The Medicine Burns (6 page)

I went to my bed and watched him, angered, perhaps by how little he reveals, the invulnerability of his desire and the wretched expression of mine. He sleeps safe and unconcerned. I watch, protecting him from nothing. And it is the feeling of nothing that has become an enemy of mine.

For days Randy wouldn't speak to me. He was never in his family's company, but stayed out from early in the morning until late night. When he'd walk into the room, my breathing would go shallow. I'd put the blankets in my mouth to silence the thin panic, the pang of lust like fists to the stomach. He undressed always facing my bed, and my eyes, with a developed sensitivity to the darkness, could make out the muscles of his stomach and the slight movements of his half-hard penis, fixing this image of him there so that it remained standing at the edge of his bed while he covered himself and slept. I would imagine him naked, walking toward me, secretively, until this image dissolved, just before touching me.

Then, the night before we were to leave Key West, he put his head in the door and told me to come outside. I jumped from my place in front of the television and followed him out. It was probably eight in the evening, but the poolside was empty and the pool lights were on, illuminating the mosaic at its depths. Randy patted a seat and held his finger to his mouth. We were sitting at a large, umbrella-topped table, Randy's legs outstretched before him.

“You're just in time,” he whispered, nodding in the direction of a window across the way. “Check out the floor show.” In the window, a woman in her late thirties was standing with her top off and wearing only the barest g-string bikini bottom. Her breasts looked triangulated from the abrupt tan line, her nipples standing out hard from the white skin.

“How long have you been watching her?” I asked.

He was intent on her image, my words were flies around his head. He batted them away.

“I'd like to fuck her good,” he said in a voice almost menacing. I remembered him holding Tom's face down in a sawdust pit, forcing him to eat from it. Now the woman was sliding off the g-string.

“She's showing us her pussy,” he said, and the towel over his crotch started to jump. I was afraid to look at the window, but Randy was bold. He sat back, shamelessly rubbing the towel. “Look at that,” he said, perusing violently the thing in the window, commenting on her parts like the opened back of a beef truck.

“Check her out, she's looking at you.” He challenges me to take my eyes off him. In a cursory glance I see her naked in a chair, one leg thrown over the side, the fingers of one hand lost between her legs. She's smoking with the other hand. In that instant, my embarrassment seemed to threaten her; she turned her head and blew smoke, as if casually, into the indistinct darkness behind her. It was like watching myself sashay along the poolside in a home movie projected by my father. I wondered if I always appeared as overt as the woman in the window, as hard to look at.

Randy could look at it.

I was flooded with memories that seemed suddenly to expose me—a kiss I'd given another cousin at his wedding that lingered far too long, a game of strip checkers I'd played with two other boys after sending Tom out of the room. When I met up with him later, he seemed not even mildly curious about who had won or lost, or how, in my case, the losing had meant winning.

The woman stepped behind the curtain flashing a last brief smile at Randy. Randy was ecstatic when she turned her light off and drew the curtains. He wanted to get drunk, he told me, and go to her room later. In my desperateness to be useful to him, my mind races like a dog retrieving slippers for its master. “I can get you the key to her room.”

Randy looks skeptically at me. “How?” he asks.

“If I get it,” I say, “you have to promise to take me to the ocean tonight.”

“I'll even get you drunk.”

“And let me go night swimming,” I insist.

“I'll let you get as crazy as you want, little pecker, just get me that key.”

I tell him to wait in the lobby, and watch him go into the Castaways bar and take a seat on one of the barstools. I walk over to Abdallah's door and knock. I knock again, this time with a sinking feeling that he is not home, or is asleep, or that he has seen me from the peephole in the door and has decided not to answer. Then I hear the sound of the lock and see him there in the doorway wearing only his boxer shorts and a gold chain around his neck.

“Isn't it late for you?” he asks. “Come in.”

“I just wanted to look at some coins for a few minutes,” I tell him.

