Running

by Cara Hoffman

  On the last day of August he went into town, for the bigger market, and docked the boat close to where the festival would be. He’d no intention of going home that night, left the café when it was dark and the streets were abandoned and already smelled of smoke, and headed down to the shore, walking the length of it, toward the blaze of tiny lights, little mounds of flame, and a roaring fire that undulated, far off near the water’s edge, throwing sparks like a forge into the black sky.

  His Greek had improved enough to have quick conversations with those he passed, to toast and say farewell to Old Man August, but he missed deeper conversations. He sat for a while on a blanket with a couple who spoke English well. They shared a clear sweet liqueur with him that tasted like pine and they talked about how the winds were going to get worse. How these were the last calm days.

  Milo asked what would happen next at the festival: Was there a boat that would be set on fire and set out to sea? Were they to run with torches along the beach? Would they burn someone in effigy? Fire jumpers, they told him and pointed far down below the dome of the monastery, its courtyard decorated with fairy lights.

  Packs of dogs ran, silhouetted by the bonfires, and they talked about how the dogs must live. Milo watched while the animals went from blanket to blanket, fed or kicked away snarling.

  They looked like regular house dogs, mutts of various sizes but with matted fur and scratched faces, rough, but not skittish like they’d been beaten, or so aggressive they were frightening. Instead they looked savagely intelligent. He left the couple sitting on the blanket and followed the dogs down the beach until they broke off running.

  Later he saw them again on the sand, the one in the lead trailing a blanket behind him that had caught fire, the rest of them growling and yipping at his sides.

  Near the black water a row of low flames lit the bodies of people dancing. Beautiful boys and men were jumping directly into them, through them, leaping or springing over them—and then straight on into the sea, screaming.

  At first glimpse he thought she was a hallucination: her hair gone, body filled out; a womanly apparition of Bridey running toward the fire. In the middle of the blaze she was simply a black outline, and he could see plainly the curve of her belly, the strength and speed of her legs as her clothes caught light. She emerged wearing flames, streaked past into the surf, then disappeared below the black water as if it never happened.

  Milo screamed her name into the waves, wading out, searching, half-blind from staring into the bonfire, crying.

  Then he saw her stand, walking to shore, wringing out her tattered shirt. He called to her and she turned, ran, began laughing. He picked her up and she was wet and cold from the sea. She wrapped her legs around his waist, her breasts pressed against him, her arms around his neck; kissed his face, pulled back to look at him, her pale eyes sated, her eyebrows singed but not a burn on her skin, which shone gold in the glow of the firelight.

  The bonfires were still high along the beach when we’d walked away, hitched a ride over a narrow barren road, then spread ourselves out on the sand near his boat to wait for it to get light. I was still high from running through the fire, untouchable from the double baptism of flame and sea. The wind was blowing and he gave me his shirt to wear, and we dug ourselves a little place to sit. The smell of wood smoke still drifting thickly across the island. His face lovely and calm.

  “Did you come straight here from Turkey, like?”

  “Athens. I found your note.”

  “Athens. Who’s there?”

  “Declan,” I said. “Everyone you’d expect. Mike, Stephan, Candy. The usual from Luzani, same people at Drinks Time. Boulous . . . No Murat. No one talking.”

  He didn’t ask about Jasper.

  “Murat was arrested,” he said.

  “While you were there?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Nasty blokes in suits wanderin’ around outside our room, looking at your missing wall, yeah? Came in to talk t’us and Jasper was on the lash, cross-eyed, like. He’d mostly stopped after you left but musta been hitting it again that day when I wasn’t around. They shoulda taken us in for all kinds of things, for more questions, even, but we were such wasters, they didn’t. We told them our room was the hotel’s storage, and they believed it. Who’d believe anyone traveled with that many books, yeah? Who’d believe we’d bought the rug and those slippers and the beadwork Jesus? We didn’t lie about being runners and they didn’t care. Showed them our own replacement passports—said we’d been robbed too. They walked Murat out through the lobby and, you know, you musta seen papers. You know.”

