Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  Behind the first two come a whole bunch more big guys wearing helmets and carrying weapons. It’s some kind of raid or a military-style takedown by a platoon of cops or soldiers or a SWAT team. But why the hell would they be making a raid down here? Nobody down here deals drugs in any quantity larger than the occasional nickel bag or a few tabs of Ecstasy. No illegal aliens. No terrorists plotting the overthrow of the state. There’s nobody here but people like the Kid and the Rabbit and Larry Somerset and Paco and the Greek. Practically everyone in Calusa has known for years what kind of people live here and why and has never given a damn as long as they stay put. The newspapers write about it like it’s a leper colony. Even the TV news has covered it a few times. The only authorities who ever visit the camp are plainclothes cops and parole officers or caseworkers looking for their clients gone missing or the occasional bored state trooper dropping by to waste time looking for drugs or following up on a possible lead to some real criminal he’s investigating elsewhere. And they don’t come at night. They come during daylight hours as if even though the doctors say the disease the residents carry isn’t contagious people think it is—cops included. They’re afraid they’ll catch it if they come at night. The Kid watches the strangers in helmets gather together in a clot at the bottom of the steep incline. There are twenty to twenty-five of them. Maybe more. And here come five or six more guys but without helmets or uniforms—civilians in regular sports clothes.

  As if at a signal he somehow missed the entire SWAT team or cops or soldiers or whatever charge full speed into the encampment. Their boots slap heavily against the concrete and their clubs are raised—the Kid sees now they’re uniformed cops carrying batons not guns—ready to bust somebody’s bones while the half-dozen civilians stand back and watch from the sidelines like they’re embedded reporters. When the raiders reach the tents and shanties they break into teams of two and three and go to work kicking over the flimsy huts and yanking down the tarps and as the residents stumble befuddled and terrified out from under the wreckage of their collapsed shelters the cops bellow at them—Get the fuck outa here! Move move move! Get your shit, get the fuck out outa here!—and call them names—Motherfucking pervs! Faggots! Kid-fuckers! The frightened residents cover their heads with their arms and try vainly to dodge the riot sticks but it’s no good and the cops club their shoulders and backs and skulls and whack them across the face. Blood spurts from noses and mouths and ears. People howl in pain.

  The Kid sees a pair of cops lurching toward his tent. He grabs his backpack and unzips the rear flap of the tent from inside and ducks out and escapes into the darkness just beyond when he flashes on Iggy and turns back. The cops have already grabbed onto the front end of his tent and are yanking it down when one of them sees Iggy on his chain stalking steadily toward him fearless and on the attack with his mouth open and his long forked tongue flicking the air.

  Holy shit! What the fuck’s that? the first cop says.

  The second cop pauses in the destruction of the Kid’s tent. He takes a look at the iguana and his eyes widen. It’s a goddam lizard! Shoot it! Shoot the fucking thing!

  We got orders to keep our guns holstered.

  Unless physically threatened, man!

  While the cops argue the Kid’s roommate wearing only his baggy boxer shorts and T-shirt and black socks like an old-time European porn actor escapes from under the collapsed tent through the open flap at the back the same way the Kid got out. He scrambles on his hands and knees into the relative safety of darkness and comes up on the Kid.

  Good God, what’s happening? What are they doing?

  The first cop has his revolver out and aims it down at Iggy who keeps on coming toward the second cop.

  I call that threatening. That’s physically threatening, man! Shoot the goddam thing! Shoot it!

  Too much fucking paperwork. It’s on a chain anyhow.

  The Kid hears the sickening crack of a club against bone and he glances in that direction and sees the Rabbit go down, then slowly get back up and stagger off, dragging his right leg as if the thigh bone is fractured. Most of the rest flee into the darkness running and stumbling past the embedded reporters or whatever they are gathered at the bottom of the incline. Those who can do it scramble up the pathway to the Causeway and hop over the guardrail and run down the highway. The few residents who refuse to run or like the Rabbit are unable to run are herded together and shoved into a group off to the side close to the civilians where they’re guarded by a pair of cops with flashlights and guns while the Kid and Larry Somerset watch unseen from the edge of darkness.

