The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  But there she was, in the very next tent. She lay surrounded by Tigran’s four small granddaughters, a blanket drawn to her chin. He had to stop himself from laughing at how cherubic a scene she’d fallen into, a shrouded Madonna enshrined by angels. How could he bring himself to wake her? Oh, but he had to, had to find a quiet way to signal to her to meet him at the shore.

  The shore. He went to the lake, removed his shirt, and dipped it into the lapping water. He brought the dripping shirt back to Mina’s tent, tiptoed over the top again, and wrung a bit—just a drop, and another—of cold seawater onto her face. He imagined her coming to angelically, each long-lashed blink a further grasping of where she was and who was waking her and what she would be doing next.

  Less angelically, she screamed.

  A scream in the dark was an unearthly thing. It spread quickly, not only to the granddaughters sprawled around her but to the parents and grandparents in the other tents in the camp. In a haze of adrenaline and fear, everyone rushed to the source of the scream. Tigran’s middle-aged son, Dev, came wielding a sturdy plank of wood that must have washed ashore, who knows how long ago.

  By the time Mina calmed down enough to explain that she’d felt something wet before waking to a shadowy figure looming over her against the night sky, Avo had successfully scampered back to his tent and out again, pretending to be as confused as everyone else. Tigran’s wife had taken Mina’s head in her lap beside the newly relit fire, stroking her hair. Mina was crying, Avo could see. She wasn’t some Madonna but a seventeen-year-old girl. Between fits of tears, she was telling Tigran’s wife all about the stories her grandmother had relayed to her growing up, of being marched from home in the night by Turks, of being raped by Kurdish mercenaries in the desert, of being split open by gendarme bayonets, of all the horrors that began with an unexpected face in the night.

  Jesus, Avo thought. All he’d wanted was to rub her feet. Somehow that now seemed worse. He could hardly look at her. She was sobbing and pawing her face because of him.

  Of course the children started wailing, too, and so they were all corralled into one of the tents with their parents for the night. Avo returned to find Ruben lying alone in theirs, his skinny, pale back reflecting whatever starlight Avo had let in. Avo hauled his bedding to the newly vacant space as far from his brother as he could get, and said luxuriously, “So I got us a bigger tent.”

  “I knew it was you,” Ruben said into the wool blanket coiled under his head. “It was a mistake to bring you. Especially with that woman here.”

  “You mean Mina?”

  “Who else?”

  “I don’t think of her as a woman, is all. She’s our age. She’s a girl.”

  “That’s an act,” Ruben said. “You can’t see it because she has power over you. But she’s not a girl. She’s a woman. Or at least she’s womanly.”

  He knew Ruben wasn’t joking, was never joking, but Avo couldn’t control himself. Womanly. Might as well have been evil-ish. Avo was shaking, laughing through an apology for laughing.

  Ruben, still facing the other way, seemed to be trembling a bit himself, but not from laughter. He sniffed. He sucked in air. He said, “I wish I had a crumb-sized piece of her luck.”

  What a miserable way to be, Avo thought, outraged on one hand and sentimental on the other. No boy half Ruben’s age could say something like that without a slap upside the head, and Avo was just about ready to deliver it when Ruben surprised him by saying more.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “It’s just that this trip was supposed to be about showing her that I don’t need Paris. That I have something she doesn’t. I have you. I’m loyal to you. I’ve been nothing but loyal to you, and now I feel very stupid. I feel very alone.”

  “You’re not,” Avo said. He rolled, side over side, until he was there at Ruben’s back. “Brother, you’re not.”

  This close, Avo could see an enormous mosquito bite, swollen to the size of a knuckle, rising from the skin between Ruben’s shoulder blades. A compulsion came over him to scratch at his own bites on his ankles and his wrists. Outside, the last of the fire was crackling, and the final concerned campers had returned to their tents. One scratch led to another, and soon both brothers were sitting up, spinning every now and then to claw at the other’s unreachable bites in the dark and spacious tent, where neither of them could fall asleep again if they tried.

  “There are lots of Armenians in Paris,” Ruben whispered over the scratching. “I’m not sure if you knew that.”

