Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  The Kid stands up and ignoring Larry Somerset stretches his arms, rolls his neck, and touches his toes once. Larry stands too, still making that toothy smile. The Kid flips his cigarette butt in a bright arc into the Bay. He’s trying to quit smoking by cutting out one cigarette a day every week and is down to thirteen a day now. Next week he’ll be down to twelve a day. In twelve weeks one a day. Then zero. The Kid is nothing if not self-disciplined. Actually he’s more patient than self-disciplined.

  Say, Kid, I’m wondering if you could give me a little advice, me being a newcomer here. So to speak.

  What kind of advice?

  Well . . . I need a place to sleep. You know, shelter from the storm, as the song says.

  Can’t help you, man. Everybody here’s on his own. So to speak.

  I can pay you, if that’s the problem. Really, I need help. I just need a place for tonight. Until I can set up my own place. You know, get my own tent set up. I had to sleep outside on the ground in Centennial Park last night. No fun. I’ll go downtown tomorrow. Pick up a tent and whatever I need for cooking and so on at a Target or something. I only just got here and wasn’t aware that it was so . . . open. I didn’t expect to be met with such hostility. I mean, they told me at the park that there were cots and so forth. Like it was a kind of unofficial shelter for people. People like us.

  Yeah, well, you were told wrong.

  Evidently.

  I don’t think I’m like you anyhow. Nobody’s like anybody else down here.

  What would you charge for letting me sleep in your tent? Just this one night. I have cash. I have my own sleeping bag in my duffel there.

  Dude, forget about it. I don’t need your money. I only got room for me and Iggy anyhow.

  Shadowy figures have slowly gathered around Plato the Greek’s generator silently waiting their turn to charge their anklets and cell phones. There are small driftwood fires burning here and there in barrels and fire pits lined with cinder blocks and the occasional blue-flamed butane camp stove like the Kid’s. The smells of burning charcoal and woodsmoke and food cooking—burgers and beans and franks and coffee—mingle with the salt-smell off the Bay.

  It is hard to know if there are twenty men living under the Causeway or fifty or even a hundred. What little conversation that takes place among them is low and mumbled and is scattered into the night by the steady thumping of the traffic overhead and the offshore breeze. Every now and then the beam of a flashlight snaps on as someone makes his way down to the water and stands there and pees into the Bay or just stares out at the lights of the city. Farther down a man fishes for his supper with a bamboo pole. Other figures stand in pairs in the shadows smoking and swapping pulls from a bottle. Where the off-ramp descends to the mainland the concrete isle underneath is closed off on both sides and beneath the sloped ceiling is a wide dark cavern. Deep inside the cavern a Coleman lamp flares up illuminating a half-dozen low shanties made of salvaged lumber. The shanties belong to the old-timers, men who have been in residence here the longest like Otis the Rabbit who is finishing his fifth year under the Causeway. The shanties look almost permanent and in the white glow of the lamp the four men playing dominoes are seated on overturned buckets around a spindly table made from a cast-off scrap of Masonite.

  C’mon, Kid, just this one night, till I get my own set-up. It’s probably a little dangerous for me to be sleeping out in the open, right? I mean, some of these guys are a little weird, I think, and some of them are on drugs. And what about rats? I’ve seen a couple of rats already. This is not what I expected or I’d have come a little better prepared.

  How long you been down here?

  Oh, just a couple hours. My wife dropped me off at the Park yesterday and I walked over from there.

  Your wife.

  Yes.

  Larry. Larry Somerset. Are you the Lawrence Somerset I’m thinking of? The asshole state senator who got bagged last spring at the airport hotel with a coupla little girls?

  You don’t have to put it quite that way. There weren’t any little girls. It was a set-up. A sting.

  Yeah, sure. That’s what everybody says. I read about you in the papers. Came to the door of a hotel room naked with all kinds of sex toys. Not very smart for a state senator.

  It wasn’t quite like that. It was a sting. Entrapment.

  It always is. But I don’t have to ask what brings you here. Do I?

  I might say the same for you.

  You might. But don’t.

  The Kid needs advice from an elder. He throws a wave in the direction of the Rabbit.

  The Rabbit saunters over to the Kid’s tent. Seventy-five or eighty-five, it doesn’t matter, he walks like a man half his age with more grace than sprightliness although he watches where he puts his feet as if his eyesight is bad. Which it is. He just can’t afford eyeglasses, he says. Or false teeth. The Kid thinks he wants people to believe he’s older than he really is so he’ll get more respect from the younger men down here. He’d rather be seen as a very old toothless and nearly blind ex-boxer than just another pathetic homeless old drunk.

  He keeps silent while the Kid explains the newcomer’s situation. The Rabbit doesn’t particularly cotton to the man who seems to have an attitude as if he thinks he doesn’t belong down here and they do. And he doesn’t trust the cat’s interest in the Kid. But maybe there’ll be something in it for the Kid since the guy obviously has money in his pocket and if so then there will likely be something in it for the Rabbit too. The Kid can be a generous little bugger sometimes.

  So what d’you think? Should I give Mr. Somerset here Iggy’s bed for the night?

