A weird moan sounded in his ears. It was a moment before he understood that it came from him. He felt it gathering like a wave within his body, swelling to crest past his lungs and his heart, rising through his throat, bursting from the scar of his lips. Again and again it rose and each time the wild stricken moan broke free.
He felt Caliope's hands pulling him to his feet. She led him from the parlor down the hall to the bathroom. She snapped on the light. His torn eye burned beneath the glare.
He stood mute and unmoving while she washed him.
He felt her fingers, the warm wet cloth soaking his bruises, softly wiping away the crusts of dried blood, dabbing the sore gums from which several of his teeth had been driven. She patted his cheek with cotton pads of peroxide and covered the torn lid and socket of his eye with a square of gauze that she taped to his temple and the bridge of his nose. When she finished, as if he were a child, she ran a brush through his thick tangled hair. He saw then with a strange shaken distress that she was crying.
She left the bathroom and he stood for a moment uncertain where to go. He walked back up the hall to the parlor. He bent once more over his son's bed, reaching out his hand to touch him, trying to console his anguish in the feel of the boy's flesh.
He heard Caliope return. She came to stand beside him at the bed. He saw her face filled now with a cold hard strength.
"Raise the boy and take him," she said, and the words came quick and sharp. "I have packed his clothing and shirts and trousers for you. I will give you blankets to wrap around him. You can catch a taxi for the airport on the boulevard."
He stared at her numbly, uncomprehending.
"Will you move!" she cried softly. She thrust her clenched fist toward him. "Here is the money for your tickets, enough besides to house and feed you both for a while. Hurry now!"
For a grieving moment he thought she had impaled him with a barbarous jest. But in the light from the hall he saw the sheaf of wrinkled bills in her fingers.
She shook her head, savagely rejecting his questions, motioning to him to raise Stavros. At that instant a wild shriek of betrayal rang through the flat, a fearful scream of loss from her mother's room.
"Hurry!" Caliope cried. "I have locked her in! Go now before she wakes the dead!"
Then everything was swept aside in his frenzy to flee. He stuffed the money into his wallet. He held the boy in his arms while Caliope wrapped the blankets tightly around him, folding the corners about his head to shield his face. He moved to the suitcase by the door and remembered his daughters. He made a mute appeal to Caliope and carrying Stavros, hurried down the hall to their room. As he passed the old lady's room she began to beat with her bony fists against the wood of the door.
He bent over his sleeping daughters, seeing their blonde and lovely faces serene and untroubled. He tenderly kissed each little girl farewell.
He hurried back to the hall where Caliope waited with the suitcase by the door. He wavered, looking toward the old lady's room, hearing her crazed howls.
"I can handle her," Caliope said. "She will not let us starve. It will be no worse than before."
He moved to open the door and Stavros stirred in his arms.
"Wait!" Caliope cried. He turned back and she reached out slowly and pulled aside the blanket covering her son's face. She bent and for a long moment kissed the boy's lips. When she rose, she turned away so Matsoukas could not see her face.
He stared at her back and was afraid to touch her or to speak. He turned then, picked up the suitcase, and holding Stavros tightly in his arms, he fled down the stairs.
With their tickets secure in his pocket he sat in the huge airport terminal, in one of the armchairs before the great glass windows that ran from the ceiling to the floor. Beyond the windows the moon was gone and the night was charcoal-black.
He carried Stavros in his arms. The boy's face was visible within the folds of blanket, and in the cold gray terminal light, his cheeks were the bleak shade of a tomb. His fingers, like small brittle twigs, hung stiffly close to his lips. He slept in a strange deep slumber.
Now, in the hour of their departure, Matsoukas could feel no jubilation. He endured only a resignation and despair. He pressed his cheek against the folds of the blanket. He rested and heard the heavy slow beating of his heart. The sounds of the terminal, the loudspeaker announcing flights, faded to a drone.
