Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  A couple of residents are fishing for their supper from the edge of the island. Someone in the cavern beneath the far on-ramp has set a grill on bricks and built a driftwood fire and is boiling water in a pan probably for spaghetti or a one-pot meal from a box. These are the only signs of domestic intent.

  From a short distance the Kid spots his bike still chained to the pier where he left it and his tent collapsed in a pile next to it. No sign of Iggy—which he’s desperate enough to take as a good sign. This is not the same as optimism. The Kid is definitely not an optimist. Even so he thinks maybe Iggy somehow escaped and is hiding in the shadows or under a pile of wreckage waiting for the Kid to come back for him. It’s possible but not very likely that the cops called the SPCA or some kindly animal rescue organization and they unhooked his chain from the cinder block and hauled him off to Reptile Village where he’s already found himself a cave to sleep in and a tree to climb and a friendly female iguana to warm his cold reptilian blood.

  The Kid knows what he’s going to find but just can’t face it yet.

  No sign of Larry Somerset either and none of Otis the Rabbit Washington which doesn’t surprise him. The Rabbit is probably in the hospital and bound for jail as soon as he’s discharged while Larry Somerset has his pin-striped lawyer arguing that in no way did his client violate the terms of his parole and Senator Somerset should therefore be released on his own recognizance immediately which will very likely happen although the Kid doubts he’ll come back to the encampment after this. He’s got options the rest of the men don’t have. He could live in a rented trailer out on the Keys or beyond the suburbs someplace close to the Great Panzacola Swamp where no children live. The Kid figures Somerset’s lawyers if they can’t get him off parole will cut him a deal with the city. He’ll probably end up living down on one of the Keys and teaching a class on good governance and homelessness at the Keys branch of Calusa Community College. It might have to be via the Internet though—there’s lots of college students under the age of eighteen who have to be kept 2,500 feet from sexual offenders.

  For months the Kid knew the raid was in the political opportunism pipeline but he didn’t really expect it to happen. Newspaper and TV editorials have been calling incessantly for a “solution” to the “problem” posed by the underground colony of homeless men living beneath the Causeway. State and local tourist boards and hotel and restaurant associations have been lobbying city government to ship the settlers out of the city to someplace where tourists never go—someplace that’s isolated and feels far away, like a homegrown version of Tasmania or Devil’s Island. Church groups and religious leaders and talk radio commentators and their call-in listeners for months have been demanding permanent punishment of sex offenders and even potential sex offenders by means of chemical castration or better yet life sentences without parole or even better execution to be followed if possible by eternal damnation.

  The county commission and mayoral elections are only six weeks off and candidates from all political persuasions have been working to outdo each other in the effort to protect American children and defend the American family from the dark desires and intentions of perverts. First they scream for laws that prohibit anyone convicted as a sexual offender from living within 2,500 feet which is almost half a mile from a school or day care center or playground or wherever children are known to gather together or from living in a home where anyone under the age of eighteen happens to reside. Which means pretty much the entire city and its suburbs are off-limits. Except under the Causeway and one or two other locations in Calusa County like the airport and the Great Panzacola Swamp. Then they turn around and call for an immediate solution to the problem of the growing number of convicted sex offenders living under the Causeway.

  The Kid’s no psychologist and he hasn’t much insight into what makes a sex offender offend but he has more sympathy for the men he’s been living with lately than with the people who put them there even though he knows that most of the men living here himself included have done very bad things. The papers have taken to calling them the Bridge People which he thinks makes sense in another way because they are a bridge between what passes for normal human beings and animals. They’re like chimpanzees or Neanderthals who eventually would have evolved into normal human beings if it weren’t for their DNA having got scrambled somehow making them forget how they’re supposed to act when it comes to sex so that what seems natural to them seems unnatural to everyone else even though everyone else has the same DNA except it isn’t scrambled the same way theirs is. The Kid wonders if all across America there is some kind of strange invisible radioactive leakage like from high-tension wires or cell phones or road and mall parking lot asphalt that is turning thousands of American men young and old of all races into sex offenders so that instead of being attracted to grown women their own age they’re attracted to young girls and little children. He worries that it’s an environmentally caused degenerative disease. He’s heard about Twinkies having chemicals that can change a normal person into a murderer. Maybe junk food like Big Macs and Whoppers can damage the immune system of certain susceptible men and convert them into sexual offenders. He wonders if his still being attracted to girls like the Babes on Blades earlier today on Rampart Road is a sign that he will someday be attracted to female children. He wonders if when he’s middle-aged he’ll end up like Larry Somerset and rent a motel room and over the phone arrange for a clucker mother to bring her two little daughters to the room where he’ll plan to greet them with porn videos and sex toys and the crackhead mother will turn out to be an undercover cop.

  Finally he sees Iggy. Poor Iggy! He walked past him twice and didn’t notice him because the iguana had turned the same shade of gray as the concrete and in the shadows was almost invisible. He’s dead. Shot in the top of his head where his third eye was located. Shot at close range it looks like. The hole is large—the size of one of Dario’s carnations without much blood showing due to his being a reptile and cold-blooded. The eyes on the sides of his head are open but dry and glassy like marbles. With his dewlaps deflated and his dorsal crest and spikes folded back he seems shrunken and old. His feet are hidden beneath him as if he was holding on to his belly when he was shot or maybe he was shot first in the belly and was holding his guts in when the cop finished him off with a shot to the head.

