Fire on the Island

by Timothy Jay Smith

  “No one!”

  “I like your odds.”

  “You’re funny, Superman. I bet you have to work at it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you look so serious when you’re thinking.”

  “If you call me Superman again, you’ll learn just how serious I can be. So she doesn’t help with the refugees?” he asked.

  “Vassoula? Sometimes she sits there and watches. They’re both a little weird.”

  “So you don’t like him, either?”

  Athina shrugged. “Most of the time he’s okay. I don’t know. People say weird things about him. What happened to your face?”

  “Did something happen to my face?”

  “You have a plaster on your forehead.”

  “Oh, that. I burned myself shaving.”

  “You burned yourself shaving? On your forehead?”

  Nick shrugged. “I was careless.”

  “Are you burned here, too?” Athina reached to touch a pinkish spot on Nick’s jaw that his beard only partially concealed.

  He grabbed her hand to stop her. “That’s from another fire.”

  “Okay, I’ll stop bothering you. I hope you enjoy your kafeneion coffee and non-English English breakfast.” The girl went back inside.

  Nick set about eating his quivery eggs, runny beans, and mealy sausage. He watched as Takis came out to retrieve the plastic wrapping for the bottles of water. Balling it up, he headed for a trash bin between the two buildings. On his way, he smiled at Nick before disappearing out of sight. He returned to his eggs and runny beans. He couldn’t guess all the weird things that might be said about Takis, but he was pretty sure about one thing: he was gay, too.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  NOT MANY YEARS EARLIER, WHEN money seemed to arrive in buckets flown in on northern Europe’s national airlines, the villa that served as City Hall had been restored and painted the frivolous colors of a Venetian palace: lavender walls with orange trim and teal balconies. That morning, as Mayor Dimos Elefteros clutched an iron rail overlooking a turquoise sea, his thoughts weren’t on the beauty of the building’s colors but their costs. The shipping charges alone for the imported paint could have paid to repair the lengthening crack on the church’s bell tower, from which, at that moment, Father Alexis was ringing the hour, each toll an insistent reminder of the thousands of euros the priest expected the bankrupt village to ante up for exactly that purpose.

  Mayor Elefteros believed the priest should repair his own damn tower. The Church had enough money, even if the local parish did not. Unfortunately, as Father Alexis had painstakingly documented, the freestanding tower was situated on municipal property adjacent to the church. Around the country, it was not an uncommon situation for churches to have encroached on bits of land around them. How else to expand a cemetery, for instance? What had changed were new European Union rules governing public safety which had convinced the priest he could demand the village repair the bell tower, though he still gladly rang the bell at civic liability.

  There was a knock on the office door and Apostolis let himself in. The mayor came off the balcony to shake the part-time fireman, part-time policeman, part-time waiter’s hand. A little plump, a little bald, and blinded in one eye from an accident, Apostolis embodied civic spirit, volunteering for everything. He set a blob of charred Styrofoam on the mayor’s desk. A half dozen cigarette butts were stuck in it; others had fallen over and become encased in the milky white plastic.

  Mayor Elefteros didn’t need to ask what it was. All the fires had been started with a similar crude detonator made from Styrofoam soaked in gasoline to make it soft. Lit cigarettes were stuck in it and slowly burned down before igniting the fuel-soaked plastic—giving the arsonist time to get away before the flames were spotted. There were never fewer than a dozen cigarettes used. Whoever was setting the fires wanted to ensure the gasoline would catch. That was about the only thing anyone could say with certainty going on a year since the first fire—except that they were getting dangerously close to the village.

  “We had to cut down Lukas’s trees to save his house,” Apostolis reported.

  “I don’t suppose he was happy about that.”

  “He used my chainsaw to help.”

  The mayor nodded, not surprised; he wouldn’t have expected otherwise. He and Lukas were of the same white-haired generation for whom honor and tragedy were synonymous. But he was surprised when the volunteer fire chief added, “A stranger saved their dog. He got there first.”

  “A stranger?”