  “You should be one of them,” Avo said. “Can’t we figure out how to get you on that trip?”

  “There are two tickets. One is Tigran’s. The other belongs to the player of his choice.”

  “I’m sure Mina would give you her spot if you asked.”

  “It’s my spot. No one gets the kind of luck she has. She must be cheating. I’m not asking her for my own spot.”

  “We could plant a loaded die in her pocket to prove she’s a cheater,” Avo said jokingly.

  “When we get home, we’ll find one, or you will—it’ll have to be you, since I have too much to gain to be involved. It has to be you.”

  “Easy,” Avo said, “I was kidding.” He said he’d never stamp someone a fraud for the rest of her life, reminding Ruben about how petty Mr. V had become, consumed by self-righteousness over a twenty-year-old game. “Imagine Mina spending the rest of her life trying to defend herself,” he said. “Telling the truth but nobody believing her, the truth about something nobody will ever care about as much as she does. I’ll help you get Mina’s spot, but not like that. Not something permanent like that.”

  “There’s another way,” Ruben said. “If she can’t travel.”

  The mosquitoes hadn’t been much of a problem since sundown, but now every itchy bite on Avo’s ankles and elbows seemed to birth a new bug, and he felt swarmed by them, waving at his face to avoid being eaten alive.

  “You want to hurt her,” he managed to say.

  “Not seriously,” Ruben said. “Just enough to require a reserve.”

  “Come on,” Avo said. “The mosquitoes must’ve sucked the blood out of your brain.”

  “If she goes to Paris, Avo-jan, she’ll have a nice vacation. If I go, both of our lives will change forever. We’re better than hurting a girl, yes, but we’re also better than spending our lives in a drunken village in the corner of a dying empire, aren’t we?”

  Gratitude could be selfish and genuine all at once. Who else had made room for Avo in an imagined future? No one. Certainly not Mina, who wasn’t bored of the past, as she’d claimed, but terrified of it. So terrified, apparently, that she couldn’t recognize him standing over her tent.

  “I couldn’t do it,” Avo said.

  “It’s so easy to slip and fall on those slimy rocks near the shoreline, you know. I bet there are two or three pairs of sprained wrists every summer here. I bet—”

  “Maybe when Tigran passes,” Avo said. “I hate to say it, but maybe it won’t be so long from now, and maybe then you can take over for him, and then you can take a student to the next tournament. Every ten years, right? Ten years isn’t so long. Ten years is nothing, your mosquito bites are bigger than ten years.”

  “You’re lying to yourself. Everything can change overnight, and who knows it better than we do? Everybody else in this stupid country is a Soviet first. Soviet first, Russian second. Soviet first, Ukrainian second. Not us. We’re Armenian first, and always have been, and we’ve seen the world’s greatest empires come and go, whole governments overturned, whole civilizations burned—overnight. Overnight, and you know it. Remember Yergat? How old was his daughter, with the coins pressed in her hand? Ten years old. Ten years was her lifetime. Ten years is a lifetime, Avo—you know that. In Paris, with those wider-minded Armenians, we can shape our life. This is our only opportunity to do this. Our opportunity. You and me. I have a plan for us, a real plan. We can either stay home and trade the rest of our lives and livelihoods f
or rejected travel visas, or we can try this. Now. Without you, I won’t go, either. I’ll work in the factory right beside you. I’ll learn a trade and die fixing buttons to shirts or blasting shit off statues. For you, I’ll do that. But we can do something greater together, if only you’ll do this for me.”

  The fire had stopped crackling, and their scratching had stopped, but of course other sounds came to fill the silence. A wave lapped at the rocks along the shore, and another, the same but for the smallest shifts in rhythm.

  One of the brothers suggested they try to sleep, and they spent the rest of the night on their backs with their eyes shut, pretending.

  Fog, early. Dim but warm, like a bulb under a sock. The children collected stones at the shore. Hunted for, more like. They crouched low to study their discoveries, turned them in their hands the way they’d seen their fathers roll cigarettes, looking to see if the stones passed whatever mysterious test was being administered. They slipped the good ones into the knit bags strapped over their shoulders. As for the stones that failed, those they hurled out over the dull glass of the sea.