He opens the closet door where the keys to each room are mounted. He brushes against them when he stretches up to bring down a tray of coins. We walk toward the television and I take my place on the rug beside his chair. He sighs as he settles back into it. His sexiness is lost to his generosity, to the benign mystery of the coins he offers me.

“Where does this one come from?” I ask, feigning interest the way I used to with his son. I'm grateful when he doesn't answer; it suggests he may not want to move to put them back. I put one like a monocle to my eye and turn to face him. I contrive it, something his son had once done. For a moment he looks down at me, shakes his head at the antic, and returns his attention to the set. I imagine Randy's impatience, and feel it for Abdallah, whose kindness seems oafish suddenly. Like Sonia, he doesn't speak the language, doesn't recognize his part in predation.

“I'll put this back,” I say.

“You can't reach it can you?” he asks, not turning as I carry it to the closet.

“Of course I can,” I say, my eyes scanning the keys, the room numbers written over the many hooks on the whitewashed board. I take her key the instant I find it, and, still holding the tray, reach up to put it on the shelf. Keys are more powerful than coins; I think at that moment, perhaps I'll collect them. He turns just as I pocket it in my shorts. He looks suspiciously at me. “I hope if you're borrowing a coin you'll bring it back tomorrow.”

“No,” I answer, “I'm not borrowing anything.” I turn my pockets out and dangle the key before him. “Just my room key.”

He turns back toward the TV. “Don't stay out too late.”

“I can't believe you,” Randy said, as I put the key into his hand. He put his arm around my neck, the key in his fist. “I'll creep in there and give her what she's asking for,” he tightened his rein on my neck, his lips almost brushing my ear. “Let's go get that alcohol I promised.”

I am not jealous of the woman, or worried for her.

We walked from the hotel, and while still quite a distance from the beach, could hear the sound of waves along the seawall.

We walked toward a market, almost like a shack with a portable generated sign boasting “Liquors.” Beside Randy I felt part of a gang, as though he had the crowding power of that roomful of Cuban boys. The stretch of road was empty, and I thought, here comes the hurricane, everyone stay inside. He left me while he went inside the store. I listened to the ocean crash against the wall.

We headed down toward the sound, Randy drinking beside me. He handed the flask-shaped bottle to me, challenged me. He tossed the empty bottle in the sand and opened another. “Whisky'll keep you warm out here,” he said, walking backward along the surf. He climbed up on a rock, put his hands behind his head and stretched himself out over it, looking up at a black sky pricked with stars. Suddenly he began to howl and I noticed then the moon, remote, allowing the tides to go out of control. I started to feel uneasy as his howling grew louder, but when I made a turn to move away from him, he gripped my arm.

“What about your swim?” he asked. His laugh was as loud as the roar of waves. I was so drunk I felt my knees buckle. I remembered Tom with those crabs clinging to him. I couldn't get that foolish dance out of my head.

“What about it?” he asked, amused by something he wasn't sharing. “Go ahead, I'll watch you.”

“I didn't bring a bathing suit,” I answered, my voice lost to the wind and the crash of waves.

“Take your clothes off,” he said, “you know you want to.”

I took my shirt and shoes off and put them on the rock beside him. I took off my shorts and underwear next. My body, covered with goose bumps, disappointed me. It was just a kid's body, shriveled with cold, and clumsy with so little alcohol.

“Go on,” he said. “See if you can swim out to that ship.” He pointed to what looked like a tanker not far from the horizon, a ghost ship.

Under his scrutiny, I walked to the waves and stopped quickly at the first feel of icy water on my toes. I felt the sand breaking up beneath my feet, dissolving. I awkwardly took my first steps into the water, my hands out before me as though I was walking into a place without light. I drew in a deep breath and bent into the water. Under the surface, my arms and legs were fighting in slow motion. I was withdrawing from the shore, just my head moving out over the huge cresting waves. I was exhilarated but exhausted, too, and just let myself rise and fall with the waves. I stretched out my toes as though I expected to feel the undertow my parents had always warned me of, pulling at each of my toes, one at a time, before sucking me under suddenly.

