DIVING FOR THE CROSS
Diana Hurlburt
sixteen
Winter temperatures plummet to a record low the first year Isidore LeondDiis dives for the Cross. He shivers in biting cold on the dinghy as his best friend Matty complains: What’s this shit, 42 in the sun, God is punishing us, last year when Vasilis dove it was like 70 already, where the fuck is the January warm spell? The steady stream of Matty’s bitching merges with the archbishop’s chant until Izzy half-believes the archbishop is swearing into the megaphone and Matty is praying.
The bayou feels almost warm when he breaks through its surface. Its fingers grab his trunks and shirt and keep hold. He pushes down, eyes open to the mild sting of brackish water, shoving through swarming arms and legs, limbs like eel-grass or mangrove roots. He’ll swear time beneath the water slows; the murky chill coalesces around him, the feet of his friends and brothers prevent him. Steve Matzakos practically knees him in the junk, and Izzy doesn’t have a ‘punch on sight’ list because that would not be Christ-like, but if he were the type to keep such a list, Steve would be topping it right now.
He watches a hand stretch out for the white-painted Cross, a pair of muscled calves kick up. The Cross is clutched to someone’s shirt, blocking the blue Epiphany Day logo, cradled to the heart.
He drifts as the churn slowly smooths. The boys’ legs diminish, paddling away from Izzy, and the water returns to its natural movement. Disappointment bites almost as deeply as the hunger in his stomach. He’s devout, or superstitious, hasn’t eaten anything for the last twenty-four hours as though fasting would make him lighter, swifter in the water, attract God’s favor like love-bugs to a windshield and guide the Cross into his hand.
By the time his lungs begin to burn, his ass is brushing the sediment of the bayou floor. Something gleams by his left foot and for a moment he believes it’s the Cross, that he hasn’t missed his chance. He grabs it, shoves off the mud, and arrows up. The water parts for him, clean and sharp, now that he has nothing to lose.
It’s Dimitri Costas with the Cross, Dimitri hoisted up on the boys’ shoulders as they make for St. Nicholas Cathedral. Izzy could have borne it better if it had been Pete Kontou or Niko Filipidis, even Steve though he’s from Holiday, not Tarpon Springs, and should keep his kneecaps to himself—any of the eighteen-year-olds making their final dive. But Dimitri is sixteen, a month younger than Izzy, in fact. This is incontrovertible proof that it could have been Izzy for whom the crowd chants axios.
He lends one of his hands to the procession and opens the other. His fingers have clenched so tightly around whatever he’d scraped off the bayou mud that blood flows back into them slowly, his palm resuming its normal rosy-brown shade with reluctance. It’s long and pale, whatever it is, pearl-white, so that he forgives himself for mistaking it for the Cross. It isn’t wood; it feels like shell, like abalone or mother-of-pearl, but light and pliant in his hand. He flips it between his fingers, rubbing the concave underside and the bluish ridges of its back. The feel of it bothers him. It’s warmer than it should be, even after being in his hand. It pulses slightly as though it’s alive.
“What is that?” Matty asks, elbowing Izzy in the ribs.
“A shell or something.” Izzy forces himself to laugh through chattering teeth. The wind has caught up with them. “Man, I was grabbing anything white down there, you know?”
“Some bullshit, let me tell you,” Matty says. “They shouldn’t let fuckin’ swim team assholes like Costas even participate. How’s that not cheating? Man, you know Marika Laskari said she’d give me a blow job if I came back with the Cross? I’m going to beat Dimitri’s ass.”
Izzy laughs again, unsnaps the pocket of his board shorts, and slips the shell or whatever it is inside.
seventeen
The winter has been so warm that the citrus crop sucks. Two days before Epiphany, Isidore Leondis eats a desultory excuse for a grapefruit, not juicy so much as watery, composed of the sort of tough flesh he knows he’ll have to floss three times to remove from between his teeth. His mother remarks that she can’t tell whether the fruit is tart, because his mouth always looks that way these days.
