Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  Though he’s never been to the Great Panzacola Swamp in person and doesn’t know much about anything that he hasn’t experienced in person the Kid knows all this. He learned about the swamp and the houseboats from the Rabbit one night back when he first pitched his pup tent under the Causeway. Still unused to the noise of the traffic overhead, the filth, stench, and crowdedness of the place and the sometimes erratic scary behavior of the other residents, he was grousing to the Rabbit who was the only one living down there who had befriended him and didn’t seem to want anything from him in return. The Kid whined that there’s got to be a better place than this rat hole where they could legally reside.

  The Rabbit told him there wasn’t. But if they had enough dough they could rent a houseboat and live in the Great Panzacola Swamp and still be in Calusa County. Nobody hassles you out there, Kid. They got a store at the ranger station where you can buy what you need. You can even rent a post office box there for your Social Security check or if you’re on welfare. Once a week or so you come in off the swamp, pick up your mail and restock your supplies, fill up the gas tanks and head back out the same day. ’Course, it’s probably pretty boring after a while. And there’s all kindsa dangerous snakes and animals out there. And it’s buggy. I mean, Kid, it’s a fucking swamp! They probably got malaria out there. But nobody can bust you as long as you can pay your rent for the boat and obey the park rules.

  The Kid asked him what the rules were and the Rabbit said he wasn’t sure but figured you couldn’t toss any trash overboard or pick the flowers or use firearms or make campfires except in designated spots. That sort of thing. He said he heard there were still a few Indians living deep in the swamp way west and north of the Calusa County line, descendants of the Seminoles and escaped slaves who fought the white Americans to a standstill back in the nineteenth century getting by on hunting and fishing for food, living in hidden huts and tents on the mangrove islets and now and then guiding fishing parties out of the lodges located near the highways and in the small towns on the far edges of the park. He thought they signed a peace treaty years ago that gave them some special park privileges. He heard there were a few fugitives hiding out in the swamp too. Outlaws, Kid. Sort of like us. Only without electronic GPS anklets, so nobody knows where they are. If you cut the fucking thing off your leg, nobody’d know where you were, either. The cops’d never think of looking for you in the swamp. They’d just think you booked for Nevada or somewhere in the West. They’d put out an APB to have you picked up and wait for you to turn up busted for vagrancy in Salt Lake City or someplace.

  The Kid was interested in the idea. That sounds awesome, man! I hate this fucking bracelet.

  It’s an anklet, Kid. And if you cut it off you’d be an outlaw too, the Rabbit pointed out. A fugitive. You’d have to live in the swamp the rest of your fucking life. For me, no big deal maybe, but for you, different. If you ever wanted to come back to civilization for a visit or to get laid you’d get busted the first day just on suspicion of being alive, and they’d nail you for cutting off your tracker and you’d be back in the can. ’Course, as long as you kept your tracker on and the battery charged, which you could probably do at the ranger station, and didn’t go beyond the county line, they couldn’t legally stop you from living on a boat in the swamp.

  The Kid asked him if he was up for it. Why not? They could rent one of those houseboats and live in the swamp together. It had to be an improvement over living in a tent under the Causeway.

  The Rabbit laughed and agreed, sure, it would be a decided improvement. But forget about it, Kid. Those houseboats go for like fifty bucks a day. Maybe more. Who’s got that kinda bread? Not me. And not you either.

  But that was then. This is now. The Rabbit may be gone to the bottom of the Bay with Iggy, but thanks to the Professor’s upcoming suicide, the Kid’s got plenty of bread now.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FLATTENED AGAINST THE SIDE WINDOW OF the van, the Professor’s fat bearded face peers inside at the Kid stretched out asleep on the backseat. Annie and Einstein stare at the Professor from the rear cargo space. All hands on deck! Einstein screeches. All hands on deck! All hands on deck! Annie offers a weak whimpering bark—her first attempt to protect the Kid since he kidnapped her from Benbow’s. She’s gradually getting her strength and health back and evidently with it a small amount of confidence.

