“Charity for one of the last devoted,” he croaks, surprising us with his English. Louise digs into her pocket and withdraws two euros to drop in the cup.
“Pretty girl.” He stares up admiringly, squinting even though his dirty face is covered in shade. “I’m disabled.” He pats the empty area of his lost limb. “I got this in a long battle with s-, s-, s- . . .”
I try to imagine him as a soldier, thirty years younger, before he found religion, when he still had hope and bipedal aspirations. I want to help fill in his stutter: S, S, S—. Cyprus? Syria? Sin?
“Circulation,” he finally utters. “They had to remove it. I had no choice. But do you think they cared how it left me?” He nods toward the gray monastery high above us. “Do you plan to visit the relics up there?”
“Not today,” Louise says. “Is it worth visiting?”
He looks like he’s tasted sour meat. “No,” he spits. “I belonged to their order once. But they threw me out. Do you know why?” We don’t have a clue. But in my years of working with homeless addicts, I’ve learned to park my expectations very close to the sidewalks of mistreatment and neglect. Right or wrong, the blame always lies in the hands of the door shutter, not in the face upon which the door is slammed. “Because I alone followed the rules of the Lord.” He taps his remaining leg, and his black toes wiggle adroitly like spoiled pets. “I wouldn’t put up with their sins. Each one rotten, pretending he is a servant of God. But do you know what god they serve in that castle? Money.” The word reminds him of his cup and he jiggles it at me, Louise’s contribution adding a tinny maraca. “You haven’t given.”
I open my wallet and tuck a five note into his instrument. His face beams.
“Don’t look for the righteous in that monastery. Like wildflowers, you will find them in plainer sight. They tossed me out, a cripple, to fend for myself. All they are is wicked landowners, running every kind of atrocity, and they invent new sins each year. Can you believe they can still think of new ones? They do, and no one can stop them. New sins all the time!” His mouth is a sucking industrial toilet. I assume he’s going to spit, as if on their memory, but he’s merely clearing his throat. He reaches behind his back to collect a bottle of water, the seal breaking as he turns the cap. Someone cares for him, carpools him here for his afternoon playing the madman for tips, and ensures he has fresh drinking water. We say good-bye, and he screams after us, “It should end with Jude, not John! Do yourself a favor! Tear the last pages out! It’s a wicked end!”
“I was beginning to think there weren’t any beggars on Patmos,” Louise says. “I passed a whole caravan of refugees on my way up here, just huddled together in the rocks by the port. It was the saddest thing. Women were holding on to their kids like life vests. But they weren’t begging. I wonder where they’ll go.”
“I’m guessing not to the monastery.”
“That’s something you could do, if you’re still looking for ways to help.” She jabs her finger in my arm, the black cross tattoo faded under the lowest knuckle.
I smile tightly. “You, um, don’t actually believe in Revelation, do you? You’re not a real Christian. What I’m getting at is—”
“What?” Louise gasps, as if I’ve accused her of putting cigarette butts in the man’s donation cup. “Oh my god, Ian, no.” I enjoy getting a rise out of her. The harshness of her voice lifts, and a tiny season of unreliable weather breaks through the merciless pressure front of her control. “Although there are times I wish I could. It solves so much, doesn’t it?” She stops on the road and looks at me. Her skin is the color of boat sails when the last of the sun hits them, a hazy desert pink. “My parents were big into religion. The extreme born-again variety. And I remember at fourteen, I sat them down and told them I didn’t believe, that being born once was cool enough for me, and I wouldn’t go to church anymore. I thought there would be a fight, I even had a bag packed. But they took it amazingly well. We hugged. It was fine. They loved me. I loved them. They went to church and I stayed home. They were really wonderful parents.” Her brown eyes tighten and she turns her head to the traffic winding up the valley. A tinted tourist bus stops and reverses by the gates to the cave. The cup begins to rattle with insistence. “But the very night I told them and every night until I left for college, I locked my bedroom door before I went to sleep.”
“Why?” I try to imagine a loving Kentucky family where its children ritually barricade their doors before bed. “What were you afraid of?”