Izzy pulls on his blue-striped swim trunks, the ones his ya-ya bought him last year and which he hasn’t worn since. They are a holy article the way a rosary is; they fit more or less identically to his other board shorts, the ones he wears every weekend to wakeboard at Howard Park; they and this year’s fresh Epiphany Day t-shirt constitute a sort of armor, suitable for a Christian warrior. He has been to confession this morning. He hopes the water will serve as a second baptism, because he isn’t at all sure the six Hail Marys and three Our Fathers the vicar bestowed on him have wiped away the smudge of what he and Marika Laskari got up to last Saturday night.
Doubt requires its own epitemia.
This year he chooses the dinghy moored third from the left in the bayou, jostling Matty and their friend Reno for the best position. Reno bumps him so hard Izzy nearly topples, and the boat’s pilot braces him, hand on Izzy’s hip. Something jabs into his skin. Izzy wonders if the pilot ever cuts his nails. He digs his own nails into his pocket and removes the shell, or whatever it is, he’d found during the first Epiphany dive. He feels bad clutching it for luck as the archbishop finishes his prayer. He isn’t quite sure where the line is between rubbing a rabbit’s foot and praying—intentionally or not—to an idol.
He hits the water at a bad angle, its surface clipping his skull, setting off a ringing in his ears. With the strange shell laced through his fingers, he cleaves forward, searching. Arms and legs chop the water around him, bleached pale by the wavering early light beneath the bayou. He pushes through them as a rat in a maze and hits a sudden vein of cooler water, a dark shaft where somehow, no one is swimming.
No, he’s wrong: There is someone. Arms stretch out from the murk, and though they don’t touch him, Izzy swears he can feel fingers. Unbidden, almost unwanted, he remembers Marika’s fingers. How she learned to do that, play dick like a fiddle: Matty laughs and says practice makes perfect, but Marika whispered in Izzy’s ear that she’d never done anything like that before.
Beneath the water Izzy is in God’s hands, he knows. The bayou has hands too, waterspouts when the weather is wrong, alligators, bacteria, an insidious tide.
The arms become a torso, floating hair—which of the guys diving today has long hair?—eyes far wider than the faint salty burn should allow. The person offers something, white and squared, tangled in long black hair.
Isidore, a voice calls, faraway and echoing. A token for a token, sweet boy.
No one calls him that except his ya-ya, and not so much anymore. He feels shame when he remembers how he told her not to, because he wasn’t a boy anymore. He wants the Cross more than he has ever wanted anything, the black shark-painted Schwinn when he was ten or Marika’s mouth on him barely three days ago, and this person has it. No one offers the Cross once they’ve got it. They shoot up through the water to acclaim and prayerful chanting and the first batch of loukoumades at the glendi.
Isidore.
His hand stretches out, offering the shell, the scale, the bit of strange luck tucked into his trunks and forgotten for a year and a day. He has nothing else. The person’s hair clouds the water around him, and he fantasizes that lips brush his, the fingers of the water slipping beneath his t-shirt sleeves, between the drawstring of his board shorts and his skin. The slight weight of the shell leaves his hand, replaced with something comprehensible: Wood planed carefully, painted smooth white, heavy as a promise.
It’s good that the boys are carrying him to Saint Nicholas, because his legs are stiff and useless, with cold or effort or shock. His mother, the vicar, his friends all assure him he has God’s favor. Who placed the Cross in his hand, if not God? He fears he has uncovered heresy, that God is a woman with black hair and eyes the color of the bayou.
eighteen
Air temperature and water temperature are in harmony on Epiphany when Isidore Leondis makes his final dive, such that he knows it will—for the moments of the plunge, anyway—feel more comfortable to be beneath the water than in the air. If he closes his eyes once under, he might fool himself into believing he has leapt into the sky. There are currents in air as there are in water, birds and fish that fly. Last night a strange ripple of cloud had lain over the moon, like the gills of a snapper.