When he raised his head again there had been a shift in the night, the charcoal-blackness screened to the shade of putty. He could sense a faint stirring in the earth, areas of mist shepherded, trees emerging dimly from the pitch. Even as he watched, a series of dark and gray hillocks sprang from the ground.
Their flight was announced and he rose with Stavros to walk to the gate. Raw pain and weariness spliced together in his body.
He moved from the main terminal under an archway and down a long corridor. In each alcove he passed, the long windows showed the altering sky, a partition of the shades of darkness and light, a slow veiling of the stars.
He had never before seen so clearly the ritual of the dawn. The first faint light like a dry and clean host assaulting the minions of darkness. A quiver swept his flesh.
When he reached the gate to their plane he stood with Stavros before the windows looking out across the field. The huge formless shape of their plane was still hinged to the darkness around the terminal.
Then the light, slowly, ravenously, gained dominance. Shreds of nightclouds, swarthy and grimed, were plucked like struggling chickens and silently butchered. The dark grays and deep purples gave way to faint blues. And far out at the edge of the earth, no more than a frail orange glow on the horizon, he saw the first trace of the sun.
His breath caught sharply in his throat. He raised Stavros high in his arms so that the blanket fell away. The breaking dawn swept the boy's dark cheeks with a flickering warmth. He stirred and opened his eyes.
The corona of the sun ascended. Matsoukas stretched out his hand and felt the burnished glow soothe his palm and fingers. A wild excitement tore his body.
And then the head, the lustrous scorching head of the sun broke over the curve of the earth. The last shadows hurled away, the final dull patches of night fled screaming. Like a fierce firebird the sun swooped. It rubied the fuselages of planes, crimsoned the runways and hangars, incarmined the conclave of buildings, reddened the spirals of the tower. It blazed across their plane. The wings flushed scarlet, swelling suddenly with a gleaming and fearful power.
The sun burst across the window where they stood, a radiance like a thousand rainbows streaming through the glass, sealing Stavros and himself in a blazing glitter.
Their flight was boarding and he hurried to the tunnel. Through the seams and folds of the bellows, he still felt the sun, fetal and molten, spinning and whirling through his blood.
His heart cried out. He felt the tears burst from his eyes, fitfully from the torn lid, jubilant and grateful tears. They fell in specks of flame upon the blanket of his son.
In this way, crying and holding Stavros tightly in his arms, he boarded the wild-winged plane.
###
HARRY MARK PETRAKIS/ BIO
Harry Mark Petrakis is the author of twenty-three books, short-stories, and essays, and has been nominated twice for the National Book Award. His books include the 'A Dream of Kings' (1966), set in Chicago, which was a New York Times bestseller. It was published in twelve foreign editions and was made into a motion picture (1969) starring Anthony Quinn. He has won the O. Henry Award, and received awards from Friends of American Writers, Friends of Literature, and the Society of Midland Authors. He was the Nikos Kazantzakis Chair in Modern Greek Studies at San Francisco State University and the McGuffy Visiting Lecturer at Ohio University. In 2004, the American College of Greece in Athens presented him with an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree.
http://harrymarkpetrakis.com
BOOKS BY HARRY MARK PETRAKIS
NOVELS
Lion at my Heart<
br />
The Odyssey of Kostas Volakis
A Dream of Kings
In the Land of Morning
The Hour of the Bell
Nick the Greek
Days of Vengeance
Ghost of the Sun
Twilight of the Ice
The Orchards of Ithaca
The Shepherds of Shadows
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Pericles on 31st Street
The Waves of Night
A Petrakis Reader - 27 Stories
Collected Stories
Legends of Glory and other Stories
MEMOIRS AND ESSAYS
Stelmark - A Family Recollection
Reflections - a Writers Life- A Writers Work
Tales of the Heart (Dreams and Memories of a Lifetime)
BIOGRAPHIES/HISTORIES
The Founder’s Touch: The Story of Motorola's Paul Galvin
Henry Crown: The Life and Times of the Colonel
Reach Out: The Story of Motorola and its People
A Dream of Kings Page 15