by Alex A King
She will not correct herself, will not swap the present tense for past. Stavros will never be past tense for her.
The detective pockets his pen.
"Go home, Kyria Bouto. This time is difficult, and you have much to do. Let me do my job, and as soon as I know something, you will know, too."
Two days ago the handkerchief in her hands was white with pink flowers. Today it's black; the flowers boiled away in the steaming dye. She twists it this way and that, wringing its cotton neck. "Do you promise?"
"I promise."
That is a mouth, she thinks, used to delivering empty promises to desperate ears.
5
Leo
The plane is still breathing heavy. Doesn't stop the cops shoving their way down the tight aisle. Not regular cops—the military kind. And they're coming right for him, as fast as they can. Which means not very. They're big, fit guys, but today's planes were built for yesterday's slighter people.
"You Leonidas Karas?"
Leo thinks about lying, but they know his face or they wouldn't be asking the question. He's lucky they're asking at all.
"Last time I looked," he tells them. Last time he looked was a couple of hours ago, while he was filling out the customs and immigration paperwork. Leo's a good Greek boy (light on the good, fifty-fifty on the Greek), but his passport is US issued. It's been a long time since he was home. About fifteen years.
Long enough that he figured he'd dodged Greece's mandatory national service.
Apparently not. They don't care that he's got fifteen years in each country, which makes him as much American as Greek.
They hoist him up by the arms. "Bags?"
Leo points at the overhead lockers. "In there. The black one."
Joke is on them: all the bags are black. So they give him one arm, but snap it back into place after he's done pointing.
The two MPs escort him off the plane. Leo knows everyone's watching. A sea of whispers swells behind him.
"Whatever it is, I probably did it," he tells the flight attendant. She's pretty, in that faded English way.
She smiles, gives him the approving up-down look. "I bet you did."
He thinks about getting her number, but there's no time. Anyway, there are a lot more fish in that sea and he's a good fisherman.
Though it's looking like fish are going to be out of season for a while.
That's okay. Leo has fresh divorce papers in his pocket. Things didn't work out between him and Tracy, so they said their goodbyes in a courtroom. He gave her the house as a parting gift. Now he's homeless. Greece is the last stop on his travel agenda. Between here and California he's seen a few airports and a lot of beautiful women. He threw his half of the community property into a storage unit and turned in his notice—effective immediately. Good thing he's his own boss.
He's glad to be off the plane. Airlines don't sell seats for shoulders like his. Part of him is always spilling into the aisle. He came by the body honestly. Good genes and a lot of lifting—animals, mostly. Comes with the territory when you're a veterinarian and your speciality is livestock.
Off the plane, into the airport. Different airport to the one he left on his way to the US all those years ago. The old one is rotting on a piece of priceless land. Lots of security with guns litter the terminal. They look even more paranoid than the guys at LAX, which is really saying something.
You guys expecting a Turkish invasion?" he asks, nodding at the rent-a-cops and their guns.
He gets nothing from the two amigos—nothing all the way to Immigration. A military cop either side of him, the Immigration officer doesn't say much, either. Not even the customary "Welcome home." She stays sour until his passport's stamped red. Probably she thinks it's bad form to welcome a guy home when he's got the law clinging to his ass like this is the Savannah and he's the lion's dinner.
Through customs; nothing to declare but this pair of goons he picked up.
"You guys want to carry my bags, or is the muscle for show?"
"Very funny."
Out into the full frontal assault of the sun. He'd forgotten its sting—different to the one back—
Home.
His parents are in Florida, his wife's gone. He's a man without an anchor, which means he should feel free. But he doesn't. Mostly it feels like he's free-falling with a noose around his neck. This place is the closest thing he's got to a hometown—a home he hasn't seen in years. They've both changed, so how's that going to work out? Leo knows there's no going backward, only forward
So why is he here?
Why not?
There's family here. Family he hasn't seen since he left. They don't know he's coming, so he'll be a surprise. But he told his Facebook friends, didn't he?
He turns to the guys in green. "Malakas, both of you," he says, big grin on his face.
Now their brick faces crack, spread wide until all three men are cracking up.
"Welcome home, asshole," they say.
A lot of back-slapping follows. There was a time Yianni and Yiorgos were like brothers. The past few years they've been Facebook friends, liking pictures and family updates he's posted. Both guys are married with families; Agria's a town they visit on special occasions, when their mothers' nagging drags them home.
"You had me fooled," he says. "I didn't recognize you guys at first."
Coming back after fifteen years is like waking up from a longterm coma: the names are the same but the faces have moved on.
Yianni shoves his hands into his pockets. "We knew you soon as we saw you. Ugliest guy on the plane—easy to spot."
They swap small talk on the sidewalk. The sun beats him with its fists. It's not as cruel as the sun in the US's southern states, but there's some weight behind its punches.
"So you guys going to give me a ride to Agria, or do I have to catch the train?"
They look at each other. Then back at him. Yeah, these guys are a ride, but not a ride home.
"So it's like that," Leo says.
His old friends nod. It's like that.
"We have to take your passport. Sorry, man."
Leo slaps it into Yiorgos's hand. Now he's stuck here until they say, "Go."
