Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  Despite being in most ways a sociable boy who appeared actually to seek out and enjoy the company of other children, he could not be said to play well with others, especially with children his own age or near it. Early on this conflict became problematic for him. Year after year he skipped grades, making him to an increasing degree the youngest in his class, although perennially the largest. He had a gift for languages and a near photographic memory and retained vast stores of data. Precociously intelligent and verbally gifted, he developed a compulsion to explain everything, at first just to other children, but then to adults as well. He explained geography, local, regional, national, and international history, politics, statistics and mathematics, physics and chemistry, sociology, anthropology, and, before it became a subject, game theory. Whether they wanted him to or not he explained things. He did it in a friendly way that was neither condescending nor showing off, and children and adults alike, all of whom were astounded by his mental acuity and linguistic clarity, were for the most part grateful for and sometimes amused by his eagerness to reveal the world to them. From kindergarten on, adults and children called him Professor, and mostly they meant it as a compliment.

  He had a mass of curly dark brown hair, smooth pale skin, rosebud lips, and round brown eyes with long lashes, and although his face, due to his obesity, was flattened somewhat, he was nonetheless a conventionally pretty child. But he was not like other children, and he knew it. From the time he learned to walk (delayed because of his weight until he was nearly two and a half years old), he positioned himself on the sideline of every group activity with arms crossed over his bulging chest and assumed the facial expression of a cool, skeptical observer: bemused smile, cold eyes, head tilted back slightly, not in disdain so much as ironic detachment.

  It was a self-protective disguise, an affect and posture designed to make his outsized body as irrelevant and close to invisible as possible. But it didn’t work. Adults couldn’t help noting and commenting on his body, and their comments, even when they took the approximate outer form of praise (That’s a real big steamroller of a boy, ain’t he? and, Bet you gonna be half the Tide’s offensive line all by yourself when you get down to Tuscaloosa! and, That boy sure mus’ like his biscuits an’ gravy! ), ridiculed him. Consequently, he knew all too well what he would look like to parents, teachers, coaches, and especially to the other children if he waddled over to join them on the playground in their games of kickball, Red Rover, and capture the flag; or if in middle school he lumbered onto the sports field prepared to play baseball or football; or when finally in high school, if he shuffled shyly up to the pretty blond girl named Ashley Tarbox at the school dance and asked her to come onto the dance floor with him and jitterbug to Artie Shaw’s “I Get a Kick Out of You.” He knew that he would look ridiculous. So he never did any of those things.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT’S THE SONG THAT’S PLAYING NOW ON THE CD player of his van as he crosses the narrow bridge from Calusa onto Anaconda Key—Artie Shaw’s version of “I Get a Kick Out of You.” His fingertips tap in time against the steering wheel. I get no kick from champagne. Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all. He passes the sewage treatment plant on his left and inside the air-conditioned van, even with the windows closed, catches a whiff of the wind-blown vegetal stink. On his right through a snaggy wall of mangroves he glimpses a narrow channel and the peeling hull of an abandoned, half-sunk shrimp boat. At a fork in the road he spots a tilted, hand-painted sign: BENBOW’S. He turns right and follows the winding, crushed-shell and coral lane into the low live oak and palmetto woods. He shuts down the CD player so he can better concentrate his attention, and as he bumps along the lane he searches in among the trees for the Kid’s tent.

  He’s excited about this meeting. Two nights ago when he made his way down to the encampment beneath the Claybourne Causeway he had not expected to find any of the homeless sex offenders who’d been living in abject squalor there. For months he had intended to visit the camp and regretted having postponed it so long, and after hearing on the car radio that the camp had been raided by the police, he expected all the residents, twenty-four hours later, to have been scattered by now or carted back to jail. Although most of his colleagues at the university—indeed, most of the good citizens of Calusa—denied knowing of the camp, there had been numerous newspaper stories and online commentaries and Internet blogs decrying its existence and urging its dissolution and the removal of the colony. There was no agreement, of course, on where the sex offenders should be removed to. They were pariahs of the most extreme sort, American untouchables, a caste of men ranked far below the merely alcoholic, addicted, or deranged homeless. They were men beyond redemption, care, or cure, both despicable and impossible to remove and thus by most people simply wished out of existence.

