Sons of Thunder (5 page)

No, he looked ahead, to the long wooden pier, jutting out like a gangplank into the sea. A seagull dove, chiding him, or perhaps he heard the cry that he longed to release.

The air smelled of a thorough scouring, raw and empty.

Beside him, Dino tripped. Markos grabbed him around the shoulders.

Sofia stood on the pier, her hair untied, the wind molding her dress to her body. Her blue eyes stayed expressionless as she watched them approach. He wanted to look away, to hate her for her omissions.

She had planned to leave him.

She held his gaze all the way up the dock to the very end, where the ferry to the mainland warned of its departure. He approached her silently until he thunked his case down next to hers. Only then did she look away. “I was going to tell you.”

He nodded, but nothing would emerge from his raw, stripped throat.

He’d never ridden the ferry to the mainland, always watched it motor up to the long Zante dock, park at the end. Two decks, with tall
dark masts that speared the sky, the ferry resembled a great shoe, like a rhyme Markos had once heard. Travelers huddled on long open-air benches, or hung over the rails, their faces to the wind.

Gaius Frangos, gaunt, white-haired against his black wool fishing cap, his face saggy with years, approached him. “You won’t make any trouble.”

It wasn’t a question so much as a promise. Or an agreement. Markos nodded. But Gaius’s dark eyes darted to Sofia, then back.

Markos nodded again, swallowed.

He carried all their cases aboard then settled Dino on the top deck. Dino again drew his legs up, a fetal gesture.

The ferry whistled again, and only then did Markos surrender to the urge to look back.

Zante, with its blue-painted roofs, its whitened nest of buildings climbing a rocky slope to the Ramone olive grove above the town, glistening black and silver in the sun. The tinkling of goats, meandering out to the hills. The sea, now again quiet, having deposited the froth of its anger on the shore. The fishing boats, red, yellow, blue, listless at their berths as if in repose and grateful for a day to exhale, sails strapped against masts. Orange buoys floated in the bay. His gaze went to his bedroom window, the tiny one overlooking the sea, next to the taverna. For a moment, he thought he saw a hand. He lifted his own—

“Markos!”

His gaze jerked from his farewell to find the voice.

Lucien. Markos pulled his hand back, everything inside him seizing. Lucien ran down the pier, both hands above his head. Not the cheerful,
Markos, take me with you
lopsided grin on his gaunt face. No, this
Markos!
reeked of desperation, his eyes wild. “Don’t go!”

The ferry whistled a final time, the engines churning up water as the ferrymen loosened the riggings from the pier.

Lucien stopped at the end. His eyes finally found Markos. “Please—Markos!”

Markos gripped the slick, cold rail of the ferry. Stared at his friend, at the bruises darkening his eyes, the body that could slip through the water like a mackerel, the hands that had rescued him from the stone floor.
Run!

Run, because Lucien had known his brother’s, his father’s intentions. Run, because Lucien was a Pappos.

Something inside Markos ripped free, and he released himself to the dark boil inside. He clenched his teeth. Narrowed his eyes.

Lucien lowered his hands.

Markos turned his back to him, his shadow long in the morning light across the deck as he returned to his brother. He draped Dino in his father’s coat and let the ferry steal them away.

CHAPTER 4

Markos had become a foreigner in his own skin. As if he’d left himself back on the dock or perhaps sitting in his square, white-washed window, the shutters wide, watching the sun’s blush on the waves creeping over the fishing boats and charming him to sea.

But not this sea. This sea he didn’t know, with its endless caldron of jagged valleys, edged with spittle, and at night, so black, the wind over it an endless lament. At night, the sky appeared so immense, yet miraculously intimate, it seemed he could pull the stars from their moorings. And, he’d never been so cold. A kind of chill that he couldn’t flee pressed into his bones, turning him brittle. The wind from this black, sometimes green sea—never his Ionian blue—moaned in his ears, burned his throat.

Most days, he wrapped himself into his blanket—the knitted wool a mockery against the shearing wind—and traced the mischief of the seabirds. Markos watched as the birds dipped into the troughs between the waves and let themselves be lured to the stern of the boat by children offering biscuits and smoked herring smuggled from the breakfast table. Once he’d spied an albatross, and something about the great span of its wings, riding the gales without effort, lodged a stone in his throat.

Three times he’d seen a whale, once with a calf. He’d watched them in anonymity for a full ten minutes before someone—one of the nearby
bull-board players—happened to the rail in time for the spray of water from the blowhole.

He lost the view then, as the crowd pushed to watch, most of them also attired in their long-coats and rented steamer rugs. Only then did he notice Dino, swallowed in his father’s woolen jacket, expressionless, perched on a barrel near the slanted, marked board of the bull-board gamers.

Dino lifted his eyes to him, held for a moment, turned away.

Around him, the foreign syllables gnawed at his ears. At first, he had strained to make out anything familiar from the cacophony that rose from the dining room, but his brain burned with the effort and, after downing his porridge or milk scones, he escaped to his third-class berth, or better, to the steel-edged winds of the promenade deck.

His berth smelled too much of mildew, a prison that muddied his lungs, snarled him into his thoughts—Lucien, begging at the end of the pier. His father’s body, bloating in the morning sun. Mama, her chapped hands grasping her apron to draw it over her head as he’d left.

And Sofia. Standing at the rail as the ferry puttered away from shore, her face a stone. He’d found her there, braced against the wind as they’d neared the port in Peloponnesus.

