White Vespa (24 page)

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Authors: Kevin Oderman

Tags: #General Fiction

BOOK: White Vespa
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“Jim,” Myles began, as warmly as he could, “please don't come to the dock tomorrow. I'd rather just slip away.”
They'd walked down, were leaning on a wall near Jim's place in Yialós.
“Okay, Myles, if that's how you want it.”
“I'm not going to lose touch with you. You'd have to have your phone changed, move to another city, more than that, to have any chance of losing me.”
“That's good.”
“But right now, even though you're here, I can't reach to you, not to you or anybody else. I'm lost, deep down lost, with Anne, and Max, the dead and the missing. I can't reach to you, you can't reach to me. I know you want to. But I don't want to be reached. Not yet.”
“When you do,” Jim said, putting his arm around Myles' shoulder.
“When I do, you'll hear from me. In the meantime, I just need to walk my thoughts out. If I walk far enough I'm hoping I'll get somewhere, somewhere that looks like a place I can live. And I'm thinking I'll try to write, that maybe this is a story, after all. Someday you'll open your mailbox and there will be a big envelope in there half covered with Greek stamps.”
Sixty-six
23 Sept.
 
Had a visitor. I was coming back, a little heavy footed from the late morning heat, on the last pull up the spur to Emborió off the main road between Nikiá and Mandhráki. I heard a banging, and a beat-up pickup that had clattered by a moment before screeched to a stop on the road ahead of me, and there, in the bed of the pickup, riding with a goat and a half dozen caged chickens, I saw Jim. He threw his big bag onto the pavement, then clambered down awkwardly, poked his head in the cab to say his thanks, then shouted greetings to me.
When he got closer, he said, “Gimme a barhug,” and beamed. I must have been beaming, too; I was so happy to see him.
He hadn't expected to, but had decided to layover on Níssyros on his way to Kos and the charter that would take him back to the States. He said finding me was easy, that there seemed to be quite a bit of speculation about the unhappy-looking American holed up in Emborió when he wasn't out walking the roads at all hours. The news surprised me; Greeks leave you alone, and somehow that courtesy had left me feeling thankfully unnoticed on Níssyros. It had been the sympathy, the knowing glances, as much as anything, that I hadn't been able to abide on Sými. I'd wanted my grief private.
We walked up to my house with his bag swinging between us, each with a hand on one grip. Jim said there was a hydrofoil for Kos the next day, so his visit would be short. “Aha,” I said, which struck him as funny, or got him laughing, anyway. And laughing with Jim, I realized how much I'd been missing just that, our flights from frightful sobriety.
Inside, he looked coolly at the hooded cameras and asked me if I'd been working. So I told him I was finished, had quit. He didn't venture a comment. We looked at the prints from ghostly Mikró Horió on Tílos, where together we'd walked the abandoned village, speculating, then, on loss. When he admired the photos, I gave them to him. Publication enough. Those photographs have something of us, not in them, but hanging from them. They'd never mean the same way bound in a book, forgotten on some coffee table.
While I was pouring oúzo, Jim rummaged through his luggage. “I have an excuse for coming,” he said.
“As if you needed one.”
Then I saw he was holding my lost glasses in his hand. When he saw how startled I looked, he said, “Aha!”
“I guess! Where'd you get those?”
“Yórgos. He gave them to me just a few days ago. He said he'd gone up to your place one last time to clean, or to cart off some of the stuff you left, and he found these on the table, outside, under the olive tree.”
I couldn't fathom this, not at all.
When the heat eased we went walking, and I felt light, unencumbered by the cameras it seemed I had always carried when I walked with Jim. He is a great enthusiast of the island and was delighted with the long views down to the water as we walked the road around the lip of the crater to Nikiá. I saw he was right. The volcano had left things abrupt, the feeling of riding over heights was very strong, and things down below had the bright clarity of a world viewed through lenses.
Curiously, he seemed surprised to see another island floating around out there. “Tílos,” I said, and he responded, “Really?” Just like he didn't believe it. But every island does feel like its own world, which makes their proximity in the Dodecanese, I guess, a little incredible. But isn't this the very thing that makes
the islands
so evocative, every one different in its own sea-green skirt? Telling the names itself is a kind of heartbreak: Ródhos, Kos, Sými, Lipsí, Tílos, Níssyros, Pátmos
. . .
By the time we got to Nikiá the shadows were pronounced, giving the small, white buildings a blue depth. We tried a few of the cobbled paths on the seaside of town, which dropped away precipitously. All the while we were talking. Jim spoke most, a little of his natural ebullience shining through, but I talked too, my lips stiff but working.
The sun set. The stars rolled. We walked back in the dark, once or twice Jim pointed, out over the black pool of the caldera, at the bright flare of a falling star.
 