  The Professor was not one of these people. Homelessness, its causes and possible solutions, interested him professionally. The legal apparatus designed to deal with sexual offenses also interested him. And so did the psychology of denial, although that was more a personal interest than professional. He’d leave any professional examination of collective and individual denial to the psychology department. When he stopped on his way home from the university and parked his van at the side of the road and made his way in the dark down under the Causeway, he expected only to see the place where these men had been living, not the men themselves. He wanted to observe what sort of habitation they had made for themselves before the city sanitation workers had a chance to come in and clean it up.

  Thus he was elated to discover the Kid asleep inside his tent. The fellow wasn’t much more than a boy. The Professor guessed him to be twenty or twenty-one at most. He acted suspicious and was a little hostile, perhaps. Testy. But why not, after what he’d been through, especially after the raid?

  Soon, with no sight of the Kid’s tent—Of course he’d want to hide himself, the poor kid must be terrified—the lane ends at what the Professor assumes is Benbow’s. He parks the van in a clearing where there are several other vehicles: a rusting Toyota pickup, a yellow Calusa city cab, and a gleaming, meticulously restored 1965 Harley-Davidson chromed front to back and top to bottom with an American flag drooping from a rod attached to the rear fender. Last of the FLH panheads, the Professor notes. First of the electric starters.

  Beyond the clearing, scattered in the shade of live oaks and palm trees, in no evident pattern and to no recognizable purpose, are a half-dozen unpainted shanties and low, shedlike buildings with corrugated iron roofs. It’s a random-seeming collection of old handmade buildings, most of them windowless and half-open to the elements. Beyond the buildings a rusted, dented, twenty-foot Airstream house-trailer with flattened tires has been set on cinder blocks. A hand-painted wooden plaque with the name BENBOW is bolted to the aluminum outer wall above the entrance.

  From his van the Professor can see on the far side of the trailer the dark green waters of the Bay fading to azure in the distance and in flashes through the tangled mangroves the wide channel that surrounds the small key where four or five partially sunk hulks, fishing boats and shrimpers, have been left by the shore to rot, too far gone to claim or repair. Looking north across the Bay he can see the Calusa skyline and the arch of the Claybourne Causeway. The purpose of Benbow’s is unclear to him, but the place looks like a staging area for refugees waiting for the arrival of the man with the boat who will smuggle them from their native land across the sea to America.

  Phrases and names have been scrawled and spray painted here and there on the faded plywood and warped board walls of the nearby buildings, more like messages left for a search party than graffiti: BOOM-BOOM BENBOW RULES! and TRINIDAD BOB WAS HERE! THIS IS THE PLACE! EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED! One of the sheds is set up like an open-air bar with a plank counter, an old-fashioned zinc-lined cooler visible behind the counter, and a fourteen-inch TV set with a rabbit ears antenna and VCR perched on a shelf above it. A small wire cage with a large gray parrot snoozing inside hangs next to the T
V. Nearby an oil drum overflows with empty beer cans and bottles spilling onto the bare ground.

  Keeping their backs to him, as if they haven’t heard his van ease over the crushed coral to a stop barely twenty feet away, two men, one with a shaved head, the other with long, lank, silver-gray hair, lean against the plank, drinking beer from cans. They are scrawny men the same approximate age as the Professor with arms, shoulders, and necks smattered with ancient tattoos too faded and wrinkled to decipher. They are both shirtless, wearing cutoffs, and barefoot, their slack-skinned bodies tanned the color of old bricks. The bald man has bright blue eyes and smokes a large, yellowed meerschaum pipe; the other wears a stringy billy-goat beard and a large gold hoop in his left ear and jangled sets of gold bracelets on his wrists. The TV screen is blank, but both men watch it intently as if it’s the seventh game of the World Series. The Professor decides that the man with the pipe is Boom-Boom Benbow; the one with the gold is Trinidad Bob. A pair of permanently stalled Vietnam vets.