  You running a fuckin’ flophouse for Level Threes?

  No way.

  How do you know I’m a Level Three?

  You wouldn’t be down here if you wasn’t, amigo. Charge him what he’d hafta pay a hotel on the Barriers, Kid. Coupla hundred bucks a night.

  Whaddaya say, Mr. Somerset? Two hundred bucks for the night in the comfort and safety of my bayside condo? Good views of the water. Breakfast not included however. Payable in advance. Cash only. We don’t take credit cards.

  What about the lizard?

  What about him?

  Does he sleep in the tent too?

  You can have Iggy’s bed. He’s fine sleeping outside if it don’t rain. It’s still summer. If it rains though I’ll hafta bring him in. Iguanas don’t like rain.

  The man gives it a moment’s thought, then agrees and turns away from the Rabbit and the Kid. He removes two one-hundred-dollar bills from his money belt. The Kid and the Rabbit watch and talk on as if the man can’t hear them. The Kid tells the Rabbit he’ll take care of him in the morning. He thinks maybe twenty bucks ought to be enough of a thanks. More than twenty is a retainer for future services, less is a cheapjack insult. When you’re in the Kid’s position sharing is carefully calculated. His golden rule is do no more for others than you expect you’ll need them to do for you. Even with friends. Although the Kid doesn’t really believe he has any friends. People he likes, yes. The Rabbit for instance. But no friends.

  Just gimme a holler the guy gives you any trouble.

  I don’t think he’s into guys. Paco thinks he’s a baby-banger, I’m betting he’s into little girls. Tweeners.

  You sure he ain’t into iguanas?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT’S AN HOUR BEFORE DAWN. THE TIDE HAS turned and the sulfur stink of the mudflat beyond the Causeway and the nearby mangrove marshes laces the cool night air. In the east where the sea meets the sky a gray velvet blanket of clouds leaches darkness from the night and dims the stars overhead one by one. It’s still too early for the traffic to commence its daily rumble over the Causeway. There are the steady slaps of low waves against the edge of the concrete peninsula below the Causeway and the sporadic cries of solitary seagulls cruising low over the Bay. There are the occasional coughs of sleepers in their huts and the low drawn-out groan of a man curled in a thin blanket sheltered from the salty dew by
a plastic tarp. There are the snores of the deepest sleepers like the Kid’s new and decidedly temporary tent-mate whose raucous adenoidal snoring has kept the Kid awake most of the night.

  The encampment is otherwise silent and still and lies in darkness invisible to the world. The fires have all burned to cold ash. Fully clothed the Kid lies awake in his sleeping bag and for a few seconds he imagines the dream of the man snoring in the sleeping bag next to his and shudders and stops himself cold. Children have come onto his radar and entered his no-go zone. Little pink-skinned girls barely older than toddlers. How do you even talk to kids that young? he wonders. He’s never been able to figure out what to say to children anyhow. Or at least children under the age of twelve or thirteen. They always make him self-conscious and insecure. Especially girls.

  Little girls. Just thinking about them—never mind talking to them—makes him self-conscious and insecure. And oddly scared. With little boys he can at least pretend they’re as old as he is himself no matter how young they are in reality and he can talk to them the same as he would a grown man. Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives. Even old men playing golf or pinochle or watching TV in their retirement homes or sitting half-asleep in a Jacuzzi tub are only pretending to be adult men. But little girls are more complicated and mysterious than little boys. At least to the Kid they are. They don’t want you to talk to them like they’re grown-up women. Maybe it’s because grown-up women aren’t like men. Maybe women really are adults and not little kids in disguise.

  But what about the women who when they were little girls got hurt somehow? Hurt so bad they got stuck there scared of having to grow up and as a result they never grow up and like men have to fake being an adult. The Kid is pretty sure from what she’s told him about her childhood and what she left out his mother is that type of woman. A fake woman. Same as he’s a fake man. It may be the only thing he has in common with his mother. He never had to deal with being beaten black and blue by his father the way she did. And he was never sexually abused or raped by anyone male or female the way his mother has hinted happened to her when she was a little girl. And he was never abandoned by his mother to the state foster-care system like her mother did to her and shuttled from one temporary family to another.

  The way he sees it his mother was always there for him. That’s her phrase, that she was always there for him, and it means two things to him: that he was a burden to her and that he never took full advantage of that fact. He never accepted her love and loyalty. The phrase makes him feel ashamed twice over. She’s a better person overall than he. She has a good excuse for refusing to grow up and he doesn’t. Her being a fake woman makes sense; his being a fake man doesn’t.

  He thinks all this has something to do with his no-go zone reaction to Larry Somerset. He wonders why he let the Rabbit talk him into taking the man’s money and letting him sleep in his tent. It isn’t like he needs the money especially. He has a job and almost no expenses. And it’s not like he’s fond of playing the Good Samaritan. He knows who the guy Larry Somerset is or rather was and what he got busted for and while the Kid’s in no position to judge Larry Somerset or anyone else living beneath the Causeway he still has a fearful attitude toward the guy and it’s not just because Larry Somerset is a cheese ball and was once a big-time state senator with all the power and prestige and money of that office and might still have some of it left over.