  I said shoot it! For Christ’s sake, he’s gonna bite me!

  The Kid suddenly stands, Don’t shoot! he cries. He’s friendly! He won’t hurt you!

  The cop swings his helmeted head around and peers through night-vision glasses at the Kid and Larry Somerset. He looks like a giant bug standing on its hind legs. He brings his gun up and aims it at the Kid.

  You got ten seconds to get the fuck outa here. You and the other guy. Otherwise you’re busted back to prison.

  For what? We haven’t done nothing!

  Obstructing a police officer. Now get the fuck outa here you disgusting little creep before I change my mind and bust both of you and your fucking lizard for resisting arrest.

  The Kid turns and runs. He’s got no alternative. Larry tries to follow him but he doesn’t know the camp in the dark the way the Kid does and after a few steps he stumbles and falls. The Kid hears his face smack against the concrete—Kid, help me! I’m hurt! I’m bleeding!—but keeps on running anyhow. The hell with him. It’s every man for himself. As he races past the civilians at the bottom of the pathway he sees that they actually are reporters—they’re holding skinny notebooks and are writing furiously in them and a couple of them are talking into digital recorders. They have strange little smirks on their faces like they’re customers at a sex show who don’t want you to know it’s turning them on.

  The Kid keeps running. He sees bright red and yellow and white lights flashing up on the Causeway and hears sirens wailing as ambulances and paddy wagons and more cruisers arrive. TV crews too. He keeps running. He makes it up the path to the guardrail, jumps over the rail onto the Causeway, then races panting down the ramp onto the highway that leads to the Barriers. He’s still running. His heart is pounding. His lungs feel like they’re on fire. Turning back he sees a pair of patrol boats cutting full speed across the Bay toward the encampment. Coming to pick up the guys who couldn’t make it up to the ambulances and paddy wagons parked on the Causeway—probably including the Rabbit, oh Jesus, the poor fucking Rabbit who looked like his leg got broken and Larry Somerset who looked too scared and bloody to get up and run after he fell. The hell with them. Nothing he could do for them anyhow. He slows to a jog. Then he walks.

  The Kid wishes he had taken his bike but there was no way that cop would have let him. He’s lucky he thought to grab his backpack. He’s lucky he slept with his clothes on because he was creeped out by Larry Somerset even though he’s not gay. He’s worried about Iggy but figures once he and Larry took off there was no reason for the cop to shoot Iggy anymore. If they do anything they’ll turn him over to the SPCA or Animal Rescue and he’ll end up in Reptile Village. As soon as the Kid has a new home set up he’ll check in with the SPCA and Animal Rescue people and try to retrieve him. If he’s not with the SPCA or Animal Rescue he’ll be at Reptile Village, which is probably where he ought to be anyhow. Living with other reptiles instead of with humans.

  The Kid is rationalizing, he knows. He is going to miss Iggy. But the iguana was getting harder and harder to feed and care for properly especially down under the Causeway and he knows that Iggy will be better off living a more natural life with his own kind than chained to a cinder block down where there isn’t much sunlight and there are no other snakes or lizards for company. Just rats and homeless sex offenders. And no trees to climb.

  The sun has broken the horizon and the rumpled silve
r gray clouds overhead are pushed halfway back by the emerging blue sky. The Bay on either side glistens in the clean new light. Palm trees clatter in the offshore breeze. Traffic has started to build as commuters from the mainland head for work on the islands and the residents of the islands start the daily drive from their homes to their jobs on the mainland. The Kid still has a couple hours to kill before he has to show up for work at the Mirador. The eastbound cars flash past him and to get safely out of their way he steps over the guardrail onto the grass and walks there.

  Things could be worse, he thinks. He escaped. And no one’s chasing him. He could be locked in a paddy wagon like Larry Somerset probably is: on his way to court and hauled back to jail for breaking parole by resisting arrest or refusing to disperse or whatever phony charge they come up with. He could be injured or worse like the Rabbit and a couple others he saw getting clubbed by the cops. But he’s not, he’s a free man. More or less. And it’s morning in Calusa.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT TAKES THE KID OVER AN HOUR TO WALK from the Causeway over to the Barriers and south onto Clifton Road and then the half-mile residential curl alongside the Bayshore Golf Club. From the sidewalk at Clifton and West Twenty-third he watches with a willed curiosity the retirees out for their first eighteen holes. His legs are still wobbly weak and his lungs burn from the long run to safety and ten years of smoking cigarettes, a habit he caught back when he was twelve and hoped that dangling a ciggie from his lips might make him seem older because people kept mistaking him for nine or ten due to his being short and skinny and big-eared. He was eager to be noticed back then but not for that.