  At that moment, Lydia burst in. “Dimos!”

  Immediately Apostolis’s neck sunk into his round shoulders. “I’ll let you two talk.”

  “You stay, Apostolis. This concerns you.”

  “Good morning, Lydia,” the mayor said.

  “Don’t you ‘good morning’ me, Dimos!”

  “I know you’re upset.”

  “Of course I’m upset! Tonight the whole village could burn down”—she picked up the Styrofoam detonator on his desk— “because of a fire started by one of these!”

  “There is no point exaggerating the situation.”

  “As long as that fuel tank is where it is, am I exaggerating the situation, Apostolis?”

  “I am not officially trained to say.”

  “Well, I don’t need official training to know that I am not exaggerating. What is it going to take to convince you to move that fuel tank, Dimos?”

  “I’m waiting for a reply—”

  “From Athens. You’re always waiting for a reply from Athens.”

  “We don’t have enough money—”

  “Of course we do. Only you’re thinking of giving it to the Church, which God knows doesn’t need it.”

  “If the bell tower falls down, someone could be killed.”

  “If the fuel tank explodes, a lot more people than some one will be killed.”

  “People can see the crack in the tower, Lydia. They can’t see an anonymous threat.”

  “How anonymous is this?” She unfolded her map, and tapped her finger on it saying, “The first fire was here. The next here and here and here until last night’s fire here that almost burned down my parents’ house. How could the pattern be any clearer? The village is next. Isn’t it clear to you, Apostolis?”

  “I can see the pattern.”

  “I can see the pattern, too,” the mayor added, “but you forget, relocating the fuel tank will disrupt the Coast Guard’s operation at a sensitive time. It’s a decision for the Ministry of Defense. I don’t have the authority to act unilaterally even if we had the funds.”

  “By the time you finally decide that you have the authority to protect this village, there won’t be anything left to protect! That’s the pattern I see.”

  Lydia stormed out, leaving her map opened on the mayor’s desk.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  FATHER ALEXIS, PULLING THE ROPE hanging down the side of the bell tower, tolled the hours especially vigorously that morning, wanting the heavy bronze bell to resonate through every conversation in the village, the subject of each surely being the fire the night before. He didn’t want some paranoid suspicion about an arsonist to sway public opinion in favor of relocating the fuel tank over repairing the bell tower.

  In reality the priest couldn’t give a fig for the ugly tower, hastily rebuilt with concrete blocks after an earthquake toppled an ancient handsome one. In fact, he rather wished it would fall down, but his status—indeed, his future in the Church—was at stake in preserving it. Historically the island had been a communist hotbed, and the youthful priest had taken on the challenge of bringing Vourvoulos’s renegade congregation into the fold. Convincing the village to pay for the bell tower’s repair would be proof that he had succeeded. In exchange, he had been promised a post in a respectable city, not another hovelish village on the priestly circuit. With that promotion would come a salary enabling him to move his mother to another apartment, out of her dead husband’s house, the oily st
ench of whose murder laced every sea breeze; a stench that Father Alexis—back then a seventeen-year-old called Manolis—had caused with a flick of a cigarette; consciously or unconsciously, he forgot, if he ever knew.

  Indeed Vourvoulos was a hovel where people ate sardines for breakfast. The thought nauseated the young priest, as did the villagers’ insistent fish breath, which was especially virulent at noon prayers when their ichthyological halitosis disagreeably peaked. His good looks and calculated charm were his own undoing, by attracting unsatisfied housewives to every service. He retaliated by strategically placing bowls of mints around the church, which several people had mistaken for incense and had tried to light the pale green lozenges. The locals soon caught on, but not always the occasional strangers who wandered in. The priest had taken to sneaking up on them, plucking the singed mint from their fingers and popping it into his mouth. “It’s a mint!” he would cry. “Try one! You’ll like it!” Unfortunately on one occasion, it had been incense, ignited by an Indian family who somehow found their way into Vourvoulos’s church with their own pale green tablets. Christians from Goa, they later explained; as if Father Alexis, suffering with a blistered tongue, gave a hoot for their primitive origins.