  Slowly the Kid props himself up on his elbows and checks out the Professor face-to-face. The man looks sad and worried to the Kid, different from last night when he was spinning his tale and the Kid fears that he’s going to ask for the money back. Too fucking bad, the Kid thinks. He’s not getting it back no matter how sad and worried he looks. A deal’s a deal. He checks the van doors—still locked. The keys dangle from the ignition.

  The Professor tries the door and when it won’t open he holds a DVD in a plastic case up to the driver’s window and offers a wan smile. The Kid scrambles into the driver’s seat and without starting the engine turns the ignition on and lowers the window an inch. He asks what time is it. The Professor says eight in the morning. This is yours now, he says and pushes the DVD through the slot to the Kid. The hurricane’s passed out to sea. It’s safe for you to leave now. He offers to drive the Kid back to the Causeway.

  The Kid grabs the DVD and reaches around behind him and quickly shoves it inside his duffel next to the money. Forget that, man.

  You can’t stay here, Kid. There’s a day care center on the next block and an elementary school three blocks over. Now that the storm’s over they’ll be checking your anklet’s location again.

  I don’t need to be reminded. You want to take me someplace, Haystack, drive me and my stuff and Annie and Einstein out to the Panzacola Swamp ranger station. Otherwise call me a cab.

  The Professor raises his bushy eyebrows in surprise. Why there?

  The Kid briefly lays out his intentions and reasoning, and the Professor purses his lips and nods in agreement—he doesn’t think the Kid will last long out there on a houseboat but he agrees to drop him and his possessions and his two friends at the ranger station. Now will you unlock the van doors?

  The Kid flicks the lock off and climbs into the back where he positions himself in the middle of the wide seat and waits for his driver to heave his huge bulk up and behind the wheel. The garage door rises and bright white daylight floods inside.

  Cock-a-doodle-doo! Einstein cries. Cock-a-doodle-doo-o-o!

  The Kid smiles and reaches around behind him and pats Annie on the head and gives a friendly wink to the parrot. This is better than he’s felt in at least two years. Maybe longer. He’s almost happy. If someone asked him if he was happy he’d say yes and he’d only be lying a little.

  BEYOND THE SUBURBS MOST OF THE OTHER vehicles on the road this morning are pickup trucks and green and white city and county trucks carrying work crews out to begin repairing the downed lines and road signs and corporate vehicles headed to clean up the ravaged fields and the migrant workers’ overturned trailers and shacks. The sky is clear and sapphire blue. West of the city limits a few miles past the last of the industrial parks, gated communities, and suburban housing developments they pass along the concrete drainage canals that run like arteries from the swamp down to the Bay, irrigating the hundreds of square miles of sugarcane and citrus groves. The waters of the overflowing ditches and canals glisten brightly in the sunlight. It’s like a gigantic gleaming green game board out there despite the devastation caused to the crops and groves by the wind and the flooding of the canals and irrigation ditches. The blown-down bright green stalks of cane all lie on the ground in the same east-west direction and wide swaths of citrus trees are broken off at the same knee-high height.

  The Professor has grown more animated as they drive and as is his wont is explaining to the Kid much of what the Kid is not the slightest interested in: the history of the canals and the draining of a huge chunk of the swamp for corporate agriculture, the political and economic battles waged for decades betw
een the environmentalists who wanted to keep the swamp intact and the businessmen and politicians who wanted to carve it up piece by piece for industrialized farming and the real estate developers who had and still have designs on the fresh loamy soil for tract housing, gated communities, industrial parks, theme parks, stadia, and malls. The environmentalists lost their end of the battle years ago and have had to content themselves with guarding the remaining two million acres protected by the national park, but the fight between the agricultural interests and the real estate and banking interests continues. Meanwhile, the Professor goes on, these concrete canals have come to function not just as conveyors of water to drain and irrigate the land but also to serve a valuable service for the Calusa underworld. That’s the aspect of industrialization that particularly interests me, he says. Professionally. How the underclasses and the underworld end up making good use of social environments designed and built for altogether different purposes. Like your Causeway. Or the way you’re now planning to make use of the Panzacola.

