They say the mountain people on the island of Crete still measure the walking distance from village to village in the number of cigarettes a man smokes while walking. I don’t smoke.
I’m an American ex-pat who gets by driving a cab. I don’t know how many cigarettes it is to our destination. What I do know is that the drive from my home in the coastal town of Kokkini Hani to Heraklion is usually three tales, and my daughter is waiting in the seat beside me for the first one.
How can I make up tales to pass the time for her when my world is so angry and dark?
For a heartbeat, I take my eyes off the road to look at her–a dangerous thing on the coastal highway of Crete.
Through her window, she watches the mix of ancient, modern, and natural dancing past to the music of tires and wind. Morning sun ignites the red in her dark hair.
I catch a glimpse of her mother’s face in the new day’s light. Only twelve, and more and more often, she’s neither child nor woman.
She seems to be meditating, to be filled with the images outside my cab, a Honda Accord I bought used on her fourth birthday. She’s not meditating. I know her too well to be fooled by her quietude.
She’s waiting for me to start the first tale. She doesn’t want to ask. She wants the dignity of not seeming to want something that has become childish in the emotional logic of her life.
Once more safely focused on the road, I seek a beginning, a place to start the little game she expects. I could tell her about her mother, about the reason for our trip to the city, but I decide to let that unfold as the gods will it. I lie to myself—tell myself it’s not my place to speak it to her. My heart knows I’m a coward.
Pre-poured concrete slab buildings with half-finished second or third stories pass by, gray cubes occupied by families like ours—rather, like ours was. Inside, the houses have stairwells that lead to roofless upstairs rooms defined by half walls and up-thrusting iron rods, rebar that will never touch concrete.
She watches houses and families pass without comment. She has no understanding of the greed that makes men tax each finished home or of the sad cleverness of families who build homes that will remain unfinished forever so the tax need never be paid. In her words, they are just “the broken homes.”
I suppose it’s something to be grateful for. Like many things on Crete, that particular version of corruption has been forced by necessity into the mist of history. The rare and precious few new homes being built will be completed instead of incompleted.
Ahead, I see a goat grazing on an unfinished second floor. To my ex-pat eyes, it’s still a silly sight.
She knows that. She points and says, “A goat on a roof! Is that a story?”
She’s tired of waiting. She has spoken my cue.
“A goat lived in the second-floor master bedroom of the house of Mr. Pavlakis,” I say.
It wins me a “you’re silly, Dad” grin and her undivided attention.
“He was a billy, and he loved to wake in the morning and pretend he was a man. From his bedroom, where the concrete floor was covered with soft earth and grass, he rose every day with the sun and sauntered into his bathroom, where the pipes rose from the floor for a shower, sink, and toilet he would never have. Still, it gave him pleasure to look out over the grape vines behind the house while he did his business there.
“The goat—”
She interrupts. “What’s his name?”
A delivery truck cuts in front of us. In spite of the bright yellow and blue taxi colors of my car, I doubt he saw us at all. He probably didn’t look. To avoid the collision, I swerve to the right-hand shoulder where tourist buses creep up hills and reckless natives pass.
We’re lucky. The lane is clear. I accelerate to get in front of the recklessness of the other man.
My little goddess was born on Crete, and the maneuver doesn’t distract her at all. “He has to have a name,” she says.
The delivery truck has a name on the side. “Dedalus Lines.” It’s a supply truck for the ferries in Heraklion.
“Dedalus,” I say. “The goat is named Dedalus.”
“Like the myths?”
“He’s a very clever goat.”
“Is someone going to eat him?”
I glance her way. She is concerned for poor, lonely Dedalus. It hadn’t occurred to me yet, but in her face, I see a possible end of Dedalus on a spit or cut into steaks. Sometimes, that’s what happens to goats.
“No,” I say. “Dedalus is much too clever to be eaten. Of course, he knows that one day he will die, so he—”
“No.” She says it with the same finality as her mother telling me she won’t go on a boat or that I won’t be leaving to drink raki with my friends on a day she has planned for me to clean the olive presses and the sheds.
“No?”
“No.” In the passenger seat, she manages to twist in her harness and cross her arms to show she means business. “He’s a magic goat, so he doesn’t have to die if he doesn’t want to.”
“Ah.” What else can I say? She has become my editor, and I don’t have the heart to lay an author’s claim to the tale of Dedalus and to give him the dignity of aging and death. She wouldn’t understand, so I need to find a new path to an ending. Perhaps our drive will be a two-tale trip instead of three.