  His energetic ringing of the bell caused bits of stucco to fall from a crack running down from the corner of a window bearing the bell’s headstock. He watched as flecks sprinkled the choked grass, and let go the rope to gather them in a plastic bag. It felt lighter than air. Certainly they were not substantial enough to convince the skeptical mayor that the bell tower’s imminent collapse was a greater threat than a catastrophic fire.

  Father Alexis glanced around. Seeing no one, he picked up a stone and knocked a couple of chips off the tower’s corner. Deciding they gave him sufficient evidence to keep his cause alive, he rubbed dirt onto the chipped spots to conceal them and, clutching his cassock, hurried out the churchyard gate.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  KOUFOS LEFT HIS HIDING PLACE behind the ossuary and imitated the priest hurrying out the gate. The deaf boy had been caught one hungry afternoon stuffing his pockets with mints, and ever since, Father Alexis ran him off whenever he saw him. Being run off was something Koufos was used to, but he couldn’t stop himself from going to the church when certain natural urges overcame him. Though unable to hear a word, he could “hear” the bell’s tolling—or rather, he felt its sound—and its resonance, buzzing through his body, aroused him. On Sunday mornings, when the priest freely rang it, sometimes Koufos stood behind the ossuary and came without touching himself. That morning, though, hunger, not hormones, had driven him to the church. The mints made for an unsatisfactory meal but stopped his empty stomach from growling. He darted inside and made a quick circuit grabbing handfuls of them.

  It wasn’t easy living off the few coins he begged in the restaurants or the scraps that diners left behind, which had recently grown more meager, as had the mysterious packages of food he would occasionally find wrapped in aluminum foil. He had no way of knowing about the country’s economic crisis; he only knew he was hungrier. He couldn’t read or speak, and didn’t have a proper name. He had been abandoned in the port like dogs sometimes were at the end of summer by yachtsmen bored with that season’s man’s best friend. No one could remember precisely when Koufos showed up, but the villagers collectively blamed the Gypsies for exchanging the boy for a few stolen chickens. He never spoke a word so they christened him Koufos. Deaf. He’d already been in the village three years though his actual age was a matter of guesswork. The prior year he’d started sprouting dark hair where none had been before. He was turning into a man and all that meant.

  He crawled into a cubbyhole under the bank of wooden seats attached to the wall. He wouldn’t be seen if someone entered, and the boy sensed that what he wanted to do was a private matter because he never saw anyone else doing it. Only the woman in a painting high on the wall could see him; and he believed she did see him because her eyes roved, following him from mint bowl to mint bowl, and finally into his hiding place. If he expelled his breath in a certain way, he felt the same erotic flutter as when he sensed the satisfying resonance of the church bell. He did it then, and took care of himself, with Mary watching from her spot above the altar.

  Then like guys are inclined to do afterward, he dozed off.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  LYDIA FRETTED HER WAY DOWN the stony footpath, catching glimpses of the port between the angled red-tiled roofs. Still fuming over Apostolis’s “I’m not officially trained to say,” she came to a spot where the village lay revealed before her: the small harbor, the arc of cafés and restaurants that lined it, the narrow dock jutting out like an angled exclamation point, and looming over it all, the Coast Guard’s fuel tank—a malevolency that in a spark could destroy everything else. Lydia scowled at it around every corner; and around the next one, she ran into Father Alexis.

  “Good morning, Lydia,” he greeted her.

  “Good morning, Father.”

  “I certainly hope that frown is not for me.”

  “Of course not, Father. I have a special frown for priests.”

  The priest was never quite sure what to make of her, but nevertheless held out his hand. “I may have a cold,” he cautioned, “but if you want to kiss my ring—”

  “I don’t want to kiss your ring,” she assured him.

  “You’d be surprised how many people do, even after I warn them.”

  “I have a restaurant to run. I have to be careful about catching a disease.”