  In the morning light we got into his boat and he rowed us to an abandoned landscape of high cliffs, stone arches. We moored the boat along a weathered wooden dock and walked up three flights of whitewashed steps.

  The house was silent. We slept that morning in a cool bedroom with one large shuttered window cut into the thick stone. Lying with my face on his chest, his hand cradling my head, I was exhausted as I’d never been. That day I slept until night, then came into the living room to read and fall asleep again. It was as if a thing that had always been alert—always been awake inside me—had stopped its watch at last; all I could do was lie flat and dream.

  When hunger woke me, I was on a low blue couch in front of a stone fireplace and it was either morning or dusk, judging by the light. An enormous bookshelf took up the entirety of a wall. Milo was sitting across from me on a threadbare chair with a sheepskin thrown over it, the reading lamp beside him casting a glow. The mismatched furniture was all pale blues and smooth butter yellow. There were piles of books on the floor around his chair, one a children’s encyclopedia in Greek, a blue spiral-bound notebook open at his feet.

  When he came and knelt by the couch, I turned and buried my face in his neck. I could not get enough of his smell, like balsam and dryer sheets and ocean air. There was a new weight to him, a new calmness. His face was lovely and not as gaunt; his misshapen ear, straight nicotine-stained teeth, broad, flat nose. His hair was salt-dusted from swimming and the kindness in his eyes had grown as if it had been fed.

  “Ar’ray our kid. Y’missed breakfast and lunch. Again.”

  Part of a dream came back while he spoke—birds flying in a white-gray sky, buildings by the edge of a crater, the pyrite irises of a frog’s eyes.

  “You haven’t seen the rest of the gaff,” Milo said, opening the wooden door and shutters to a warm salt breeze and the sound of birds and waves. Outside, open water, an expanse of air and sky and nothing more. I stood and stretched and walked with him to stand and look down at the white crest of waves moving rhythmically below.

  “How did you get this place?” I asked him.

  He said, “Don’t think memorizing poems won’t get you anywhere. Owner’s off teaching in England. This is her family’s house from way back. Practically nobody lives on this side of the island.”

  I tried to imagine anyone who would let a runner looking like Milo did stay in their house. Or maybe I said that out loud.

  “She did think I was a no-good at first,” he said. “She’d lived in Manchester, yeah? Actually knew where me neighborhood was. But then we talked and I took out books to show her, like an arrogant fuck, I actually read her one a me own poems! I did, Bridey! She told me the last girl had this job had been singing on the street—busking, like—on the other side of the island. I think this lady might be an angel, Bride, what do you think? Maybe she’s an angel and we’re dead.”

  It seemed possible.

  “You hungry?” he asked quickly. He rose and I followed him up the outside stairs to the kitchen where dried herbs hung from ceiling rafters and the shelves were well stocked with boxes of crackers and canned food and cereal, jars of tomatoes and peppers and olives and pistachios; bottles of Metaxa and ouzo sat on the shelves. In the refrigerator, ­Amstel. A bowl of fruit on the table. I peeled an orange, breathed in i
ts fresh bite, then uncapped a beer, sat at the tile-topped table, the last light of day pouring in across the room.

  Milo opened a jar of olives and pulled some feta out of the refrigerator, began slicing a tomato. He put these things on little dishes. I ate everything as he set it out and still felt hungry. He opened the refrigerator and took out some lemons, something wrapped in white paper. Inside, the short, thick tentacles of an octopus, dark and mottled, with fleshy circular suckers. He took down a frying pan, poured olive oil into it and lit the burner, crushed garlic, pulled herbs down from where they hung and tossed them in the pan, then dumped in the octopus, squeezing the lemons over it. I’d not eaten sitting at a kitchen table in years. The last time I’d had more than one meal a day was in Winthrop.

  “You’re going to like this,” Milo said.

  I came and stood beside him at the stove and smelled the garlic and oregano and thyme, the fresh briny smell of the octopus. He cut a little piece as it cooked and put it in my mouth, the flavor so bright I had to shut my eyes.