“Dedalus,” I begin again, “the magic goat, woke as always one morning, a morning when the sun was particularly bright. Across the grape vines in the yard below and beyond the fences that held the less clever goats, Dedalus saw the shimmer of the asphalt highway along the sea.
Out on the perfect, blue sea, he saw ships and a distant red line—”
“You put the dust storms in the last story. I don’t like the dust storms.”
I quickly revise my plan. “This red line was not the dust storm blown across the sea from the Sahara. This red line was a change in the sea itself, like the water had turned to blood in the morning light.”
“Is this going to be a scary story?”
I realize that it was very much on the verge of becoming a scary story. I had let my guard down, and the muse carried my own heart into the tale, into a story for a child whose heart would bleed soon enough.
“Do I ever tell you scary stories?”
“There was the one about toads that eat farmers.”
“One, then. One scary story in how many stories?”
“And the one about the zebra man who steals dreams and eats them while you sleep.”
That had been a scary one. It had scared me that such a tale could come out of me at all. I blamed the gods for that, but she was right. Sometimes, the stories were scary.
“No. Dedalus is a clever goat, and he knew that the red water was an omen, a sign that the day would bring difficult times to him and his friends in the yard.”
She shakes her head. She’s a copy of her mother—small, but her mother. One day, she won’t want to hear my stories anymore. I’ll start to speak, and her eyes will focus on some distant vision I can’t see and she doesn’t want me to see.
“I’m almost thirteen,” she says. “Magic goats are for little girls.”
Today, perhaps?
I say, “You said you wanted the goat to be magic.”
In the certain, parrot voice of a child struggling to sound like an adult, she says, “I said that for you.”
A sharp pain bites at my heart, the knife of mortality twisted by the gods. My daughter has called me a child.
“Daddy, I’m not a little girl.” She says it kindly, the only apology I’ll get. “I’d rather hear a real story about real people.”
The words chill me. This is what killed Puff the Magic Dragon. It’s the moment that relegated Winnie the Pooh to gathering dust on neglected shelves. It’s the kind of dark determination that might render an audience silent while Tinker Bell’s light goes out. Worst of all, it’s her mother speaking through her.
Silent, I pull the car into the traffic lanes again. Cresting a rise, I see the Mediterranean stretching out beyond the hills and rocky coast, an ancient archive of lost lives, cities, and tales.
For a moment, I feel like I belong there, under the waves inside a lost amphora, only the silt of the ages witness to my heart and mind, to the story told in images on my clay-shell skin—my memories and words lost in waters of timeless indifference.
I clear my throat. “You’re a big girl, all right,” I say. “I’ll tell you an adult story about how love begins.”
She sits up very straight. Her crossed arms part, and her hands fold in her lap. She is drawn to the mystery of love, but she is too young to know it is magic—both dark and light.
“It’s a story about a cab driver.”
“Like you,” she says.
“Very much like me. In a car very much like this one, only a little smaller. It was a Honda, though, and the driver had picked up two passengers, an American businessman and a pretty, Greek girl. In fact, they were on this very road.”
My little editor seems to accept the idea, so I begin in earnest.
#
“There’s a clear lane,” the American man, one of his two passengers, said.
In reply, the driver only nodded to the rearview mirror. The little flock of geese hadn’t made it across all the lanes of the coast expressway, and the kind men who had abandoned their car to save the geese wouldn’t return to their automobile’s relative safety yet.
Safety—as if the two men would be safer in their car in the rush of chaos on Greek highways.
American passengers in his cab always made the driver just a little homesick. Not much, but a little.
An American man and a Greek woman made him want to explain things, tell them what he had learned.
Of course, nothing he had learned would be useful to them. After six years on the island of Crete, his eyes hurt from the endless, Mediterranean sun. Certainly, he’d learned not to drink the last third of a cup of Greek coffee. He’d learned enough Greek to say, “Your place or mine?” and he’d learned not to say it. He’d learned many things that were more or less useful, including how to politely, slowly sip instead of insulting a host by saying no to a refill of family-distilled raki.
That last was perhaps the most useful.
What he hadn’t learned was how to squint just right so the sun didn’t feel wrong, so the color of the buildings and the skin of the women looked the right shade of white or gray or. . .
