Running

by Cara Hoffman

  In the evening Boyfriend of Navas picked her up or stopped by. Boyfriend of Navas was training for the Golden Gloves, treated her well, and though Milo couldn’t understand him, he was not an idiot. There were times when his accent was so strange, Milo almost thought it was Mancunian, like he came from Salford, like he grew up around the block; but it was just the linguistic DNA of ghetto neighborhoods blurring into one, Canon Green Court or Soundview. The words were never what he thought they were.

  Navas slept outside Milo’s bedroom door, some nights curled up with his twenty-year-old American doppelgänger. Navas and Milo would stay up late talking about poetry, then she would go to bed with the boy.

  If Milo was in love with her, if he wanted her to himself, if he imagined some kind of life with her, this would have hurt.

  The fine stillness of morning broke into my dreams. Tide had rolled in overnight and the sea was now a few feet away. The cove turned out to be a long, curved strip of rocky land interspersed with gleaming beaches. The narrow trail that had seemed hidden and precarious the night before was a well-worn path to the beach. And what I’d thought were shadows in the distance were actually enormous arched stones jutting from the sea, and the jagged edges of a cliff. Out in the distance boats rocked to the faint clang of bells. People, tan and barely dressed, walked along the road above or headed down the path to stake out a good spot on the sand.

  I stood and stretched, felt the breeze off the water, then hunched by the trees, vomiting. When it passed I walked into the water and floated faceup, let the silence of the sky fill me.

  Later, I dressed and walked across the white sand then up onto the road. The whitewashed blue-domed buildings in the distance were blinding.

  Past the bridge there was a market. Stalls lined the cobbled street, one selling fish and sea urchins and oysters, the long tentacles of an octopus draped over the side of the stand. Vendors sold fresh bread and olives, herbs, and cheese. Bushels of vegetables, tomatoes and cucumbers and onions, were set out. I passed by, crushed by the smell of food, a deep, sharp pain in my stomach. Usually I could go days without eating, but things had changed. Sellers called out in Greek not English, smiled, gestured for me to come to them. Though the place was remote and small, it was not what I’d expected. The whole street was filled with people speaking Greek; I heard not one passing word in German or English or French.

  At a brightly painted fruit stand a strong, sun-worn woman threw me a fig.

  “You eat,” she said, patted her belly and pointed to mine. “Eat.”

  It tasted like sweet earth, its skin tender against my teeth and tongue, the soft pulpy flesh filling my mouth. She watched me, smiling, then handed me another and I bought a small round watermelon with the last of my money, put it in my bag and headed out along the shore.

  Sunbathers were wandering down to the beach with their blankets and towels and now finally I saw some foreign tourists among them—no crowds, no drunks, but older people, families, stoic-looking blond-haired couples with guidebooks.

  The sun was blazing hot on my skin and scalp and I clambered down the hillside to a little plateau overlooking the beach, then took my knife and sliced into the melon, so taut it nearly burst at the blade’s touch. The rind was dappled green, the flesh inside deep pink with small white and black seeds. As soon as I could smell it my mouth began to water. I cut it in half, then quarters and eighths and sixteenths. It was sweet.

  When I’d eaten several slices I climbed down to the beach, took off my shirt, and lay in the sun on the beaten edge of the land until it was too hot, then stood and carried the bag of watermelon slices across the beach, zigzagging toward the water’s edge, stopping before people on their blankets, asking if they’d like to buy a slice for one hundred drachmas. After I’d sold ten slices, I went back to the fruit stand, bought two more melons. When I’d sold them and made 3,500 drachmas, I put my shirt back on and took the main road to find a café, where I bought a souvlaki and a bottle of water and sat looking out at the ships moored far out in the placid water.

  The counterman was in a conversation with a man wearing high rubber boots. I asked where Alogomandra was and they drew a map on the back of my check. Pointed to the pier and slips. “Only by boat,” the man in rubber boots said.

  “Can you take me there?” I asked. He and the barman exchanged a look.

  “There’s nothing there. One spot. No roads. Just the cliff houses.”

  “Do you have a boat? I have a friend there.”

  “No one will be there,” he said. “Because of the fires.”

  More frogs came and repopulated the site of the killing. Their voices echoed in the darkness outside my window, just as they always had. I could smell pine and the rain-soaked forest understory and all the life inside it. Their peeping voices had a meter like a heartbeat, or like my feet hitting the track when I ran: throbbing and pulsing in the whole hollow valley, like a boy’s swollen cock in your hand.

  Life was relentless and the illusion of accomplishing something by killing was strong. I knew this even at fifteen. I could see in that moment by the pond why men had cut whole forests, turned mountains into craters. They did it to silence something that doesn’t stop, even for a second. I could see why they made monuments, bunkers to be safe from themselves, why they guarded ruins. I had to live beside men, but they had to be men. I could walk away. But they were trapped. Would never be free.

  When I told Dare I was leaving, he turned his back and started organizing the cupboard.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he said.

  “I am.”

  “You’re a tough girl, little Sullivan,” he said, trying on a different voice. “But I’ve got things taken care of for us.”

