The Medicine Burns

by Adam Klein

  “That’s really made from lava?” he asked. “That’s pretty cool.” He was already distracted by conch shell dealers set up on the roadside. “I wouldn’t mind living like that,” he said to the irritation of my aunt and uncle.

  “Promise me we won’t stop at Sugarloaf,” he said, leaning forward, but really looking at himself in the rearview mirror. I saw the profile of my Uncle Mack flinching, his gaunt features patchy, like a fungus, and his nose bright red.

  “This trip isn’t just for you,” he said. He stopped himself.

  Randy folded his arms across his chest. “Too bad,” he muttered.

  “Where’s Tom?” I asked.

  “He’s at a special school this summer,” My aunt said.

  “He’s in the psych ward,” Randy corrected, “studying beekeeping.” He tittered, rubbing his open palms on his knees.

  “Enough of you,” my aunt said, turning in her seat and glaring at him. The eyebrows she’d drawn in looked like two exclamation points.

  In Sugarloaf Key, we drove off the main road past a scuba rental shop. A dirt road stretched out to the water. All around us the land was barren except for tufts of brown grass. My uncle stopped the car in front of a cement-brick wall. The rest of us hollowed him out.

  “By next year,” he said, “we’ll have a house here, and my boat will be tied over there.” He pointed.

  Randy looked restless already and was kicking the pyramids of red ants and bombing their cities with rocks. When he reached for one of the concrete bricks from the top of the wall, my aunt silently took his hand and squeezed it.

  My uncle bought the property three years before, and every summer we’d come to visit the plot of land as though it were a gravesite. Now he wanted us to see it as a place we’d come to summer. “Key West,” he would lament, “is becoming just a bunch of private beaches for fruits.” There were no neighbors yet on this tiny Key. We stood there quietly for about fifteen minutes before my aunt said she wanted to use the bathroom, and so we went back to the main road. The visit depressed us all. When we finally pulled into a Chevron station, everyone’s mood lifted.

  Randy and I stayed in the car while my aunt and uncle went to the bathroom and brought cold drinks from the connected mart.

  “Let me wear that,” Randy demanded the moment they slammed their doors. He leaned over and began to remove the tiki from my neck. I let him. It lay flat against the hair on his chest. I reached out and turned it, making its eyes fire with sunlight. I want to spread his legs apart and crawl in closer to him, to let my hands explore under his shirt and up the legs of his shorts. “You can have it,” I said, resting my eyes at the center of his chest.

  “Too bad we can’t fuck with Tom again,” he said. I remembered guiding Tom under the pier, telling him Randy wanted us to see something he’d found. The water under the pier was cold and the stones slick with algae. Randy stood beside a leaning piece of seawall, as though it were a large trophy. I could hear the scuttling behind it, stepping back in anticipation of the surprise. When Tom had ventured close enough, Randy toppled the piece of wall and hundreds of blue crabs scrambled off the slippery surface. Tom was beating wildly in the water, a few of the crabs clamped onto him like swinging ornaments. I remember being stunned by how upset he’d become. Later I’d apologized for laughing at him, but it had never ceased being funny to Randy and me. We’d whispered about it from bed to bed after Tom had fallen asleep. I asked Randy about the parties he went to, the girls he met, and how far he’d gone with them. Their behavior fascinated and troubled him. I wanted to ask him how it felt when he kissed them, where he touched them, and how they responded. I wanted to offer myself for practicing on—silent and compliant as a pillow.

  Instead, I asked him about night swimming, about the powerful undertow that made it off-limits to Tom and me—could he feel it dragging him off course, swallowing his resistance?

  We crossed the Seven Mile Bridge under blinding sunlight. It seemed frighteningly insubstantial, stretching out over the ocean’s rough, glinting surface and contradictory currents.

  “Some good fishing ahead,” my uncle said. Now he had sunglasses and a thick, white cream on his nose. I knew he was suggesting this to Randy; on the last trip he’d caught me throwing their catch off the boat.