He wasn’t sure what color a woman’s skin should be, but he was sure his world wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
His Honda taxi, his by virtue of an accident that made it so cheap he could trade his Vespa for it, idled in the side lane, the one that wasn’t supposed to be used—the emergency lane—or, as the Greeks called it, the extra lane. He kept an eye on his review mirror. Buses liked that lane for running fast, and auto drivers liked it, especially taxi drivers like him, for passing trucks and buses.
At times, a hundred little, personal emergencies could make it the most crowded and dangerous lane on the highway into Heraklion.
“Greek drivers are the best in the world,” a boy selling jewelry on the street had told him when he first arrived on Crete.
He’d glanced at the nearby highway and cringed. “They drive like madmen,” he’d said.
“Exactly,” the boy said. “If they weren’t the best drivers in the world, more of them would die.”
“You can’t argue with that,” he’d said.
Nor would you argue with men who might knife you for showing disrespect but who would stop traffic to help a couple of gray geese and their goslings cross an expressway.
He could help a little. It was, he decided, a very Greek thing to do.
He maneuvered his nose farther across the extra lane to completely block ambitious drivers. He’d risk standing still there until the little drama had ended. It was his part, and the men in the road noticed and understood his gesture.
He wondered when he’d started thinking like a Greek, when he’d started thinking of the word American as a pejorative instead of as people from home.
A goose stopped and pecked at the asphalt. One of the goose herders, a youngish man who had very little goose herding experience, shooed her, apparently the mother. She, like any woman would, stood her ground and hissed. The gander turned and stood his ground as well.
He chuckled.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” the American said. “I’m supposed to be at the airport in Heraklion. In the states, there are laws. You can’t block traffic. You have to run over animals in the road.”
Surprised by such arrogance, even from an American, he glanced in his mirror. The ruddy face that stared back was thin from sixty miles a week on a track or treadmill. Its dark eyes were narrowed and sharpened from looking for opportunities that would cause others pain. Pale lips tightened, narrowed, and set in a determined and useless attempt to intimidate the driver and impress the sultry, Greek woman settled patiently beside the American.
She raised a shapely eyebrow and smiled into the mirror.
“I can’t believe this,” the man said. “I’m going to miss my plane because of a goose and an illiterate, third world, taxi driver.” To the woman, he said, “Tell him to hurry up. Tell him he’s costing me money.”
For the first time since he’d picked up the pair, he spoke English. “In Crete,” he began. He took pleasure in the suddenly wide eyes of the American. “Most people read and speak at least three languages. Personally, I only barely manage three, but I’m from Iowa. Greeks are kind. They let me live here in the first world, the world from which all western culture evolved. They make gracious allowances for impatient and ignorant Americans.”
The older goose herder, a man with more experience, took the younger man’s elbow and moved him along ahead of the mother goose.
She gave chase, hissing and stretching and snapping at the younger man’s ass.
The older man led the younger man off the road and onto the shoulder.
The mother goose flapped and hissed, teaching her goslings to defend themselves all the way onto the broken, pale gravel and then into blue-green scrub.
The Greek men, stepping high, laughing, and grinning, danced away from the geese.
The older goose herder rewarded the taxi driver’s patience and use of the Honda as a shield by smiling to him and making a small bow.
The driver pressed the gas pedal and pulled forward.
The American started to say something, but he only grunted, apparently thinking better of it.
After the American was safely away in the airport, the driver turned and looked over his shoulder to the woman who had been left behind. “Where shall I take you?” he asked.
“They paid me to translate,” she said. “His medical equipment company.”
He nodded. She was attractive, and she didn’t need to explain—certainly not to an American ex-pat like him. Even though her explaining felt wrong, her words warmed his heart like a shot of warm raki.
“Home, then,” she said, and she told him the way.
When she got out of the taxi, afternoon sunlight ignited golden highlights in the down on her smooth, Minoan cheek. He loved the way the Mediterranean sun of Crete gave everything an ancient quality of patience and perfection.
#
The story is over, and I wait for the editorial comments. It was a very adult story, and I expect my audience to rebel.
“That’s not a story,” says my daughter.
“Because the geese weren’t magic?”
“You are being ridiculous.”
“Then why? Why isn’t it a story?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
She blushes a little.
I wonder whether her thoughts are a child’s or a woman’s.
She says, “They didn’t get married.”
I almost laugh, but I know better than to toy with the fragile, imagined truths at this moment in her life. For her, the story needed a marriage. For me, a marriage would be too painful to tell. Maybe I had shorted her. “Are you sure?”
“Don’t they fall in love, the driver and the woman?”