  When he finished cooking, he brought it all to the table and we ate and drank Amstel and listened to the quiet sound of the waves. The food was savory and rich and delicious.

  After, we sat lazily, picking at the olives. A salt breeze drifting up from the blue below.

  “I couldn’t bring him here, Bride,” Milo said.

  “Or anywhere,” I agreed.

  Milo called Jasper’s parents from a bank of telephones on Victor Hugo Street. Talked long enough to tell his mother where they were and that Jasper was unwell. When they came they did not look at Milo, would not speak to him. Would not take his help in getting Jasper downstairs and into a cab.

  The horror of having desired that boy could still keep him up nights; the hollow awful feeling of watching Jasper’s face, fascinated by the news footage. He’d seen the debris, the filth of remains, but couldn’t feel what it had done to flesh; he could barely feel his own pain let alone that of others. The shame of how deeply Milo had loved and despised him was only beginning in those days on the island.

  “Do you need to see a doctor?” Milo asked.

  Bridey looked up, startled. “For what?”

  “‘For what,’” Milo said back to her. “We gonna never talk about it? How far along are you?”

  She held up one of his blue spiral-bound notebooks. “A few pages in. It’s really good.”

  “Com’ed, stop it, Bridey.”

  She was silent. The wind was moaning again and waves crashed up the side of the cliff, breaking and spraying. She went back to reading his work.

  When she finally spoke she said, “What are we going to do about Murat?”

  I turned eighteen on that island. And felt through the skin of my belly the pressing and turning of another body, the quick silent tap of a knee or elbow or head or foot. And I laid my hand there so we could feel each other.

  I stayed with Milo for four months. Reading. Eating. Lying beside him at night. In the beginning we walked along the cliffside and down to the beach. Swam in the sea, tasting salt, lying in the bright sun, warm and painless, like being drunk. Like never having to sober up, never having to speak. We were quieter still in the evening. Unconscious for ten or twelve hours at a time, slept on clean sheets in a real bed, often without dreaming. And in the morning, birds were singing and gulls crying, and no clanging from the harbor carried up to the windows.

  Summer dresses hung in the closet of the room in which we slept. Short-sleeved shirts with buttons, skirts. I tried them on, slid them over my round body. Most days I wore a white cotton slip I’d found hanging in the bathroom and Milo’s Joy Division shirt. My hair had grown in, dark and wavy. I sat out on the deck reading books Milo’d brought, eating olives.

  His body had changed too. His facial hair coarser. His back and chest broader, the flesh beneath his skin more voluptuous. We turned and held one another in the soft bed at night. The smell of our breath and bodies becoming one scent. We would wake and talk and kiss and then sleep again.

  “We’da been fine,” Milo said one night, head on the pillow, staring at the ceiling. “But he’d this whole other idea of making money didn’t he? Just like alla them. Wasters in their navy blue blazers. It’s never enough for them.”

  I said, “We all sold the passports. It wasn’t just Jasper. He never planned to make it more than that.”

  “You know he did.”

  The wind had picked up outside, its force pressing against the shutters, rattling the small boats down by the dock. I got up and sat in the bedside chair, turned on the light.

  “Murat prob’ly’d no idea at first it was us that sold his papers. Thought we were just some perverts who drank too much. Then he’d come up and seen all the shite Jasper’d bought at the flea market, saw our place. Once you left—he was hours from turning us in, I swear.”

  I shook my head.

  “Yeah,” he said. “He was. An’ Jasper understood the value of that kid’s story; Murat spoke Greek, he spoke Danish, English, Arabic, German. All Jasper had to say to the police was those passports disappeared an’ the explosion happened just after Murat got there. Which was true. No, com’ed, listen to me.”

  “Is that what he did?”

  “I’ve no idea what he did. But that’s what makes sense, yeah? And after all that he still planned on selling more.”

  “There were no more.”

  Milo threw the covers off, strode naked to the dresser; he pulled out three passports. American, English, German, dropped them into my hands.