  He is still attached to the chain and the chain is hooked to the cinder block but he dragged it about twenty feet away from the tent and the Kid wonders if he did that after he was shot and his final effort in life was either to get away from the cops or to attack them.

  Knowing Iggy he was on the attack. Iggy was always braver than the Kid. Iggy would never run from a fight. Not that he’d had many opportunities—in all the years he lived with the Kid Iggy never met another male iguana. And the Kid always protected him from dogs except when he was in basic training at Fort Drum when he made his mother swear not to let him out of his cage except when she cleaned the cage and then to make sure the door to his bedroom was closed tight and the windows down so he couldn’t escape into the dangerous outside world. Down here under the Causeway no one bothered Iggy. He was sort of a mascot anyhow as if he somehow represented not just the Kid but all the men living under the Causeway to the world at large. To the residents under the Causeway Iggy was more than a pet and less. To the Kid however he was more than a human being and less. He was his best friend. He never should have abandoned him during the raid. He never should have trusted the cops to ignore him especially when that one cop drew his gun and the other cop yelled for him to shoot Iggy.

  Tears are running down his cheeks and he feels like a big baby. He’s ashamed of himself not for crying but for having been such a coward and though he feels rightly punished by having his best friend taken away forever Iggy did not deserve to die. Iggy never once did anything to be ashamed of. All he did all his life was be his natural self. Unlike the Kid. Who doesn’t even know what his natural self is.

  There’s no way h
e can bury Iggy down here so the Kid drags Larry Somerset’s sleeping bag out from under the collapsed tent and unzips it and rolls Iggy’s body and the chain and cinder block into the sleeping bag and zips it back up. Then he lifts the bundle in his arms and cradling it walks down the sloping concrete island to the water. With Iggy’s body which weighs twenty-seven pounds plus the cinder block and chain the sleeping bag is too heavy for him to toss so he drops it straight into the Bay and then takes a nearby two-by-four and pushes it out into the deeper water where it slowly sinks to the bottom.

  The Kid loved Iggy—maybe the only creature he has ever loved except his mother and he’s not really sure he loves her because sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between lifelong dependency and love especially for someone you can’t be sure loves you back. But he knows that from the day Iggy clamped onto his hand with his little beak and the doctor wanted to cut off his head to make him let go the Kid has loved Iggy. And now that Iggy is dead and his body is at the bottom of the Bay the Kid wants to be dead and at the bottom of the Bay too.

  Slowly he turns away from Iggy’s watery grave site and walks back to his ravaged campsite. Larry Somerset’s duffel is still there alongside his own supplies and sleeping bag and clothing and his cook-kit and stove. There’s even a can of Corona beer and a bag of Cheetos left over from last night’s supper. The tent poles and lines are intact and the tent itself wasn’t torn. He’s able to reset it quickly and in an hour he has restored his camp to its original neat four-square condition. While he drinks the beer and eats the Cheetos he pokes through Larry Somerset’s bag: corduroy trousers, a Brooks Brothers V-neck sweater and two folded dress shirts, some underwear and socks, a shaving kit and miscellaneous toiletries, a pair of flip-flops and a bath towel. Also a Bible which doesn’t surprise him since guys like Larry Somerset are usually Bible thumpers and a thin leather briefcase stuffed with legal-looking papers that the Kid intends to read in the morning light as it’s nearly dark and he remembers that his headlamp batteries are weak.

  On the north side of the Causeway a couple of the survivors of the raid have put the shower pail back up on its stand and have repaired the latrine which is basically a large plastic bucket half-hidden behind a floral shower curtain stretched over a tripod of bamboo poles. One of the men—a guy named P.C. who is around fifty and says in his previous life he was a high school track coach—passes by his camp and the Kid asks him what happened to Rabbit.

  P.C. is a fleshy white man with a steel gray buzz cut. He wears baggy bermuda shorts and white basketball sneakers, a faded green Calusa Tarpons T-shirt and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap and is lugging a second plastic bucket to the latrine for when the first bucket is full. He looks like a suburban dad off to wash his station wagon in the driveway. You’d never think he was a sex offender but what’s a sex offender look like anyhow? The Kid doesn’t know what P.C. stands for but he’s pretty sure it isn’t “politically correct.” More likely it’s “partly correct” because he’s one of those guys who speaks with total authority about things he knows almost nothing about. Also there is something sly about him that the Kid can’t quite name. Something compulsively deceitful—like he would say it’s raining, it’s definitely raining, when you can see for yourself that the sun is shining. He doesn’t trust the guy. Not the way he trusts the Rabbit. Or even Paco and most of the other residents.

  Rabbit? Oh yeah, he got his leg busted up pretty bad. They took him and some others in the ambulances. Paco just took off on his motorcycle and no one followed him on account of being so busy busting everybody else.

