A Dream of Kings

by Harry Mark Petrakis

  When he turned to pick up his shirt, a seething rage trembled the flesh of her cheeks.

  "Go then, goddam you!" she cried.

  He made an effort to touch her and she pulled savagely away. "Go, goddam you, go! Don't expect me to be waiting when you come crawling back!"

  He looked at her in mute torment.

  "I do not expect you to wait for me if you don't wish to wait," he said. "You are free to choose any man you want."

  "I will choose ten men!" she laughed hoarsely. "Twenty lovers if I wish! I will find out what real men are like!"

  He saw before his eyes the whipping away of love. He balanced wearily on one leg to pull on his trousers.

  She leaped naked from the bed and swung her peignoir violently across her shoulders. She held the front tightly overlapping as if suddenly she could not endure being naked before him.

  "Do you call yourself a man?" she cried fiercely. "That is a laugh. My dearest husband was ten times more a man than you! He could satisfy me!"

  He looked up from tying his shoes, stung by the unfairness of her accusation.

  "Perhaps that is why the poor devil is underground," he said.

  She waved that aside. "I know you now!" she shouted vengefully. "You are a pervert! You rouse a woman and leave her unsatisfied!"

  He started for the door picking up his coat on the way. He looked one final time around the room that he recalled as a nest, a warm and gilded sanctuary. For a bereaved moment he mourned the death of dreams.

  "Pervert!" she shrieked. "The arrogance to ask me for money! I would not give a soiled dime! Pervert! Fairy! Queer!"

  He shook his head in wonder before her fury and opened the door leading to the bakery kitchen. "I have loved you and still love you," he said sadly. "I only do what I must do." He paused and sighed. "Pray my beloved, to Zeus," he said slowly. "Pray to Zeus and perhaps he will send you Apollo for no mortal man can fill your insatiable tank."

  He started down the stairs rubbing the cold hard dice in his pocket.

  Within the back room at Falconis', it was a clockless and hourless night. The light shone hard over the railed table, there were cracks in the boards, and webbed darkness in the corners of the room. The men around the table bent and swayed under the churning and snapping dice. Their thighs bumped, their fingers trembled, and they moved by quick rotation to the toilet to empty their burning bladders.

  Matsoukas was ahead about fifty dollars, playing with the fair dice. He waited for his chance to use the Busters, to make three passes in a row doubling his money each time, a hallowed moment when the tension of the game stirred the players to a fever.

  An old man cackled the dice in his dry and withered palm. He threw with a brittle snapping motion of his wrist. The dice spit snake eyes. The old man groaned. The dice passed on.

  The hands and fingers of the players swept into the beam of light and fleeced and shuffled the dough. A rat-faced man threw a four, gathered the dice and threw again, hurling a miss-out. The dice passed on.

  Matsoukas made small and medium wagers, winning a few dollars with the fair dice, playing cautiously, girding for his big throw. He kept a wary eye on the house man who drifted around the table tabbing the game. He felt the Busters in his pocket weighing down his clothing. He made a hasty trip into the foul toilet to stand over the bowl stinking of urine and desperation.

  He returned to the table and played for another hour. He knew he could not delay ripping in the Busters much longer without becoming sick. A dark hot bile kept bubbling in his belly. With his fingers shaking he counted his money into two neat piles, one of seventy-five dollars and the other of a hundred and twenty-five dollars. He reached slowly in his pocket and palmed the Busters. When the dice reached him he shoved in the larger amount of the money and withdrew his hand from his pocket. He picked up the fair dice and deftly switched them with the Busters in his palm.

  "I am all out for action!" he cried. "My hundred-twenty-five bucks of front money begs to be doubled! Come on and fade Matsoukas!"

  When he was covered he raised his hand and felt a wild quiver down his back. Each movement of his arm seemed an incalculable burden. He threw the Busters with a groan. The four and trey snapped up in response. His heart gave a jump and he reached quickly for the dice.

  "Two-hundred and fifty stays," he cried. "Keep your pretzels and peanuts in your pockets! Raise your pokes and fade my bet!"

