She Wakes (10 page)

    They’d bring in the bags and then go out to the Harlequin or Pierro’s or Anna’s Bar for drinks. He knew people in all these places. The people would be well-dressed and handsome. Some even glamorous. You could forget anything inside. You were supposed to.

    He pinched an olive off the plate of
mezes
. It had a rich dark taste, the flavor of earth. He moved it around inside his mouth and scraped it with his teeth until the pit was clean. Then he spat it out.

    A girl walked by and looked at him. A slim Greek girl not more than seventeen.

    Greek women were getting bolder.

    He turned to Danny. “Mykonos will be a whole lot better,” he said.

    Danny nodded. “You bet. No bears there, Sparky.”

    “You promise?”

    The Greek girl moved away, her hips a gentle tide to Dodgson.

    “I promise. Nothing with teeth. Honest, Sparks. You got it made now. I promise.”

    

    

    

    “Excuse me.”

    The shopkeeper’s eyes were furtive. They moved over her, then away, then moved back again.

    It was nothing new. It was difficult for most men to look directly at a beautiful woman. Men were weak. Most were idiots.

    Dodgson hadn’t found it difficult. It was one thing she’d liked about him.

    “What time’s the bus to Heraklion?”

    The man’s eyes darted. I could put them out for you.

    “You are leaving us?”

    “Yes, I’m leaving you.”

    “That’s a shame. You go somewhere else?”

    “Yes.”

    He waited for more.
Of course I’m going somewhere else, you asshole.
But she might as well tell him.

    “I’m going to Mykonos.”

    The man smiled. There was something furtive in the smile, too, as though she’d told him she were fucking half the island.

    “Mykonos!” he said.

    “The bus. Just tell me about the goddamn bus, will you?”

    
Or I will pull off your cock and stuff it into your goddamn ugly mouth.

    
I’m coming, Dodgson.
The man told her.

    

    

    

    

    

    On Delos the shepherd Dinos Siriandu dreamed he caught a chicken in his yard for dinner. The chicken had led him a merry chase. He cornered it, finally, against a bale of wire by the side of his hut.

    The chicken did not die right.

    He put the bird to the block and beheaded it with a single short stroke of his hatchet. The head fell away.

    Normally the body trembled, the legs tried to run. It was a while before the chicken knew it was dead.

    But this bird did nothing. It just stopped.

    Normally there was blood.

    This chicken had no blood.

    In his dream Siriandu was repulsed. He threw the bird off the block. He crossed himself. He kicked away the carcass.

    The carcass struggled to its feet and walked away.

    He woke, listening to what his wife called Hecate’s wind howling off the mountain.

    

    

    Tasos Katsimbalis lay sleeping in his Athens bedroom dreaming of his friend Jordan Thayer Chase.

    He saw an island rising out of a dark starlit sea, rising to a single peak. At its summit, by torchlight, a group of ecstatic naked women- Greek women, young and lithe-slaughtered a huge black bull with their bare hands. By sheer weight of number they pulled it to the ground. They tore it open. They drank its blood and ate handfuls of its living flesh. The bull bellowed. Tasos watched them carry pieces of it away with them and down the mountain.

    The bull rose up bloody and maimed on its hind legs, its intestines dangling, steaming, and slowly became a man. The man was Jordan Chase. Tasos waved to him and Chase waved back. And faded.

    

    

    In Heraklion Lelia Narkisos dreamed herself lying naked in a driving wind, a brutal stinging sandstorm, and impassively watched the force of it tear at her and the hot winds crumble her to dust.

    Then she was whole again. Lying in a dark sudden silence. In a hotel room in Heraklion and on an unknown mountain all at once.

    Powerful. Cruel.

    Inevitable.

    

    

    

    They sat at the Sunset Bar in Little Venice, listening to the lapping waves in the gentle heat of evening. Above his head an octopus dangled drying from a clothesline. He could smell them cooking over charcoal grills. He could smell the ocean too a few feet away.

    The night would be neither cool nor hot. The sun burned down the horizon. The music from the big outdoor speakers poured sweeping and romantic over the sea.

    In the distance he heard the flower man. “Tee oreo-anthioan-thopolis!” It was a cry that anyone who came to Mykonos got to know by heart and it made Dodgson feel at home here. In a moment or two he’d round the comer, a stooped old man with powerful shoulders, white hair and a huge wicker basket of flowers on his back. Some tourist would photograph him while he beamed into the camera. Apart from the windmills and the pelicans walking dockside in the harbor he was the most photographed thing in town and the effortless grin was always there. He was a man who seemed to love his work. Half the time he’d give the flowers away. Dodgson envied him.

    He was amazed that so little had changed here.

    Long ago the international types, the jet-setters, had discovered the island and money had come pouring in-big money and from very few hands only and it stayed that way as a sort of private preserve for quite a while before the crowds descended, and maybe because of that, change had come more gradually than on other islands.

    There were hotels now where there hadn’t been six years ago but not too many, and people like the flower man still existed, there were still the fishermen who went out to their boats every morning and had their own private bar to repair to, still the old women who met the produce wagons mornings and then sat knitting every afternoon in the narrow winding fieldstone streets, still the farmers and donkey men, and it seemed to Dodgson that while the new world had arrived here in force the old one had managed to hold on, at least for now.

    After Matala it was good to see. For all its chic shops and glitzy bars the place still had character. It was not what you’d call the “old” Greece-you had to go out to the countryside for that-but it was not all pollution and mopeds either. The scent of decay had not yet reached here.

    Or had it.

