by Jack Ketchum
"I don't believe this. Is your name Helen?" I said.
"How did you know?" she said.
"Because I just said goodbye to your girlfriend," I said.
On the road you have many options. You can tell the bald truth about yourself or you can try on a pack of lies and see what fits. No one knows you so you're free to choose.
The truth always tires me less.
I told her what kind of woman her girlfriend was. I left nothing out. I even told her about the cocaine. Then she told me. That it was all daydreams. There had been a Greek boy back in Mykonos but he was Mary's, not Helen's and one day Mary just disappeared on both of them. As to Istanbul, that was impossible. By now Mary would be back in Dublin. She was due to start work the following day. That meant she'd stayed with me right to the last possible minute. There had never been any intention of going to Istanbul.
There had never been any midwifery either. She worked for a greengrocer.
I asked about the madhouse.
"She's never worked in one to my knowledge. But I'm afraid she does visit them now and then," she said.
It wasn't surprising. But I wondered how close I'd come to dying that night. I remembered her threat.
Helen told the truth, though, and told it nicely. We arranged for a bunk together and screwed our way across the Sea of Candia. She stayed with me in Athens and waited outside the hotel while I made my delivery. Her eyes were not blue and her skin was deeply tanned.
There was nothing transparent about her.
This is based on an actual incident or series of incidents. Though I was not stupid enough to try to deal coke or anything else during my travels in Greece. The character Mary later became the model for Lila, the beautiful crazed antagonist in my novel SHE WAKES. It was necessary in that book to leave out the coda on the ship with Helen but believe it or not, it's absolutely true.
And I was scared of Irishwomen for years afterwards.
THE LIAR won Swank's Best Fiction of the Year Award for 1979 and appeared in their annual Best of Swank collection in 1980.
THE FRENCH
We were down at Red Beach every day and that was where we saw them. But they kept to themselves and so did we, taking the sun until even the gin and grapefruit juice didn't help and it was necessary to go into the water, basting ourselves with sonnenmilch when we got out again and trying not to burn. When the heat got to be too much we would sit up into the sea breeze and put on sunglasses and eye the naked women. That was how we first noticed the French. When they were naked you didn't see the greasy silks and the camp dust. You just saw how good the women looked and how mean. I wanted one of them in a passive sort of way, not any one of them in particular but any of the dozen or so. Just a tough little French runaway with a cruel line to her jaw who would give me a good hard time for a while. But we both had Swedish women who were good women so that was out. The French were beautiful though.
Matala is a fine town but a very small town too, the kind of place that changes fast and visibly in high season. I had been there for a week, a nice easy life with the pound tucked away in my suitcase awaiting delivery. My man in Athens was in no hurry and neither was I. There was plenty of money. In Greece a couple of hundred dollars is plenty. And Matala was a good safe place to rest and occasionally sample the merchandise.
Or it was for a while.
But now the town seemed to be slowly turning ugly. Talk had it that the French were responsible, that the campground up the hill from the tourist beach was surly now and perhaps no longer safe. I didn't know about that and neither did Tommy. We had money so we didn't bother with the campgrounds. We were out of town a ways at the Minos and we each had a woman and we both drank a bit too much and all we knew of the French was that the men used mascara or coal and that the women were hard and beautiful and dressed in silks from India.
Besides, around the same time we started hearing rumors about the French, Tommy seemed to be trying to get us both killed every day, so evenings we had our own stories. There was nobody who looked milder than Tommy but with a few drinks in him there was nothing he liked better than the short fuse or bad odds.
He was a big Swede with a gentle voice and he seemed very mild and easy. But he was a very dangerous fellow and probably he was born bad yet that was the way he liked it and he was a very good friend to me. If Tommy got you into trouble and there was a way out of it and he could see it, you'd be out of trouble way before Tommy was, he'd be sure of that, and you could trust him.
But there was almost always trouble.
He came paddling over in a cheap plastic kayak one day and suggested that we use it to explore a cave he'd found. I could barely fit into the kayak and it was a precarious business getting into the cave and then, once inside, we turned the damned thing over and my breakfast was a lungful of salt water.
The next day he wanted to hunt for fossils. He knew I was interested in fossils and he had found a bed of them which he said was a very rich bed high up in the cliffs over Red Beach. The cliffs looked fine but once you were on them they were a catwalk of crumbling sandstone with the sea and the rocks far below and there were fossils all right but there was no way to get them down and hardly any way to get us down either.
We had no ropes and we were stark naked besides because Tommy had said what an easy climb it was and our descent was the worst two hours of my life. At nearly every step the sandstone fell away underfoot and I had to hold on to the vertical cliff-face like a spider to keep from going over. That was no good either because the rock above fell away too. I cursed the stuff and kept going, holding one terrific fossil stubbornly in one hand and the rock face with the other.