  Once more he was covered and once more with wild abandon he threw. The seven clicked up again.

  "One more time!" Matsoukas cried. "Are you high rollers or squips? Don't squawk when you crap out! This game is a steeplechase and I have five hundred hurdles!"

  He picked up the dice and rattled them in his ringers waiting for his money to be faded. He felt as though his heart were a worm, stirring beneath a rock. He threw the Busters, saw them whirl and blur, strike the rail, hurl off to churn to a stop. The third natural made several men curse. A sigh swept like wind through his body and he reached quickly for the money and the dice, the fair dice waiting to be switched in his palm. He pushed in the second pile of money containing seventy-five dollars. He would rip the Busters out, throw fair, and quit.

  Suddenly two of the men across the table from Matsoukas were shoved aside. The cold twisted face of the Turk, Youssouf, appeared between them. His big hairy hand reached down to snap up the Busters. Matsoukas cried out and felt his breath twist like a knife up his throat.

  Youssouf grinned at Matsoukas and bent forward slightly to come under the light. He examined the dice. A weird tuneless hiss broke from his lips. "Get Falconis!" he said harshly to a man at the table. The man scurried off. The Turk looked at Matsoukas.

  Matsoukas felt the moment black and long, coiled like a serpent about his head. The players at the table looked from Youssouf to him. And shame carved a wound in his flesh.

  He heard the door open and Falconis appeared at the table, his face pale and tense. The Turk motioned toward Matsoukas and then rattled the dice in his hand. With a droll and voracious grin he hurled them across the table. The four and three snapped up again.

  "Busters!" the Turk cried fiercely. "The whoreson Greek using Busters!"

  An angry hiss and mutter broke from the players around the table. One man cursed furiously, another shoved Matsoukas from behind, and a third man spit at him. A trickle of the saliva dripped down his cheek.

  "Matsoukas! Matsoukas!" Falconis said in a horrified voice. "How could you do such a thing?"

  Matsoukas tried to muster a defense. The words died in a futile little moan at his lips. He slowly pushed the money he had won to the center of the table to be apportioned among the players. He looked back silently at the distraught Falconis.

  "Get out, Matsoukas!" Falconis cried shrilly. "Never come back in here again for any play! I erase the cursed debt you owe me! I want nothing from an animal like you except never to set eyes on you again!"

  Youssouf made an angry sweep with his arm and caught the owner's shoulder in a wild hard grip.

  "Goddam, no!" he said fiercely.

  "I have forbidden him ever to return," Falconis said helplessly. "He will never be able to play in any gambling house again. That is his punishment."

  "Goddam, no!" Youssouf cried and the veins in his neck swelled with blood. "Goddam, no! I have waited too long for this moment!"

  Falconis looked trembling at the Turk. The men around the table grew still. Falconis tried to speak again but terror had muted his tongue. He stared at Matsoukas in despair.

  "Let the gorilla try," Matsoukas said, and his voice did not seem his own, the words born of a strange and weary lament. "I have it coming and he has the right to try."

  He turned toward the alcove and walked out the door. He moved down the narrow hall leading to the basement. He felt his body suspended between resignation and despair. He heard the Turk coming behind him.

  They faced each other in the shadowed basement, a single large low-ceilinged room bricked on all sides except for
the door through which they had entered. No sound from the world above penetrated here, and no cry of torment or pain could be heard in any of the rooms upstairs. It was an anteroom of Hades, the only light a single yellow bulb swinging in a metal shade.

  Matsoukas untied his shoes and kicked them off to one side. He took off his jacket and loosened and removed his tie. Youssouf had stripped to the waist and his great muscled arms and powerful shoulders were smeared with the same green heavy oil that glistened on his bald boar's head. His huge bare toes clung webbed to the dirt floor.

  They began warily to circle one another. Matsoukas flexed his arms but could not shake the lassitude, the weakness that foraged through his body.

  The Turk lashed a searing kick at his groin. Matsoukas leaped aside barely evading the hard cutting toes.

