Randy did not relax into life around the inn, the long breakfasts of instant coffee and juices of every color, Lucinda’s gassy baby learning to walk on the humus of the courtyard. He looked all day like someone waiting on a platform, someone who had no time for even the small, pleasant distractions. Reaching to stroke him, four-inch reddish tufts coming from her armpits, Fay seemed to grow calmer the more agitated Randy became. “You’re right,” she was fond of saying, a firm hand on his shoulder. He never spoke of the finger he had shot off in order to be discharged, and only in brave daydreams did Wright ask him. He always smoked without his hands, the lit thing bit down and finished in a minute.
Randy was not ashamed to ask for money and Fay was happy to give it, glad to reach into her fringed suede purse to thumb off bills with a licked finger. When she was not making beds or cooking stew or switching out locks that the afternoon rains had slowly ruined, she had begun teaching yoga. She had taught herself, advertised by flyer, spent a week of early mornings with her machete clearing a space down the path behind the inn. It was not far from the waterfall. She learned to raise her voice.
Before and after these classes Randy could be heard taking advantage of the new audience, quoting statistics about the death of Vietnamese children, naming the exponential increases in U.S. nuclear armament. Wright attended each, a devoted figure in the front row. His mother’s body, bent this way and that, was a testament to her way of being in the world, more than others, Wright thought, bound to it differently. Few people came, four or five women who were loyal, subjugated by bugs despite the citronella candles Fay placed around the perimeter. Randy often abandoned his straw mat halfway through the practice, stalking off from the topiary of upside-down bodies, the left feet high above the hips, to smoke between the enormous roots of an ancient tree. Fay never said anything about it. She smiled from the cloud of her linen caftan, protected by something no one could see.
The language of it sometimes scared him, imperatives from which return seemed unlikely. Pull your face up to touch the sky, she would say. Breathe into your elbows. Feel how much of your body is water. Her voice became a parody of itself, throatier, punctuated more frequently by exhaled notes of contentment. After she had said her last om she fielded questions about positions, asked them to demonstrate then adjusted them, placing two firm hands on their lower back or tugging their heads up to elongate their necks. That his mother was as available to others as she was to him, as magnetic and imperious, had only just become clear. In his worst moments he fantasized, cold and jealous in the way of someone who needs to be touched, of cutting her hair in the middle of the night, moving the blades at a glacial speed in the total dark.
If Randy loved to hear himself talk, Fay loved to hear herself listen. She took pride in the forty-degree tilt of her head, the murmur of agreement when it mattered most. There were few instances in which she could not tolerate being the silent receiver, few outrageous reactions she could not meet with some placid, clement response. Though Wright resented this about her, how much she shared herself with every person she met, it made the occasions when she snapped or bristled all the more frightening. He was always aware of the other part of her, ready to whip her braid forward and curl her upper lip. When Randy was the target the room became another place, the talismans of their lives taking on other meanings.
THERE WERE MOMENTS HIS MOTHER was located so far within herself she could not be reached, and in hours like this Wright touched her, rubbing her back or braiding her hair. One such afternoon in March, Fay held her body in a twist on the bed, her right knee crossing her body above the left, a limp hand draped across the meeting of thigh and calf. Randy was out, one of his walks, through the pink and green gazebo in the town square and over the river. Wright lay behind her, whispering at himself, trying to make the strands even. He wanted the fine hands of an adult—the fingers that could tie the necessary knot, reach into the wallet and pay for things in shop windows.
As he concentrated, his exhales came a little clotted from his mouth. He was the child who never breathed quite easily, a lesser health that gave him an adult quality, for he could complain about symptoms, identify patterns in their uptick. His sniff and rattle distracted her and she turned, kneaded at his sinuses with the pads of her thumbs. Soon she was hunched over him, her hair slipping out of the inept braid and falling around him. She was the most in his possession like this, diagnosing an ailment, her torso contorted to better see him like some tree that grows in the direction of sun. Fay rose and was back in a minute, spreading the Vicks VapoRub over his neck, squinting to see where the application was thinner.
“On the count of three I want you to breathe in through your nose and imagine you’re somewhere with a beautiful view, maybe high up a mountain. One, two, three.” Randy stalked in as she spoke, carrying bread and flowers and his Polaroid.