“It was so long ago, I don’t even know. Weird, isn’t it? I was weird. Although they were the ones who believed in demons, so we were all a bit deranged. Most families are, aren’t they? Weird?” She pulls my arm to keep us moving. I fight the urge to kiss her; she hasn’t locked her bedroom door on me.
“You can’t blame me for asking,” I say. “You have a cross tattoo.”
“Oh, it’s a design I call a postcollege mistake,” she says rubbing the knuckle. “I don’t know what I was thinking. It could have been a diamond or the face of Jerry Garcia on a different day. Maybe I wanted to own my past, take it up as mine. But that’s just putting an adult spin on a stupid decision. I’ve been a lot of people between the one you knew in college and now. Not all of them sensible. It’s a souvenir of one of them, I suppose.” She studies the error inked on her finger. “You see all these crosses and almost forget it’s a sign of public execution. It might as well be an electric chair.” She laughs. “We’re going swimming, right? Let’s hit Petra Beach. It’s close, and there’s a nice taverna there that Sonny took me to.”
“Where did you park your bike?”
Louise and I met at the cave. I crept off this morning under the guise of visiting Charlie on Domitian. I can’t convincingly report on his condition to Sonny if I didn’t clear a few hours alone. What did he ask me to tell her? That he’s still upset and not ready to come home? Instead of Domitian, I went to a restaurant in Kampos and ordered a breakfast of hummus and eggs. It felt human to be able to choose anything I wanted on the menu without worrying over the cost. I texted him while eating: MANAGE TO GET AWAY? No answer. YOU AND I ARE HANGING OUT RIGHT NOW. YOU’RE EXTREMELY SORRY FOR BEING A DICK. No answer. I texted him again as I paid the bill. WAITING FOR WORD. IN THE MEANTIME, I MIGHT GIVE MYSELF A RAISE. I grab my phone now to see if Charlie has responded. The screen is just a series of my sent messages, glowing green thought bubbles without a single reply.
“I’m over by the rock wall,” Louise says. She casts her eye down at my phone, and when I cover it with my hand, she smirks. “Is it Charlie?”
“I saw him earlier,” I say.
“I’m guessing he didn’t apologize,” she replies. I shrug vaguely. Lying to Louise feels a degree beyond my duties. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone behave like he did.”
“He’s never like that. I think he’s just been overwhelmed with work. The stress was getting to him.”
“Overwhelmed.” She test-drives the word and finds it lacking horsepower. “When you’re overwhelmed, do you lash out at those you presumably care about?”
“Well, he got punched for it, didn’t he?”
Louise puffs her cheeks. “I didn’t know Miles had it in him. I was actually impressed.” She rubs her neck. “Not impressed. Startled is more like it. I was under the impression that Miles couldn’t squash a mosquito, not unless Sonny was in danger of being bitten.”
“You think he’s obsessed with her?”
“No doubt about it,” she says. “But who cares? Is it so awful to be infatuated with someone who doesn’t love you back? He didn’t deserve to be attacked like that. None of us did.”
I so badly want to confide in her that it was all a ruse, that it was simply Charlie’s tactic for creating a rift, with the additional benefit of dropping Miles from his constant periphery. But I keep my mouth shut as we approach her bike.
“I asked you the night you arrived if you thought Sonny was happy,” she says. “Do you still think she i
s?”
“It was one fight. I’m sure they’ve had plenty. It seems to be their way.” Louise nods, but the length of her stare, into worlds beyond the ground at our feet, indicates she doesn’t agree. “You obviously don’t think she’s happy.”
“I can’t shake the feeling that she’s always performing for him. Not as in former actress. Fine, she’s dramatic. I mean in a deeper way. Maybe performing for herself too. Telling herself this is what she wants, this is the best she can hope for.”
“And by this, you mean Charlie.”
“It’s like she’s much realer without him. And when he enters the room a light hides behind a door and all you get is this faint incandescence. Charlie doesn’t hide for her. Look how he behaves. He has the luxury of acting however he wants, and since he does, we can judge him by it. A hummingbird really does hum, you know.”
“What does that mean? Is it a Kentucky expression?”
Louise stops at her bike, resting her hip against the black seat cushion.
“Most people turn out to be what they seem like. They usually aren’t endless labyrinths of surprise.”