“Myles?”
We were side by side, up on the roof, on our backs, still stargazing. “Mmm?”
“Are you sure she's dead?”
And I gagged on her loss all over again. Fought down the impulse to sob. I lay there, under stars too bright. Finally, I got out the question, “Why do you ask?”
“They never found her. They thought they should have.”
“And?”
“It's the glasses. First they disappeared, then they turned up,” he paused. “Somebody had to know where to take them.”
“You think Anne put them there? She was in the water when they disappeared, Jim. It couldn't have been her.” I lay there, heart beating hard, “I'm not sure, really not sure if I can stand thinking, what, that she ran from me? Jesus, Jesus, I don't mean that like it sounded. I
. . .
I've been trying everyday, all day, just to accept that she is dead. If I hope, I fear. I hoped before, for Max, for years. That the phone would ring, and I'd hear that familiar voice, his voice. And the phone did ring, and it was always someone else. Not Max. I just can't do that again. I'm all wrung out.”
And I lay there feeling maybe not as wrung out as I wanted to, frightened still.
“Jim?”
His voice came back quiet, very quiet, out of a deep hush. “It's only a feeling, Myles, and it may be stupid of me to tell you, but I think she's out there. I'm going to allow myself to hope she is.”
 
In the morning, we were glad Mandhráki was downhill, what with the two of us and Jim's big bag on the Vespa. At the pier we watched as the hydrofoil dropped into the water and came on into the dock. A couple in plaid shorts got off, looking quizzically around at the blight you can see from the pier. Jim was the only passenger outgoing.
“I can't tell you what I'm feeling, Myles.”
I nodded.
“Maybe it's time,” he said, “time for you to be going home, too.”
“I just don't feel there's any home to go to.”
I didn't know what else to say. That, in spite of how it looks, I'm not done here?
“Maybe it'd be there if you went,” Jim said.
But I don't think it would. So I gave him one last
barhug
and he crossed over, on to the bobbing dolphin, and the crew tossed off and the dolphin turned, churning the water white, then it was running. A hundred yards out it came up out of the water onto its hydrofoils. It got small quick, but I could see Jim out on the back deck, waving, for quite awhile.
Sixty-seven
28 Sept.
 
Since Jim's visit, I find that I am waiting. I seem to have been turned forward, but nothing has begun. Outwardly, my days are little changed. I walk. I eat, read, go to town and come home again. But it's not the same. The clouds are different. They were there before but blew across the island; now they just hang, suspended, between worlds. Some days I walk goat trails out along the lip of the volcano to sit under a tree, just looking. The caldera feels full to me. I study its fullness. I am visited by the occasional hawk, riding the thermals welling up from the floor of the crater. Down there, dust devils swirl, touching down on the sulfurous earth, reaching up a yellow cone to blue heaven. I blow the spores off a dandelion and they float away, wishes, in no hurry to get anywhere.
Or I trail the Vespa down to a lonely bit of shore, on a spur out beyond Páli, to Líes, a protected cove at the end of the track. The water is warm but in a different way. It has remembered winter. These days hang between seasons. I wade in, the sand rippled like corduroy under my toes. Deeper. And I feel my body lightening up. Then I'm weightless, and I breathe the salt air deep into my glowing lungs. I am floating now, between mediums, the air pressing down, the water pressing up, and the sun shot all through it. My ears fill with sea water and my breath, my blood, are all I hear. I am waiting for something to begin.
I dream of fish, weightless, the beautiful silver domes of jellyfish, the rhythm of their pulsing, the skimming blue of flying fish, of dolphins, a seahorse, hanging in consciousness like an unanswered question.
Sixty-eight
2 Oct.
 