  “I know you do.”

  He said nothing for a long time, then finally: “I’ve tried to be family for you, Bridey.”

  “You are my family,” I said.

  But I shouldn’t have said it. Because I hated every family I’d ever seen. I hated every second of every minute in other people’s houses where there was a man and a woman and children. I especially hated it when they were attending events at school where there were groups of them all performing their civic duty; I hated their public personas, or when you saw them on some outing together, taking pictures. I especially hated photographs of families: the mother and father, the children in front of them like a litter of puppies. Families on television, families in the movies, families a constant topic on the news, the need to preserve family values. For my whole childhood the country I lived in was building nuclear bombs to obliterate the families of the world. My uncle had built a shelter so that we could live underground, eating dried meat and hydroponic lettuce while other families died. I should have been honest and told Dare that he wasn’t family, because that’s how I felt. He was better, like some friendly stranger I could trust, because he had his own life. The saving grace of my parents’ deaths was that they were freed from being part of an American family, and through their deaths I was spared and could think clearly.

  “I want to see some things,” I told him. “See if what I’m reading is right.”

  “Well, I don’t get that. Y’know? Maybe you could just go to fucking school more to figure that out. I don’t get that. You’re doing all this work and your teachers are saying you’re so smart and you’re not even showing up, man.”

  He started to wash the dishes. He told me to take out the garbage.

  When I came back in, he was sitting on the couch, watching television.

  I sat next to him and knew that if he was like me, he was starting to feel relieved, happy that he could get back to being alone.

  “When I’m out there above a fire,” he said quietly, his eyes straight ahead, watching the screen, “I feel like I know my place.” It was a story that I’d been told enough to recite blind: the concrete operations of stepping into the sky. A hop and sl
ip from the edge of a machine into the wind’s force against your weight; the rush of your body and mind doing everything to stay alive and then the illusion of soaring, conquering as you drop into dark clouds; tall trees and hillsides and houses blazing. Knowing as you stop it that it won’t stop. You’ll be called to do it again. Sisyphus, Hercules, Dare Holleran, your name hardly matters.

  I listened until he was done. And was grateful again that Dare was my uncle, and that I’d only lived with him for four years, and that tomorrow I’d be gone.

  How’s it I’ve no problem with your boxer but you get to tell me Steve is a bum.”

  “Steve.” She just said his name and nothing else.

  “Yes, right. Steve.”

  Navas said, “Why can’t you date someone from school? What happened to your painter boyfriend?”

  “My painter boyfriend from when I was twenty-six years old?”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it’s not really your place, picking who I might have a bit of luck with, is it?”

  “You’re sleeping with a homeless guy,” she said. “It’s not . . . He’s . . . Why doesn’t he have his own place?”

  “Why don’t you have your own place?”

  That ended it. Then she asked if he was going to class. Told him she’d assigned them The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.

  “Oh, Anne Bradstreet! Fuckin’ brilliant.”

  “I know it’s fucking brilliant! You can’t just tell the class they can do whatever they want, Professor. It doesn’t work.”

  “It works fine—they’re reading The Tenth Muse.”

  “’Cause I told them to.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “What would you’d a been like without all those punches to the head?” she said.

  “Prettier,” Milo said, “if you can believe it.”

  Navas put her coffee mug in the sink, went into the bathroom. When she came out, her hair was up and she’d put on lipstick. She slid into her boots and zipped them, picked up her backpack, got her jean jacket off the hook in the hall. He loved the way she walked like she would break anything that got in her way.

  “F’real,” she said. “You coming to class?”

  “I am,” he lied. “I’ll see you there.” When she left he went back to the bedroom and opened the laptop and a can of Four Loko. He’d started thinking about what he’d say in the letter for her, but his thoughts drifted back and were soon consumed by the image of Bridey Sullivan’s pregnant body illuminated by flames.

  I couldn’t find a boat to the other side of the island and had slept that afternoon in the shade of a mastic grove beneath low trees that smelled of pine and frankincense, and when I woke the sky was a darkening purple. A light hot wind had picked up, and the smell of smoke and roasting nuts and sage was drifting on the air.

  Below the grove, people were walking along the road that hugged the shore, so I collected my things and followed.

  Children ran along together barefoot in little packs, brandishing sticks, and the air was charged with anticipation. Adults walked slowly side by side carrying blankets and baskets, passing bottles of clear liquor back and forth. Teenagers tripped along, giddy, hugging one another, singing the same refrain of a song, bursting into laughter. Girls my age with long, dark, ocean-salted hair, boys in crisp jeans and tank tops, muscles pressing out against their skin.

  The road ended in low whitewashed steps, lit on either side with candles in little glass jars. At the bottom was a blue-domed building crowned with a cross, illuminated arched windows cut into walls that were easily three feet thick. The church courtyard was lined with terra-cotta pots full of red flowers, and the terrace strung with strings of tiny white lights. A band was playing, the music high and precise, chords like ringing bells, the bright metallic flutter of mandolin and bouzouki.