“If you grab it again I’ll get you fired,” Matty threatens, and digs his elbow into Izzy’s ribs.
“Please get me fired,” Izzy says. They both work on Dodecanese in various tourist-related capacities, grilling lamb and guiding tours of the sponge docks for spare dollars, because girls don’t take themselves on dates. His stomach growls, thinking of kebabs.
The dinghy’s pilot shushes them, his eyes canted toward the archbishop.
Izzy has perfected his dive over the years. He doesn’t like to be showy the way some of the guys are, swan dives and back-flips. He narrows himself, trains his body on the mouth of the bayou like his skin has eyes, his whole fleshly countenance focused. As little of him as possible penetrates the surface—and then, beneath, he explodes outward, spreading like the blooming tea his mother likes to make in her glass kettle, like a sea monkey toy. Only immersed does he become himself.
He doesn’t particularly like himself, most of the time. It’s easier to be Izzy underwater.
A boy’s year of the Cross is supposed to be a blessed one. Dimitri Costas won the all-state track title the spring after his successful Epiphany dive; Cary Matzakos got into all four of his top choices for college; Jake Elenopolous nailed a perfect SAT andtook Marika Laskari’s legendary older sister Cassie to prom; and on back, each year a fable, a textbook example of righteousness and favor. Izzy can’t recall if his year has been blessed. Sure, he turned perfect grades last spring, and he got his job at Stavro’s over the summer, three bucks above minimum wage for no real labor, and Marika’s let him go down on her twice since Pete Kontou’s Halloween party…but that could be anyone. Anyone could do those things.
The cacophony of splashes, the riddle of arms and legs. He glares into the depths. He has never been able to decide whether the forward thrust of the Epiphany dive is holy longing or carnal greed.
He cannot clock in his head. Every dive feels like a year long, or moments. Light lances down when the sun decides to make itself known, and Izzy rolls in the water, skimming away from someone’s leg. An arm snaking his torso, a foot shoved against his shin: Good Orthodox boys don’t fight, except when the Cross is on the line. Perhaps if he catches it this year, things will be different. He will feel God’s hand more truly, evident and undeniable. He’ll invent something, write a best-seller, get a scholarship to Emory. Fuck Marika for real before she leaves for Clemson. He punches someone in the shoulder, harder than he means to.
The tangle of boys rolls beneath the pier. This happens sometimes, so he’s heard, there was a concussion incident five years ago when someone kicked Alex Mercouri’s head against a pylon. He misses the sunlight above. He had almost fooled himself into believing the sun would guide him, illuminate the white-painted Cross, spotlight it on the mud with a neon arrow just for him.
He turns in the bayou, searching. He doesn’t realize he’s yelling until fingers cover his lips, or maybe it’s just the fist of water, the laws of physics reminding him of his mortality.
Isidore.
Eel-grass has always freaked him out. He avoids swimming through it when he can, and he detests the velvet-slick drag of the stalks on his skin. He didn’t think there was a patch of it beneath the dock but dark, waving strands surround him. Breath burns out of his lungs. He needs to surface; why did the archbishop aim the Cross toward the pier; the grass fills his mouth, blocks his vision, twines around his wrists until he shudders. Every animal nerve in him wants to thrash, but he remembers Alex Mercouri’s concussion.
Breath whispers into his lungs. A cool current brushes his cheek. Isidore. He hangs in the water, suspended and weightless. Someone is breathing for him.
A token for a token, sweet boy.
The Cross, whole and perfect, pale as the hand offering it. The other hand is empty, open and inviting. He knows what the Cross brings. He links his fingers through long white ones; it isn’t skin on his but something crystalline, iridescent like a Portuguese man-of-war. He lets himself be kissed as no girl has ever, would ever, rough and grasping. Lips open up him, filet him like snapper beneath his uncle’s knife, suck out his marrow and leave him gleaming, bone-white, newborn.
The crush of boys’ limbs thrums into distant water, the Cross clutched beneath someone else’s arm.