The day started with bread, or the thought of it. Even in bed, I began to hunger. I'd pulled a sheet up over my eyes, wanting to sleep again, to float away on the light breeze that trailed from window to window. But it was already late, and before I could find my way back to sleep I smelled bread, or imagined the smell of fresh bread, and the goodness of that smell got me out of bed. There would be fresh bread in the bakeries of Mandhráki, on the square or in that bakery run by brothers, off the paraléia, overlooking the restless sea. I wanted something fresh and heavy, dense and chewy. I wanted it deep in butter and honey. So I pulled on my loose slacks and cinched my heavy belt tight to hold them up. I pulled on a rumpled white T-shirt and consulted the mirror. The news was not good, but I wanted bread, the smell of bread, so I slicked my hair back with tap water, stepped into my sandals, and went out the door.
The Vespa, I noticed, was no longer very white, but khaki, the color of dust, and I swiped at the seat and got on, picking my way down the alley to the pavement. You can see bits of several switchbacks from Emborió, and I braked to a stop when I saw someone walking up way down below, someone in a loose, green skirt and a black T-shirt, carrying a day pack. The hair was wrong, but I knew that stride. My hands felt weak on the grips and my arms suddenly very cool inside. I hesitated. I eased off the brakes and started down, braking often, going slow. I wanted to be ready or ready to be wrong. But I couldn't get myself to think or to feel. Should I have felt elated, furious? It was as if my head, my heart, had been swept out, clean and empty. I dropped through the terraces, in and out of shadow and sun, air, a bird flying in it, two choughs in a tree, one cawing, his body heaving the sound up. Every hairpin turn brought up a new prospect, dizzying, and it should all have been familiar but was not. Another turn and there she was, standing still, head cocked, listening to the familiar rattle of the Vespa's muffler, eyes wide, and, I think, a little afraid. Her fear disarmed me. I pulled right up next to her, stopping, face to face.
“Take a picture of a girl, mister?” She said, a forced smile fading on her lips.
“So,” I tried to say something but all I could do was lean into her. I could feel her shuddering against me.
“I,” she began, and I could feel her pulse pounding in her chest. She twitched, and I ran my hands over her back and shoulders, gently, trying to steady her and wanting to touch her. But her breath came ragged when she spoke.
“I couldn't stay dead. I thought I wanted to, but I didn't.”
I just held on, could not speak. I wanted to say, maybe what needed to die did die, what wanted to live, lives. But all I could do was hold her a little tighter, and finally, say her name. “Anne.” Just Anne.
“I'm back,” she said, her voice throaty and broken.
“Then get on.”
And she did.
 
Things went in motion again. Clouds streamed over the island. Birds rattled by, going with the wind. The Vespa made the landscape rush, olive trees bent and blurred, the sere grasses yellow and blown back. A herd of goats scrambled away from the road, one pied goat leaping like an ibex from terrace to terrace. Anne pressed her cheek against my back and her arms roped around my waist, with me again in a flowing world.
The Vespa reared a little in the steep, cobbled alley, and the sound of the engine bounded back and forth between the close walls. At my gate I shut it down. Anne didn't move.
“Well?”
“So this is it?” Her voice came low, muted, from behind my back.
I nodded, but she made no move to get off, held on.
“What are you doing?”
“Smelling you.”
 
“I didn't know this was here.” We were looking into the crater, sitting high up, on a rock wall a little beyond the last house of Emborió. “Or not here,” she added quietly.

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