Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  The man named Larry Somerset is a little taller than the rest and soft in the face and belly like he’s spent his life sitting in a padded chair signing official documents and giving orders to underlings. He wears a plain gold wedding ring. The Kid notices it at first glance because a wedding ring is unusual down here and the guy has a black brush of a goatee that looks dyed and long graying hair combed straight back to where it curls over the dirty collar of his shirt. The Kid is sure he’s never met him before but something about the guy is familiar especially the name like he maybe read it in the Calusa Times-Union.

  It’s obvious even with his floppy wide-cuffed trousers that the guy’s got a TrackerPAL GPS clamped to his right ankle. The Kid wonders if it’s the same as his or if it’s one of those cool new units he’s heard about with the built-in cell phone that’s connected to a monitoring center 24/7 and even pokes your caseworker’s beeper if you forget to recharge your battery so the caseworker can phone in to make sure you haven’t died. It’s like being followed around by a CIA drone with a heat-seeking missile ready to fire. The new style TrackerPAL with the cell phone attachment intrigues the Kid simply because he’s into the technology of surveillance but no way he wants an upgrade. The Kid’s anklet is more like a simple antitheft tracking device for a stolen car that at least lets him piss in privacy.

  The Kid sits down on his folding canvas camp-chair in front of his tent and lights his first cigarette since leaving work and right on schedule up under the Causeway the motor for the generator gasps and coughs and after a few seconds settles into a clattering diesel chug. Plato the Greek owns the generator and buys the fuel for it and runs it every evening from seven till nine and sometimes later depending on business. He has it wired to a twelve-outlet surge protector and the residents pay him a dollar each to recharge their cell phone if they have one and their anklet battery. Which they are required to do every forty-eight hours or more depending on the model or else in an office somewhere on the mainland a beeper will go off and in a few hours you’ll see someone’s caseworker or parole officer prowling through the camp looking for a guy he calls his client but who in actuality is his legal electronic prisoner and is probably only in his squat sleeping off a drunk or nodding off without having remembered to charge his now very dead battery. Sometimes though it’s only a resident who has fallen into despair from living down here—a man with no job who’s become a scavenger supporting himself by wandering the city with a shopping cart collecting and redeeming cans and bottles—and after months and even years of it opts for three hots and a cot because if you refuse to charge the battery that powers your electronic anklet you violate a key term of your parole and back you go to prison. Voluntary incarceration.

  Outside the tent Larry Somerset takes a few cautious steps closer to the iguana and gives it a once-over. He says that he’s not seen an iguana this large before and has to admire the Kid’s use of it to guard his home and property. Better than a pit bull, he says. Certainly uglier than a pit bull.

  Iggy’s chain-link leash is long enough to let him lie in the front entry of the tent but still able to scramble around to the back if someone tries sneaking in that way. The iguana looks lethargic and slow but they’re often seen streaking across golf course fairways and putting greens at astonishing speed—low to the ground on short legs but fast as a greyhound. The eyes of the iguana are round and large as marbles and watchful and like its scales dry and cold. It stares motionless at Larry—eyelids sliding slowly up and down like thin scrims. Every few seconds its forked tongue slips from between its jaws and flicks the air as if tasting it for flavor, passes quickly in front of its nostrils to read the odor of the air and withdraws. When the iguana swallows, its dewlaps loosely flap.

  Larry keeps a respectful distance from the iguana. Everyone does. Except for the Kid. He loves the lizard. He could say Iggy is the only person he loves. But he wouldn’t. It was a birthday present from his mother. The summer before he turned eleven she left him home alone and took off a week from the beauty parlor where she was and still is a hairdresser and traveled with a group of seven other women to Mexico to participate in a summer solstice sun ceremony in the Yucatán. It was an annual spiritual rebirthing ritual designed and led by her yoga teacher and held in the main plaza of the Mayan ruins at Chichén Itzá. During the overnight layover in Mérida on the way home she purchased a baby iguana from a street vendor and smuggled it into the States in her suitcase. It was illegal but three other women in the group—all mothers—did the same for their kids and none of them got caught by customs because except for the yoga teacher they were women in their forties traveling home as a group to the same city and looked like American sex tourists which in a sense they were because all of them had gotten laid by Mexicans while in Mérida.

