MORONA-SANTIAGO PROVINCE, ECUADOR, 1966
The day he met the man with the missing left finger, Wright had spent the morning building a town, murmuring to it about what it was. At the long picnic table of the dining loggia, sitting on his knees on the bench that ran the length of it, he arranged his blocks in great walls that he tore down with a violent push of a plastic truck. There was an earthquake, he decided, a bad one. The detritus lay on the sandstone floor, a curiosity to the birds who wandered in. He was furious and merciful, famous to the tiny people he had created of stones and matches—their beds were moss, their dreams his invention. It had rained until noon, the pressure unrelenting. The wide leaves of the mangroves still dripped water just beyond the open eastern wall, the wooden ledge he would lean over in test of his courage.
At the inn where Fay cleaned and cooked in exchange for a suite, the owner, Lucinda, kept the news of the labor strikes on the radio. Fay and her son were something of a joke to the people who watched them go by, a unit whose lostness was so woven into them they could not see it. Her Spanish was effective but not without its eccentric flourishes, for she had studied certain tenses and subsets of vocabulary largely on her own, and she was respected but vaguely pitied there, someone whose real feeling was always disguised by a word only partially chosen.
His mother and Randy appeared above him, casting shadow on the roads he had poured of sand, Fay’s eyelids hooded and her mouth a little open. Her skin was pink and damp and there was a smell to it, a slurry of salt and sweat. “Sweetheart,” she said, her wiry arm looped around the stranger’s abdomen. “This is my friend Randy. He runs a reading program at the prison.”
The man did not treat Wright as other adults did, chucking him under the chin, offering him fruit. His name didn’t suit him, the jauntiness of it, the singsong conclusion. This was not a man, his posture communicated, who stopped to greet just anyone, who felt any pressure except the kind he generated on his own. His real name was the sound he made leaving a room, quickly. His real name was the doors he would not close.
Randy only nodded at him, a gesture Wright had seen men offer others in a line of urinals, and shifted slightly in the jeans that sat high on his hips, noticeably worn around the five-button fly. On the lapel of his jacket, thin corduroy in pale blue, were many pins, mysterious symbols and exclamation marks. THEY ALSO DIE WHO STAND AND WATCH, one said. His eyes were very pale, his blond beard shot with gray. He resembled Paul Newman until he showed his bad teeth.
“Far out,” he said, pointing at what Wright had made. “Can I?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just pushed the plastic ambulance down the thoroughfare. Then they were gone, laughing through the misty courtyard, disappearing into the room where, despite there being two beds, Wright and his mother had always slept together. Their quilt the color of sage, their lamp draped with her lilac scarf.
Soon Lucinda came to get him. Would he like to go up to the roof with her and see the birds, the crested oropendolas who made sounds like bowling balls plunking into deep water. He wanted to make her happy so he took her hand, he climbed the ladder, he watched the small bodies light in the deep green of the leaves. But he could hear it still, his mother and that man alone together. She was laughing in bright bursts, and then it became so quiet he thought she had fallen asleep.
“For god’s sake,” Lucinda said, when the noises came. “Is that necessary? Is he building a house with it?” She put her hands over his ears.
Soon, his mother had often said, you’ll be teaching me, my love. Lucinda’s hands on his skin, the birds beyond them coupling and recoupling, in some way Wright knew that something had fallen away. It was a surprise in the way of a burglary, a mauling of native order, the arrangements we are not aware of having made until they are disrupted.
RANDY HAD BEEN A SOLDIER, Wright soon learned, in a war America was still fighting. Transmissions from his native country were foreign to him, the footage of marches, the dubbed commercials for liquor, and he was curious about this war, his body eager to hear the stories and reenact them—make guns of his hands, the sounds of explosions with his fat, wet lips.
The stories didn’t come. Wright’s disappointment at this, once he’d digested it, turned to dread, because when Randy did speak about it, unprompted, his voice changed. It spiked. He lifted the needle from the turntable, he abandoned meals, he calcified in the one chair in their hotel room and would not talk or move at all.
Did he want to go, he asked his mother. He volunteered, yes, she said. But he hadn’t been given all the information. He was very poor, he had few options. It seemed to Wright she had given him several answers, testing out the effectiveness of each.