Tommy was out ahead of me all the way and I could see he was having a hard time of it too. The poor bastard had probably made one wrong turn and here we were, wondering if we'd survive. Then suddenly I felt something come loose beneath my hand and a stone the size of a grapefruit whacked me in the back of the head. I heard it splash into the water. Everything went bright yellow for a moment and then black and then bright yellow again. My vision cleared and I moved on. I didn't dare worry about my head. The important thing was to keep moving and get down and not to fall.
We reached bottom with hands and feet all bloody, trembling and sweating with fear. The back of my head felt raw and pulpy. I tumbled down on the sand and on my knees called Tommy every kind of asshole I knew in every language I knew while he stood there panting and grinning at me. And it was then that I saw Tommy's grin for the first time really. A cold clear light from the bottom of hell and merry to the very end. He noticed the back of my head and I watched his face change just as a wave of nausea hit me and I blacked out on the sand.
I wasn't out for long. When I awoke I saw one of the French girls bending over me. She had grey-green eyes and she was one of the sad and dangerous ones I'd been admiring.
"Your head is bleeding," she said.
"Cracked it on a rock," I said.
"Let me get some water."
Her voice was soft and strangely without expression or concern I thought but she returned with a jar of water and a towel and washed my head. She had been on the beach for days but I noticed that her skin was still fair. She had a beautiful body. She said nothing further. The wound was not a bad one so I thanked her and she smiled distractedly and then returned to her party. Tommy decided he had better get me back over the hill into town. He was all remorse.
"It's not your fault," I told him.
"It was my idea, wasn't it? I swear I never thought that climb would be so bad. It wasn't last time. I got turned around up there."
"Forget it."
"I feel terrible. Suppose you've got a concussion?"
"I haven't got a concussion. It's nothing. Save your breath for some more climbing. Hell, you're just trouble. I've known that all along. From now on I'm just going to know it a little better, that's all."
"You've got one hell of a bump there. But it's stopped bleeding, anyway. I'm really sorry, Be
n."
"Hell, Tommy, I had a fine time."
I had three quarters of a beautiful old sand dollar in a pound of matrix to show for my trouble and I had seen that crazy smile. I was very proud of the sand dollar and showed it around everywhere until a shop owner cited the Greek antiquities law and impounded it. With what I had in my room I couldn't complain.
I stayed out of the sun for a few days while my head was healing and Tommy kept me company. Our women had gone on to Hania to hike through the Gorge so we were alone most of the time. The Domestica was cheap in the marketplace so we did our drinking there and once in a while someone would come up off the tourist beach and join us for a glass and then go back down again. But the French were all over at Red Beach every day so we hardly saw them until the night of the roundup.
There was a place down by the sea where the calamari was well-prepared and always fresh so we liked to eat there. You could look out over the tiny harbor with the tourist beach beside it, then up to the cliffs filled with caves the backpackers had slept in for years until the town became famous for them and thus too crowded and too prone to drug traffic, so that the caves were off-limits now, and then out to the sea for the fast wonderful sunset. All along this strip of harbor there were restaurants but this one had the best food and the best view of all.
We were finishing dinner one night when six policemen walked into the restaurant just next to ours and looked around. It was damned surprising to see them there. You almost never saw a cop in town and certainly not six together. Matala had no police, it had to import them. But rumor had it that the night before there had been some stealing at the campgrounds and evidently the haul was a tidy one. Passports, travelers' checks, currency. Even a credit card or two.
And it was the French they suspected. There were six of them sitting in the restaurant. The police hauled them out of their chairs and demanded to see their passports. There was shouting and name-calling while the passports were produced and examined and then a few more police arrived with a few more French in tow.
Finally there were maybe thirty French and plenty of cops and they herded the whole bunch of them down to the beach and dumped their packs and suitcases out on the sand while we watched and drank our cognacs.
The cops were thorough. They went through everything. The French were furious but there was nothing they could do. Soon the beach looked more like the town dump than a tourist beach. The French were screaming and the police were screaming and the entire town watched from the restaurants and the shoreline.
I had never seen Greek justice before.
It wasn't pleasant, not for me.
But they were not going to miss. I looked for the girl who had washed my head for me and she was there. Every French national in town was there. The girl seemed to be trying hard to stay under control. She looked even better to me now than she had then. She was explaining something to a policeman and when she talked her long thin hands moved ceaselessly and when she stopped speaking they remained poised and trembling in front of her. She was slim and very beautiful.
It took over an hour but in the end they let the crowd pack up their gear and disperse while they pushed two sullen unhappy boys ahead of them up the hill to the paddywagon. Their silks were worn and dirty but one of them was a big fellow and you could see he was a leader of sorts, he had dignity, and that he had just lost a very important battle. I felt a bit sorry for him though it seemed to me that stealing in a foreign country was probably a very stupid thing to do. Then again moving drugs was probably not so brilliant either.
We finished the wine and walked over to the Dolphin where the liquor was cheaper and they had some old fifties rock music we liked to hear. It was the last place in town to close up at night and the best place to find a woman since it had the only dance floor. We walked by the paddywagon and saw the Frenchmen were inside and it looked like the cops were giving them a pretty hard time. The big fellow's face was hard and disdainful but the other boy was crying.