  His mother’s name is Adele and she was not married to the Kid’s biological father who was a roofer who drove his pickup down from the North for work after one of the bigger hurricanes and was a sort of boyfriend for a few months but when she got pregnant with the Kid the roofer moved back to Somerville, Massachusetts, where he was from originally. She told the Kid his father’s name and not much else because there wasn’t much else to tell or so she said. Except that he was a short good-looking Irishman and had a funny accent and drank too much. After the roofer left and the Kid was born she had boyfriends pretty constantly who lived in her house with her and the Kid for up to six months on a few occasions but none of them stuck around long enough to claim the Kid as his own or take responsibility for educating or protecting him. Adele needs men to want her but she doesn’t want men to need her. In fact she doesn’t want anyone to need her—not even the Kid although she does not know that and would deny it if asked. She believes that she loves her son and has done everything for him that a single parent could and has sacrificed much of her youth for him and therefore cannot be blamed for the way he’s turned out.

  It might have been different she believes and has often said if she’d had a husband to help raise her son and be a role model for him but most men at least the men she was attracted to as soon as they found out she shared her concrete block shotgun bungalow in the north end of the city with a young son weren’t interested in much more than sex for a while and someone to cook breakfast for them the next morning. There may have been men out there hoping to marry a good-looking red-haired woman with a terrific body in her thirties and then forties who owned her own house and had a steady job and was raising a boy on her own but she hadn’t met any. At least not any who turned her on sexually or even had a good sense of humor which she likes to say is as good a substitute for sex as anything else. She says she can live without one or the other—humor or sex—but not both. But then after her son turned eighteen and joined the army and moved out she looked in the mirror one day and she was fifty years old and was coloring the gray out of her red hair and unable to keep the weight off her hips and waist and almost any man who paid attention to her would do. Forget sense of humor. Forget good sex.

  What about him, the lizard? Does he have a name?

  Yeah, sure. Iggy. He’s not a lizard by the way. He’s an iguana. Iggy’s short for iguana. It’s a stupid name, I know, but we’re both used to it.

  How long have you owned him?

  Eleven-twelve years maybe. Since I was a kid. But I don’t exactly own him. I mean it’s not like he’s my slave or something.

  He’s your friend.

  Yeah. You could say that. You know, if you’re the guy named Lawrence Somerset I’m thinking of you’re kind of a freak. Even down here.

  Don’t believe everything you read.

  I don’t. But be careful of Iggy. He doesn’t like freaks.

  On the flat a short ways behind the Kid’s tent a shirtless yellow-skinned man named Paco lies on his back on a homemade weight bench pumping iron. Paco is a surly Dominican with muscles in his arms like tattooed bowling balls and a stomach like corrugated iron. He drops the barbell onto the rack with a loud clank. He sits up straig
ht and calls over to the Kid, Just blow him off, man! The dude’s a fuckin’ baby-banger.

  That true, Larry? You a baby-banger?

  God, no!

  If you are then you must not be the dude I’m thinking of. He was into little girls.

  Everyone down here is the same, I thought. Everyone’s here for the same reasons, right?

  Fuck no. Baby-bangers, man, those guys are the worst. The lowest of the low.

  What, some of us are worse than others? C’mon. I don’t buy it.

  Buy it, man. Guys here for rape or what they call sexual contact with teenaged girls, they’re on top. Like ol’ Paco there. He claims to be a rapist. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. Then come guys convicted of sexual contact with young boys. And below them are guys who did time for sexual contact with young girls. And way way below them are the baby-bangers. There’s other categories too. Like fags and straights. Straights are ranked higher than fags.