  They came slowly together again. The Turk charged with a grunt and Matsoukas spun away and landed a wild chop across the Turk's neck, feeling the huge boned head quiver, a small spit of air hiss from his lips. At arms length they jabbed and chopped, stiff fingers and knuckles stabbing for nerve centers of soft flesh.

  Youssouf charged again trying to drive Matsoukas against the wall. Matsoukas held him off with a savage flurry of blows that stopped his advance and yet could not drive him back. Their bodies rammed together, their fingers flailing to lock one another's arms, freezing their limbs in a wild clawed grip.

  Matsoukas strained and heaved for an edge, blood bursting through his veins. He cried out fiercely seeking the fire and power in his body, but his flesh quivered weakly and would not respond. His bones creaked and bent to snap. He felt his spirit wavering, his strength falling away like fragments broken from a piece of crushed rock. A tearing despair leaped through his loins and he felt the Turk gaining. Even as he was driven to his knees, his arms torn aside, he felt his heart surrender like a corpse.

  The Turk beat him down with a wild rocking blow. His head shuddered and fingers of shock stabbed through his temples. He tried to rise from his knees and the Turk struck him again. His senses fled shrieking. He swayed and waited with pain plummeting through his body to his testicles. A frantic thread of spittle, slow and thick as honey, ran from the corner of his mouth.

  Another terrible blow burst in his throat. He felt the spurt of his blood, teeth shattered in his mouth. His agony passed into numbness and he felt himself in a sea of foaming billows.

  He huddled palsied and shattered and through his terror saw the enraged Turk's foot rise and arc and he could not move to avoid it. The ridge of toes caught his cheek, split the flesh, one toe gouging the soft pulp of his eye. A flame burst in his head and he felt himself falling. His cheek struck the cold damp earth and he burrowed in it like a mole. He tasted kinship in that moment to an animal being slaughtered. The yellow lamp shone down with a cold and unblinking light. And with a sudden strange calm he knew that the Turk was going to kill him.

  He watched him approach. He could see the high broad ridges of the Turk's body, crags of rock and clumps of brush. The Turk crouched beside him and caught him by the hair. His head was yanked off the dirt and the Turk's arm coiled around his throat to strangle off the air that held him to life.

  "Let me live," Matsoukas whispered.

  The Turk paused and bent closer to hear.

  "Let me live," Matsoukas pleaded, and the words bubbled from his bloodied lips. "For the sake of my son."

  Youssouf wavered. His arm continued to lock and press but the fingers trembled. His breath came in short hoarse gasps and the scent of oil and sweat and hate raged suddenly in a fearful struggle against something within him. Matsoukas hung in the thunder of each heartbeat. Then Youssouf moaned and released him, thrusting his head back to the dirt. The Turk swung off his heels and rose to his feet and stepped away. And Matsoukas heard his soul cry out.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  He entered their flat and moved slowly from the hall into the parlor. The light from the windows shredded the bars of his son's bed, cutting strips of shadow and moonglow across his small blanket-covered body.

  He gripped the bars and lowered himself painfully to the floor. His body ached fearfully, riots of pain razing his flesh. The socket of his wounded eye flicked with fire. He felt a segment of the torn lid congealed with blood so it would not close but remained hinged apart.

  He heard steps from the bedroom and after a moment Caliope came up beside him.

  "You're early," she said. "It's not daylight yet."

  He wanted to tell her to return to bed but he could not assemble the words. If he opened his mouth he feared he would cry out.

  "Be careful you don't wake him," she said. "He was restless all evening."

  She came closer and he turned his face away. She seemed to sense that something was wrong. He motioned her aside with a gesture of his hand.

  The moon emerged from behind a cloud and shone through the windows. He felt her hand on his shoulder, tugging his body around. For an instant he fought her and then resigned himself. He turned his face to the light and stared up at her seeing her cheeks a blurred oval suspended against the shadow and mist of the room.

  She drew her breath in sharply. He looked back toward the sleeping figure of his son.

  "What happened?" she whispered. "In the name of God, what happened to you?"

  "I fought the Turk," he said slowly.

  "Why?"

  He thought of rising and fleeing but his arms and legs were a ponderous burden that he could not lift.

  "Why?" she asked again.