  The Kid perks up at this and asks how the underworld makes use of the canals. The Professor pulls the van over onto the shoulder near a thick hand-cranked lock on the farther bank where a smaller side canal feeds water into a thousand-acre cane field. If you want to get rid of a body or a gun or other incriminating evidence or a stolen car stripped of its resalable parts, you drive out here at night and drop it into a main canal like this. Look down. You can’t see a thing. It’s twenty to thirty feet deep. The water’s darkened by the tannin off the mangroves that grow around the lakes miles north of here, where most of the canal waters originate.

  The Kid asks why the canals don’t eventually fill up with all those bodies and guns and stolen cars and shit and turn into like garbage dumps and clog up the canals and the Professor explains that once every few months the Calusa police and county sheriff’s departments send crews and divers out to drag and search the canals and when possible identify the bodies and whatever else they fish out of the dark waters and try to attach them to unsolved crimes. Usually in vain, of course. Bodies of missing persons can often be identified, and the serial numbers of guns are sometimes still there, and there’s usually a way to trace a stolen car back to where and from whom it was stolen. But there’s almost no way after it’s been in the canal for a month or two to determine who put the body there or who used the gun or stole the car.

  That is very cool, the Kid says. I mean the way criminals and gangsters and what you’re calling the “underclasses” like me get to reuse things like canals and causeways and swamps for their own purposes. Sort of like recycling. So is that what you teach at the university?

  It’s not of general enough interest to justify an entire course. It’s merely one of the things I like to investigate and think about. In the future it’s all that will be left to us, Kid. Recycling. You’re readier for the future than most people. Before long we’ll all be recycling buildings, roadways, industrial machinery, everything we’ve built for the last two hundred years or so, recycling them for purposes other than what they were originally designed and built for. And it won’t just be the underclasses and criminals doing it. We’ll all be living that way.

  So I’m sort of like a pioneer, right?

  That’s right, Kid. You’re the future. Now, remember this spot, Kid.

  Why?

  No special reason. It’s just a spot where we had an interesting discussion about the future. Maybe our last.

  Yeah, okay. Drive on, Haystack. The Kid’s got an appointment with destiny in the Great Panzacola Swamp.

  So the Kid’s speaking of himself in the third person now? Money talks, I guess.

  Yeah, it does. Unless you’re a parrot.

  The Professor, chuckling, drives on.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE COUNTY ROAD INTO THE GREAT PANZACOLA Swamp ends at a crushed limestone parking lot the size of a football field. Adjacent to the parking lot a grove of tall slash pines draped with scarfs of Spanish moss slopes down to the shallow end of a long, narrow estuary where the swamp empties into the southern end of Calusa Bay. It’s the first of dozens of small, meandering, island-clotted estuaries where freshwater slowly slides off the swamp and mingles with the salty depths of the Bay and the Gulf. All the way west to the Gulf and north to the lakes, except for the turnpike that slices off the top of the park with a single straight stroke, there are no more paved or unpaved roads. Nothing but endless miles of floodwater sluiced off the lakes in concrete canals and poured into the swamp where it spreads out in a thin slowly drifting plane of water that passes through tangled thickets of mangrove and saturates wide knee-high saw grass veldts. It’s a primitive ancient landscape, Paleozoic. From time to time the shimmering watery plane gets split by low tree-covered hummocks into mazes of dark shifty streams and sloughs, making thousands of impenetrable islets where water moccasins lurk and alligators wait patiently in the mud for their next meal. Here and there along the outer edges of the park ripples of dry sandy ground and a long broken chain of oyster-shell mounds, ten-thousand-year-old midden heaps left by the first human residents of the swamp, are laced with narrow footpaths and board catwalks, nature trails for day-trippers winding in circuitous routes to dark green observation towers that stick up from the flat expanse of the vast swamplike sentries.