  Soon the adults joined, Mina among them in her yellow bathing suit, scratching at the dimple in her collarbone. She’d folded her hair under a beige swimming cap, but two hooks of shiny black hair escaped in front of her ears. At the shoreline she said good morning to the children, who opened their bags to show her the best of their collections. Then she walked farther into the water, toward the approaching swells, until she was swimming, diving into one of the swells, a moving ridge of sea that swallowed her headfirst, burped her out from behind, and broke gently into a foam over the children’s toes at the shore.

  While Avo watched her swim, Ruben joined the adults for a fireside breakfast. Tigran’s wife and daughter-in-law had made and packed a stack of lamajun as tall as a tree stump, each thin circle of beef-spread bread separated by a greasy sheet of parchment, and now the campers who weren’t planning on getting in the water were at the fireside, peeling the lamajun apart. Ruben and his teacher heated their slices over the fire, spritzed them with lemon, rolled them into tubes, and ate them in no more than a few bites. Over the fire, the wheat and the spiced meat sent their grilled smells into the world, cut with the scent of lemon juice, and suddenly, the fishy coast of Georgia smelled exactly like an Armenian kitchen.

  “Hungry?” Tigran asked, catching Avo loitering between the fire and the shore. “I probably shouldn’t invite you to eat. I had an uncle like you—big. Had a real appetite. My aunt used to hide food in the house.”

  Everyone laughed but Ruben, eating silently beside his teacher, looking out over the sea.

  Avo knew he was watching Mina, all alone out there in the dangerous water. Almost asking for a fall. “Eat while you can,” Avo tried to joke, but the tone came out menacing. “I’d like to swim first, I think.”

  After a quick change into his shorts in the tent, Avo ambled past the little treasure hunters on his way to the shore. The children, afraid of or awed by his size, had successfully avoided him the whole trip. But now one of the boys, maybe seven, tugged at his shorts and said, “Guess how many I found.”

  Mina had gone farther out, past where the water swelled and rolled. She was floating on her back, with her hands crossed over her chest at her shoulders. One streak of sunlight broke through the cloud cover, a white scar on the water near her feet.

  “How many?” Avo said, thinking, Feet, feet, feet.

  “Guess!” said the boy.

  Was Mina floating back to shore? The sky was opening up, and she would leave soon to get some shade.

  “Six,” Avo said.

  “Nope. Guess again.”

  Now Mina did seem to stir. She was still floating, but her arms had come uncrossed. “Let me go swim and think about it, and I’ll come back with an answer.”

  “No! You have to guess correctly or else you cannot pass.”

  “Seven?”

  “You’re big,” said the boy, “but you’re a bad guesser.”

  “I have to go,” Avo said, but the boy kept tugging at his shorts. “Guess!”

  The sky was breaking open now, and Mina—he’d missed his chance—was swimming back to shore.

  “You have to guess!”

  “Ten?”

  “Nope! Guess again.”

  “Just tell me dammit just tell me,” Avo said in a single hoarse breath. He hadn’t shouted, nobody had heard him but the little boy. Still, the boy broke into tears.

  “Man,” Avo said, kneeling down to look the kid in the face. “I’m sorry.”

  Mina emerged from the foam. “What happened?” she said, coming to them. “Is he okay?” She knelt to embrace the crying boy. “Are you okay?” Beads of seawater shivered on Mina’s skin.

  “We got frustrated,” Avo said. “I couldn’t guess how many stones he had in his pouch.”

  “He cursed me,” the boy cried.

  “Well,” Avo said, “I cursed the situation.”

  “How about this,” Mina said, taking the boy by his shoulders. “How about if I can guess the right number of stones you have, then we can forgive Avo? Does that sound fair?”

  The boy sniffled. “Maybe.”

  “And if I’m wrong,” she said, “we can go tattle on him to your grandpa.”

  “Yeah!” said the boy, immediately dry-eyed. “Okay, guess!”

