A Flag for Sunrise Read Free Page A

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’redetermined 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 itdown 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