A Flag for Sunrise Read Free Page B

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, hedragged 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 ofChristian humanist witness in a vicious world. Somewhere, in some reasonable, wood-paneled overheated room, he heard himself recounting what had