  Mina rested her chin on her fist, making a display of a deep, long rumination.

  “Good thing you have your thinking hat on,” Avo said, snapping her swim cap gently. A bad joke, but a joke. The first he’d made to her in a while.

  “You only get one guess!”

  “One guess, huh? Okay. Here goes. How about . . . seventeen? Do you have seventeen stones?”

  The boy’s face dropped. His eyes peered into Mina’s, studying her like one of his rocks.

  “Well?” asked Mina.

  The boy emptied his bag onto the sand. He counted the rocks, and then began to count again.

  “Yep,” Mina said. “Seventeen!”

  “Wow!” said the boy. “You’re way better than he was.”

  As the boy happily re-collected his rocks, Mina and Avo started toward the fire.

  “How’d you do it?” Avo asked, a little overwhelmed by the magic of her. He could really use a rational answer. Maybe, afloat on the sea, she’d watched the boy pick each rock up?

  “Honestly,” Mina said, “I just guessed.”

  Maybe she really was the luckiest person in the world. Somewhat grandiosely, it occurred to him that if Mina consistently drew good things to herself, he would need to be a good man to end up in her life. They walked to the fire together. The smell of lamajun roasted in the thinning fog, and Mina’s attention became the new litmus test in Avo’s mind for his own capacity to be good.

  Breakfast was delicious but lonely. Ruben had already returned to his tent, having squeezed the last of a lemon into the fire. Tigran was having a post-breakfast smoke as Mina ate and they went over opening strategies for the tournament. The flirtation just a few minutes earlier—the way Avo slid his fingers beneath her swim cap to snap it, the playfully pestered look she gave him—seemed absurd to him now, seeing her in her professional mode. She’d wrapped herself in a large green towel that brought the green flecks in her eyes to life, but her focus was on her mentor. Unlike Avo, she had a reason to be here. She was the reason to be here.

  Ruben was the reason Avo had been invited. How had it not occurred to him until just now, watching the green specks in a pair of eyes ignore him? Ruben must have insisted that Tigran invite Avo along on this trip, must have given the old man an ultimatum: Both of us or neither. The only way a double-reed worked. That Ruben hadn’t extolled his act of loyalty to Avo—that he had not, in fact, mentioned it—made it an even holier act of kindness. Ruben’s allegiance was pure. He didn’t perform loyalty, hoping someone would notice. He simply was loyal.

  Back in the tent, Ruben was reading the pocket-size Bible he’d apparently packe
d and brought along. The first half of the book was more dog-eared and worn than the second.

  “Brought you some cantaloupe,” Avo said, offering the plate. “Tigran’s wife just cut a bunch. I know you’re probably full already, but it’s a good snack.”

  Ruben looked up from the book and pinched a cube of the orange melon into his mouth.

  “Look,” Avo said, “I missed my chance out there in the water, but I don’t want you to think I’ve given up on the plan. I hate to say I think you’re right. It’s a small, necessary evil to get Mina out of the tournament so you can take her place. And it’s my job to help you do that.”

  “When?” Ruben said, and when Avo said later tonight, after the children were asleep, Ruben stood and hugged him as high as he could reach, right around the ribs.

  Outside, Tigran announced that the men were hiking to a secret fishing spot on the other side of the cove. Only the men and the older boys—Tigran, Dev, Ruben, and Avo—would be going. They would return after sundown, bearing dinner.

  The hike took almost two hours. Tigran’s son, Dev, led the way. He carried the poles and a belt equipped with hooks and bait, and Avo and Ruben each held a handle of the icebox they hoped to fill with fish. Every now and then Dev would stop to point out a large boulder jutting from the cliff to their right, or a strange patch of blue rocks on the beach to their left, to recount a story from his youth. “Dad spanked me over there, where those gulls are hanging out,” he’d say about the time he’d thrown a rock at a bird. “I never was cruel to a bird again.” Tigran himself was quiet, harnessing all his energy for the walk, which, flat though it was, was littered with loose and slippery rocks. The master with his cane moved slowly. An hour into the hike, he took a seat at the rock where his son had once blown a whistle made of grass. He apologized for being old.