Fire on the Island

by Timothy Jay Smith

  Limits.

  The word itself seemed so heavy and confrontational. At once a word of aggression and barriers. He hoped he could explain what he meant in tenderer terms that conveyed the sympathy he felt without the harshness that “limits” sounded. But he felt he needed to use that word, not to shirk his responsibilities but to remind everyone to keep his responsibilities in perspective. Already achieving more than anything he could have eked out in his village, Ridi wasn’t looking for excuses to stop. Or go home. Or change courses or marry someone to whom he had already said no. There were limits to his responsibilities for Jura’s folly.

  Ambitious.

  He was proud to be ambitious. It stood him apart. Certainly apart from his fellow countrymen, who had also found their way to that small Greek village, which he was reminded of every morning when he chugged into town on his backfiring scooter and passed the little café where they all gathered for coffee. Fairer, bluer-eyed, and less furrowed than the Greeks, they sat there blearily, rousing themselves to work another day to earn the beers they would piss away that night; while Ridi had a list of vocabulary words in his pocket, a scooter he owned transporting him to work, and bigger dreams in his head than pissing foamy liters into a urinal.

  Eager to glimpse the girl whose heart he had apparently won, Ridi showed up at work especially early that morning. He also needed extra time to set things up for that night’s Miss Icon Contest. Behind Lydia’s Kitchen, to one side towered the fuel tank, but to the other was an abrupt hill with a couple of outbuildings, and in those he would find extra tables and chairs, and strings of lights to hang, too. He climbed narrow steps to the storage room that had once been a goat shed and still smelled gamey. It took him several trips to carry down four tables and enough chairs to go around them. Once emptied, the room was cozy. Five or six small tables could be squeezed comfortably into it; and a window, an easy thing to knock out of a stone wall, would have a view of the sea. Ridi figured it could be the kind of place where tourists would nurse coffee or wine while checking emails and sharing photos, or working on the novel almost every one of them said they wanted to write. Who cared if it was only a dozen coffees or glasses of wine or sandwiches sold a day? It was still more than nothing, which was all the unused shed was earning now.

  Athina appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “I was going to help you carry down the tables,” she said.

  “I came very early.”

  “Me, too. At least early for me. I think the last time I was up this early was when my dad forced me to go fishing with him.”

  “He forced you to go?”

  “I think he wanted me to know what a crummy life he chose, in case I had the idea of becoming a fisherman, or marry one I suppose—as if I would ever want either one. The truth is, I hate the smell of fish. Can I help you carry stuff?”

  Ridi shook his head. “This is the last chair.”

  “Then I need coffee. Do you want some?”

  He did, and they went into the kitchen. Athina tucked a filter into a coffeemaker. “Is not Greek coffee okay?” she asked.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Good, because I don’t like the way it sticks to my teeth.” She poured water into the machine and flicked on its switch. Instantly it made little popping noises. “My mom is worried about the wind coming up tonight. She’s not worried of course that we might capsize in the procession because of the wind but because she might lose money.”

  “Today is exactly the same as yesterday. No wind.”

  “God could tell her that and she would still worry. She’s weird that way.”

  “The wind is easy to fix.”

  “If it is, she’s never figured it out.”

  Ridi explained how her mother could attach clear plastic sailcloth between posts buried in heavy pots at the corners of her property. “That way, the wind is stopped when people still see the sunset. With no wind, it takes only a minute to roll again the plastic.”

  The coffeemaker sputtered, signaling it was ready. Athina filled two cups and handed one to him. “Tell me about your calculations.”

  Ridi had run the numbers, keeping track of how many people left when the wind kicked up, how many drifted next door to Vassoula’s for a nightcap or three, or simply moved on; and estimating how many might have stayed instead at Lydia’s for dessert or another pitcher of wine, if it weren’t for a little too much breeze. Even under the worst-case scenario, the small investment would be profitable in a short time, not to mention encouraging repeat customers. “Your mother needs music, too,” he said. “Stavros’s music.”

  “People can hear him from his boat.”

  “It’s not so close enough. In the night, when he plays music from his boat, people can listen from anywhere. But when they eat, people want to sit close to the music.”

  Again the young waiter ran through some numbers, but Athina wasn’t listening very hard. The mention of Stavros’s music reminded her of how romantically the fisherman had played the night before, bringing tears to her eyes for the earnest young man now explaining his calculations. She had texted him a heart, and with hardly a beat missed, he sent one back. She went to bed, in love, content that they could put behind them whatever had happened; and woke up remembering Jura. She wasn’t just a worry or memory, but a real person who couldn’t be so easily relegated to his past. What if Ridi had loved her? Could he be tempted again? She interrupted him to ask, “Did you see Jura this morning?”

  “I will go after I finish here.”

  “And I should start,” Athina said. “I have to finish the prep for the whole night before I put on my costume.”

  “I will help you later.”

  “You are so sweet, Ridi. Thank you.”

  He set down his coffee. “You don’t have to worry about Jura.”

  “Well, someone needs to. What is she going to do?”

