Brenner's Bones

By Wynn Parks

Most people think they would know a dragon if they saw one. That's what expatriate American, Andy Alytis thought, before his need for a resident's visa compelled him to set out for the Greek island of Hypata. Hypata, he learns, is an obscure island in the Aegean, with a dark history of corsair kingdoms, ancient gate-ways to Hades, and dragon-infested, inland mountains. For the practical minded Andy, his interest in going there is strictly to collect and old debt from his long-lost German friend and trepanning afficianado, Brenner.
After a catch-as-catch-can trip, bumming rides, by land and sea, Andy finally reaches his destination and discovers that Brenner now lives in an old Venetian country house filled with bones. Previously a much sought after stone worker, Brenner has developed a bizarre obsession with collecting the mortal remains of animals. The redeeming feature of his obsession is that, by island standards, he makes a good living reassembling skeletons that he sells to biological supply houses in northern Europe. Nevertheless, Andy's hope for a quick in-and-out on the money, falls through. He reluctantly agrees to lay over on Hypata, and work with Brenner to finance the next leg of the visa quest.
For the first few days of their reunion, Brenner regales Andy with peasant food, expensive intoxicants, and a place to pass out.
On one of those first evenings, Brenner and Andy are visited by a local who passes around a jug of raki, and tells the boys a tale of how he was crippled and scarred twenty years before by a demonic mule; a creature that his father had captured in the mountains, and his grandfather had sworn was a dragon. Only later, in the wake of the mule's mayhem, and his son's maiming, does the father give up his hopes of selling the beast, and takes it into the mountains to leave it, chained up to die...
Over several days of partying with Brenner, Andy gradually gets use to the notion of assisting his German friend in boiling down road-kill and other dead animals for their bones. However, no sooner does Andy reconcile himself to that work, than Brenner comes back from the island's main village with a job offer from the local priest. The Papas offers not only to pay the lads to dig up an anonymous grave in the cemetery; but throws in the bones as well. It is there that Andy draws the line, and where the two entrepreneurs have words that threaten to end the friendship. After a cooling-off period, and in the spirit of compromise, Andy finally proposes to Brenner that in lieu of an exhumation, they trek into the mountains and bring back the bones of the mule they've been told about by the crippled islander. It proves a fatal compromise; a trek into the realm of a wild and ancient darkness, where Andy learns, first-hand, that dragons are indeed shape-shifters...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wynn Parks
• Release date: Mar 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301600960

Wynn Parks

Wynn Parks was born in the southern U.S., and raised on Air Force Bases scattered from the Philippines to Turkey. Growing up as a "military brat" bred into him the love of travel that has motivated so many of his life choices, and piqued his fascination with with such famous travelers as Odysseus, Ibn Battuta, and Burton.The author put himself through college at South Dakota's Black Hills State University, and later the Iowas Writers' Workshop by working summers as Driller's Helper in the eastern Wyoming coal fields.After six months as a Dobey-Paisano Fellow at the University of Texas, he spent a winter in an Alaskan bush camp as an exploration geologist. There he managed to save enough for traveling expenses to get him to the Greek island of Paros, where he contracted to teach Creative Writing at The Aegean School of Fine Arts. Having lived in the Aegean as a boy, going to Paros felt like a homecoming. Though he forayed off-island to Europe, North Africa,and Iran,it was Paros that was his haven from the middle Seventies through the mid-Eighties.In 2010, Parks was awarded a fellowship at the Hawthornden International Writers' Retreat, south of Edinburgh, Scotland. Two of the offerings published on Smashwords, originated at the Hawthornden Castle.Several of the stories featured on Smashwords are excerpted from the author's "arabesque" novel, "Songs from Dinosaki's Jukebox". "Jukebox" grew out of the author's years in Greece and, earlier, Turkey, and his life-long sense of connection with the Aegean.The author currently lives in the United States in Blue Mountain Beach, Florida.

Book preview

Brenner’s Bones

By

Wynn Parks

The old man use to say if you want to be lucky, you should find lucky people to hang out with. For my sixteenth birthday, he passes me down my grandfather’s old, flying jacket with a reared-up, missile-hurling dragon painted on the back; below, in flaming letters was, Carpe Demon!

The old man says:

Your grandfather was one of the luckiest bastards alive, to make it through the Asian War, flying swivel-wings!

But even hanging out with lucky people never stopped my own old bastard's luck from finally running out. I do everything I can, not to get the notion that Lady Luck is my bitch. So the old man’s buying the farm, gets me to wondering what life really amounts to, disappearing like it does at both ends, in blackness. On top of that, I can't hack the way everybody simpers about the full life the old man has led. As if they would know a full life. Finally, after the funeral, I stuff my "Big Khuna’s navy sea-bag with a change of clothes, an old, paper-back Kerouac and a few odds and ends, just in case; and hitch a ride to New Orleans.