  Disease! The very word offended the priest. In fact, he didn’t have a cold; he had lied to dissuade her from the unhygienic practice. The older Vourvouliani women especially had taken to kissing his ring hungrily while tickling the back of his hand with their rogue whiskers. “I am obliged by canon to offer my ring to be kissed,” he reminded Lydia. “But here I am worrying about giving you a cold, when your parents almost had a tragedy last night.”

  “My parents did have a tragedy last night. Lukas had to cut down his beauties to save the house.”

  “Trees grow back but not lost lives.”

  “Not my father’s trees. Not in his lifetime. He planted the first one the day I was born. That’s forty-three years ago. He won’t see another tree grow for forty-three years.”

  “He will if he has faith.”

  “Well, if you are talking about watching trees grow from heaven, that’s not the perspective he wants. He likes to look up at them from down here on earth.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you, Father? Because if you did, I don’t think you would worry more about your bell tower than protecting all of this.” Lydia opened her arms to embrace the whole village.

  “It’s not the tower that I worry about, but public safety.” Father Alexis showed her the chips in his plastic bag. “More than this falls off each time I ring the bell.”

  Lydia shook her head incredulously. “You’re worried about those flakes?”

  “It adds up. Think about it.”

  “I am thinking about it, and the solution is remarkably simple. Stop ringing the bell.”

  “It’s my job to ring the bell. People expect it. God expects it. It’s how He hears our communal prayers.”

  “He might be glad to hear less communal bellyaching. Anyway, the mayor doesn’t have any more money to fix your tower this week than he had last week, if that’s where you are headed with your bag of flakes.”

  “Because of these flakes, as you call them, the bell tower becomes more dangerous every day, to the point that it’s become dire!”

  “Dire my derriere! Which I would ask you to kiss, except I don’t want to catch your cold!”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  FATHER ALEXIS EMPTIED HIS BAG of stucco chips onto a sheet of paper on Mayor Elefteros’s desk. “This is less than half of what falls off each time I ring the bell, so you can see how the situation is becoming more dangerous every day.”

  “No matter how dangerous it’s becoming,” r
eplied Mayor Elefteros, “the town has no money to repair your bell tower.”

  “Of course there is money, only you’ve chosen to use it for another purpose.”

  “I must be prepared to move the fuel tank if I am instructed to do so by Athens.”

  “Then Athens should pay for it.”

  “Athens has no more money than we do. I’ll need whatever money I can find, and with the tax base shrinking because of the bad economy, it’s going to be very difficult.

  “My ‘tax base’ is shrinking, too. Attendance at services is way down.”

  “Really? I heard you were very popular,” the mayor replied.

  “You are always welcome to come to a service to find out for yourself.”

  Father Alexis smiled insincerely. They both knew that attendance had shot up ever since the striking, stubbly bearded priest had taken up his post in the village. The women jockeyed to glimpse him through clouds of incense during the overcrowded services, not one complaining about her tired feet, and each finding coins she didn’t have to spare to drop into the collection box.

  The mayor reached for the sheet of paper holding the bits of stucco. “Have you weighed these?”

  The priest had not, but added confidently, “They are not as insignificant as they look.”

  The mayor placed a postage scale on his desk. “We shall measure exactly how significant or insignificant they are, so as not to be accused of making wild claims.”

  Father Alexis bristled. “With all the evidence I have provided you, I don’t think I can be accused of making a wild claim.”

  “We shall see how wild or not. Ultimately it’s a matter of numbers.”

  “Numbers?”

  “Mathematics. By profession, I was a structural engineer.”

  The priest paled hearing that, and worried even more as he watched the older man weigh an empty sheet of paper and then the one holding the flakes. After some quick calculations, he muttered, “Hmm.”

  “Hmm what?”

  “Let me double-check my numbers before I say more.”

  It was hardly a question of saying more when the mayor had said nothing at all, but Father Alexis kept his complaint to himself while watching the old man recalculate everything. His whole future was balanced on that scale.