  Well, I’m certainly straight. And I’m no baby-banger. Jesus! That’s disgusting.

  You’re disgusted, eh? I told you there was a kind of ranking.

  What about you, Kid? Where are you in the offender hierarchy?

  The Kid turns his back and ducks into his tent. Figure it out for yourself, man. I gotta feed my pit bull.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IGGY HAS BEEN THE KID’S MAIN FRIEND FOR all these years and sometimes his only friend but their relationship did not get off to a good start. The Kid’s mom arrived home from her trip to Mexico in a cab and lugged her suitcase up the crumbling cement walk to the porch and when she couldn’t find her key she banged impatiently on the screened door. The Kid was alone in his bedroom at the back of the house, a small dark room that was once a toolshed made of plywood located under a mango tree at the far end of the backyard until Kyle who was one of his mother’s boyfriends and wanted a little more privacy shoved the shed on two-by-four skids up to the back of the house where he bolted the shed to the exterior wall with metal straps and cut a door into the cinder block wall where a window off the kitchen had been. Until then it had been a single-bedroom house and the one bedroom had belonged to his mom and whoever was sleeping with her and the Kid slept on the couch in the living room which wasn’t too bad since he got to watch a lot of what he wanted on TV. At first when thanks to Kyle he got his own room he missed having all-night access to the TV and being able to keep track of the men who passed back and forth through the living room on their way to the kitchen from his mother’s bedroom but when his mother finally bought him a laptop computer which was required that year for every middle school student in the state he was glad to spend all his time in the new little dark room in back and lost track both of what was on TV and who was sleeping with his mother. Although now and then he took a peek at both. More than now and then actually. Especially the TV. When she was out at night he watched porn on pay-per-view until finally the monthly bills from the cable company got so high she checked the specific charges and ordered the parental control option. No more watching porn on my dime, mister!

  She banged on his bedroom window which was opposite his computer screen and could have given her a view of what he was watching there so he clicked away to a different website and then looked over at his mother. Her face was red and sweating from the summer heat.

  For God’s sake open the damn door and let me in! Didn’t you hear me knock?

  He got up and slid open the window and smiled in the way he knew calmed people when they were excited or angry.

  I had the air conditioner on high, Mom. I couldn’t hear you. Welcome home, Mom.

  I can’t find my keys. Come and open the door and help me with my suitcase. I’ve got a present for you. The house better not be a mess.

  It’s not, Mom. Don’t worry.

  And it wasn’t. He was a neat boy, more orderly and in fact a better housekeeper than his mother and whenever she left him alone at home and came back the house was cleaner than when she left. He actually enjoyed the chance to live in the house alone for a few days and nights and put everything right—squaring the pillows on the couch and mopping the tile floors and scrubbing the kitchen counters and restacking the dishes according to size and use and lining up the cups and glasses in military rows. When he could busy himself cleaning and rationally organizing the house he was less lonely and almost didn’t notice his mother’s absence and sometimes even forgot to remember when she was returning.

  He opened the door and grabbed onto her suitcase and dragged it into the living room and she followed. She kissed him on the cheek and chucked him under the chin with her thumb and forefinger as was her habit. Her smell was a vinegary mix of sweat and cologne and her thick red hair was damp and tangled and her mascara was smeared from the heat. She wore a pale blue nylon tracksuit for comfort and bright yellow high-top sneakers as a fashion statement. She looked tired and not especially happy to be home from Mexico.

  I thought you wasn’t coming back till tomorrow or the next day.

  I brought you a present you’re gonna just love. Wait’ll you see it.

  She lifted the suitcase onto the sofa and flipped the latches, opened it, and took out a shoe box–size carton with a thin blue ribbon around it. She handed him the carton and hugged him.

  It’s for your birthday! Happy birthday, little buddy.