  Anybody killed?

  A heart attack or two and one guy who tried swimming to the mainland but got caught in the rip and drowned.

  P.C., that’s gotta be bullshit. It woulda been in the paper and I read the paper today. I woulda seen it.

  They’re keeping it quiet on account of politics. A lot of us just ran like hell. Once people heard the cop’s gun from when he shot your lizard everybody who hadn’t already gotten the hell out of here like you and me froze and behaved themselves and got hauled off in the paddy wagons. Hey, too bad about your lizard, Kid.

  You think they’ll be back? I mean the cops and all?

  Not tonight. This whole thing was staged for the press. The media. An election year photo op. A few days though an’ there’ll be reporters back to write their follow-ups and if they find us still here and write about it the cops’ll be all over this place again.

  I thought you said they were keeping it quiet on account of the politics.

  Trust me. Better pack your stuff and find a new place to live, Kid. At least till after the election.

  Why do I think you’re trying to keep people from coming back, P.C.? You got your eye on one of those empty shacks?

  Come morning I’m outa here myself.

  Where can we go?

  There’s no “we,” Kid. My advice is go alone. The same way you came here in the first place. Being homeless ain’t a team sport. And keep moving is my advice. And never sleep in the same place twice. Hey, good luck out there, my little friend.

  Yeah, thanks.

  You might try Benbow’s over on Anaconda Key for a few nights. It doesn’t look like it but it’s a business so he won’t let you camp there permanently. You know Benbow’s?

  You’re just making it up, P.C., like everything else. Benbow’s is probably some kind of beach resort where they’ll run me off as soon as they see me start to pitch my tent. Or they’ll bust me. You’re trying to get me busted, aren’t you? You want my spot here beneath the Causeway with the great view of the Bay and beautiful downtown Calusa.

  Naw, Benbow’s an old squatters’ shrimper camp. Trust me. They sell beer and smoked fish and shrimp. But guys down on their luck hang out sometimes for a week or two and nobody bugs ’em for it unless they want to make it permanent. Benbow and a bunch of old Vietnam vets run the place. Crazy guys but harmless. Him included. Other side of the South Bay Causeway. On Anaconda Key out by the sewage treatment plant. Can’t miss it. They make movies there sometimes.

  What kinda movies?

  I heard skin flicks, porn. Cheap shit that goes straight to the Internet. Trust me.

  Yeah, right. The Kid says he’ll think about it. Tomorrow. Tonight he’s too fucked up by the death of Iggy to think about anything that might be considered his future or his past. Tonight all he wants to think about is the immediate present.

  P.C. says, Suit yourself, Kid. But you’re going to need a power source to charge your anklet battery. The Greek’s generator is permanently out of business. This place is totally over, Kid.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE KID FLICKS HIS BIC AND LIGHTS A candle and crawls into his sleeping bag. Above him shadows flutter like restless crows across the pale green skin of the nylon tent. He forgot to buy batteries for his headlamp. Dumb. Lying back, elbow bent, head on his upper arm, he lights up a cigarette. His thirteenth smoke of the day. He’ll be down to twelve next week. But who’s counting, right? At least he’s not thinking about Iggy or about being fired from his job or about having to find a new place to live. The Kid is good at keeping in cages the things that trouble his mind.

  He opens Larry Somerset’s Holy Bible. It’s the only book in the tent. The Kid’s never been much of a reader and he has hoped for a long time, ever since he first heard of it, that he suffers from attention deficit disorder because in school and in the army most people regarded him as borderline retarded. He’s pretty sure that he’s not but he’s had a hard time coming up with a better explanation for what’s gone wrong with his life so maybe he is borderline retarded.

  He’s not actually read the Bible before. All or even in part. His mother never made him go to Sunday school or church but he’s known about the Bible all his life of course and he respects it—just as he knows about and respects the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence which he’s also never read and Shakespeare and a few other famous writings that weren’t required reading in school a
nd some that were but which he never got around to reading. Supposedly those are the chief books and documents where people set down in print the basic rules that you have to obey in order to live a good productive legal life. A moral life. Everyone in authority when you got down to basics concerning right versus wrong quotes from them or at least refers to them but the Kid always figured that since every rule and regulation in the world was based on them you didn’t have to read the originals.

  But lately he’s started to wonder if the authorities have been misrepresenting the originals here and there or at least interpreting them in a way that is more to their own advantage than to the good use of people like the Kid who are both ignorant and pretty much powerless and therefore usually have to depend on the authorities to tell them what’s right and what’s wrong.

  For instance he wonders where in the Holy Bible or the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or Shakespeare it says you aren’t supposed to try and have sex with anyone under the age of eighteen. He’s pretty sure that somewhere in the Bible it says God doesn’t want you to have sex with animals or with your mother or your sister or daughter. Shakespeare was probably against all that too. Who wouldn’t be? But what about sex with hard-bodied flirtatious fourteen-year-old girls with navel rings and tattoos and you’re not related to them? What does the Bible have to say about going online and trying to have sex with them? Shakespeare might even be for it.