  A yellow mixed-breed dog skulks toward the Professor’s van, too sick and undernourished to bark or even growl or glare, but unlike the pair at the bar is unable to resist the instinct to challenge an intruder. She’s an old bitch with sagging teats who’s been allowed to breed too many times. The Professor eases himself from his van to the ground, and a wave of sweat instantly sweeps down his broad face into his beard. The sweet smell of woodsmoke and the damp salt smell off the briny Bay and open sea beyond mingle in the sulfurous breeze that wafts across the Key from the sewage treatment plant. The mix of smells is almost pleasant to him. He’s wearing faded blue farmer’s overalls, fisherman’s sandals, and a yellow seersucker short-sleeved shirt—clothing that makes him look even larger than he is. Sweat circles spread from his armpits across his upper chest where tufts of white hair peek out from the open collar of his shirt. He has a pale blue baseball cap on his head, and his abundant long hair pokes through the plastic, unhooked hatband at the back.

  He stares down the yellow dog and dismisses it with a flip of his hand, and the dog, glad for the dominance, flops in the shade of the van and closes her eyes. Slowly the Professor approaches the men at the bar and takes a position next to the one with the shaved head, the man he believes is Benbow, and watches the blank TV screen with them. Neither man acknowledges his presence. The other, Trinidad Bob, finishes his beer and tosses the can in the general direction of the barrel of empties. He reaches over the bar and fishes a fresh can from the cooler and cracks it open.

  Got one of those for sale?

  Trinidad Bob answers by hauling another can of beer, Miller, from the cooler and slides it down the plank to the Professor.

  How much?

  Two bucks.

  The Professor lays three singles onto the plank in front of him and waits. After thirty seconds Benbow grabs the bills and stuffs them into his pocket. He relights his meerschaum pipe.

  Tobacco smells good. Not many people smoke a pipe anymore.

  Trinidad Bob laughs, halfway between a chortle and a giggle. Not many people smoke anything anymore! ’Cept mary-juana! He knocks a cigarette from a pack of Parliaments and lights it. Mary-wanna. Mary Jane. Merry Christmas. You here for fish? Got some fresh smoked marlin today. He points to a large rusty oil barrel that’s been converted into a primitive smoker with a low-burning fire beneath it, the source of the sweet-smelling woodsmoke the Professor noticed earlier. Been makin’ it since mornin’. Came in yesterday afternoon. Seven bucks a pound.

  Actually, I’m looking for someone. A friend of mine.

  Benbow turns and looks the Professor over once, top to bottom, then goes back to the blank TV screen. What’s his name?

  Kid. Just Kid. Young fellow, said he’d meet me here around now.

  Never heard of him. You ever heard of him, Bob?

  Trinidad Bob hesitates a few seconds, then says, Nope. Never heard of him. ’Course, we had a crowd here last night, mostly youngsters over from Calusa an’ the Barriers. He might’ve been one of them people. Lots of pretty girls in bikinis an’ mini skirts dancin’ an’ drinkin’ and partying like crazy! I was sort of distracted by all that so could’ve missed your friend named Kid. They all wanted to talk to Trinidad Bob. That’s me. Them little chickies like talkin’ to Trinidad Bob.

  Because you’re so fuckin’ handsome. Without looking at him, Benbow says to the Professor: I take you for a cop.

  I’m a teacher. A professor at Calusa State.

  I still take you for a cop.

  I take you for a vet. ’Nam. Noncommissioned officer, E-5, Air cav, probably. Or else BRO. Two tours, early 1970s. Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. I take Trinidad Bob there as a vet too. A blueleg E-2 who never got to E-3. One tour, late 1960s, maybe early 1970s like you. BRO, but not in your outfit. Took some shrapnel in the head. Like they say, FUBAR. Fucked up in the head.

  Trinidad Bob says, Hey, that’s pretty good, Professor! How’d you know all that?

  ’Cause he’s some kinda fuckin’ cop is how. Turn on the TV, Bob. The news is over. It’s time for Jeopardy!

  Bob says, Me, I always wanna watch Wheel of Fortune, but Boom, he prefers Jeopardy! So he says, anyhow. He likes questioning answers, he says. But Wheel of Fortune has Vanna White, man. Fuckin’ Vanna White! You ever check her out? Can’t get enough of that bitch, man! Bob quick-steps around the plank bar and switches on the TV, fiddles with the controls until the picture comes up on Jeopardy!