It was unpleasant to see so we just kept walking.
Inside the Dolphin the French were doing some serious drinking. We sat with friends and talked awhile. Meantime we watched them. Everybody did. You couldn't say they were getting much sympathy but they had been through a hell of a circus at the hands of the Greek police and there was some respect for that. Yannis, the barman, put a bottle of red wine on their table and told them the house was buying. "That everyone should be friends," he said.
"Yannis is crazy," Tommy said. "He's handing out free liquor to a pack of thieves."
"You can't say they're thieves, Tom," I said. "The thieves are outside in the wagon."
"Sure I can. Look at them. They all look guilty as hell."
He was right. In one way or another they all did look guilty. It was good to see that the girl was not among them.
I didn't like watching them there.
"It's a peace offering," I said.
"He's crazy. Probably just hoping to make it with one of the women."
"Maybe. But in that case maybe he's not so crazy."
"I guess. It's a pretty bad fucking group though."
"You think?"
"Oh yeah, sure. Very bad, very distasteful."
Then there was that smile again.
"But then what the fuck can you expect from a Frenchman," he said.
I mean he said it loudly.
And I guess I was a bit fuzzy with the cognac, a bit slow to react to what he'd done because while I was still laughing somebody leaned across the table and put a fist in Tommy's face. Then things got clear enough, though because there were three of them, two on Tommy and one on me and we were suddenly very busy.
Now my man wasn't a big man. He was small and wiry and mad as hell, so mad that he was easy. He swung once, wide and high. I pulled in tight and let him have it in the kidneys. He howled and went down. Then I turned to Tommy.
They both were on him but he was doing fine. They had made the mistake of grappling with him instead of standing back and slugging and that was to the good. Tommy had big arms and hands and one man was hurting bad with Tommy's arm around his neck while the other had Tommy in a similar hold from behind. But his hold wasn't working. The man didn't have the power. Tommy did.
When he'd hurt the first man sufficiently he let him drop and then turned in the other man's arms and for a while they looked like lovers standing there until Tommy broke the Frenchman's hold, took one step backward and slapped a fast right to his nose. The nose cracked and started leaking blood all down his mouth and chin. The man sagged into a chair and threw back his head to stop the bleeding and it was over.
Except for Yannis hollering.
Except for the police whistles outside.
There was nothing to do but run.
"You dumb sonovabitch," I said. "Do you know what I'm holding?"
"What?"
"A pound of coke."
We ran. It was late and the streets behind the Dolphin were empty. I didn't hear them behind us but I didn't want to assume anything. Maybe the French had got the blame, maybe not. There was no sense taking chances. We ran steadily and quietly. Pretty soon we could see the Minos up ahead.
"I think we made it," I said. "Let's walk the rest of the way. I don't want to upset the neighbors."
"Okay."
Greeks are frugal people. On a moonless night a Greek country road is one of the darkest, loneliest places you'll ever see. But by Greek standards our landlord was a very affluent man and he had a lantern burning all night long. It hung from a tree in front of the hotel. There was somebody under the tree. Somebody just standing there, not moving. We strained to see. And then we did see. Something had told me it wasn't the police. I couldn't be that unlucky. We kept walking.
It was the girl—the French girl. I was very relieved. I said hello and listening to her voice I had that strange feeling again, it was that same vacant voice I remembered. She spoke just to me as though Tommy wasn't there at all. I couldn't tell what to make
of her.
"May I come inside?" she said. "May I come in with you?"
I looked at Tommy. "Sure," I said.
"Is there a problem?" Tommy asked her.
"No," she said. "No problem."
We went inside. Tommy and I had adjoining rooms so we said goodnight at the door as though nothing had happened at the Dolphin at all and Tommy went to his room and I went to mine with this strange French girl on what was probably one of the strangest nights of my life.
"Were you looking for me?" I asked.
"Yes."
"How did you find me?"
She shrugged. "You've been here a few weeks. You are known."
Her voice was still empty, impossible to figure. But it seemed to me now that she was lying to Tommy before when she'd said no problem.
"Are you in trouble?"
"No."
"Is that the truth?"
"Of course."
She sat down on my bed. She ran her forefinger over the clean course linen sheets.
"You've noticed me before, haven't you," she said.
"Oh yes, I've noticed you."
"Do you want to sleep with me?"
Why now? I should have asked her but she looked at me and it was the first time since the day on the beach that I saw her eyes up close which were large eyes and beautiful and direct, not like the evasive gestures or the distant unresponsive voice.
So I told her the truth.
"Yes I do."
The eyes lowered again. There was no smile. She pulled the thin blouse over her head and her breasts were bare beneath and stood slowly and pulled off the loose-fitting jeans, which were so worn and shabby-looking and she was naked there too. Her body was wonderful in the lamplight.