Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  You want your little friend to live and grow big and eat dogs and babies, eh?

  Yes.

  Does it have a name?

  The Kid suddenly thought that if the iguana had a name the doctor might not be so eager to cut off its head. He said the iguana’s name was Iggy.

  Hmmm. Iggy. Cute.

  Yeah. I guess.

  The doctor reflected a moment and walked to a cabinet and removed a glass vial from a drawer of vials. He doused a large square patch of gauze with chloroform and wrapped it around the face of the iguana and after a few seconds the body of the iguana went limp and its color changed from green to gray. Its mouth opened and released the Kid’s hand. The iguana plopped onto the tiled floor. Ignoring it the doctor examined the Kid’s hand, saw that there were no breaks in the skin other than a curved line of pinpricks on the top of his hand and another on the bottom between the thumb and forefinger. After applying antiseptic to the Kid’s hand the doctor dropped Iggy into a plastic HAZMAT bag and sent the foolish boy and his even more foolish mother and their sleeping baby dragon on their way.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHILE HE WAITS FOR THE BLUE BUTANE flame of his camp stove to heat his supper the Kid stands beside his tent in the damp semidarkness beneath the Claybourne Causeway and contemplates the smooth blue waters of the wide Calusa Bay and the southern outflow of the thousand-mile-long Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. Bumper-to-bumper cars, trucks, buses, and intermittent motorcycles rumble overhead crossing between the mainland and the barrier islands on the eastern side of the Bay. It’s the end of a long late-summer day. Everyone’s headed home. Everyone’s home is in one place or the other, the mainland or the islands. There. Or over there. Definitely not here. Not here on the broad flat concrete peninsula that anchors the rusting steel piers that hold up the Causeway.

  He pretends that he is alone down here. He turns away from the polyethylene lean-tos and tents and the salvaged plywood huts nearby and the men who live in them standing around like bored ghosts and he gazes out at the Bay, thinking not of where he is but of where he would like to be. This is how he has learned to endure being where he is without bawling like a little lost boy. Or worse: trying to escape from this place.

  He peers out at the Bay. He tracks charter fishing boats and a few large white yachts and dozens of small private fishing and pleasure boats returning from open waters after a long day’s pleasure at sea and in some cases work. He would like to be aboard one of those boats. A pleasure boat or a charter fishing boat or a shrimper. Any one of them would do. That one. Or that one. Or that fifty-foot cabin cruiser shaped like an arrow. The flotilla passes through Kydd’s Cut from the open sea into Calusa Bay and plows steadily northward keeping downtown Calusa portside and the Great Barrier Isles off to starboard. Individual boats peel off and make their way to the thousands of marinas, dockyards, and piers scattered along the mainland and the islets and canals that filigree both the mainland side of the Bay and the Barriers, where the fleet finally disintegrates.

  The official name for the twenty-mile linked chain of narrow flat mostly man-made islands between the Bay and the open sea is the Calusa Great Barrier Isles. Real estate developers, speculators, politicians, and hoteliers a hundred years ago invented the Calusa Great Barrier Isles by dredging muck and crushed limestone from the bottom of the shallow Bay and filling in the mosquito- and crocodile-infested mangrove swamps from Bougainvillea Shores twenty miles to the north all the way south to Kydd’s Cut, the deep-water channel that opens the international port of Calusa to the Atlantic Ocean. The Realtors, speculators, politicians, and hoteliers hauled ten thousand tons of white sand from beaches in another state hundreds of miles north of here and made with it a wide fine-grained sun-reflecting beach running along the ocean side of the islands from one end of the Barriers to the other. They connected the island chain to the mainland with bridges at each end and a four-lane causeway in the middle—the Archie B. Claybourne Causeway, named after the president of the corporation that financed the development—and laid down a grid of streets, carved out Venetian-style canals, planted palms, and built marinas, beachfront hotels, golf courses, and high-rise apartment buildings with ocean views.

