Island Casualty

by D. R. Ransdell

  Soumba and I might have had to spend all night on that upper deck answering questions about what happened, but then Soumba vomited all over himself. A couple of guys carried him down to the infirmary, where he couldn’t harm anyone. Not even himself.

  After I changed into dry clothes, I returned to the bar. Marios had closed out the cash register, but when he saw me, he waved me towards him. He started for the refrigerator but hesitated before opening the door. “You do drink, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Retsina?”

  “Got anything stronger?”

  He poured me a huge snifter of Metaxá. I was pretty sure that wouldn’t be enough.

  “You were great out there,” Marios said. “You went right in after him. It was very brave.”

  I wasn’t clever enough to lie. “No, I didn’t. I lunged for him and we went in together. After that I acted on instinct.”

  Marios poured an equal amount of brandy for himself. “But you saved him. In the end.”

  “I had to punch him. He kept fighting me.”

  “He’s not a bad man,” Marios told me.

  “I know that.”

  “He tried to do the right thing. He didn’t quite manage it.”

  “No. Somewhere along the line, he got messed up.” I started to get out my worry beads, but I didn’t know if I’d lost them in the water or whether they were somewhere in my luggage.

  “What’s his wife like?”

  “She’s out of her mind.”

  “I thought he was exaggerating.”

  “No. He told the whole thing straight.”

  “What about his daughter?”

  “She’s like a kid. She needs him. He’s all she’s got left.”

  Marios stacked plates, making a jarring sound as he set one on top of the other. “You can’t turn him in.”

  “I realize that.”

  “He has more integrity than everyone on this ship put together.”

  Marios exaggerated, but I understood his point of view.

  “You’re going to have to take him to a hotel. Let him sleep it off.”

  I felt as drained as if all my experiences on Amiros had been compressed into one day. “That’s kind of a problem for me.”

  He reached into his pocket. “If you don’t have enough money, I’ll give you some.”

  “I’ve got a flight to the U.S. I’ll be going straight from the port to the airport.”

  Marios shook his head as he wiped the sink with a dirty rag. “You can’t dump him in the street. The nurse probably gave him a sleeping pill by now, or maybe two or three.”

  “Do you have any better ideas?”

  He rapped on the counter. “We only stay in Piraeus an hour. Then we head back to the islands.”

  “I can’t go back.”

  “Maybe we can get your friend a cabin. We’re not usually full mid-week. By the time he wakes up, he’ll be halfway home again.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “Don’t worry,” Marios continued. “I’ll keep an eye on him for you.”

  I couldn’t think of any better solution. Then again, I couldn’t think of any solution at all. I wanted to be off the ferry and out of Greece. No matter where I went, I wouldn’t be far enough away.

  “You saved us both,” I told him. “If it hadn’t been for you, we would have drowned.”

  When the man nodded, his chin doubled over. “I try to do one good deed a week, but this counts triple.”

  “I guess you never had anything like this happen before.”

  “No. This was a first. This was one to remember.”

  “You must hear all kinds of stuff.”

  “That I do. I’ve been on this ship a long time. Back and forth between here and the Dodecanese. Most of the scenery is water. You could say it’s isolating. But in a strange way, this long journey has an effect on people. I hear more confessions than the priests do. German, English, Greek. I can understand them all. But it’s the Germans who are real buggers. You can’t believe the filth they talk about. And of course they don’t think I can understand.”

  “This is my second confession. I can tell you right now that I never want to hear another one.”

  “Maybe you’re a good listener. Maybe you won’t have a choice.”

  He brought out a mop and bucket from behind the counter. I moved chairs out of the way so that he could swoosh the area below them. “Yep, people confess to all kinds of things. You’d think nobody had a conscience anymore. Men cheat on their wives, and the wives cheat right back. Bankers cheat investors. And everybody cheats on taxes. I hear it all. There must be something about lying on a beach for a couple of weeks that makes people want to talk. All their confessions spill out into this bar and into my ears. I ought to charge for therapy sessions.”

  “Don’t tell me what Soumba told us was normal.”

  “God, no. This was one of the better ones. Usually I have the bar cleaned up way before we hit port. Today the time flew.”

  Out the window, the lights of Piraeus already loomed into view.

  “I’ll see about a cabin,” Marios said. He handed me the mop.

  I started mopping in long, useless strokes. The spots I went over didn’t look any cleaner, only wet. I could have emptied the bucket and started over with fresh water, but I wasn’t that ambitious. I didn’t figure it would make any difference. No matter how well you washed something, the next minute it got dirty again. And no matter how hard you tried to do the right thing, you couldn’t do that either. You could only choose the option that was the least worst. Soumba had done everything wrong, but some of it had been for the right reason. In the end everybody lost. Hari was the only one who hadn’t suffered. He would have never known what happened.

  We reached the long fingers of the port. I could hear the ship hands’ exclamations as they threw down the ferry’s ropes and secured them along the side, the slow creaks as they lowered the ferry’s gate, and the stampede as my fellow travelers poured out to meet their friends.

  Marios came back with a key in his hand. “We’re in luck. But let’s get him out of sight before the new passengers rush on board.”

  Sure enough, Soumba was sleeping in the infirmary. Marios shook him until he stirred. The police captain made a few incoherent sounds, turned his neck, and started snoring at a different speed. Supporting him on either side, Marios and I pull-pushed him off the couch and started down the hall while the nurse proceeded us, holding open the doors.