I stayed out for some time, until my bobbing became effortless. But the water got cold again without my effort against it, as though it was charged with memories of another me altogether, wordless, out on the playing field behind my school. I called out to Randy, to lure him in. “There is no undertow.” That's how drunk I was, because I kept shouting it even as I watched him walking up the beach and disappearing out onto the main road.

The Medicine Burns

I see my pitted skin reflected in the tinted window of the airport limousine. Outside, the flat, white fields appear endless; my reflection is an overlay of holes. The landscape has other blemishes, dead trees here and there, an old farmhouse half sunk in the snow. Beneath the snow, I can just make out the dead, wiry stalks of corn combed back across the land, parted, it seems, like frozen hair.

We enter town as the lights of Old Capital are turned on. I see its gold dome from a distance. The driver points out the English and Philosophy building from his window. It is an old brownstone and unlike anything I've known in Miami. We drive up to the front of Stonecourt Apartments, and I am overwhelmed with disappointment. The building is far from the campus, off the side of the highway. It looks like a dorm - less attractive than the dorms he'd pointed out on the way over here. I want to ask him to keep driving.

There's an information area near the banks of elevators. The attendant greets me eagerly, as though he's hemmed in by the counter.

“You're very lucky,” he tells me as he slides the rental agreement over the counter. “The tenant before you mirrored one of his walls so you have the only different apartment in the building.”

As I sign my name to several sheets of paper, he leans over and whispers, “The guy who lived there was kind of kinky, I think.”

I look at him, disinterested, and return the papers to him. There is nothing outstanding about his face; it is as common as the faces coming off the elevators. I find it both pathetic and enviable. Some people look like they belong, even in places like this.

“I live here, too,” he says, and I notice his braces for the first time. They don't surprise me on children, but on him they're shocking.

“Maybe I'll check up on you later,” he warns, “just to I make sure you've got everything you need.”

The mirrors are cheap tiles affixed to the wall next to the bed. My first instinct is to pull the bed away from the wall. I can't imagine rolling over in the morning and seeing myself right away.

I turn away from the mirrors as I make my way around the foot of the bed, but I detect an image from the corner of my eye a presence I can never completely obliterate, hunched over, almost hiding, and wearing a blue shirt.

I meet Lawrence on the first day of class. He's smoking in the hallway, dressed beautifully, sure of himself. I ask him if this is where Theory and History of the Avant Garde will be taught. He nods. I look out the window at the slick walkways and I can feel his eyes on me.

“Is this your first semester?” he asks, more curious than the question permits. My face can do that sometimes, encourage curiosity. He has the striking beauty of a face you see in a magazine, looks, I am sure, that enable him to have whatever he wants.

We sit together in class, in the last row so we can talk while the professor shows slides. He asks me where I'm staying and when I mention the Stonecourt Apartments he whispers, “I'm sorry. There's a suicide there every winter.” Then, “If I had to live there, I'd jump too, but from the penthouse.”

When the lights are off, he seems relieved and leans back in his seat. He leans in toward me and whispers, “Brancusi's
The New Born.”
The projected sculpture is perfectly smooth. The professor extracts a long, silver pointer from what looks like a pen. He cannot resist its surface and absently traces it while he lectures.

“He's passionate about his subject,” Lawrence says, sounding ironic, jealous even of that work of art.

“You must have had him before?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” he says, “too often.”

I look closely at the professor. He is thin but distinguished with a shock of gray hair at the front of his part, which someone, my mother probably, told me had to do with kidney dysfunction. Between him and Lawrence, I begin to suspect a conspiracy of elegant, wealthy men sprinkled throughout the general population of students, but the function of this secret fraternity is difficult to discern.

On the break, Lawrence tells me his full name, Lawrence Coolidge III. He must be joking, but I don't question it there is something about him that makes me think, cynically, of the word
breeding
. He tells me that he is a painter and that his family lives in Chicago. He has been a student here in Iowa for two years. I've never been to Chicago. All my images of it are derived from Sister Carrie.