  “I mean, you don’t have to worry that I love her.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t love her.”

  “She must think you do, or why would she risk coming here? Is it really so bad in your country?”

  “Half she loves me and half it is so bad in my country. Half and half.”

  It wasn’t exactly a reassuring answer, until Ridi added, “But with you I am one hundred percent. Not even one percent with Jura.”

  “I guess that’s a sweet thing to say.”

  “I am faithful,” he emphasized, and left the kitchen.

  Faithful.

  He smiled to himself. He had managed to work another vocabulary word into their conversation. He only had one word left on his list and knew the moment he hoped to use it.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  NICK’S EYES FLUTTERED OPEN.

  He saw a pile of bloody towels a few feet away. Outside, croaking birds sounded like the vultures of Kabul. Someone slept pressed against his back. He felt wounded with stabbing pains all over. He could taste his sickness and smelled his own foul breath, but his mind was too muddled to sort out what had happened or where he was. His bladder insisted on relief and he started to get out of bed.

  “Are you awake?”

  It was Takis.

  “I’m not dead?”

  “You almost were.”

  “I need to take a piss.”

  Nick took a couple of wobbly steps.

  “Do you need a hand?”

  “Where are you suggesting?”

  “It sounds like you’ll survive.”

  Nick looked at his arms and legs. “What the fuck happened to me?”

  “You don’t remember the spiders?”

  “They were real?”

  “Go take your piss. And brush your teeth. I’ll make coffee.”

  Nick, toothbrush buzzing in his mouth, checked his wounds in the mirror. “What the fuck are those red circles on my back?”

  “My sister bled you.”

  He came back into the room. “She bled me?”

  “We wanted to get as much poison out as we could. You had alr
eady done a pretty good job on the bites you could reach.”

  “You actually bled me?”

  “Don’t worry, and it won’t leave scars.”

  “I already have scars.”

  “I meant more scars. Coffee?”

  “I’ll meet you on the terrace.”

  Nick slipped on shorts and a T-shirt, and joined Takis outside. The sun was high and the day warm. “Is it already afternoon?”

  “You needed to sleep. I guess we both did.”

  Suddenly dizzy, Nick dropped into a chair.

  “Are you okay?” Takis asked.

  “Just a little woozy. It comes in waves. Tell me what happened.”

  As Takis described finding him on the bathroom floor, Nick slowly recalled the evening. A late night with a little too much wine, almost asleep before he got into bed, and waking up with spiders biting him. He recalled the spider nests in the cemetery. “Are they really common here?” he asked.

  “They don’t nest in beds. My sister thinks someone tried to kill you.”

  “That takes a lot of bites, doesn’t it?”

  “You had enough bites. You might have died if she hadn’t bled you, and for sure if you hadn’t bled yourself first. That took a lot of guts to do that to yourself.”

  “When I was a kid, a friend of mine survived a rattlesnake bite by doing that. I never forgot it.”

  “You really work for the FBI, don’t you?”

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “You have three of those Styrofoam things in your bottom drawer.”

  “You went through my stuff?”

  “My sister did. I couldn’t stop her.”

  “What was she looking for?”

  “Anything interesting. So am I a suspect?”

  “Maybe. Tell me about the Takis Fire.”

  “I hate that name for it.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “Not for the reasons you might think.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It happened the day that I confronted my father on the beach.”

  “About being gay?”

  “About both of us being gay.”

  “You mean, right after that, he went home and was killed?”

  “I think he committed suicide.”

  “Why?”

  “They found pieces of the house that showed the shutters had been closed. That was usually my job and I didn’t do it that day. I brought home a new gas bottle and left for the beach. I knew I’d be back before sunset to shut them.”

  “I heard a different version of the story.”

  “The version where I closed the shutters early because I’d be back after sunset?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  Takis told him, “That’s my version. I made it up.”

  “Why?”

  “The investigators would have eventually come to the same conclusion that my father had killed himself. No one else closed up the kitchen. Zeeta fell a couple of days earlier and couldn’t get out of bed so she couldn’t have done it.”

  “What about your sister?”

  “Vassoula hadn’t come back to the house in a year. Not since she moved in with Omar. It had to be my father. I know how unhappy he was. He went home, and you’re right, he saw the gas bottle and decided to end it.”

  “And kill your mother, too?”

  “I’m sure he wanted to kill her many times.” Takis shook his head, remembering the man. “Poor guy. Can you imagine what his life was really like? Gay and stuck in this village? The only thing he knew to do was grow olives. He couldn’t take his trees to Athens or Thessaloniki, and where else can you live in this country if you’re gay? Then he ends up getting caught taking care of a simple urge with a guy on the beach and he’s forced to marry Zeeta. She didn’t have a good heart, she had a cold one, and adopting kids didn’t change that. We were constant reminders that she couldn’t have her own. She never loved us. She felt she had done us a favor, and that was the most she could feel for us.”

  “Sounds like a miserable situation.”