Diana Hurlburt
sixteen
Winter temperatures plummet to a record low the first year Isidore LeondDiis dives for the Cross. He shivers in biting cold on the dinghy as his best friend Matty complains: What’s this shit, 42 in the sun, God is punishing us, last year when Vasilis dove it was like 70 already, where the fuck is the January warm spell? The steady stream of Matty’s bitching merges with the archbishop’s chant until Izzy half-believes the archbishop is swearing into the megaphone and Matty is praying.
The bayou feels almost warm when he breaks through its surface. Its fingers grab his trunks and shirt and keep hold. He pushes down, eyes open to the mild sting of brackish water, shoving through swarming arms and legs, limbs like eel-grass or mangrove roots. He’ll swear time beneath the water slows; the murky chill coalesces around him, the feet of his friends and brothers prevent him. Steve Matzakos practically knees him in the junk, and Izzy doesn’t have a ‘punch on sight’ list because that would not be Christ-like, but if he were the type to keep such a list, Steve would be topping it right now.
He watches a hand stretch out for the white-painted Cross, a pair of muscled calves kick up. The Cross is clutched to someone’s shirt, blocking the blue Epiphany Day logo, cradled to the heart.
He drifts as the churn slowly smooths. The boys’ legs diminish, paddling away from Izzy, and the water returns to its natural movement. Disappointment bites almost as deeply as the hunger in his stomach. He’s devout, or superstitious, hasn’t eaten anything for the last twenty-four hours as though fasting would make him lighter, swifter in the water, attract God’s favor like love-bugs to a windshield and guide the Cross into his hand.
By the time his lungs begin to burn, his ass is brushing the sediment of the bayou floor. Something gleams by his left foot and for a moment he believes it’s the Cross, that he hasn’t missed his chance. He grabs it, shoves off the mud, and arrows up. The water parts for him, clean and sharp, now that he has nothing to lose.
It’s Dimitri Costas with the Cross, Dimitri hoisted up on the boys’ shoulders as they make for St. Nicholas Cathedral. Izzy could have borne it better if it had been Pete Kontou or Niko Filipidis, even Steve though he’s from Holiday, not Tarpon Springs, and should keep his kneecaps to himself—any of the eighteen-year-olds making their final dive. But Dimitri is sixteen, a month younger than Izzy, in fact. This is incontrovertible proof that it could have been Izzy for whom the crowd chants axios.
He lends one of his hands to the procession and opens the other. His fingers have clenched so tightly around whatever he’d scraped off the bayou mud that blood flows back into them slowly, his palm resuming its normal rosy-brown shade with reluctance. It’s long and pale, whatever it is, pearl-white, so that he forgives himself for mistaking it for the Cross. It isn’t wood; it feels like shell, like abalone or mother-of-pearl, but light and pliant in his hand. He flips it between his fingers, rubbing the concave underside and the bluish ridges of its back. The feel of it bothers him. It’s warmer than it should be, even after being in his hand. It pulses slightly as though it’s alive.
“What is that?” Matty asks, elbowing Izzy in the ribs.
“A shell or something.” Izzy forces himself to laugh through chattering teeth. The wind has caught up with them. “Man, I was grabbing anything white down there, you know?”
“Some bullshit, let me tell you,” Matty says. “They shouldn’t let fuckin’ swim team assholes like Costas even participate. How’s that not cheating? Man, you know Marika Laskari said she’d give me a blow job if I came back with the Cross? I’m going to beat Dimitri’s ass.”
Izzy laughs again, unsnaps the pocket of his board shorts, and slips the shell or whatever it is inside.
seventeen
The winter has been so warm that the citrus crop sucks. Two days before Epiphany, Isidore Leondis eats a desultory excuse for a grapefruit, not juicy so much as watery, composed of the sort of tough flesh he knows he’ll have to floss three times to remove from between his teeth. His mother remarks that she can’t tell whether the fruit is tart, because his mouth always looks that way these days.