  When we got to Soumba’s cabin, we opened the door and stumbled inside. We were trying to set him down gently, but Marios lost his grip, and Soumba fell onto the bed, his head crashing into the wall.

  “Ow!” Marios cried, but Soumba didn’t hear it. He was sprawled on the bed, face up.

  We closed the cabin door behind us without taking off his shoes.

  ***

  “You look awful,” Mrs. Sfirakis said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  I adjusted my watch, which I’d found in my toiletries. By now it was the dead of night. After the transatlantic journey, the layover in Dallas, the flight to L.A., and the wait to get my luggage, I’d gotten to my apartment and slept through the rest of the evening. At two in the morning, I woke back up. By then I was too wired to fall asleep. When I went outside, I found Mrs. Sfirakis in the adjacent balcony. She was curled up in her chair combatting insomnia by leafing through a clothing catalog. Purring as loudly as a tow truck, her cat was sleeping on a rug at her feet.

  “I’m all right.”

  I lied without thinking about it. I didn’t have any idea how I was. I’d flown to Amiros to have fun, to relax, and to regain my focus. Instead every piece of me felt scattered. I’d tried to do right things only to realize in the end that every solution was more problematic than the last.

  “You’re not much of a liar, Andy. Maybe you need more practice.”

  She spoke so sternly I thought she was angry, but then I realized she was kidding. When
she held out her glass, I poured her a shot of brandy. Mexican Presidente, not Greek Metaxá.

  “Here’s to Squid Bay,” I said.

  Mrs. Sfirakis watched me cautiously. She angled her chair so that she could see my face. “You must have had some strange experiences on that island.”

  I was sure I didn’t want to meet any more fiancés. Or hear any more damned confessions. I wanted to meet normal people who complained about their lives but never took drastic action to change them.

  “I didn’t find what I expected.”

  “We never do find what we’re looking for,” she told me. “That’s one of the givens in life. Nobody gets a crystal ball or a set of directions. We have to muddle our way through.”

  A fly buzzed around my head as if taunting me on purpose. I spent several seconds trying uselessly to murder it.

  “I’ve been worried about you, Andy,” Mrs. Sfirakis continued. “They closed your restaurant.”

  “Joey filled me in.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d come back to Squid Bay at all.”

  “I might not be able to stay.”

  Mrs. Sfirakis set down her catalog so that Shadow could jump up in her lap. “Maybe you’re not meant to. It seems that the town is unlucky for you.” She waved her hands in circles. “Maybe the air is wrong.”

  “The air?”

  “That Chinese thing. The energy.”

  “You mean the feng shui?”

  “Right. Maybe you need to go off in a new direction. Not that I want you to move. God no. You’ve been a big help to me.”

  I thought of the time I’d changed a light bulb she couldn’t reach on her own, the time I messed around with her garbage disposal until it worked again, and the time I chased all over the neighborhood looking for Shadow, who had come home on her own. But Mrs. Sfirakis could have gotten the landlord to help her with all that.

  “Because I’m awake all hours of the night?”

  “That’s handy, certainly. Otherwise I’d have to spend a fortune on phone calls to friends in Europe who live in a different time zone. It’s always nice to have a little company at three a.m.”

  “I’m glad I can help one person at least.” That was more than I had done for the crew back on Amiros.

  “Andy, I never thought I’d think this way, but you’ve been a big help to me because talking to you makes me glad to be old. Past all the silliness. I suppose you’re in trouble because of the girl you went to see.”

  “As it turns out, visiting Rachel didn’t help me any.”

  “So you didn’t get much of a vacation.”

  “No. You might say that the Greek island I chose to visit was no paradise.”

  On another night, I’d tell her the whole story. Even if she thought I was crazy, she wouldn’t say so. I would be free to think it all by myself. After all, I’d tried to combat the Amirosian value system single-handedly. Instead Amiros had changed me. It had taught me that no matter how sure I was, I was wrong. If I knew ten angles of a situation, there would be another ten under the surface and another ten under each of those. Whatever I thought I knew would always be a drop of water in a thunderstorm.

  “There aren’t any paradises when you get right down to it, Andy. There’s always more behind the scenes.”

  She had no idea how right she was.

  “So what are you going to do with your time?”

  “I’ve got to get busy and find a new job.”

  Because she hadn’t taken off her glasses, she looked at me with big fish eyes. “Andy, that’s the way of the world.”

  “Working?”

  “Keeping busy. Moving forward. We’re all part of some cosmic chain. No wonder we can’t figure it out. It’s too complex.”

  I wondered if I’d be half as wise as Mrs. Sfirakis when—and if—I ever reached her age.

  Shadow jumped off her lap and came over to visit me. I petted her while she purred.

  “Andy, you were supposed to get back here three days ago.”

  “I’m lucky I got back now.”

  Her eyes traveled across my drooping shoulders. “I’m not sure whether you’re lucky or not.”

  I reached into my shirt pocket and dragged out the pack that contained my last two Karelaias, one of which I offered to my neighbor. “Believe me, Mrs. Sfirakis. Neither am I.”

  We turned and stared into the dark.

  In the distance, the ocean crashed along the shore.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Mike Orenduff at Aakenbaaken & Kent for his encouragement and guidance. Thanks also to Billie Johnson, Suzi Yazell, and Jeana Gartshore-Thompson. On the editorial side, many thanks to Sandra Ransdell and Kristin Little for reviewing this manuscript and providing valuable input. And thanks to the island of Kálymnos for inspiring a fictional counterpart. My two visits to the lovely island are among my most precious Greek memories.

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