    “Jesus!” Danny said.

    He was looking at a big dirty bear of a man walking toward them through the tables. Another smaller man and a woman walked behind him. The big man was dressed in silks but they didn’t hang right. He looked like a glacier draped in a schooner sail. There was just too much of him.

    The woman might have been pretty if you cleaned her up a bit, washed the stringy hair and fed her now and then. She and the other man were little more than ragged skeletons. It was like watching a small social group of predatory animals, the big man dominant-so much so that the others were starving in the face of his appetites. Even the female. Strange, he thought, the groupings we content ourselves with.

    They walked past them and disappeared into the streets.

    “Where do you figure they’re from?” said Danny.

    “Got me,” Dodgson said.

    “French,” Michelle said. “They're countrymen.” From her tone she might have said weasels.

    “Thought I smelled Gauloises,” said Danny.

    “It is very fashionable to travel very far away and come home dirty. Especially to go east. For that I think we must blame the Beatles. The silks were Indian.”

    “Ugly little bunch.”

    Over by the rocks two fishermen were working on the day’s catch of octopuses, holding them by one tentacle, swinging them overhead and then whacking them hard against the rocks, a sound like the slap of wet leather. Was it to tenderize the flesh or get the insides out? Dodgson wondered. Two mongrel dogs stood watching.

    A pair of hands slipped over his eyes.

    “O singrafeas! My writer!”

    He knew that voice-rough, Greek and feminine.

    “Xenia.”

    “So turn around and give me a kiss, Robert Dodgson.”

    He turned to familiar bright gray eyes and a crooked smile, the smile lines webbing her broad scarred face. He put his hand into her thick mane of jet-black hair and kissed her.

    “You are back.”

    “I am back.”

    “Good. Okay. These are your friends?”

    “Michelle Favre, Danny Hicks. This is Xenia Milioris. Best kiss on the island.” They shook hands.

    “You are here for a while?”

    “A week or so, yes.”

    “Good. You come to the bar tonight? You better.”

    “Of course.”

    “Okay, good. I have to run. I got to put my boat in the water.” Predictably, she was suddenly fierce. “These assholes at the dock, they don’t know shit how to do it. I got to show them. Tomorrow we go to Delos. Eduardo, me-a bunch of us. We have a picnic. You want to come? All of you. If the weather is nice.”

    “Sounds good.”

    “Okay, we’ll talk about it tonight, all right? I’ll tell Eduardo, Dimitris, the rest of those bastards, you’re here. All right? I kiss you, darling!”

    “I kiss you, Xenia.”

    She moved quickly away. Her gait was almost a man’s. He watched her.

    Sometimes Dodgson thought she was the only person in Greece who was always on the run, a single locomotive in a world full of baby strollers. At the bar where she worked she was amazing, weaving through the thick crowd of dancers with her tray held high over her head, her policeman’s whistle shrill over the pounding music, darting around with uncanny accuracy and nerve-racking speed.

    Like the flower men she was essential to the place for Dodgson, part of the landscape. Six years ago they’d hit it off immediately and he figured he was lucky. You wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of Xenia. He’d seen her break a beer bottle over some witless Irish kid’s skull one night. Once she decided he had it coming she hadn’t hesitated an instant. It was more than that, though. If you got on the wrong side of Xenia you’d have missed something.

    The others were looking at him.

    “Just friends," he said.

    “An interesting lady,” said Danny. “A bit two-fisted, I think.”

    “She is. Xenia was born and raised here. She works in a bar and takes home whoever she likes in a country where most women stay in the house all night sewing and wouldn’t be caught dead in a bar-and where most of the men damn well keep them there. It’s a small island. She’s tough.”

    “I get you.”

    “It’s just as well she’s two-fisted. Otherwise they’d crush her.”

    "Tee oreo-anthioanthopolis!”

    The flower man turned the comer.

    “Watch this,” he said. “God, I love this place.”

    The flower man posed and smiled.

    Flashbulbs popped in the gathering dusk.

    

    

    

    The Greek was a sailor with the merchant marine and he’d trotted out his limited opening gambits the moment she sat down. But it was easy to discourage him.

    It was easier every day now.

    Why was that?

    For a moment she felt a vague uncertainty. She closed her eyes and three images skittered through her imagination. A full moon. Then dark of the moon, clouds scurrying through the sky. A woman-herself?- in childbirth. She opened them again.

    The sailor sat near her a discrete distance away reading a book.

    Lelia leaned against the rail and watched the sea roll by. The lower deck was crowded, mostly with Greeks bound for Tinos or Siros. They were noisy and dirty. Their children ran around like indians and there were plastic bags dripping bread and cheese and fruit everywhere. Overripe.
It’s all so overripe,
she thought.

    The only problem with Greece was Greeks.

    And one of them was staring at her.

    A skinny old hag of a woman dressed in black.

    
Go to hell,
she thought.

    She looked back across the railing and watched the gulls scavenge the sides of the boat.

    When she got bored with that the woman was still staring.

    Her face was expressionless but her gaze was hard and steady. And now two middle-aged women were watching her too. The hag was fingering a blue bead hanging from a chain around her neck.

    The sailor looked up from his book.

    
What the fuck is this? A show? Who do you think you’re staring at?

    She stood up.

    Abruptly the woman turned her head and spat.

    Lelia stood rooted there. Surprise and anger boiled in her. Why you dirty old bitch.

    She started forward.

    The woman saw her move and turned her head away again, spread the fingers of her left hand and shoved the hand palm-outward in her direction.