Izzy pulls on his blue-striped swim trunks, the ones his ya-ya bought him last year and which he hasn’t worn since. They are a holy article the way a rosary is; they fit more or less identically to his other board shorts, the ones he wears every weekend to wakeboard at Howard Park; they and this year’s fresh Epiphany Day t-shirt constitute a sort of armor, suitable for a Christian warrior. He has been to confession this morning. He hopes the water will serve as a second baptism, because he isn’t at all sure the six Hail Marys and three Our Fathers the vicar bestowed on him have wiped away the smudge of what he and Marika Laskari got up to last Saturday night.
Doubt requires its own epitemia.
This year he chooses the dinghy moored third from the left in the bayou, jostling Matty and their friend Reno for the best position. Reno bumps him so hard Izzy nearly topples, and the boat’s pilot braces him, hand on Izzy’s hip. Something jabs into his skin. Izzy wonders if the pilot ever cuts his nails. He digs his own nails into his pocket and removes the shell, or whatever it is, he’d found during the first Epiphany dive. He feels bad clutching it for luck as the archbishop finishes his prayer. He isn’t quite sure where the line is between rubbing a rabbit’s foot and praying—intentionally or not—to an idol.
He hits the water at a bad angle, its surface clipping his skull, setting off a ringing in his ears. With the strange shell laced through his fingers, he cleaves forward, searching. Arms and legs chop the water around him, bleached pale by the wavering early light beneath the bayou. He pushes through them as a rat in a maze and hits a sudden vein of cooler water, a dark shaft where somehow, no one is swimming.
No, he’s wrong: There is someone. Arms stretch out from the murk, and though they don’t touch him, Izzy swears he can feel fingers. Unbidden, almost unwanted, he remembers Marika’s fingers. How she learned to do that, play dick like a fiddle: Matty laughs and says practice makes perfect, but Marika whispered in Izzy’s ear that she’d never done anything like that before.
Beneath the water Izzy is in God’s hands, he knows. The bayou has hands too, waterspouts when the weather is wrong, alligators, bacteria, an insidious tide.
The arms become a torso, floating hair—which of the guys diving today has long hair?—eyes far wider than the faint salty burn should allow. The person offers something, white and squared, tangled in long black hair.
Isidore, a voice calls, faraway and echoing. A token for a token, sweet boy.
No one calls him that except his ya-ya, and not so much anymore. He feels shame when he remembers how he told her not to, because he wasn’t a boy anymore. He wants the Cross more than he has ever wanted anything, the black shark-painted Schwinn when he was ten or Marika’s mouth on him barely three days ago, and this person has it. No one offers the Cross once they’ve got it. They shoot up through the water to acclaim and prayerful chanting and the first batch of loukoumades at the glendi.
Isidore.
His hand stretches out, offering the shell, the scale, the bit of strange luck tucked into his trunks and forgotten for a year and a day. He has nothing else. The person’s hair clouds the water around him, and he fantasizes that lips brush his, the fingers of the water slipping beneath his t-shirt sleeves, between the drawstring of his board shorts and his skin. The slight weight of the shell leaves his hand, replaced with something comprehensible: Wood planed carefully, painted smooth white, heavy as a promise.
It’s good that the boys are carrying him to Saint Nicholas, because his legs are stiff and useless, with cold or effort or shock. His mother, the vicar, his friends all assure him he has God’s favor. Who placed the Cross in his hand, if not God? He fears he has uncovered heresy, that God is a woman with black hair and eyes the color of the bayou.
eighteen
Air temperature and water temperature are in harmony on Epiphany when Isidore Leondis makes his final dive, such that he knows it will—for the moments of the plunge, anyway—feel more comfortable to be beneath the water than in the air. If he closes his eyes once under, he might fool himself into believing he has leapt into the sky. There are currents in air as there are in water, birds and fish that fly. Last night a strange ripple of cloud had lain over the moon, like the gills of a snapper.