* * *
The day's just getting started. Hot, but not too hot. Smoggy, but not too smoggy. It's no Beijing (circa today) or Los Angeles (circa 1984), but the air is thicker than it used to be. Athens is a big city, and all those people, a city gets messed up fast. Greece is a country with problems, these days. Not just money and corruption, but pollution.
As soon as they get out of Athens, the car cuts southwest, headed for Kalamata—birthplace of the Kalamata olive, home to the base where Greece trains its soldiers.
The road ahead is shimmering. Heat rises in dense sheets. The windows are open, the air conditioning off. Spring comes in, snuggles right up to him. Feels good at first, until the sweating starts.
"So what happens next?" he asks his old buddies.
"Five weeks of basic training. Then you'll get five days to visit the family. After that, who knows? They could send you anywhere."
Nice decorations in this car—they look like seat belts. Yianni and Yiorgos aren't wearing them, so he doesn't either. Which means he can lean forward to talk. "Any way out of that?
"They make exceptions, sometimes."
"For what?"
Yiorgos glances over at him. "Bigger problems than you've got, my friend."
"How long do they keep you, these days?"
"Nine months."
Nine months. Damn.
Leo bangs his forehead against the seat. He's heard the stories about guys who came to Greece on a family vacation and got hooked. The family went home while the guys stayed to complete their service—no choice. But he figured it was one of those urban legends. Something that happened to a friend of a friend of an uncle. Unreliable tales from unreliable witnesses.
Now here he is, the friend of a friend of somebody's uncle.
He could run but he won
't. Duty matters.
And he's a man with nothing much else to do. May as well be useful.
"Do I get a phone call?"
"Calling your zoo keeper?"
He laughs. "Parole officer. Just kidding. My folks. Have to check in if I'm going to be out of range for a while."
"Mama's boy."
They all laugh at that, because it's standard operating procedure for Greek sons, but Leo's mother is a hundred-percent American.
"You know it," he says as his phone gets busy reaching out to make a connection.
"Leo?" Dad asks. "Where are you?"
"About that," Leo says, and tells him the good news. He's in Greece. For the next nine months. Well, ten if you count basic training. "Why, you guys missing me that much?"
Not exactly. They need him—Mom needs him, Dad says. But what he's really saying is that he needs Leo. Because Mom has cancer of the fast-moving kind. Pancreatic. No surviving that unless it's caught early, and Mom's wasn't caught early.
Curse words spray the inside of his head. Think, Leo, you dumbass.
"Okay. Okay. I'm coming home."
He doesn't say when—he can't. The army took his passport, which means he's going nowhere without a new one.
"I need my passport and I need you guys to turn this car around."
They exchange glances. "Orders, man."
"Can't you pretend I wasn't on the plane or something?"
No can do.
"Just wait until I tell your mothers," he mutters.
What's he going to do? Who you gonna call?
(Hint: Not the Ghostbusters.)
The USA's home on greek soil—who else?
He makes his dad a promise he's not sure he can keep, then calls the US Embassy in Athens. He wastes the next hour of his mother's life bouncing from line to line.
No.
No.
No.
A lot of "No," and not nearly enough "Yes, we'll get you home."
As far as they're concerned he is home. And he's Greece's problem until he's served his time. Mom doesn't have an endless supply of time.
Now his old friends feel like new enemies.
6
Kiki
Times have changed, and the bishop is a compassionate man. He grants the Boutos family permission to give Stavros a Greek Orthodox funeral. Suicide is not the anathema it used to be.
It's the afternoon before his funeral, and mourners shuffle up to the coffin one-by-one to leave their final kisses on Stavros's cheek. St George's priest has come to the Boutos home to conduct the Trisagion—the Greek prayer service for the dead.
Kiki looks at Stavros in his wooden box set up in the dim living room, Mama on one side of her, Soula on the other. Yiayia is somewhere in the house, taking a hiatus from her latest coma. No way was she going to miss all this excitement.
"Kiss him," Mama says.
That's what they're supposed to do, take turns dropping goodbye kisses on his cheek, but Kiki's not big on kissing the dead.
"If you are not going to kiss him, at least pretend! Otherwise how will it look, eh?" Mama doesn't wait for an answer. "Bad. Very bad, Kiki."
"Where was he shot?" Soula asks.
"Soula!" their mother hisses.
"Through the heart," Kiki tells her sister.
"Poor Stavros. Interesting suit. Is that—"
"Yes."
His wedding tuxedo. Very ugly. Thea Helena's choice. Looks like something the 70s coughed up. The best place for it is six-feet underground with her wedding dress and the green thing their mother had Soula wearing. But not like this.
Yiayia rolls up in her wheelchair, cranes her neck to take a good gander. "He looks like wax."
Poor guy, Yiayia is right: he looks like one of Madame Tussaud's rejects.
"Mama!" Margarita hisses.
"What? All I said is that he looks like wax. Your father looked like wax when he died, too. But old wax left in the sun too long. And he was yellow because of his liver. Wrap some flowers around him, and he would have looked like a lambada."