“If you knew that from the story, why did I need to tell you?”
“I knew because you told me the story was about love.”
“Why do you want them to fall in love?”
“Because it feels good,” she says. “They should fall in love, get married, and have a girl like me.” Her voice carries triumph. She’s hit on the prefect formula, the ending of all endings, the mythic philosopher’s stone of tale telling.
Quietly, she adds, “It was about you and Mom, right?”
“Maybe,” I say. A mileage sign flashes past, and I mark the distance to the city. It isn’t far.
She looks at it too. “The people in the story,” she says. “They did get married, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“And have a girl?”
“Yes.”
“Tell that story. I want to hear that part.”
“Which?”
“About how they have a baby girl.”
I’m not sure I have a story to tell about that. My vision blurs. I blink rapidly to clear my sight. I see a man at the side of the road. He’s old in the leather-and-soul way only old people in Crete can be, and he wears the traditional tall, black boots and loose pants of the hill people. He’s smoking and leaning against a walking stick.
He had daughters.
I can tell.
I feel like the lines in his sun-browned face scream it to the world. “I had a daughter. I had one, and I know you!”
“See that man?” I point.
“The old guy?”
Let the gods be kind to her, I pray. “Yeah. I’ll tell you the story of his daughter.”
“You know him?”
“I’ll tell it like I’m him, like he’s telling it.” I think that’s safe. I think I can do that without losing the story in my own pain. I begin, hoping the tale will tell itself and find a path my young editor will allow, embrace, and understand.
#
“Kalimera.”
The midwife says this to me—just Good morning, and she sweeps in from our olive grove and past the grape vines and into our house.
Moments, or maybe hours, later she is born, my little Athena, naked and wrapped only with the ageless wisdom of her powerful cry.
One night of passion—or many—what does it matter? Love is what matters, and there is love, and she is loved, and we hold her and hug her and kiss her, and we cry together, her mother and I, and we cry with her, and we laugh through our tears as she takes the tit that only I have sucked before this moment, and I am for a moment jealous, but only for a moment, then I’m crying and laughing and glad to share, and I know that anything she wants, I will give to her.
Anything, and I will never be able to say no.
Fear takes my gut. I will never be able to say no.
My wife’s warm hand takes mine. “Beautiful,” she says.
And the fear is gone, replaced with a warm, watery feeling that I will never lose again, never outgrow, never be without. I thank whatever gods may still live in the oceans, skies, and caverns that we are blessed with this moment and this love.
#
“Kalispera.”
My young goddess breezes into my tiny study and says it, Good afternoon.
I’m distracted from my work projecting income from hopes for a good harvest of olives and grapes. The winter is over, and olive buds are heavy and will bloom very soon. Cool air still blows down across the sea from the north. There is a chance, still, for us in the hills to see frost. I worry and hope. That’s me. I am worry and hope. I am a father.
She hugs me, kisses my cheek, and tells me that she wants a bow—a bow and arrows.
She wants them, and the warm wet feeling is coming to me, filling me. I look at my projections and say no, but the warmth is rising.
Her mother appears behind my little goddess, smiling that crooked smile that means she already has a plan to find the money or make it.
“No,” I still say. “Not a bow. Anything but a bow and arrows.” The idea of them makes me cold inside. That she should wield a weapon at all feels wrong. She is too beautiful at twelve and too small to be threatening.
I win the day—but only that day.
She asks again and again, and I say no for six weeks—a record for me.
The olive blossoms come and go safely. Finally, relief breaks the dam of my resistance.
The warm and wet in my gut washes upward and over me in a tidal wave of permission.
A bow—a bow and arrows.
The best I can find.
The best I can afford.
Double-compound with counterbalance and safety features. I’m a father. Lots of safety features.
She dances and kisses me, and I’m a puddle—a happy, laughing puddle.
Her mother makes love to me in the night afterward—makes love to me like we are newlyweds, and it has been a long time since then, but she still has her figure, her hips, and her ability to dance for hours.
#
Selling the olive trees hurts. Five hundred years in our family, and I am the one who sells them.
I sell them for her.
I sell them for our future, though I cannot see it. Leaving the recording agent’s offices in Heraklion, I stop on the street by a false-stone face, a vending machine made to look like an ancient mask—an oracle. I put a Euro in the slot. I press the button that says, “Money.” The Oracle speaks in a strange, electronic voice. I can’t understand the words. For a moment, I think it is not speaking Greek, then it says, “Adiosas,” and I know I am dismissed.
