TREMORS

    

    When the seas began to rise Orville and Betty Dunsworth were smack in the middle of the Aegean and it was questionable whether the thirty-four-foot cruiser Balthazar was up to it. By 10:00 a.m. Orville was pretty frightened.

    He stood on the fly bridge scanning the dials, alert to disaster- checking temperature, oil pressure, rpm’s, like a doctor hooked up to his own private cardiograph and waiting for his heart to stop. Nobody’d told him the Aegean could get this bad. Sure, they’d warned him about meltemi winds in July and August but this was only late March for chrissake and the swells were lifting her up god knows how high in the air and slamming her down with a tilt and a crash and a grinding sound that was frankly scaring the shit out of him.

    Dockside Balthazar had felt big and new, secure. She didn’t now. She felt like a sixteen-footer. And sounded a hundred years old.

    Exactly how he felt.

    They’d overloaded her for one thing. Fuel and water tanks full and gear enough to last them their entire two-month vacation in the islands. Enough for six months actually. The goddamn beautiful scenic Greek islands. It was Betty’s idea, naturally. What in hell was wrong with Florida, anyway? He’d be sipping a daiquiri by now.

    He squinted through the dripping fiberglass and saw the biggest one yet come rolling toward him, a sliding solid wall of water. He braced and prayed. This was no damn business for a retired optometrist. Just get me through this one. he thought. Just this.

    The wave lifted her high and he felt the sickness rise in his stomach, not from the buck and roll so much as the fear. For one roller-coaster moment he felt weightless, felt the hull beneath him slide and shift and then the sharp swift crack that seemed to grind at his bones, that stunned him like a blow to the head.

    Where the hell was Betty?

    Damn that woman! Not that she’d do him any good up here. But he could use the company. Somebody to yell at, anyway. He was in a trough now, starting to lift again. It wouldn’t be as bad as the last one. Couldn’t be.

    “Betty!”

    “Coming, dear!”

    She moved up unsteadily beside him. He nudged her away. He didn't want her crowding him. He meant his glance to be reassuring but from the look of her it wasn’t. A handsome sixty-year-old woman with the body of a forty-year-old and now, the face of a scared old crone of a hundred and five.

    “Is it getting any better?”

    “Not much. No chance to make Santorini now. Mykonos isn’t far, though.” He tried for a hearty tone and failed completely.

    “But we were going to do Mykonos at the end of the trip, dear.”

    “Jesus Christ, Betty! We’ll be lucky to make it at all, for god’s sake!”

    He was screaming into the wind now.

    “What?”

    “Never mind.”

    She patted his arm. “Don’t worry. Mykonos will be fine.”

    Crash. Roll. His stomach took a leap.

    It better be fine. It better be.

    

***

    

    …Linda McRae and Will Sandler were going to get off the island when the storm hit, to spend the last four days of their vacation on Crete. Now they rethought that idea. With one day wasted and so little time left it was hardly worth it. They couldn’t afford to fly. And the long shipboard journey there and back to Pireaus would only give them a day, barely enough to see Knossos. So they decided to stay on Mykonos where it was cheaper, anyway, living out of backpacks and camping on Paradise Beach and where they knew they’d be having a good time. Which was what they’d come all the way from Forest Hills to do in the first place.

    That and dump their parents.

    It wasn’t easy being seventeen and in love despite what you saw on TV. You had to sneak around for one thing. You made it in cars and behind bushes at the country club and at friends’ houses when their parents weren’t home. And when you couldn’t make it, it killed you.

    They’d managed to fix that here.

    Neatly too. Coming away on vacation without either Linda’s parents or Will’s knowing that the other guy’s kid was going. Luckily the McRaes and the Sandlers didn’t talk. Luckily they hated one another.

    The old Romeo and Juliet routine, thought Will, had its points.

    It was a nowhere beach day because of the storm so they’d hiked to the old monastery, which was pretty boring.

    Linda killed a ladybug.

    And that was about the height of their day.

    Unless you counted the evergreen. That was kind of neat. Who’d expect to find an evergreen tree in Greece?

    Linda broke a branch off that.

    She was a big strong girl, Linda. Athletic.

    And Will guessed she just liked to break things.

    

***

    

    …he cursed her and cursed her. Cursed the day he’d married her, cursed the pretty oval face and bright black eyes, the slim figure, the flirtatious smile. At heart she was a village girl and would always be. When what was wanted was a city girl. Or better yet, a tourist girl. A blonde, maybe. Yes, a blonde from England or Sweden or California.

    And now of course she was pregnant. A year after now she’d be pregnant again. That was the way with village girls. And in five years or maybe less, he thought, slim lovely Daphne Mavrodopolous will be fat the way they all are fat and the eyes will not smile for me anymore but only for the children.

    Five years after that she’d have a mustache.

    I have never seen a tourist girl, he thought, with a mustache.

    Kostas Mavrodopolous watched his eighteen-year-old wife clean the tables of his waterfront taverna with a damp cloth until he could not stand to watch anymore and stared out angrily over the rough dark waters.

    Today, because of the sea, there would be even fewer tourists than usual.

    He was twenty-two years old.

    He had only just learned he was about to be a father.

    So far his taverna had not caught on. Only in July and August, when everyone in Mykonos made money, did he make money.

    His wife was happy. She sang as she worked. She was going to have a baby and all the women were happy for her. For the village girl.

    Two years now he had tried and still had nothing.

    He could think of only one thing that would comfort him. Tonight after closing, after the chairs were stacked and the tables tucked away he would go to the bars, where she could not follow. Tonight and however many nights it took thereafter. It would help nothing. He would find no answer to his problems there. But it was something.

    He would find himself a tourist girl.