  I couldn’t explain my dread of fishing. The gills were the most horrible part, like perfect incisions, pulsing like just-cleaned cuts, sucking hard as though attempting to draw the moisture from the air. Randy would run his fingers through the gills, or slide the fish across the floor of the boat where they’d collect, tails still beating, once a graceful motility. Their mouths would bubble out with gray fish gut, their eyes fixed like glass.

  Benevolence in their family was ascribed to Tom—the otherworldliness in him—something serene and reserved he’d developed, perhaps, from the odd shape of his head. He’d once taken a sick bird from a classroom incubator and fed it from a dropper around the clock; then named it Garlic after it had pecked at some, and dizzyingly, comically, staggered from the plate. The bird always remained frightened and small and incapable of flight. It became a creature of the palm rather than one of the air.

  In two months it was dead, strangled in Randy’s shoelace in his attempt to make a leash for it. He’d killed Garlic by mistake. He’d never meant to. It was a kind of brutal curiosity he developed around helpless things.

  Tom shrank away from him—a reflex. He moved from puzzles to computers, normal interests. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Randy, flattering him with discreet observation, watching his hand play over himself from the other bed, an observation that seemed to encourage him, creating almost a schedule, like a film that starts up when the viewer arrives. Except, of course, when he was at the ocean, night swimming, or guiding girls beneath the piers or around the poolside while their parents slept.

  Once I watched him through a slit in the curtains kissing a girl we’d seen at the beach. I watched their figures circling in the cold pool light, all the windows dark, with my hand like a visor to the glass, until I was certain he was watching me, and the two stood only feet away, his kissing merely a distraction from the work of his hands. I watched him clutch her top and tear it down, and stand behind her with his hand over her mouth. He held her hand behind her back and turned her toward the window, her breasts heaving, her back painfully arched, reacting to his kisses like bites, a look about her like Tom’s with the crabs clamped to him, an almost comic fear, an awkward resistance. I watched her break away from him, and run out to the street.

  We arrived at the hotel where we always stayed, the Santa Maria. The owner, Abdallah, brought his face down to the window, smiling broadly at my aunt and uncle. He took my aunt’s hand into his own and kissed it, a strange formality or humorous extravagance he’d carried from Morocco. I rolled my window down and threw my arms around his neck. I loved the scratchiness of his short beard and the limey smell of his cologne.

  “Where’s Ahmed?” I asked. His son and I played together. Although I often found him boring, it was an excuse to be near his father in their apartment. They lived in the hotel in a room behind the lobby mailboxes. The small apartment always smelled of spices and coffee, and of chlorine from their wet bathing suits hanging in the sunlit window. Ahmed’s mother had died of cancer, so it was just the two of them, which seemed exotic to me. His father was dark and muscular and rarely wore a shirt. He watched their small television with just his shorts and sandals on. Ahmed would spread his coin collection over the rug, but I never concentrated on it. My eyes would go from the profiles on the coins to his father’s. His nose was long, his eyelashes thick and ink black. His lips were the bright pink of the inside of a conch shell, and always looked soft and glossed and taken care of.

  “Ahmed is away at Seacamp for the summer,” he said. Then rubbing my head with the palm of his hand, “come and look at his coins whenever you want.”

  I felt a glow of shame come over me. His invitation felt like a seduction. I imagined t
he lingering of his callused palm over my face, the soft punctuation of his lips on mine. Suddenly Ahmed’s disengaged presence meant everything—the bottle thickness of his glasses and his immersion in coins, his books on sea life. Normal interests. I was faced with my own naked infatuation. I remembered the year before, walking around the poolside in my bathing suit, thinking Ahmed’s father could see me from the reservations desk. Brutally, my father had called my attention to the way I wiggled like a girl, which I blamed on my thongs.

  Randy and I had our own room. His parents, in an adjoining room, slept in separate beds, the way they did at home. My mother had told me not to mention it. I watched them unpack at opposite sides of the room. I’d marveled at how they’d divided their responsibilities by each claiming one child. Randy was Mack’s child; Tom was Evie’s. With Tom away that summer, I could feel the divide of their affections—my aunt’s quiet, elderly doting, and my uncle’s almost complete disengagement from me. Randy’s privilege had always stemmed from this arrangement—favoritism from the head of the household. Tom’s indulgence was mother love, a sympathetic accommodation that rendered him impossibly shy around men.