A bit of paper sticks out of its mouth like a thin, limp tongue of white. I pull the paper free and read the words on it. “To grasp wealth, one must open one’s hand.”
I open my hand.
A breeze picks up the paper and sends it across the street then upward above a park and finally out over the bay and into the path of a giant ferry of the Dedalus line.
I sell the olive trees. I sell two of our vineyards. I buy her a coach and training, and when she wins her place on the Olympic team, I buy her a uniform and first-class upgrade to her travel tickets. I give her everything I can to help her success. I am a father.
We watch her on the television at Papa’s Taverna on Eiodos Nikkis, Victory Boulevard. It is the thing to do, and she has so many friends. We all watch together, and she is my Athena reborn as Artemis, and her arrows are golden, and her true aim wins a silver medal, and we see her there on the television smiling and hugging a boy from America we have never met.
My father’s heart becomes the cold of the deep, dark fields of Poseidon. A father knows.
He comes to our home, the American boy. He is too big—too tall, too broad, too loud—too big in too many ways, and when he is asleep—when she is asleep in another room, though we are not fools and know they have loved one another many times—then her mother and I cry.
We do not laugh. We do not love. We only cry.
#
“Kalinichte.” She says, Good night, and the big boy from America and my little Artemis leave.
They marry.
They live in a place called Ohio, which must mean something in ancient American, but the boy has no idea what. They live there, and we live here, and the olive trees will never come back, and we will never harvest from the vines behind our house again. My little girl will never dance for me or stand with me, waiting with her cup, laughing, while the first hot drop of raki quivers at the tip of our copper kettle spout.
My wife and I, we hold each other, but there are no more tears, there is no more laughter.
She wears the black now, though nobody has died, and I drink perhaps more raki than will give me health.
#
“Yasas!” I say, Hello. “Come in! Come in! Why do you knock at your own door? Come in!” And before my little Athena can come in, I have taken her little girl from her. I have taken her, whisked her away and caught her up in my grandpa’s arms, and she smells of American baby food and American baby shit. “Yamas.” I say, our good health, to her. We will have you right in no time. “Mama!” I call, and my Hera answers in Greek, “Ne?”
In Greek, the American boy says, “She needs to be changed. I’ll do it.”
He speaks in Greek, the American. My wife and I, we laugh and cry again. “No,” I speak in my bad American. I learned it for her—in hope, but now I speak it to honor this young man’s effort. “It has been too long since I have opened the diaper and smelled the smell of new life.”
Yasas, tiny goddess. Only one such as you could have golden shit.
Yamas.
#
My child-editor’s nose wrinkles. Her frown and crossed arms tell me she’s displeased.
“That’s one of the worst stories you’ve ever told.”
“You said you wanted grown up stories.”
“Baby shit that smells like life?” She gives me her special two-syllable, “Da-ad.”
“You’ll feel different someday.”
“What happened to Dedalus the goat? Maybe he can fly or something? Does he teach the other goats?”
We arrive, and I stop the car in front of the apartment building. She looks around, and I see surprise on her face.
My adult tales have stolen our time. They have also made her young again, a little girl with her own mind and magic in her heart. If only for a moment, she has come back to me.
I pop the trunk, get out, and retrieve her bags.
She runs to the door. Her mother buzzes us in.
Together, we climb the stairs. Her mother meets us at the apartment door. My tiny goddess, my little fare, passes through the door. I do not. Her mother blocks my way, arms crossed, dark hair soft and back-lit with afternoon light from the windows behind her. “She’s in a hurry,” my ex accuses.
“She’s 12.”
“You told her stories during the drive?”
I place her bags on the floor beside my ex. “I told her how we met. I told her the story of your father’s groves and vineyards.”
“Did you tell her the truth?”
“Some. The rest is for you.”
“Coward.” She closes the door.
She’s right. I’m a coward. I head back to my cab, hoping to catch a fare for the ride back along the coast. Maybe an American tourist. That would be nice. It’s been a long time since I spoke to anyone from home.
Eric Witchey’s credits include over 170 stories, including 5 novels and two collections. His work has received recognition from New Century Writers, Writers of the Future, Writer’s Digest, Independent Publisher Book Awards, International Book Awards, The Eric Hoffer Prose Award Program, Short Story America, the Irish Aeon Awards, and other organizations. His How-to articles have appeared in The Writer Magazine, Writer’s Digest Magazine, and other print and online magazines.