. Three dark children, scroungy with gutter dirt, were stalking a cat among the crates and bottles under the tree.

Pablo went to the Coke cooler behind the office and pounded on it with his fist several times. Presently a youth of about fourteen came out, unlocked the cooler and gave him a beer for a fifty-centavo piece. There was no change — there was never any change.

Disgusted and worn, he sat down on a wooden bench near the tree and tried not to let the birdcalls get to him. When I straighten out, he thought, I’ll have a plan. The kids in the courtyard began to throw crates at the cat. Pablo drank his beer and watched them irritably. Everything was a trapeze act.

When one of the children kicked a bottle at the cat and smashed it, Lana came out and yelled at the lot of them. One of the kids was hers. She saw Pablo and sat down beside him on the bench.

“You get somethin’ to make you feel good?”

“I thought you was gonna get me something,” Pablo said. “I can’t deal with these people down here.”

“Thas all right,” Lana assured him. “We take care of you.”

“You ain’t doing much of a job,” Pablo told her.

Lana moved closer to Pablo on the bench and reached over to take a swallow of his beer.

“Don Jorge says you can bring the maricón here. If he’s got a lot of money we help you take care of him. But it got to be at night, Don Jorge says.”

“Who gets his money?”

“Some for everybody,” Lana said.

Pablo put the beer bottle down.

“What am I supposed to do — kill him? Is that what I’m supposed to do?”

Lana shrugged. She had lived for two years in Coney Island, she once told Pablo. Off Surf Avenue, by the projects.

“I don’t know nothing about it, man. I just tellin’ you what Don Jorge says.”

“Don Hor-hay says,” Pablo said bitterly. “I ain’t hustling queers for Don Jorge. And I sure as shit ain’t gonna kill nobody for Don Jorge.”

Don Jorge was the proprietor of the Miramar and of the bar beside it. A big man with gray wavy hair who always wore dark glasses — you saw him all up and down the waterfront streets bullshitting, doing some kind of bad business.

As far as Pablo could tell, they wanted him to bring the queer down there and kill him. Then they could turn him in.

Gotta get out of here, Pablo thought. Time to walk.

“How about you all give me my passport back?” he said to Lana. “I need it. I can’t identify myself without it.”

“Baby, I don’t have your passport. Maybe Don Jorge has it. Maybe you owe him money — something like that.”

“I don’t owe him nothing,” Pablo said. “If anything, you all owe me.”

Lana hastened to say that she knew nothing about it.

“But you can bring that man here tonight,” she reminded Pablo. “Then he can’t cause you no trouble.”

Pablo stood up. “I’m gonna go see him now,” he told Lana.

Trucking back up Catorce de Mayo toward the zócalo, Pablo noticed a young American couple in backpacks; he wondered immediately about how much money they might have on them. He himself was down to seventy dollars — not counting the local money. His clothes and his passport were in the custody of the Miramar, probably lost to him.

Shoeshine boys harried him across the square, right to the door of the tourist hotel, hissing and whistling like the sinister birds. Inside he dried out in the air conditioning, checked the curio stand and the magazine rack, watching the hotel flunkies for bad eyes or wrong signals. No one seemed to notice him.

Tony Bobbick, the rich maricón, was not to be seen. After waiting a few minutes, Pablo sauntered into the poolside restaurant and ordered coffee at the counter.

The question of Tony Bobbick was a difficult one. On the one hand Pablo was a family man; it was degrading to hustle fags and he was a bit old for it. On the other, Tony Bobbick seemed to be Vizcaya’s best-known and most popular mark, famous from one end of town to the other for his wealth and the variety of his credit cards. It was a period when credit cards were a popular novelty in Mesoamerica; the locals had acquired the necessary machines and were dispensing rental cards and plane tickets with Yankee dispatch and Old World courtesy on signatures which they could barely read, let alone verify. Relatively untouristed, they still relied on the rigor of North American commercial procedures and the Code Napoléon. Pablo — strung out on his trapeze, obsessed with birds and incipient gonorrhea — was lamed by indecision and scruple.

But I got to walk, he thought. Get clear of this Vizcaya.

As he sat hunched over his excellent Compostelan coffee, brooding on Tony Bobbick, the man himself appeared. In blue duck trousers, Adidas, and a Triumph tee shirt, Tony settled himself at a table against the window that looked out on the garden and the pool. He drank greedily of the purified water which the waitress brought and laid out the previous day’s Miami Herald before him.

Tabor sighed, hesitated for a moment to assume what he hoped might be a pleasant or even desirable aspect and approached Tony’s table.

“Hey, guy,” Pablo said cheerily. Although he had dealt with many homosexuals in the course of his career, he remained under the impression that they all addressed each other in this fashion. “How you feeling this morning?”

Bobbick looked up wearily and did not invite him to sit down.

“Good morning,” he said.

Tabor stood over Tony Bobbick’s table with a dreadful smile. Not a grain of good humor was left to him and the very sight of the man’s boyish face, drawn and sagging with toxins, caused him to clench his fists. He found it extremely difficult to begin a conversation.