  The Kid has glimpsed kiddie porn by accident lots of times back in the day cruising the Internet looking for company late at night but he always quickly clicked off—scared but not sure why. Nothing he’s seen on the Internet has scared him like that and he’s seen a lot. And it isn’t fear of being caught and punished for doing something illegal or weird or breaking a taboo like incest or sex with animals. That’s a whole different kind of fear than what scares him about Larry Somerset.

  It’s what he felt in the not-too-distant past spending his nights maxing out his mother’s credit card and then his own debit card on porn sites and role-playing and swapping endless sex-talks with strangers in chat rooms when he’d sometimes click his way unintentionally into a website or a chat room where the hinted-at subject was sex with children. Which is immoral. Maybe worse—if there is something worse. Well, baby-banging is worse.

  It wasn’t that he was afraid of getting caught unless by his mother and she didn’t bother for years to check on where he went in real life—never mind where he went on his computer. He might not have been raised by wolves exactly but he was a feral child. He was pretty sure that back when he was still living at his mother’s house none of his digital travel was illegal or expressly prohibited as long as he did it on his own time which since he got sent back from Fort Drum became almost all the time.

  Fear of being caught and punished for doing something most people disapprove of and some people prohibit or is illegal is only what goes with playing a high-stakes game of chance. If you win you feel lucky and if you lose you feel unlucky and you just take your punishment like a man. Either way you don’t feel ashamed or guilty. It’s almost never colored by shame or guilt like it would if it was immoral.

  The Kid hears a car overhead or maybe it’s a truck because it’s moving too slowly to be a commuter’s car and while he waits for it to thump off the bridge onto the highway to the Barriers he hears a second vehicle also moving slowly but on the opposite side coming from the Barriers toward the mainland and then he hears both vehicles crunch to a stop somewhere up there on the Causeway. For a long moment, silence. Until several more cars or vans—he can’t be sure which except he knows they’re not trucks or buses—arrive from both directions and stop overhead. More silence. The Kid sits up and listens. Nothing. The man lying next to him turns fitfully in his sleep, rolls onto his left side facing away from the Kid and yanks the top of his sleeping bag over his head against the chill and goes back to dreaming whatever a guy like that dreams. The Kid doesn’t want to know.

  Iggy’s chain clanks and the Kid knows that the iguana is awake and alert. The chain is locked onto a cinder block and Iggy can drag the block a fair distance but not easily and is lazy enough not to bother unless someone accidentally drops trash that he thinks is food just out of his reach. It’s one of the reasons the Kid keeps his campsite clean and gets pissed off at anyone who tosses his garbage and wrappers from McDonald’s or an empty pizza box anywhere close to his tent.

  The Kid’s heart rate has picked up. He’s spooked but doesn’t know why. He’s almost never spooked down here. The other residents might be weird and even squalid because of the difficult living conditions and some of them are drunks like the Rabbit or high on drugs and a few of them are potential if not actual thieves but so far none of them has been violent. At least not against him. It’s violence from outsiders that you worry about. Besides, all of the residents except for the Rabbit are afraid of Iggy the best guard dog a man can have and even the Rabbit is cautious around Iggy. Not that the iguana would ever actually attack a human other than to defend himself and probably not even then but nobody except the Kid knows that for sure. The only person in danger of being attacked by a male iguana is another male iguana. And that’s in breeding season when there’s a female iguana in the neighborhood.

  He reaches forward and partially unzips the front tent flap and looks out. The predawn light in the east hasn’t reached the camp yet and it’s like being in a cave out there. He grabs his headlamp and switches on its narrow beam. The light is dim. Nearly out. Batteries need replacing. Always happens when you need it. The Kid drops the pale beam of light onto Iggy, who has run his chain out to the end. The iguana’s sawtooth crest is rigid and on high alert. He follows Iggy’s stare and casts his headlamp’s useless fading yellow light in the direction of the off-ramp but it falls short. A narrow bare-dirt path starts at its base and switchbacks up the steep incline from the
encampment to the guardrail and highway. It’s the only entrance and exit. Unless you arrive or leave by boat or jump into the Bay and swim from the mainland against the tidal current—where to keep from drowning you’d have to be an Olympic-level swimmer—there’s no other way in or out.

  Maybe Iggy hears one of the residents sneaking home after curfew and because of his electronic anklet already caught without knowing it and scheduled for trouble or maybe jail time. Why bother to sneak in when you know they’ve already nailed you? Why not just stroll home openly?

  Old habits, the Kid guesses.

  He snaps off the useless light and glances back toward the path one last time and against a gray swatch of the eastern sky spots the moving silhouette of a man. The man carries what looks like a baseball bat or possibly a rifle. A weapon anyhow. He’s wearing some kind of helmet with a visor. Behind him comes a second man who also wears a helmet and carries a club or a gun. They’re big guys and they’re walking carefully in the darkness as if they aren’t familiar with the pathway down and don’t have any flashlights or don’t want to reveal their presence by using them. The Kid remembers training in the dark at Fort Drum wearing helmets fitted out with night vision and how useless they were for walking on rough unfamiliar ground and wonders if these two are using night vision.