Somehow, the eight-hour trip to the main peninsula had boiled his anger down, and although it remained a hot coal in the center of his chest, he’d found he could finally breathe around it by the time the sun nudged the dark waters.

Sofia had stiffened as he’d slipped up beside her on the way to Peloponnesus. He wanted to take her hand then, to find if it might be as warm as the night before. Instead, he clutched the rail, his hand inches from hers.

“Why did you not tell me that you were leaving?”

She didn’t look at him, and he found her just as beautiful in the outline of twilight, the sun a pink halo at her back, her blue eyes unblinking as the lights of the port town winked at them from shore.

“My grandfather decided only a week ago. He received a letter from his brother’s son, with tickets for our passage. And—I didn’t know—how to tell you.”

She shot him a quick look—fast, as though she feared him.

And for a second, he saw himself launching at Kostas. He may have even heard his own feral scream in the wind.

She drew away, wrapped her knobby wool sweater around her. A strong gust just might toss her into the churning waves. “Grandfather is feeling ill. I should check on him.”

They’d found passage to London on a ship through the Mediterranean—the SS
Adriatic
—and he thought perhaps Sofia would come to him, sit with him on the deck. But she hid herself away in her cabin, leaving him to roam the ship as the coastline slid by.

He longed for her song.

When they’d reached London, Sofia appeared drawn, her grandfather fragile, as they’d disembarked. Markos had purchased the passage for America on an American shipping line.

He bought tickets in third-class steerage, hoping he had enough for the train to Chicago.

During the journey to London, he’d sounded out his uncle’s letter then managed to find a map of America. Such a large country, and Chicago seemed so far to travel.

Not until he reached London and stood in the shipyard did he understand his mother’s instructions. Around him, families camped out upon their worldly belongings, fatigue scrawled in the eyes of the women, the children chasing seagulls or playing games between the crates and coiled
ropes, fishing gear, and oil slicks. Everyone seemed skittish, unsettled. Clinging to their own.

Yes. He would go to Chicago, to be with his uncle’s family. Because they spoke Greek.

Markos stared at the foreign letters over the ticket counters, the same ball of heat in his chest that he felt every time his mother pulled Dino to her lap and they read aloud together. The fluency in their tones made him turn away, slam through the house, and out to the sea. It cooled him like nothing else could.

To live in America, he’d need family.

Just like in Zante.

The whistle for lunch blew, a high shrill that never failed to make him wince. He debated his hunger, then unwound himself from the deck chair. Dino had dug into their luggage and unpacked his mother’s books and now claimed a space in the shadow of an overturned lifeboat,
The History of Greece
in the nook of his up-drawn legs, the collar turned up on his coat. Markos nudged him with his foot. “Lunch.”

Dino shook his head.

Markos grabbed his collar. “Mama will kill me if you starve to death.”

Dino shrugged out of his grip and shot him a glare, but stood up. Markos considered it a victory, of sorts.

In the dining room on the saloon deck, the stewards had already begun lunch service—green soup—probably pea—and a meat pie, biscuits smothered in brown gravy. How he longed for lamb, or perhaps a tilapia, grilled with lemon and basil.

Markos stood over his food, made the sign of the cross.

Dino sat down, lifted his spoon, and dug into his food.

“Dino—we’ve not lost everything of ourselves, have we?”

Dino ignored him. Markos tucked himself into the deck chair affixed to the floor.

“Markos, I need you.”

Sofia’s hand skimmed his shoulder, enough to turn him. Wrapped in her sweater, with her hair tucked into a black scarf, she appeared almost wan, weaker than he’d last seen her—although with her cabin situated what seemed an entire village away from his on the middle deck, he hadn’t sought her out. Indeed, she seemed to be avoiding him.

Murderer
. He shook the word free. “What is it?”

“My grandfather. He has a terrible fever; he’s saying things, and…I think he needs a doctor.”

Markos longed to reach for her hand. “Doesn’t the ship have a doctor?”

She nodded. “But…Grandfather is stubborn. He wants someone Greek.”

“Dr. Scarpelli can speak Greek.” Dino wiped his mouth. “I will fetch him.”

Markos followed his brother down the aisle. “Who is this doctor?”

“He taught me how to play bull-board.”

He wove through the tables, away from Markos. Behind him, Sofia pressed her hand on Markos’s back, urging him forward. Dino approached a well-dressed middle-aged man seated at one of the few round tables reserved for the first class. He leaned close to Dino as the boy whispered into his ear. Then he nodded and stood.

The woman with him looked up. Tall, with hair as yellow as a moonbeam, she wore it outrageously short and covered with what looked like a bucket, pulled down past her ears for an effect that only made her dark green eyes huge in her pale face. Her dress stopped him cold—green,
and short, well, shorter than many he’d seen—surely shorter than what Sofia would ever wear—with a deep neckline furred in white, the same that encircled her wrists. A long strand of pearls, knotted nearly at her waistline, swayed as she rose and took her husband’s arm.

“Who is she?” Sofia asked, but Markos had no words to answer as the woman glided toward them like a mermaid, mesmerizing, beautiful, mysterious.

The doctor, his dark hair oiled back, his mouth pinched, had picked up his coat. He seemed older than the woman, despite his full head of black hair, his handlebar moustache. Although shorter than she—nearly boxy—he had such a walk of confidence.