  In the shady grove by the parking lot most of the Spanish moss has been ripped from the branches of the slash pines by yesterday’s wind and several of the larger, older trees have been uprooted and thrown to the ground. Palmettos and torn palm fronds lie scattered around the lot and under the trees, yellowing in the morning sun like abandoned brooms. The Professor’s van, a red national park service pickup truck, and a dark green minibus with the county seal on the side door are the only vehicles in sight. On the seaside of the estuary where the swamp flows into the Bay a quarried limestone breaker and a wide bunkerlike concrete dock with a half-dozen empty slips and a boat-launch ramp appear to have survived the storm intact and undamaged. Opposite the slips and the dock four young black men in baggy dark green trousers and pale green T-shirts lug aluminum rental canoes from a rusted corrugated iron shed and place them gently down on the grassy bank of a slurred black-water stream that flows out of the dense jungle beyond. A portly middle-aged white man in a dark green short-sleeved shirt and trousers with a rifle cradled in the crook of his arm stands nearby smoking a cigarette. He watches the Kid and the Professor as they pass, flicks his cigarette butt into the water, and turns back to his prisoners.

  A forty-foot open tour boat with a canvas canopy extending its length has been let back into the water and tied to stanchions. A teenage white boy near the bow of the boat wearing the same inmate’s uniform as the young black men pointedly grunts from the effort of lifting an overturned ticket booth back into a standing position ready for business. At the edge of the dock a peeling gasoline pump and beside it another for diesel wait for takers. A tipped hand-painted sign, PAY INSIDE! CASH ONLY! points toward a low flat-roofed cinder block building where a lizard-skinned man in a baseball cap, sleeveless undershirt and cutoffs and a tanned white-haired woman in denim overalls and tie-dyed T-shirt pry sheets of plywood off the plate glass store windows. Signs on the glass advertise groceries, fishing gear, beer, bait, and sundries, an ATM, and a United States post office, Panzacola branch.

  Behind the store and adjacent to the parking lot is the ranger station, a low stucco Bahama-style building with a covered porch on three sides and open floor-to-ceiling wood-latticed windows. There’s a small office for the rangers in back and in the front an information center with a pamphlet stand and public restrooms, a beverage-dispensing machine and not much else. There are no visitors to the park this morning. Only the Professor, the Kid, Annie on a rope leash, and Einstein in his cage.

  A heavyset red-faced ranger in his late thirties with a pale blond buzz cut and rumpled uniform, his short-sleeved shirt already wet with sweat, sits at his desk in the office and talks into the radio to fellow rangers located
deep in the swamp checking on storm damage to the lookout towers and catwalks. The ranger glances up and notices the Professor and the Kid. Park’s closed today, folks. On account of the hurricane. No visitors. Not till tomorrow at least.

  I was gonna rent a houseboat.

  The ranger says he’ll need a permit. He speaks in short crisp sentences. No permits issued till tomorrow. Still have to clear some trails out there.

  Without meaning to the Kid imitates the ranger’s way of speaking. He says he’s ex-military. Back from Afghanistan. Needs to clear his head.

  The ranger crinkles his brow and thinks a minute. Ex-military, eh? He asks the Kid if he knows how to handle a canoe.

  The Kid lies and says sure. He’s never been in a canoe in his life but figures it can’t be all that hard to stick a paddle in the water and push. Or maybe you pull.

  The ranger says that the guy who runs the rentals is short of workers today. All he’s got is a small crew from the county jail that the guard won’t let him send into the swamp. Willing to work a few hours for no pay?

  Maybe. Why?

  Go talk to Cat Turnbull. Guy who runs the store. Help him get his houseboats in from the swamp this morning, maybe he’ll rent you one today. If he does, I’ll give you a permit to go into the park. In spite of its being officially closed till tomorrow. Seeing as how you already came all the way out here. You both going in? He tosses a skeptical glance at the Professor as if trying and failing to imagine the man paddling a canoe. Hard to imagine him even sitting in one.