“If you grab it again I’ll get you fired,” Matty threatens, and digs his elbow into Izzy’s ribs.
“Please get me fired,” Izzy says. They both work on Dodecanese in various tourist-related capacities, grilling lamb and guiding tours of the sponge docks for spare dollars, because girls don’t take themselves on dates. His stomach growls, thinking of kebabs.
The dinghy’s pilot shushes them, his eyes canted toward the archbishop.
Izzy has perfected his dive over the years. He doesn’t like to be showy the way some of the guys are, swan dives and back-flips. He narrows himself, trains his body on the mouth of the bayou like his skin has eyes, his whole fleshly countenance focused. As little of him as possible penetrates the surface—and then, beneath, he explodes outward, spreading like the blooming tea his mother likes to make in her glass kettle, like a sea monkey toy. Only immersed does he become himself.
He doesn’t particularly like himself, most of the time. It’s easier to be Izzy underwater.
A boy’s year of the Cross is supposed to be a blessed one. Dimitri Costas won the all-state track title the spring after his successful Epiphany dive; Cary Matzakos got into all four of his top choices for college; Jake Elenopolous nailed a perfect SAT andtook Marika Laskari’s legendary older sister Cassie to prom; and on back, each year a fable, a textbook example of righteousness and favor. Izzy can’t recall if his year has been blessed. Sure, he turned perfect grades last spring, and he got his job at Stavro’s over the summer, three bucks above minimum wage for no real labor, and Marika’s let him go down on her twice since Pete Kontou’s Halloween party…but that could be anyone. Anyone could do those things.
The cacophony of splashes, the riddle of arms and legs. He glares into the depths. He has never been able to decide whether the forward thrust of the Epiphany dive is holy longing or carnal greed.
He cannot clock in his head. Every dive feels like a year long, or moments. Light lances down when the sun decides to make itself known, and Izzy rolls in the water, skimming away from someone’s leg. An arm snaking his torso, a foot shoved against his shin: Good Orthodox boys don’t fight, except when the Cross is on the line. Perhaps if he catches it this year, things will be different. He will feel God’s hand more truly, evident and undeniable. He’ll invent something, write a best-seller, get a scholarship to Emory. Fuck Marika for real before she leaves for Clemson. He punches someone in the shoulder, harder than he means to.
The tangle of boys rolls beneath the pier. This happens sometimes, so he’s heard, there was a concussion incident five years ago when someone kicked Alex Mercouri’s head against a pylon. He misses the sunlight above. He had almost fooled himself into believing the sun would guide him, illuminate the white-painted Cross, spotlight it on the mud with a neon arrow just for him.
He turns in the bayou, searching. He doesn’t realize he’s yelling until fingers cover his lips, or maybe it’s just the fist of water, the laws of physics reminding him of his mortality.
Isidore.
Eel-grass has always freaked him out. He avoids swimming through it when he can, and he detests the velvet-slick drag of the stalks on his skin. He didn’t think there was a patch of it beneath the dock but dark, waving strands surround him. Breath burns out of his lungs. He needs to surface; why did the archbishop aim the Cross toward the pier; the grass fills his mouth, blocks his vision, twines around his wrists until he shudders. Every animal nerve in him wants to thrash, but he remembers Alex Mercouri’s concussion.
Breath whispers into his lungs. A cool current brushes his cheek. Isidore. He hangs in the water, suspended and weightless. Someone is breathing for him.
A token for a token, sweet boy.
The Cross, whole and perfect, pale as the hand offering it. The other hand is empty, open and inviting. He knows what the Cross brings. He links his fingers through long white ones; it isn’t skin on his but something crystalline, iridescent like a Portuguese man-of-war. He lets himself be kissed as no girl has ever, would ever, rough and grasping. Lips open up him, filet him like snapper beneath his uncle’s knife, suck out his marrow and leave him gleaming, bone-white, newborn.
The crush of boys’ limbs thrums into distant water, the Cross clutched beneath someone else’s arm.