I try to process how this depressing view of humanity applies to us. What do I seem like to Louise? Is she the only one allowed to be so many other people? For as smart as Louise is, she views the world too neatly. In her absolutism, there’s no room for the in-between. Or maybe she feels that certain people need to earn their mistakes.
“I think you’re reading too much into one bad night. And if we were all spectacularly ourselves all the time I’m pretty certain we’d be unbearable.”
“We both know why she won’t leave him,” she says, patting my arm. “Just like you won’t.”
“Louise.” Silence, a bird screaming in the bushes, and then an answer. “You’ve made your point. I could do something more fulfilling with my life. I get it. Can we please move on?” I’m almost ready to see her onto the ferry back to Athens if it provides a moratorium on these lectures on my moral inferiority. I could go on disappointing her from the distance of an ocean.
She races to explain herself. “All I’m saying is that he wasn’t so nice to you last night either. And you’ve only been here a few days.”
“I should stop drinking. I really don’t have a problem.” I sound exactly like a man with a problem. Admittedly, my hangovers are starting to ravage my mornings—not enough to leave me bed-wrecked, but to the degree that my brain cells are like passengers stranded at an airport, wasting hopeless hours until the weather lifts. “It’s just the last of vacation for me. In a day or two I’ll be working full-time for Charlie and I’ll be going to bed at a reasonable hour.”
“What are you doing for him? You never said.” She pushes her bike off its stand and glides her leg over the seat.
“Support and development.” Those duties seem so vague and vacuous, like code words for “hired friend,” that I blush. Louise examines me, her crooked teeth trailing across her bottom lip. “And general office management. It’s an expanding business. There’s a lot to handle.”
Louise inserts her key in the ignition. “Sounds hectic.” She waits before turning the engine on, as if enjoying the warmth of the leather on her thighs. “What exactly about his business is expanding? What’s his long-term plan anyway?”
“Aren’t all businesses expanding? Boats. Tourists.”
“I tried to find the Konstantinou Charters Web site on the Internet last night. His father’s company, Konstantinou Engineering, has a zillion hits, not all of them very nice. Ugly really, with a rap sheet of violations a mile long. But I couldn’t find Charlie’s site.”
“It’s an elite clientele. They aren’t promoting budget boat rentals on Yahoo. There are only ten or twelve yachts right now.”
“Oh,” she snaps in verdict. “Don’t get too fancy, Ian. You’re liable to forget the rest of us. We’re not just people to sleep with.”
“I didn’t sign a lifetime contract,” I say with a sigh. “All I’m doing is trying here. Can you please stop saving me from something I want?”
Louise nods, letting the subject drift. “I also did a search on Miles. I was curious about those accusations Charlie made about him. About owing money in London. Nothing came up. Just a zillion photos of him at boring social functions—all lawns and dinner parties and gravel driveways and ballrooms. Quite an extensive bow tie collection he has.” Lucky, I think. Not everyone’s worst transgressions end up in the septic tank of public consumption.
My phone vibrates with an incoming message. I hurry to read it, hoping to find a response from Charlie in Bodrum, news of him a-okay and heading back tomorrow, or maybe, benevolently, not to bother with the trumped-up alibi. But it’s a message from my sister. My body goes cold.
DIDN’T HEAR FROM YOU. CALLING LAWYER. YOU REALLY NEED TO MAKE CONTACT. NOW. NONE OF US ARE OKAY WITH YOUR COMPLETE DISREGARD FOR OUR QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS AND WE MIGHT HAVE TO RESORT TO UNFORTUNATE ACTIONS. JUST WARNING YOU. FUCKING CALL, IAN! IS IT BEYOND YOU TO DIAL A PHONE NUMBER?
“What’s wrong?” Louise asks.
“Nothing,” I say, struggling to inject the ordinary levity of reading a message. “It’s Charlie. He’s very sorry about his behavior. Are you satisfied?”
“Beach then?” she says, securing her bag around her shoulders.
“Louise, you’re a lawyer.”
“Not yet. I’ve only done one year. I wouldn’t represent myself. Why?”