  The value of real estate rose by 10 and 15 percent a year for a hundred years. And as the price per square foot of land rose the height of the hotels and apartment buildings rose and now the Barriers are lined for twenty miles with terraced pastel-glass towers filled with northern retirees and tourists, South American entrepreneurs and drug lords, European fashion models and the men who photograph them, aging out-of-work Latin American dictators and generalissimos. Most of the people who serve them, sell to them, park their cars, and clean their condos and hotel rooms live on the mainland north of downtown Calusa in barrios, slums, ghettos, and subsidized housing projects and ride the buses across the Causeway and bridges to work and back. Most of their supervisors and managers live west of downtown in middle-class suburbs and gated communities and drive east in their cars daily through ten, twenty, and even thirty miles of clotted traffic to the Barriers and in the evening drive back again through the same jams.

  The Kid listens to the rumble and roar overhead of day’s-end traffic crossing the Claybourne Causeway and trying to hear his thoughts he turns and looks south across the lower Bay at the clustered skyscrapers of downtown Calusa—fifty-story towers of smoked glass and gleaming sheets of aluminum and steel high-rise hotels here too, but these are Marriotts and Hyatts and Holiday Inns built for business travelers instead of tourists. There are domed convention centers and international banking and insurance company office buildings and whole colonies of condominiums stacked on top of one another like gigantic poker chips. A condo downtown would be fine, he thinks. He doesn’t need to live on the Barriers. Even a small studio on a low floor without a view would do. He’d furnish it simply for one person alone with a single bed and a table and two chairs and a lamp or two and a dresser. Maybe a few small pictures. Some dishes and pots and pans. Sheets and blankets and towels. Keep it simple. Keep it neat and clean. He doesn’t really require a view but it would be nice to have one. To stroll to the fridge and take out a frosty Corona and crack it open and flop in his La-Z-Boy recliner and check out the city below.

  At this time of day he’d watch the glass and metal towers cast their long shadows over the cluttered port where cranes and gigantic elevators load and off-load rows of room-size steel shipping containers from wheezing freighters headed to or from China, India, and Brazil. He’d consider the three creamy cruise ships lined up like floating amusement parks beside the docks and warehouses sleepily waiting to be restocked with food and liquor and refilled with fresh island-hopping limbo-dancing tourists from the North. If the Kid were a deckhand he’d have his own bunk in one of those ships. He’d have access to a galley where the cook prepares meals and the crew eats them. A recreation room for watching TV and movies on DVD. He’d be able to travel to Asia or South America or to the islands of the Caribbean.

  Out where the sprawling city dwindles and finally ends, beyond where the malls and bungalows and gated communities of the suburbs turn into trailer parks and the trailer parks eventually merge with palmetto scrub and cane fields and mangrove marsh, out beyond the Great Panzacola Swamp a flattened red sun glimmers near the low unbroken horizon. Streaked with tangerine strips of cloud the western sky turns turquoise and then orange all over and finally scarlet. The Kid can see that evening sky from here beneath the Causeway but only if he walks out to the end of the concrete peninsula and stands at the water’s lapping edge and looks up. A pair of 747s departs simultaneously from the international airport west of downtown. Parallel white contrails scratch the darkening sky. Then directly overhead one plane slowly veers northeast in a long arc toward England while the other bisects the dark sky above the blackened green Gulf Stream on a line that follows the Tropic of Cancer straight east all the way to North Africa and beyond.

  Here below the Causeway he gazes along the smaller Gr
eat Barrier Isles and the canals between them and the bayside backsides of the palatial homes of singers, professional athletes, and movie stars and the men and women who import and export drugs and manage and launder other people’s ill-gotten and sometimes inherited money in hedge funds and offshore accounts in the Caymans, Turks and Caicos, and Bahamas. Along the canals the mostly Moorish-style estates hide floodlit manicured gardens, terraces, and Olympic-size pools behind ten-foot walls alarmed and topped with razor wire. Looking east beyond them he can see the tall seaside hotels, their pastel walls splashed with warm light. Neon signs chum the names of the hotels against the purple eastern sky and blot out the stars: CONQUISTADOR. CASA CALUSA. MONTAGUE. MIRADOR.