  My birthday’s not till September.

  So? It’s a problem I’m a little early?

  Two months early.

  Better than two months late, ingrate. Go ahead, open it!

  He slowly untied the ribbon and lifted the top off the box and there in a pile of straw lay the pepper green baby iguana, eyes closed, its body shaped like a carving knife unmoving as if sleeping or maybe dead, he couldn’t be sure which. Or maybe neither sleeping nor dead but instead carved out of jade. It was a beautiful thing. It looked like an ancient piece of Mayan jewelry on a fine gold chain that a brocaded priest dressed in robes for a religious ceremony hangs from his neck.

  The Kid reached into the cardboard box and picked up the iguana and suddenly it came to life and twisted its body around as if it were a snake and bit the Kid on the meat of his hand between his thumb and forefinger, clamping onto it like pliers and refusing to let go even when the Kid as if he’d been scalded shook his hand in the air trying to get rid of it. He yowled in pain and kept flipping his hand to shake off the lizard but it clung by its dry-boned mouth to the soft lump of skin and muscle, not chewing or biting hard enough to break through the flesh but clipped precisely to it by rows of small inward-slanting serrated teeth so that it could not be removed without tearing the flesh.

  Get it off me! Ma, get it off!

  She yanked on the iguana but it wouldn’t let go. She was afraid that if she pulled any harder she would rip away a chunk of her son’s hand which was already swelling around the creature’s beak. The Kid was bawling now. She decided to call 911. Fifteen minutes later the ambulance arrived and the EMT aides and the driver took one look at the iguana and the Kid’s hand and half-laughed and drove him and his mother to the emergency room way over at Cameron-Kelly Hospital on Northwest Fiftieth.

  They waited for thirty or so minutes before a doctor could see them. By then the Kid had stopped crying. His hand had ballooned out like a baseball glove and had gone numb and he had gotten used to the sight of the iguana clamped onto him and because the bite didn’t hurt now it seemed almost affectionate, a kind of hard ongoing kiss, and he wasn’t afraid of the creature anymore. In the waiting room the eight or ten other people waiting for a doctor stared at the iguana, repelled by it, and felt sorry for the Kid even though most of them were in much worse shape than he with busted feet and cuts and concussions and mysterious pain from places deep inside their bodies, but all their attackers had long since fled or been arrested and here he was still under attack.

  His mother sat beside him and stroked his head with her left hand and flipped through a People magazine with the other. Finally a nurse called his name and led him and his mothe
r down a long tiled hall. The nurse carefully averted her eyes from the Kid and the iguana which creeped her out and walked fast in front of him and his mom so they had to trot to keep up.

  In the treatment room the Kid sat on a paper-covered bench while the doctor examined his hand and the iguana attached to it. The doctor was a slender light brown Asian-looking man with a shiny bald head and a thick black mustache.

  Well, my friend, this is a problem, yes, but a problem easily solved. If you don’t object to a little blood. Okay?

  What? No! Don’t cut off my hand! Please, mister, don’t!

  I would not think of doing such a terrible thing as that. No, I am going to cut off the little animal’s head. A very simple solution to your problem.

  Don’t worry, honey, it’ll be over in a minute. God, I wish I’d thought of that before calling the ambulance. I could’ve done it at home myself with a kitchen knife. This is going to cost me a pretty penny. I don’t have insurance.

  No-o-o! Please don’t kill it!

  When the head has no body, when its spinal cord has been severed that is, the muscles that contract to control the mouth relax. You are very fortunate that the iguana is only a little baby. They grow to be very big, you know. Where I come from they are known to kill and eat dogs and even people sometimes. Especially babies. They like to eat babies. They are dragons. They are known to inject their prey with a poison that causes fatal internal bleeding. This one is only a baby itself and is not of the poisonous type anyhow. Which is very fortunate for you, eh?

  Can’t you just like put him to sleep or something? Like with a needle?