“Is it illegal—” I try to frame the question so ambiguously it can’t be traced to an actual situation implicating an actual person perspiring eight inches from her “—if say, someone were to die, and there was money that was for an entire party, a party like a family, and when that person died, one of the party took a little of the money, which they were regularly allowed to access, but they did so right after the death, although they never did before, because, well, anyway, my question is, would that or wouldn’t it be illegal?” Running my own experience through the shredder of imprecise generalization in hopes of discovering a legal precedent is beyond me. The English language tightens into barbwire, each attempt to maneuver through it tangling me deeper in its teeth.
“Is that a question from Charlie? He must have access to better legal advice than I could provide. I haven’t even taken Ethics of Finance yet. I guess technically it could be considered stealing, but only in the strictest sense. Only if the family pressed charges, and most families wouldn’t. Maybe if you told me the exact situation.”
“Forget it. Let me get my bike. I’ll follow you.”
Last night, while Louise was scouring the Internet in her cabin, I checked on the bag of money in my drawer, counting and recounting it. When Charlie returns from Bodrum, I’m going to ask him for a larger advance and send the nine thousand back to Lex and Ross in New York, no return address, just a note, enjoy your inheritance, good luck in life.
We roar up the hill into Chora. Although Louise is leading the way at full throttle, my skills at steering and angling the curves have become stronger with practice. Stability on a motorbike requires envisioning the road not as solid but as a yielding, permissive skin, the tires like a tongue licking the strip of an envelope. Focus too intently on the dangers, the cracks and potholes, and the fear takes over, a crash victim due to excess caution. I keep up with her on smooth blacktop, on mossy brick, on expectorating gravel, on un-mowed weed patches where stray kittens leap from the wheels like death is a ball of string. Before a steep descent from the star-white village, a little boy stands on the corner midtantrum. His mother is dressed in beach paraphernalia—a folding chair, a pair of flippers, and three towels conceal whatever swimsuit she might have on—and she tries to grab his arm, but he swings it away, feet-pounding, the fat tears rolling down his cheeks. He’s not getting what he wants, a sufferer of island pleasure fatigue. I feel sorry for him. It’s always the vacation tantrums that are remembered later by family members with mean fondness; vomit once at Disneyland, and you are forever age six vomiting on a
wrought iron park bench whenever Disneyland is mentioned. The world is unforgiving to unhappy vacationers.
I have been trying to understand Charlie’s tears all morning, why he was crying last night even as he launched his assault on Miles. There seemed to be a second, larger pain behind the first, a speeding train hiding a car crash on the other side of the tracks. It’s those strange tears, even more than the dilemma of Sonny-versus-Bodrum, that leaves me aching for a single response from him.
The southlands flatten out by the sea, the weeds chirring with insects as we pass the timber skeletons of abandoned, half-built apartment complexes and the metal signs for GRIKOS. We’re not far from Charlie’s dock now, and Louise slows her speed, weaving through the low winds that smell of lavender and sting with salt. First it’s one blue police car parked on the shoulder of the road; POLICE is written across the door in English. Then as we ascend a small hill and as the tin roof of Charlie’s hangar gleams in the distance, another police car appears, this one with a siren on the roof revolving in the sun. Across the asphalt, in a field of yellow, waist-high weeds, three officers with leather bandoliers X-ed across their shirts stand in an awkward triangle, their eyes stuck on some disturbance in the grass. A young woman in tie-dye sits ten feet away on a slab of brick, sobbing into her hands; salamander tattoos writhe up her ankles. The oldest officer, his face ghosted like breath on a window, is snapping on a pair of light-blue latex gloves. It’s the plastic gloves among all the loose details that puts the fear in me.
Louise and I brake simultaneously. Her mouth holds the first letter of a question—the angry kiss of a W. We stop our bikes beyond the police car, farther up the slant of road, and from that vantage point we both see the unmistakable line of a human arm stretching through the long, dry grass blades.
“Oh, shit.” Louise clenches the handlebars, accidentally triggering the motor, which shoots her a few feet forward before she manages to stop again. The three Greek officers glance up in irritation. The youngest officer is prematurely trying to rope off the scene with yellow tape, but his clumsy attempt to yarn it through the weeds isn’t working. The wind has the tape, tossing it playfully.
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