  Small square tables had been set up, piled with plates of food: kebabs, and olives and bread and fruit. The whole place smelled of roasting lamb and smoke and sea and the woody resinous scent of forest or church. I followed a loose crush of people toward the food, taking a charred kebab and cramming it into my mouth.

  Beside the musicians, a group of older people stood, women in long skirts and sandals with graying hair pulled up off their necks, near them young women in capri pants, bellies bare, and men with wet-looking hair, their white shirts open at the chest; they clapped along with the music, then began to dance a simple metered cross step, arms woven together. The men at the ends of the line held white handkerchiefs in their hands, waved them slowly. And then the music grew faster, and the dance more complicated, their heels hitting the ground in unison with a sharp, flat snap, a relentless downbeat, bodies bouncing higher, the crowd yelling “Opa!” Drinks passed around, faces flushed, hair coming undone, long and dark and whipping against faces. I ate and watched them. Feeling the mad pull of the music.

  Down the coastline dozens had already gathered beside the water. The surf rolled in, cresting beside a tangled mass of driftwood and debris that was surrounded by a crowd. I ate another skewer of lamb, licked the grease from my fingers, sat on the edge of the terrace, and then jumped off, onto the rocky embankment thick with scrub grass and tree seedlings, the sound of waves hushing against the land, the music getting quieter as I walked.

  Children ran along the water’s edge, throwing sticks and flotsam. Stars now filled the hollow sky. I took off my boots and walked toward the gathering.

  When the match dropped I felt a weakening in the pit of my stomach and a wild rushing power rising up from the arches of my feet into my chest. It made me gasp. The wood had been well doused with alcohol and immediately smelled of anise and pine, which I could taste at the back of my throat. Then all the darkened faces came to light, orange and yellow and white, and low awed moans rose in chorus as the fire grew.

  A pack of dogs ran along the beach, pawing at something in the wet sand, yapping and tossing their heads.

  I moved closer to the crackling fire, listened to it breathe. Candles pushed into the sand lit the camps of people with children setting out blankets, stargazing or sitting crosslegged, talking, eating. Farther down from where we stood below the monastery I could see small fires at the edge of the land, hundreds of flickering lights from candles along the coast, like a border of stars before the empty blackness of the water, shadows gathered around them, illuminated briefly, then blinking into darkness.

  A pack of children, maybe seven or eight years old, had built their own blaze by the water and were poking at it with sticks, throwing seaweed and shells into it, but it soon smoked and guttered and died. I watched them as they sent a tiny wiry runner to the main fire, who came back jubilant with a burning torch and hurled it onto the pile. This was starting to flame out as well, so I walked over and sprayed it with lighter fluid, laughing at their happy squeals as the fire shot skyward.

  The girls I’d seen on the road were in their bathing suits running from their blankets to the main bonfire; they joined hands and ran in a ring around it, tripping and laughing as they were on the road, their skin shining in the yellow light. They began a mock approximation of the dances in the courtyard. Their shouts of “Opa!” sounded sarcastic, ridiculous, but soon they were dancing on the sand, in the same perfect cross steps as above, screaming out a song that might have been a thousand years old.

  A dense semicircle of people surrounded the central bonfire, its smoke rising, the warm glow reflected in the black water. Running from the edge of the embankment, two girls leaped over it like deer, followed by a crowd of shirtless men in shorts who jumped, then rushed into the sea screaming. A variety of children and dogs ran howling by, closing in on the flames and then skipping away, kicking up sand.

  Everywhere, figures were moving, a confluence of voices becoming one human sound. I looked for Milo’s easy gait among the shadowed figures in the crowd. I wandered and listened for words in E
nglish, for the sound of his rich voice. The air was cool and the wind was pushing the fire in toward the land, sparks and ash drifting across the beach and up into the dark and glittering sky.

  Every two weeks he would go into the main port town, taking the boat and docking it at a public marina, then walking inland half a mile to the bus stop. The roads were close and barren and dusty, and toward the end of summer the wind had begun to pick up. He’d buy things that would keep—bags of rice, jars of beans and tomatoes, and tins of meat, and on market days fresh vegetables. At home he fished off the low dock by the cliffs. In town he drank in the café and played cards or dominoes with whoever was there, sometimes until it closed. Then he’d sleep on the beach and take the boat home the next day.

  Milo thought there would be competition for this house-sit, but Zenaida, who owned the place, was gone from late summer until early spring every year, and it was not somewhere most would agree to stay in bad weather. The house was among several built directly into a cliff, all whitewashed, doors the same blue as the sky, the flat roof nothing more than a barren dirt-covered plateau. The place had no back windows or door. Wide zigzagging steps carved into the stone led down into the other rooms of the house, each off the outside terrace. These steps ended at the sea, a weathered boat dock, and an expanse of smooth white rocks, curved like the bellies of giants, massive bodies in repose. Out in the water, this same white stone jutted up like tiny islands, formed arches and bridges, caves that were submerged for half the day.

  This is where Milo lived for six months when he was twenty years old.