  “It was, especially for Markos. Probably she gave him a hand job on their wedding night and that was the last sex they had. What kind of cure for homosexuality was that supposed to be? Of course it wasn’t, and every once in a while there would be another snide remark made about him. For a while, at school I was kidded about losing my virginity, which confused me because I thought only girls could be virgins. Somebody explained what they were talking about, and I realized that people imagined all sorts of things could be going on between Markos and me. Nothing was, except at some point, I knew that I was gay, too, and I didn’t want to be gay. I didn’t want his unhappy life. Shame, and secrecy, and his olive trees: that’s all he had. So for a long time I tried to deny it. I went all the way with a couple of girls because I could, but afterwards, I felt as unhappy as he was. It didn’t seem fair that I had to live with being adopted and then live with being gay, too. It wasn’t until I moved to Australia that it clicked up here”—Takis tapped his head—“that it wasn’t being gay itself that made my father unhappy, but the people who made him feel so ashamed that he was gay.”

  “And they drove him to suicide, not your conversation with him,” Nick interjected.

  “It was the day I outted him. That had to contribute to it.”

  “You outted him to you and nobody else. It had to be a conversation he’d anticipated many times. He couldn’t predict the binoculars, but when it finally happened, he already knew what was going to be said.”

  “He wouldn’t have killed himself that day without our conversation.”

  “You’re wrong. He wouldn’t have killed himself that day without the gas bottle being there. Otherwise, he would have done it another day. He came home and saw the opportunity he’d been waiting for. You know I’m right,” Nick concluded.

  Takis teared up when he replied, “He wasn’t a bad man. That’s why I lied for him. He died ashamed of himself. The ridicule had never really stopped. He’d lived with the shame of being gay all his life, he didn’t need the shame of suicide for all eternity. So I lied, saying I had closed the shutters, and why not? It made no difference to me.”

  “Except to make you a murder suspect,” Nick reminded him.

  “It could never be proved. What evidence would there be?”

  “So you’re saying, it might be true?”

  “And you’re saying, I am a suspect?”

  Nick answered: “Tell me about the insurance money.”

  “Five hundred sixty-seven euros and sixty-eight centimes.”

  “You got to Melbourne on that?”

  “I had some savings, too.”

  “What did your sister do with her money?”

  “She didn’t get insurance money. It was only good until we were eighteen. I had two weeks to go. That makes me suspicious, doesn’t it?”

  Nick’s phone beeped inside his room.

  “Can we still be friends?” Takis asked.

  “Let’s see how things go.”

  The phone beeped again.

  “I better check that,” Nick said, and went inside.

  He had a message—SUBJ: VATIS Takis—and attached to it was the official report on the Takis Fire. He left the phone on the counter and went back to the terrace.

  Takis was gone. Nick had hoped learning more about Takis would allay his suspicions. But, in fact, he’d now leapfrogged into being Nick’s prime suspect when his motive became so much clearer. He had many reasons to hate the village in his own right. He’d been ridiculed, and blamed for a fatal fire he didn’t start.

  Nick retrieved his phone to read about the Takis Fire.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  ATHINA WEDGED THE LAST TRAY of chopped vegetables into the refrigerator. “I’m so nervous!” she said to Ridi, sponge in hand, wiping down the counter.

  “Nervous? Why nervous?”

  “Because of the contest, silly! Why do you think?”

  “I’m not nervous, only
I hope your mother has her biggest night of all the nights tonight. She bought extra food.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. She could sell a million sardines and she’d still close the restaurant in a few days.”

  “Do you think there are still a million sardines in the sea?”

  “There won’t be tomorrow, if my mother sells them today.” The girl dried off a couple of knives and put them away. “You never said, Ridi, what you’ll do when my mother closes the restaurant. Will you look for another job?”

  “What another job? There’s no another job. Maybe I try to make my own job.”

  “Doing what?”

  He replied with his own question: “Why your mother want to close everything?”

  “She can’t serve food in winter without tables inside.”

  “The storage room is big enough for five tables.”

  “It’s a smelly old stables!”

  “I can clean it. Four coffees pay for the heat on a cold day. Everything else is profit. I make the calculations.”

  “You and your calculations! I hope you calculated my crown correctly.”

  Ridi gulped. It was show time. “We try it now?”

  “We better, because I need to get ready.”

  Ridi retrieved the crown from a cupboard. He had fit the Styrofoam skeleton to her head, but she had not yet seen it covered with stones, which added to his mounting anxiety over the end of the conversation he’d been practicing all day. What if she didn’t like it?

  He didn’t have to worry. As soon as he held it out for her to examine, the light hit it and the faux gems sparkled brighter than real ones.

  “Oh my God!” Athina exclaimed. “It’s more than beautiful! It’s more gorgeous than the original! Oh. My. God.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Do I like it? I love it! I hope it fits! I’ll shrink my head if it doesn’t!”

  Ridi pulled in a chair off the porch. “Sit here and let me test it on you.”

  Athina sat, and he set the crown on her head.

  “How does it look? Oh, I know it’s beautiful!”

  He moved it around, rocking it to test it with the weight of the stones. “It is too big,” he announced.