  “Of course there were,” he said. “You knew there were.”

  Who else could it have been? That time before she left. All those times with Jasper, when he wanted her there but didn’t want her. This was Milo’s baby. She wouldn’t have looked for him otherwise. She wouldn’t be there. She wouldn’t smell so good to him, wouldn’t be sleeping in bed with him every night, if it wasn’t his.

  He said, “Thinking again of going back to Manchester, yeah? See me ma, just for a bit.”

  Bridey stood in the shallow waves, shells cupped in an upturned hand. “Why?” she said.

  “It’s on my mind. You’d like Colleen. You’d get along.”

  She’d need to be somewhere for a while once the baby was born. He could get a job.

  Bridey walked out into the waves, hair whipping against her face in the wind.

  “You could come with me and stay for a while,” he called.

  She walked out farther. Slipped beneath the next cold blue crest and swam.

  Milo was a person whose future you could see clearly. Milo had looked for the house-sit. He planned. He wrote every day, he studied. He saw the world as it was and wanted no part of the ugliness, so he wrote or drank, or wandered until it was pretty. Nothing else suited him.

  Murat’s papers and a journal were in the drawer where Milo’d kept the passports, along with several thousand drachmas he must have stolen before the police had come. He must have been afraid we’d be mentioned in them, and we were. I couldn’t read the Danish but I could read our names, and Declan’s.

  I left before he woke, in one of the neighbors’ boats, so he wouldn’t be stranded. It was cold and windy and there was a light rain. The sky was glowing pink and orange when I shut the wooden door of the cliff house. It took hours to row to the harbor, sticking close to the coast. I used his money for food and a ferry ticket. Sat in the hold this time, rocked and slept above the roiling sea.

  I loved Milo Rollock, and I loved leaving him where he was, lying beside his notebook, alone.

  A boy with a Rottweiler told him they took the scaffolding down on Ninth Street and Steve had been sleeping down by Hamilton Fish Park across Houston. He went there but couldn’t find him, drank the bottle himself.

  Navas would be tired when she got home, so he would make her dinner. He went back up Avenue A to buy her
some books at Mast, then to the grocery store, stopping to smell the cut flowers outside. But the posters they hung in the window, the pictures of pork chops and heads of lettuce and boxes of crackers all with prices written under them, were devastating; bright and gloating. How could they make you pay for something you needed just to survive? He stood on the street in front of the automatic doors and wept.

  When he thought about Navas leaving, he couldn’t breathe.

  It was dark when I arrived back in Piraeus, and raining. I sat in a café by the docks drinking Turkish coffee until the sky grew lighter, then took a train into Athens. I was unrecognizable now. My hair down to my chin. I wore a short skirt and leggings that I’d taken from the closet, pulled low beneath my belly; wore Milo’s T-shirt and sweater and a jacket I’d found on the boat.

  Declan was not at Athens Inn, which meant he was running a train, had another job, or had finally been killed working. I asked at the desk if he’d been around and the receptionist pretended he didn’t exist. So I spent a day walking through Monastiraki and sitting outside the Acropolis, looking for the right woman to be. Someone small, round. A pregnant woman. Someone with money, with nice clothes. Someone wearing makeup; dark hair, short or cut neat. People climbed the stairs in the nearly still mist and disappeared inside the gateway to the ruin.

  Finally I saw her coming down the steps. One of those people who wore special shoes for hiking. She looked strong, American by her style of dress and the bottle of water. She had a camera bag around her neck. A green raincoat with the hood up. I followed her.

  The presence of money was clear in the way she moved and I figured she wasn’t staying far from there. I kept a few yards behind in the crowd and hoped she wasn’t heading to Luzani, where I might be recognized.

  But she walked to the Airotel Parthenon, all white and glass, inside draperies and rugs and two chandeliers over the long reception desk, leather furniture in the lobby. She wasn’t alarmed by my going up in the elevator with her. People find nothing threatening about a pregnant woman, and only consider the poor distasteful and beyond talking to.