  Now he’s eager not to be noticed for anything.

  He tries distracting himself with the sight of elderly pink people in pastel shorts and shirts whacking with sticks at little white balls, the kind of people he’s never known personally or even spoken to except to say, May I clear, sir? at the restaurant, people whose thoughts he cannot imagine, whose past, present, and future lives are incomprehensible to him. As if they were members of a different species. He wants to understand what it must feel like to be them. To wake in the morning and shower and shave and read the Wall Street Journal or whatever at breakfast—freshly squeezed orange juice and bacon and eggs cooked just the way you like them by a Jamaican lady who is employed by you—and then you take your bag of golf clubs from the trunk of your S-Class Benz and walk from your walled-in rancho de luxe across Clifton Road to the Bayshore Golf Club where you meet two or three fellow retirees from New York or Philadelphia and stroll out to the first tee chatting knowledgeably about yesterday’s Dow Jones average and the gross national product.

  Whatever they are.

  Who are those fucking people? the Kid wonders and beneath his wondering hopes that the question will keep him from thinking about what he just went through back at the encampment beneath the Causeway. He can keep the shock of the police and press raid pretty well out of his mind almost as if it never happened but it’s harder for him to ignore the fact that now he’s scared of being picked up by the cops and charged with resisting arrest or unlawful flight or any of the other dozen charges they could easily stick on him if they wanted to because no one will believe that he’s innocent of anything. Even of just being alive. He’s guilty of that too. Being alive. Besides that he’s lost his squat, his safe haven, his home. And he’s worried about Otis the Rabbit and Iggy and feels sorry and a little ashamed that he abandoned Larry Somerset in spite of finding the guy creepy. Guilty and ashamed. Like he did something immoral by running for his life.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HE’S SITTING ALONE AT A CAFÉ TABLE outside a small bookstore on the fifteen-block-long section of Rampart Road that’s given over to pedestrians—a chic sprawl of sidewalk cafés, restaurants, bars, brasseries, and upscale shops for people who want to be seen by each other alongside souvenir stores for short-term sunburnt tourists and sunglass and sneaker stores for young people who like to think of themselves as raging against the machine. A fine mingling spot for people-watching if you’re into that but the Kid is here because it’s still early in the day and there aren’t many customers and no one wants his table so he’s free to idle away a few hours over a cup of coffee and not get nudged off it by the waiter. It’s a bookstore café with a newsstand and a sprinkling of people are sitting nearby reading newspapers just as he is although he’s not reading his newspaper exactly. He’s cashed one of Larry Somerset’s hundred-dollar bills at the bank on the corner of Clifton and Rampart and has bought a city map at the newsstand and a cup of coffee and an apricot muffin at the café. He’s opened the paper to the real estate section and is working his way down the listings for studio apartment rentals.

  Parc Bay Plaza Apartments

  2341 North Bayshore Drive

  $750–$1378. Live up to ONE MONTH FREE in selected apartments when move-in by the end of September. Prices listed reflect the one month free. Enjoy breathtaking views of Calusa Bay and downtown Calusa. Our lovely studio and 1- and 2-bedroom apartments for rent are beautifully appointed with spacious living areas. Many of our homes have large patios and balconies. Our controlled access community includes a swimming pool and a 24-hour fitness center. Catch a flick in our big screen surround sound movie room or play pool, table tennis and air hockey in our game room. Call today to schedule a personal tour: 866-510-1424.

  A tall very thin guy in his forties with long lemon yellow hair carrying a purple velvet clutch purse and wearing nothing but a gold lamé Speedo, flip-flops, and an all-body leathery tan swings past and catches the Kid’s eye. He’s anorectic thin with a lace mesh of wrinkles for a face and is weighed down with gold rings dangling from his ears, nostrils, nipples, and navel. He flashes a toothy smile and waves at the Kid, flips his hair and cruises in a half-circle up to the Kid’s table and stops.