The French Quarter isn't quite what I expect. Some local horn-tooter doesn't like the way I play piano for someone he thinks is his girlfriend; calls me, Andy Pounder; keeps sending his coon-ass friends around to hassle me. So after about six weeks, of Soap-opera Creole, I get really drunk one day and start out to get a tattoo, but end up signing on with a Greek freighter as a deckhand. From his time in the navy, my father use to spin me all sorts of tales about Greece --- about how some of his great, great grand-parents had come from there; stuff like that.

So the skinny is that the freighter will stop in Africa on the way to Greece, but they never mention three months schlepping along the Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Liberia, swilling Gatorade and waiting to be loaded, en route to Hellas.

Back in New Orleans, I signed on to go to India, but, after Africa, decide to jump ship in Piraeus. Just like that. I'm not sure how big a deal it is, but figure, depending on how heinous they think ship-jumping is, they might start looking for me in the hotels and pensions. So I buy a ticket on an island ferry to a place called Yria, taking it as a good omen, that I can walk a hundred yards, and book on board, without ever leaving the docks.

So that's how I came to the island. At first, all I'm there for is to get away. It's basically a rocky, desert island; living somewhere in the nineteen hundreds style. But after I look around Yria for a while, it hits me how simple the life is; how folks work to live, rather than live to work; and how you can see them stomp the grapes, and drink the wine, and eat and dance, and the whole lot of them grow young again, for a while. So it hits me that these are people who are lucky. That's seven years ago; I'm living on the island ever since.

For the past three years I’m going out as a hand on my captain’s boat, putting out, and pulling in nets with two or three other guys when the weather's good; picking up shit jobs on the island when it isn’t…. So I’ve got a pretty good idea there, about what the possibilities are, but it takes me considerably longer to figure out that I've been walking only on the sunny side of island living, all along.

I've heard the fishermen --- hell, all the islanders---, spinning yarns about Epiphany, between Christmas and the arrival of the Kings. All sort of weird stuff happens during Epiphany; kind of like Halloween in the states. But normally I don't worry too much about that kind of boo-gah, boo-gah, because I've seen the Aegean from different islands, and all on its own, the sea can be a nasty enough bitch about this season.

To begin with I’m telling myself: no work, so what? I’ve had plenty of good times bumming around without work. At least, I’ve found a place I like, and I’m holding my own against the money-devil… and better yet, after three or so years, I’m beginning to think of something besides Silvia, my use-to-be wife.

Still, all month the fishing boats are stuck in harbor. Christmas has already disappeared most of my moolah, and on-shore, work is nil.

And it never rains but it pours, because yesterday, it hits me that my visa is coming up for renewal, and that means showing a Greek magistrate that I am a solvent foreigner.

Before, I’ve been able to rent a stack of bills, to take to the Tourist cop-shop in a brown paper sack. But what are the odds that this time, the guy who usually rents me the show money will be busted trying to smuggle a few antiquities. So, bam, around the beginning of Epiphany, I’m on my own for show-money! By then, I’m down to two, thin C-notes, and can’t show enough money for, pardon the French, a good wipe.

Just when I’m about to eat crow-pie, and call the states for help, I get word that Brenner is living on Hypata…

Okay, Brenner: Brenner’s a German guy I loaned some money to a couple of years ago; a slightly creepy guy to some, but a great builder-landscaper, to the rich-ass foreigners looking for someone to restore their dilapidated island houses.

Anyway, a couple of years back, he disappears off the map. Knowing Brenner, I don’t spend much time looking for a reimbursement check in the mail.

So, when I find out where he is, my attitude changes, and I decide my best chance of quick money is for Mohammed to go to the mountain. What he owes me won’t be enough to show the Magistrate, but it’s enough to make it to Turkey for a little R. and R., wipe the slate clean; then, come back into Greece, in a few days, on a humble tourist visa. The whole thing is like running a circular gauntlet. If you make it back, the visa guys on the island figure you’ve paid the price, and grant you another six months of normal, hand-to-mouth living.

One way or another, I tell myself, I’ve got it all figured out: being a fisherman, I know a lot of the small boats, and which islands they fish off, so I decide I’ll look for a break in the weather and try to hitch a ride with one of the captains going in the general direction of Turkey. I already know I’m opting for the worse time of year to travel in the Aegean, but, weather or not, when the money runs out; what's your choice?

If the weather doesn’t break, I tell myself, and worse comes to worst, a person can stowaway on one of the car ferries. And, if I can't find Brenner, then I’m already moving in the right direction to get a visa in Turkey... And, I have got an ace-in-the-hole: a brand-new pair of made in the U.S. jeans, which I hear tell are worth a fortune in Turkey; enough anyway, to camp out, to save money; check out the bar scene; try and hook up with the locals, or some back-packers. When I get the lay of the land, maybe a few days work; then, bum my way back again … if that’s what I still want. And that's the plan.

The day I