  Randy informed his father he’d take the car that night, and Uncle Mack, still folding swim trunks and putting them neatly in a drawer by his bed, consented wordlessly. I followed Randy from their room into ours. He closed the adjoining door and locked it. “I want to go tonight,” I told him pleadingly.

  “Maybe some other time. Besides, my mom won’t let you go.”

  “She’s not my mom,” I said despondently. “I could sneak out.”

  “Not tonight,” he said, turning from the mirror to look at me. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.”

  That night I walked through the glass-walled lobby of the Santa Maria, the sky mixing orange and dark blue as the sun dropped out of sight behind the ocean. There were only a couple of people inside the bar as the jukebox played “There’s A Kind of Hush.” The lobby, with its oversized coral-colored chairs, was empty. I sat in different chairs, first looking out toward the empty pool, then facing the street where some bicyclists were making their way down toward the beach. I imagined Randy and his friends in dark water, clothes piled at the shore, their bodies drifting together like buoys, the movement of their hands hidden beneath the tumbling breath of waves.

  I walked to Abdallah’s door and knocked, suddenly anxious. He answered it in shorts. I looked directly at the deep brown creases around his stomach.

  “Come in,” he welcomed. He went to his son’s coin collection and withdrew it from a closet shelf. He placed the trays down on the carpet next to his recliner, and put his feet back up, feeing the television. His hand drifted down from the armrest and patted my head, then began a thoughtless kind of stroking as he might have done to a cat on his lap. I slowly let my head respond to his hand, rolling it against his palm. The coins remained untouched before me, currencies removed from exchange, just the warm glow of their surfaces and the weight of them.

  Randy came in drunk that night; he fell into his bed with sand on his feet and in the hair on his legs. He didn’t turn the light on, just removed his shorts and shirt and dropped them by the side of the bed. He lay on the bed with his arms over his head, watching the play of light from the pool on the ceiling. “You awake?” he asked after a while.

  “Yes,” I answered. “What happened?”

  “Come here and I’ll tell you.” He looked away.

  I crawled into his bed. Up close to him, the hair under his arms looked thick with sweat. “What’d you do?” I asked. His profile was like stone, mottled by short, coarse hair, his lips barely parted, as though his teeth were clenched.

  “I fucked some girl,” he said. I see his hand travel under the sheet, a moving knot, toward his groin. I remembered playing with cats and dogs that way, hypnotizing them with the thing under the sheet, at the same time protecting myself from their bites and scratches.

  “How’d you do it?” I asked, putting my head beneath the sheet, not needing an answer, smarter than a dog.

  I felt his hand clamp to the back of my neck and force me toward his crotch. I reached out for his penis, already hard and gripped by his other hand, but he more insistently moved my mouth to it. The unpracticed act felt nonetheless inevitable, and I approached with anxiousness and dread. I opened my mouth and felt his hips jerk up to deliver it, his hand (and mine) fell away. My eyes and nose were greedy, too, as though instinctively committing it to memory. I breathed in, and the smell of saltwater and the sweat of his crotch commingled. The sight of that part of his cock that wasn’t in my mouth; his testicles, still hanging fully between his parted legs; and the thrust of his hips became permanent, a moment upon which all others would build. But almost fighting this memorial, his hips swing into violent thrusts, rolling over and straddling my head as though it’s a pillow, oblivious to my gagging, the tears forced from my eyes. He whispers, “sshhh,” an exhalation of the breath he’s stolen from me, and then, lifting out of my throat, but still in my mouth, shoots his semen in cathartic bursts, drowning me in the salt of his violence and his pleasure. Before I’ve even swallowed it, he’s pushed me off the bed and onto the floor. For a moment I remain there watching him. He’s unconcerned even with my humiliation, and falls to sleep with no softening of his features.

  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.