  The cars, buses, and trucks on the Causeway and bridges and the north-south Interstate and the traffic-jammed turnpikes to the suburbs have switched their headlights on. In the high-rises and skyscrapers downtown fluorescent night-lights ignite floor after floor as the cleaners and janitors and watchmen begin their night’s work and from the rooftops and penthouses slender beacons reach like long pale arms into the darkness. An offshore breeze puts a sudden chill in the air. Night has fallen in the city of Calusa and along the Great Barrier Isles and down here under the wide loud Causeway that connects the two.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE KID CLICKS HIS HEADLAMP ON. HE shuts off his stove and holds the hot tin can with a gloved hand and spoons chili con carne onto a paper plate and starts eating his supper, washing it down with a warm can of Corona beer. The iguana settles in beside him and watches while he eats as if waiting for leftovers but there are none. Iggy’s an herbivore anyhow. Pure vegan. The Kid crushes the chili can underfoot and drops it into his recycling bag and lights and burns the paper plate on the ground. He opens a second Corona and places the empty into the bag where he stores returnables.

  Waste not want not. Carry out what you carry in. The Kid is a good camper. His habits go back to when he was fourteen and behind his mother’s house pitched the same Boy Scout pup tent that he lives in now. He placed it in the shade of the mango tree where the toolshed that became his bedroom had been located before his mother’s then-boyfriend Kyle attached it to the house. That first summer he rarely spent more than a single night at a time out there but he discovered that he loved the privacy and solitude of it. When later that summer his mother got her own computer and a wireless router he had Internet access in the tent. He strung a long extension cord from the house to the tent for charging his laptop and cell phone. In the fall when he started attending North Village High where he didn’t know anybody and no one wanted to hang with him and wouldn’t let him join any of the sets which were mostly black kids anyway he made the tent his semipermanent residence.

  Next to his tent he built a new outdoor cage for Iggy six feet high and four feet wide and deep with a perch, a bathtub, a bed of mulch, and a heat lamp. Nights when he needed company or when the temperature dropped into the fifties and occasionally into the forties as winter came on he brought Iggy into the tent with him and visited the house only when his mother wasn’t home for food supplies and to use the toilet and every few days to shower and do his laundry. Most of the time when he wasn’t at school or taking care of Iggy or the two of them were just sitting there staring at each other he watched pornography online and charged it to his mother’s Visa.

  At first his mother didn’t seem to know. He told himself he didn’t care. He did care but didn’t want to be the one who drew her attention to the facts. But she barely noticed that he’d moved out or that he was running up bigger and bigger monthly charges on her Visa—although she did notice and complained when he took food from the cupboard and fridge that she’d bought for herself and whomever she was sleeping with and making breakfast for. She said, For Christ’s sake, why don’t you get a part-time after-school job and buy your own damn groceries? And no more drinking my beer! Or smoking my cigarettes! It’s enough already that I’m putting a roof over your head and buying your clothes. Besides, that food, beer, and cigarettes aren’t always only mine, you know.

  A few weeks into October walking home alone one afternoon after class he saw a hand-painted sign, PART-TIME HELPER WANTED, in the window of a wholesale lighting store on Northwest Primavera Street on the edge of Haiti Town. The owner’s name was Tony Perez, a gaunt pale-skinned Cuban in his early fifties with a shaved head and Fu Manchu mustache and a small gold hoop in each earlobe. He needed someone a few hours a day to sweep the place and dust the thousands of lamps hanging from the ceiling and pack the sold lamps for shipping. He said he was the first cousin and had the same name of the famous Cincinnati Reds first baseman Tony Perez who the Kid had never heard of which Tony said was too bad, he was a great first baseman.

  Tony didn’t mind that the Kid was small and underage. He was energetic at least and seemed intelligent enough and told Tony that he had no problema being paid in cash off the books. Tony admitted that he hadn’t wanted to hire Haitians from the neighborhood because most of them couldn’t speak English well enough and no way he was going to learn their lingo. Not at his age.

  The Kid figured Tony was racist and wouldn’t have hired anyone who wasn’t white like him anyhow or someone almost white but that didn’t bother him and instead made him feel lucky that both his biological parents were white people. He had never met his real father or seen a picture of him but he was pretty sure if his father wasn’t a white guy his mother would have told him as she was in no way a racist and now and then actually seemed to be attracted to men who weren’t white since at least three of the boyfriends that he knew about were black dudes and two others were very dark Cuban or Dominican guys, one or the other, he wasn’t sure and they never said. She told him black men were sexier than white men and were better hung which he wasn’t sure of even after being in the army and seeing lots of black guys naked. She said it didn’t matter but he had a feeling it did. Because he’s never actually made love to a woman the value of having a large penis is one of the many things about sex and women that he still wonders about. He does know from watching porn that big looks better.