* * *
Not that lambada, the silly (okay, and catchy) song from 1989 that had us all humping legs, South America style, and in 1990 spawned a movie—
No, you can't really call it a movie. More like … cruelty to captive audiences who paid for entertainment and wound up sitting through the visual equivalent of waterboarding.
Anyway, before the song and the movie and the dance, there was the Greek lambada, a long, thin candle wrapped in ribbons, flowers, and various other decorations, made for Easter's midnight Service of the Resurrection.
* * *
Margarita Andreou closes her eyes, pleads with some higher power. "A lambada. What is wrong with you, Mama?"
"Nothing. I came here to see if Stavros was really dead or just pretending."
"Who pretends to be dead, Mama? Who?"
"Elvis."
"Elvis is dead," Kiki tells her grandmother, but Yiayia's grabbing the coffin's rim, hoisting herself into a standing position.
"How can he be dead when Kyria Marika saw him at the beach ten years ago? Dead men do not sunbathe, because—po-po—the smell. His death was theater for the media so they would leave him alone to eat his sandwiches on the toilet. Maybe Stavros wants to be left alone, too. Did he like sandwiches?" She reaches into the coffin, pinches his nose. Gets up close. "It is okay, Stavros. If you are alive I will not tell anybody. It will be our secret, eh?"
"My Virgin Mary," Margarita mutters. "Get her down from there before Helena calls the police to come and take us all away."
Yiayia glances over her shoulder. "I think he might be dead. So far he has not opened his mouth to breathe. Does anyone have a mirror?"
"No mirrors, Yiayia," Kiki tells her. With a one-two-three she and Soula wrestle the old woman back into her chair.
"Stavros is dead," Yiayia announces in her outside voice. "I made sure."
The room stops.
"Why are they looking at me like that?" she asks her granddaughters. "I was trying to be helpful.
* * *
St. George's bells won't quit crying. They weep all morning, a slow, plodding sound that escorts them first to the church, then to the graveyard. Everyone walks, following the crawling hearse. They, too, are slow and plodding.
Spring. Too much sun and too much green for a funeral. Fall and winter are better suited for burying the dead, but Stavros had other plans.
It is a black sea of people that pours into the graveyard.
There are levels of mourning, and defying them is a metaphorical spitting on the deceased. A widow wears black for the rest of her life. One year for a sister or daughter. Forty days for a friend.
(Men wear black armbands, because the people who make the rules naturally favor themselves.)
But what is Kiki? She's not any of those things. She's the abandoned bride. Not quite a widow, and not a sister or a friend. Yet Mama dished up the bad news the day after Stavros's death: "Two years, Kiki, or everyone in town will hate you."
Everyone meaning Thea Helena. The rest of the town won't hate her, but they'll talk. Oh, how they love to talk. Gossip is Greece's unofficial national sport.
Everyone—not just Thea Helena—is watching her. This is the part where she's supposed to hurl herself at the coffin, wailing. It's practically law.
Except she's not, is she?
One day she might wail over a descending coffin, but not today. Like any number of depraved sexual acts, she's saving that for someone special.
Mama nudges her. "Go."
"No," Kiki says.
"You have no choice! What will people say?"
Mama is a mallet; it's nothing for her to hammer Kiki until she's flat and compliant. But Stavros's death is the beginning of something new.
A door has closed, a window opened, and there's no hand waiting to shove her out. If she wants to jump, it's her choice.
Arms folded. "No, Mama."
She's not alone in her stone shoe
s. Thea Helena stands close by, her feet clinging to the patch of grass she's chosen. The woman Kiki has known all her life doesn't blink, doesn't move. Her head is turned away from the grave, looking out toward the road. Kiki wonders if she sees the pickup truck parked there, with Romani piled in the bed. They're watching this Greek tragedy intently, as if they're trying to figure out who is Electra, who is Antigone, who is Oedipus.
* * *
Ancient Greeks loved their tragedies. Modern Greeks still do. Now they prefer it closer to home, preferably in a neighbor's yard. That way the seats are free and front row.
But in the old days, they were happy to pay to watch the misfortunes of others. For a country that once embraced homosexuality as commonplace, they sure didn't take to happy endings—not for a long time, at least.
Not many of those tragedies have survived the time travel. Only three Ancient Greek tragedians made the leap. Sophocles, the rich kid, who may or may not have died choking on a grape. Euripides, who died after a dog attack. And Aeschylus, who was known as the father of tragedy, and also as the man who died after an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head.
And now here is Stavros Boutos, writing his tragedy from the afterlife.
* * *
"Go," Margarita hisses.
"Mama, stop," Soula says. But their mother isn't in a listening mood. She lets out a huge melodramatic sigh, then flings herself at the coffin, hand curled around Kiki's wrist, wailing and weeping. Her fingernails bite.
"Poor Stavros," she cries. "Oh, the poor boy! Why did God steal him from us? Whhhhhhy?" She nudges Kiki. Whispers, "Just do as I do." Then her howling continues.
Very dramatic. A fantastic performance. Kiki hopes she has a Margarita Andreou at her funeral someday. But she can't join in. Like Helena, she's watching the road. It's not a big road, but it leads to a bigger road, and that road leads to another road that goes someplace that isn't here.