“There’s my sweet family.” He used this phrase often, as though it were a slogan, and he had a side like this, a part that wanted to photograph them. He had shown Wright how to use a level, drilled him on multiplication tables as they walked. “There’s my sweet family,” he said again, nuzzling the door frame a little, his thin denim sleeves rolled up and the pearled snap buttons halfway undone. Wright loved him at these times, his enthusiasm for the makeshift slingshot, how he inserted their names into American songs. He had crooned a perfect Brian Wilson as he sang his revised “Surfer Girl,” Fay’s palo santo his microphone, Do you love me, do you Wright and Fay, Wright and Fay, my little Wright and Fay? Today he was buoyant, managing the door with an exaggeratedly light wrist until the air of the room closed around him.
“Where did your walk take you, love?” Fay sat cross-legged now and patted the space next to them on the bed. Randy’s nostrils began to flare as he examined the place she gestured to, as though there were some threat there, a roach or a scorpion, that he would have to artfully remove.
“That does makes me think of those bodies,” he said, each word a little louder than the one that had come before, the middle of a conversation he had begun without them. “Those who were lit up. Those who bought the farm.”
Randy let out a moan then that used all parts of him, the shoulders thrown back making it louder, the tensed calves making it deeper. Fay leaned to the side, blocking Wright’s view, and threaded an arm around back to hold on to his foot. From behind her Wright brought a hand to her belly, pressed his head against the place where the crepe of her halter top met her skin.
“We’re going to have to get it out of here,” Randy said, and soon he was in the bathroom, rifling through the shallow shelves of the mirrored cabinet, opening the few sticky drawers. She chased him in with her mouth set. There was the clatter of jars, the swishing of the shower curtain and the clicks of the rings. She was speaking his name, the meaning different with each iteration, a prayer, a threat, a command. “Where is it?” Then the stick and release of his sneakers stopped, the faucet came on, and he was standing over the bed again, lunging at Wright with a twisted washcloth.
They were before Wright on the foot of the bed in an instant, and she had Randy’s hands behind him, her torso atop his and her knees spread on his back. She spoke into his ear, her lips contracting and releasing so quickly that her teeth appeared like flashbulbs. Wright could hear only every other.
“Ever
Fucking
Touch
Not his
War
Will be
Out
Not
Ever
Understand?”
They were silent a minute, five, Randy’s breathing grinding down from its panting, and finally she freed his hands. Wright had hidden his head in the crumple of sheets so that only a slice of vision remained, but turned when Randy lay his face near him. It was totally changed, open to other people as it had been closed, wet. “I’m sorry, pal,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
At the door Fay gestured with a scoop of her shoulder for Randy to go. He stopped at the long bureau, surveying the things there, the Mamas and the Papas record with its lush colors, the end of an incense stick that wilted over the long wooden holder. Then he was gone again, leaving behind the sweet smell of his sweat.
“I forgot something I shouldn’t have forgotten,” Fay said. “You did nothing wrong.”
She sat on the end of the bed, speaking to him in the mirror, her hair made wild by the struggle with Randy.
“The war Randy fought in was, still is, evil. That’s really the only word for it. Teenagers killing boys your age, being urged to kill. Told that was their purpose, denied privileges if they did not, socks, meals. It was an experience so frightening that it latched on to the rest of their lives, to their futures, too—have you ever had a memory come at you for a reason that didn’t seem really clear?”
“I think so. Songs.”
“Right. Exactly. A sound is one way we associate, and so are other ways of sensing. Smell. Is another.”
She had her right palm half in her mouth. He imagined she was keeping her organs in, imagined them pouring over her pink bottom lip. For the next quiet minute he prayed they wouldn’t, knew they would. It would be his job to clean them. It would be, somehow, his fault.
“That Vicks VapoRub that we put on you tonight, it means something different to Randy. It doesn’t mean medicine. In the war they put it under their noses to keep from smelling other things, so that scent immediately brings him away from us, to a time when he was very scared.”
Wright did not ask what things. He heard Randy say it again: Those bodies. Those who were lit up. The fear of the evening had exhausted him and he brought his knees to his chest, falling into a thin, taut sleep.
HIS VISION SANDY, HE WOKE a few hours later, alarmed by the lack of other sounds in the room. When he pulled the linen curtain he saw them on the ground, his mother’s caftan around her hips, Randy’s ass lean and puckered. Their bodies moving in concert reminded him of trains, motion made of other motion, the undying violence of wheels.