  He kept the job at the light store all through high school and worked there full-time after he graduated right up until he enlisted in the army. Tony never promoted him or gave him a raise but the Kid was okay with that because he was able to cover all his expenses with what he made. He lived at his mother’s rent free so he only needed enough money to pay for cigarettes and his and Iggy’s food and his increasingly regular visits to Internet porn sites. He put most of his earnings into a savings account at the Wells Fargo neighborhood bank branch and was given a debit card that he could use to pay for his porn, his phone cards, and other incidental expenses. Once a week he gave Tony enough cash plus a ten-dollar surcharge to buy him a case of beer. He had no friends—only acquaintances—and no girlfriends and essentially no family either. He wasn’t sure if this should bother him but since he had no idea how to go about obtaining friends or girlfriends or family he made the best of the situation and not only never complained—who would listen, who would have cared?—he told himself that actually he preferred things this way because he at least had Iggy and didn’t have to answer to anyone except Tony Perez and even Tony he could say fuck you to and walk away if he felt like it. Back then there were all kinds of jobs—thousands of them—available to a kid like him that were just as good as his job at the light store.

  Larry Somerset the new guy lugs a large dark green duffel bag over to the Kid’s tent and sets it on the ground and smiling in a contrived casual way hunkers down beside him on the side opposite Iggy like an overfriendly uncle. He’s positioned himself a little too close to the Kid for comfort and his breath smells like old moldy cheese. The Kid looks beyond him and over his shoulder thinking maybe he ought to pull somebody else into this conversation since this guy Larry is a little creepy somehow. Maybe he is a baby-banger. The Kid isn’t afraid of Larry. He just feels trapped by the bright insincere light of the guy’s smile. Very few people down
here ever smile like that. Very few people down here smile at all. The Kid can’t remember the last time he smiled.

  In the shadows he sees Otis the Rabbit leaning against a girder watching them. Otis is maybe the oldest resident although probably not eighty-five as he claims, more like seventy-five but being eighty-five gets him a certain amount of admiration and status as does his claim that he was a professional featherweight boxer who fought in Madison Square Garden on the undercard twice back in the 1950s. He’s a short dark-brown man tight and trim with a white grizzle of a beard and a bald head that he covers with a black beret. He has the professional fighter’s squashed nose and ridge of scar tissue above the eyes and he stammers a little which might be a result of too many blows to the head.

  Otis the Rabbit Washington was his fighting name because of his quickness he likes to say but once he confessed to the Kid with a certain small pride that he got the name because he was an expert rabbit-puncher and could knock a man out with it and get away with it even though it was illegal. He says the reason he’s here is because he was caught pissing in a parking lot next to an apartment house in broad daylight and a white woman looked out a first-floor window a few feet away and saw him and claimed he was showing her his dick. He likes to say that a black woman would never have done that. But he was homeless to start with, he says, sleeping in the parks and behind Dumpsters and getting constantly rousted by cops and square-badge security personnel so for him becoming a sexual offender and landing under the Causeway with official permission was in a way a move up. He’s a juicer who supports his habit by canning recyclables and with as much of his Social Security check as his sister will give him after she takes her cut for acting as a mail drop.

  Otis the Rabbit likes the Kid and the Kid likes him and unlike most of the other residents they do favors for each other. Now and then when they have nothing better to do Otis shows the Kid a few moves and has promised to show him his patented secret version of the rabbit punch someday. He says he taught a legal version to the welterweight champ Kid Gavilan that Gavilan made famous as the bolo punch. You deliver it with your left hand after a hopping side step to the left but need to set it up with a wide-swinging right which opens you up in front and makes it a risky punch. Otis thinks the Kid has possibilities as a bantamweight except that at twenty-two he’s almost too old to start now and is probably not allowed to train or fight in public anyhow especially wearing an electronic ankle bracelet.