  Hello, Kid. A little early to be working the street, isn’t it?

  The Kid gives him a cold stare and looks down at his map. It’s a very detailed map of the entire city with the Calusa Isles segment scaled at five hundred yards to the inch.

  Oh, I forgot, you’re holding down a regular job now. Like a real quote family man unquote.

  Fuck off, Molly.

  Molly spins in a feigned huff and walks away. The Kid retrieves his cell phone from his backpack and punches in a number.

  Parc Bay Realty. How may I help you?

  He says he’s calling about a furnished studio with kitchenette and bath. Always he asks first for the price and then the square footage. It’s the drill—the same old Q’s, the same old A’s. Regarding price he’s looking strictly at the low end. Location is irrelevant as long as it’s within biking distance of his job but he knows it’s reassuring to the rental agent so he politely inquires into the related questions of neighborhood safety and building security. While the woman at the other end goes on about how it’s perfectly safe even after dark and the building has excellent twenty-four-hour security he dots the street address on the map with his ballpoint and draws a circle with a diameter of two inches—one thousand yards, three thousand feet—around it.

  There are a half-dozen kindergartens, day care centers, public and private schools, and three or four public playgrounds inside the circle. There are kids’ ballet studios, martial arts studios, art classes, music classes, and SAT preparation classes located inside the circle. Inside the circle everywhere you look the children are already gathering.

  He makes an appointment anyhow to come by and check out the room as soon as he gets off work at the Mirador and she says fine. He takes a box of Marlboro Gold from his backpack, knocks a cigarette loose, and lights it. He asks about pets and she says no dogs or cats.

  He says, Oh, followed by a longish pause. How about a pet iguana?

  She knows what an iguana is. She asks how big is it.

  Not big, he lies. It sleeps all day and can live in a box under the bed. It doesn’t make any noise and won’t damage anything.

  She says she’ll have to see it
first and then decide.

  He’s okay with that. He says he was thinking of giving him away anyhow. To a friend, he lies again.

  Then she asks his name. As usual he wants to tell her Kid. But no way he can get away with it. End of interview. He knows what she’ll do with the information as soon as he gets off the phone. He says his real name anyhow. He has to.

  They say good-bye and he clicks off. He imagines her going straight to the Internet to run his name. He’s been through all this before—how many times? Fifty? A hundred? It’s a total waste of time, energy, and hope and he knows he won’t bother to show up at the appointed time and place. Even so he’ll make a call to a second agent. And a third. And probably a fourth. Before finally once again he’ll give up the search for a home.

  It’s an hour before the Kid has to be a busboy again and pedestrian traffic has thickened somewhat with tourists, brunchers, and dog walkers strolling past the café and grabbing seats nearby in increasing numbers until all the tables are taken and the Kid has noticed a clutch of people gathered by the headwaiter’s stand staring pointedly in his direction. He folds up his map and is about to leave the café and does not see the two bottle-blond girls in bikinis Rollerblading his way until they circle his table eyeing him like a pair of hawks riding a rising thermal high above a distracted mouse. As their shadows cross him he looks up and instinctively ducks. He wishes he had a hole to dive into. One bikini is pink polka-dotted, the other is tiger striped. Both girls wear carefully tousled honey-colored manes, black fingernail polish, lovingly applied makeup, and the usual navel rings. Polka-dot snaps one of his ears with her thumb and forefinger and keeps circling. Rolling along behind her Tiger-stripe does the same to his other ear.

  Ow-w! Cut that shit out, man!

  They flash their gleaming teeth and make a second loop. They are both genetic wonders, their smooth tight bodies evenly toasted a golden brown, flesh firm as an unripe Bosc pear, symmetrical faces with pertly sculpted noses and chins. They’re not quite twins, probably not even sisters—Polka’s cheekbones are a little higher than Tiger’s and she’s maybe two inches taller—but have been manufactured from the same prototype by a bored God for no better reason than to satisfy His private eyes.