  He imagined her watching him, the black cold hollows about her eyes.

  "I cheated," he said, and the words burned his tongue. "I cheated."

  There was a moment of stunned silence and then she laughed. Yet it was not really laughter because there was no mirth in her voice, only a savage expelling of air.

  "Not you!" she said mockingly and he felt the naked glitter of her eyes. "Not you with your uncompromising virtue, your lofty sense of honor, your consecrated ethics at gambling. Not you!"

  He did not answer. He put his finger to the socket of his eye and felt the torn lid shoot sparks of pain through his body.

  She moved from the bed. She walked to one of the windows and stood for a moment with her back to him. The curtain stirred before her, a ripple of wind passing down the filmy cloth. She turned and came back to loom dark and vengefully above him.

  "Are you becoming human then?" she asked. "Are you beginning finally to walk the earth with us poor mortals? Are you starting to understand the weaknesses of our flesh?"

  He felt the first stirring of cold wind from a forest of black cypresses, a wind carrying the chill of damp blossoms and wet soil. He leaned forward wearily and rested his cheek against the bars of the bed.

  "Ten years," she said and he trembled at the fury rising from the marrow of her bones, "Ten years of living with you, sleeping with you, watching you indulge in the absurd ritual of your days and nights. You lodged in some place of rarefied air where only Matsoukas could breathe, a land denied the ordinary slob."

  Stavros fluttered his fingers on the pillow and Matsoukas reached between the bars and drew the corner of the blanket gently over his hand.

  "God, why did I marry you? Why of all the women in the world you might have graced with your studding virtues and your incomparable temperament did it have to be me? What screw of chance decided that stroke?"

  He tried to close his eyes but the torn lid would not shut. The eye stared unblinking at the pale glimmer of moonlight through the curtains.

  "If you knew how much I hated you," she whispered. "O God, I think hate has kept me alive. Even when I lie beneath your heaving loins with your matchless cock buried in my body, even then I think my hate is most of the passion and I wish my body were a great claw to draw you into me and devour you, destroy you."

  A vision of her face in their moments of love came to him. He recalled the large luminous glitter of her eyes and a shudder swept his body.

  "But I was not always
that way," she said and for an instant her voice wavered. "I loved you when we married. I thought you were full of grace and strength. I did not know then you would move through life like a bird scattering shit where you wished, keeping yourself untouched, unblemished, unsoiled."

  He felt her words hooking his flesh, gouging his wounds, probing for his soul.

  "Even the boy, God help him, was always yours," she said. "He was your son. Only your love could save him and nourish him. I was only his mother, only the woman who held him inside her body for the months before his birth, only the woman who brought him into the world in a tide of blood and bile. When they washed him off, cleansed his body of the slime, then he was your son."

  The words hissed from her mouth, sharpened and flung from the taut tendons of her rage.

  "I think sometimes you were to blame! I think you believed he was the son of a God and the Gods you revere as your relations decided to smite your arrogance. They covered him with a cloud to punish you, a madman, a bastard, a fool!"

  He moved his trembling hand and the soft strands of the boy's hair slipped beneath his fingers. The scalp was warm. He touched it lightly, embracing the delicate crown.

  "And right to the end you indulge your absurd dreams," she said. "You tear about like a maddened animal, an insane fool seeking to carry a dying son to some land of dreams. You are mad and this dream is the maddest one of all, this dream of flight with a dying child."

  He shook his head. The light beyond the window swayed again. He wanted to cry out but he could not speak.

  "He is dying, Matsoukas," she said, and for the first time he heard clearly the cry of her anguish. "The boy is dying. Whether here or in Greece, he will die soon. Not even you can avert that. He is dying and no power on earth can save him from that death."

  "No," he said, and the word came torn from his lips. "No."

  "Yes!" she said, "Goddam you, yes! Accept that truth and there might be hope for you to join the mortals. He is dying. He will die soon. Flight is useless."

  "No," he said helplessly. "No."

  "Yes! Yes! Yes!" she cried. She came closer and he tensed waiting for her to strike him. "Bastard! Madman! Fool! Yes! Yes! Yes!"