  Don’t think I’ve ever seen the show, the Professor says.

  You’d know if you did. They was gonna shoot an episode of that show here at Benbow’s one time, on account of so many TV shows an’ modelin’ shit and movies that gets shot here. Only at the last minute they decide to do it over on the Barriers at a fancy fuckin’ hotel instead. Too bad. I really was hopin’ to meet Vanna White in person an’ maybe get me a lick of that, y’ know what I’m sayin’? Chicks dig me, man.

  The Professor glances left at the sound of a door opening and sees a thin woman in her late forties or early fifties step from the Airstream trailer, followed by a slightly older man in jeans and motorcycle boots and a muscle shirt. He has short, stiff, shoe-polish-black hair and a pure white handlebar mustache. He’s a man who lifts weights regularly—broad meaty shoulders, thick neck muscles, and slabbed biceps decorated with tattoos of overlapping dragons and unicorns. He falls into a bow-legged swagger as he nears the men. A competitive power-lifter who just got laid or a blow job, the Professor decides. Senior heavyweight division. Not a bodybuilder. Bodybuilders favor the deliberately cut look over bulk and brute strength and avoid tattoos. She must be the smoked marlin.

  The man takes a position at the bar beside Trinidad Bob. The woman walks behind the bar, pulls two beers from the cooler and passes one to her companion. Her face is freckled and blotched from too much sun. She has a web of fine lines around her green eyes and a vertical cluster of smoker’s lines above her upper lip. Her thick coppery hair is cropped short, chopped rather than layered, and streaked with gray, as if the copper-red dye needs to be replenished. She’s her own hairdresser, the Professor observes. She’s full-breasted for such a thin woman and wears a loose, black chenille skirt with a dangling, ripped hem and a faded red T-shirt with I GOT CRABS AT HALEY’S CRAB SHACK printed across the front.

  She smiles and says to the Professor, How’re you doin’ today, big man?

  Trinidad Bob says, Boom-Boom thinks he’s a cop!

  That’s interestin’. Are you?

  I’m a professor at CSU. Calusa State. I’m looking for a young friend who was supposed to meet me here.

  One of your students?

  Sort of. A small young man in his early twenties with a buzz cut and big ears. I think he hoped to camp out here on the Key for a few days.

  Sure, the Kid. He’s here. He’s still here, ain’t he, Boom?

  Shut the fuck up, Yvonne.

  You don’t look like a cop. Or a professor, either. I mean the way you’re dressed an’ all. What’s with the overal
ls?

  I said shut the fuck up, Yvonne.

  The weight lifter takes a final gulp from his beer and cleans his mustache with his paw like a schnauzer. I’m outa here. Check you later, Boom. He steps away from the bar, drops the can into the barrel, and walks quickly to his motorcycle. In seconds he is gone.

  Yvonne smirks after him. No good-bye even? Jeez.

  Cops make Paco antsy.

  He said his name was Tom.

  Yeah. Whatever.

  Trinidad Bob looks over at the Professor. If you ain’t a cop how’d you know so much about me an’ Boom-Boom so fast? You a vet? You in ’Nam?

  Would it make a difference if I were?

  Without looking away from Jeopardy! Benbow says, What branch?

  101st Airborne.

  Yeah, you an’ everybody else. The 101st’s like Woodstock. Everybody and his brother over fifty got high and got laid at Woodstock. What year were you in ’Nam?

  In-country from December fourth, 1968, to September twentieth, 1969.

  Based where?

  Long Binh. And mostly up in the A Shau Valley. What is this, a quiz show? Benbow’s version of Jeopardy!?

  Yeah. Except in Jeopardy! you get told the answer first and the contestant has to come up with the right question.

  Fair enough. Here’s an answer. “Pup tent.”

  Trinidad Bob slaps his hand on the plank to ring the buzzer. I got it! “Where’s the Kid?”

  Right. Next answer, “On the beach on the far side of the trailer.”

  “Where’d the Kid pitch his pup tent?” Man, this is too fucking easy!

  Shut the fuck up, Bob.

  Here’s the final answer. Get it right, I buy a round of beers. “Yes.”