Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  No. Just me.

  How long you want it for?

  Not sure yet. Have to see how it goes. A few days anyhow. Maybe more.

  Okay. Costs fifty-something bucks a day. Plus tax. Cat’ll want a deposit. You got a credit card?

  No. I got cash though.

  The Professor grunts.

  Okay, go see Cat. Tell him what I said about volunteering. Take it from there.

  The Kid snaps him a military salute, turns on his heels and marches out to the parking lot. The Professor, leading Annie and holding Einstein’s cage, trails along behind.

  At the store, where Cat Turnbull and his wife are still removing plywood sheets from the windows, the Kid makes his deal for the houseboat. The leather-skinned old man is surprised and pleased to hear the Kid’s offer to help bring the boats in from the swamp where they rode out the storm. And he’s very glad to have what looks like a cash-paying rental in hand, especially at this time of year, four months before the start of tourist season. From March to December the only business that comes through the door of his store is brought by fishermen from Calusa who drive in with their own fishing gear and boats with the gas tanks already topped off and park in the lot and launch their boats straight into the Bay; and bird-watchers who want only to walk the marshes on the footpaths and catwalks and bring their own binoculars and sandwiches, cold drinks, and coolers with them. From June to early October, hurricane season which is where we are now, even the local fishermen and bird-watchers stay away. This kid is the first cash customer he’s seen in nearly two weeks. And now he’s offering to paddle into the swamp where they parked the houseboats and bring them in. Good deal.

  How long you gonna need the houseboat for?

  Not sure. I’m thinking maybe five days, maybe more. I’m sort of recovering from the war. Afghanistan. I’m just out of the military. Need to get my head together. Post trauma whatever.

  Semper fi, sonny. Retired Marine. What branch?

  Army. First Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, New York.

  Well, damn! Welcome back, soldier. America thanks you for all your sacrifices. And we’re real glad you’re back home alive in one piece. The old Panzacola’s a good place for a man to get his head together. Especially after what you been through. Nothing out there but gators and slithery snakes and pretty birds. And they won’t bother you none. You can do a little fishing. Catch your own supper. No fucking rag-heads blowing themselves up and cutting off people’s heads on TV. It’s real peaceful.

  That’s good.

  I’ll give you a military discount. You gonna need supplies? Food, water, gas, and so on?

  Yeah. Five days’ worth anyhow. And some dog food and birdseed if you got it.

  We’ll fix you up good, son. He tells the Kid to leave his bags and animals here at the store and take one of the canoes that the colored guys are bringing out. There’s three houseboats tied to the mangroves about a hundred yards upriver. You won’t get lost. The river’s blazed. You’ll have to make three trips. Just tie the canoe to the boat when you bring it in and paddle it back for the next one. Shouldn’t take you more’n an hour a trip. You know how to drive a houseboat, sonny?

  Sure.

  There ain’t much to it anyhow. Pontoon boats, little pissy twenty-five-horse outboards, no wheel or tiller to worry about. They only draw about ten inches. Moron could drive it. Lots of ’em have. Water’s pretty deep out there now on account of the storm and you might run into some drowned trees coming in, so don’t try no water-skiing, sonny. Heh-heh.

  Cat’s wife has been looking the Kid up and down in a kindly, warm open-faced way as if she recognizes the young man from someplace pleasant and can’t remember where it was. The Kid catches her gaze and feels the warmth of it and grows uncomfortable. It’s a familiar enough gaze to him, one that he usually gets from women. Especially older women. They seem automatically to trust him. He doesn’t trigger their usual alarms against strange young males nor does he in any way invite their erotic attention or desire, subliminal or otherwise. He doesn’t even make them feel maternal. It’s as if he’s outside all sexual potential, is without an erotic marker of any kind, has no sexual past or future. Somehow in his presence middle-aged and older women seem released from all their usual forms of sexual anxiety and feel instead a physical warmth toward him, unrestrained and unedited. It’s almost as if he’s a very old woman himself.

  But whenever the Kid perceives this warmth flowing in his direction—which due to his deflective nature isn’t all that often—he grows itchy and uncomfortable. A little fearful. It makes his stomach churn, and his breathing speeds up and goes shallow. He’s afraid that if he doesn’t turn away from that onrush of female warmth he might literally start to cry.

  So he ignores Cat’s wife, refuses even to look at her. Instead he walks a few yards away from the couple and turns his attention to the Professor.

  Well, Haystack, I guess this is good-bye.

  Yes. I doubt we’ll meet again. I’ll leave your backpack and duffel up at the ranger station.

  Okay. Thanks. Well, it’s been . . . interesting knowing you. The Kid doesn’t understand why he suddenly feels so sorry and sad for the Professor. He can’t remember when he last felt both sorry and sad for someone—even the Rabbit whom he felt sorry for when the cops busted his leg and sad about when he drowned but never both at the same time. Most people seem to him not quite real, as if they’re on a reality TV show and are only pretending to be themselves like the guy who’s supposed to be the park ranger and the old guy who calls himself Cat Turnbull and his wife who the Kid doesn’t want to look at. It’s like they’re on a reality show called Swamp People. They’re not actors like you see in soaps and movies or even porn because they’re playing themselves instead of people invented by a writer to say words written in a script and do what a director tells them to do, smiling or crying or taking off their clothes and screwing each other or just talking to each other on their cell phones. The ranger and the old guy named Cat and his wife and pretty much everyone else the Kid meets aren’t actors, he knows that—they’re just not real in the same way that he himself is.

  But the Professor is different. He’s starting to feel real to the Kid the same way the Kid feels to himself and he’s puzzled by the feeling. He’s never much liked the Professor or enjoyed his company the way he enjoyed Rabbit’s for instance or even Paco’s because of his goofy concentration on something as useless as pumping iron that turned him into a cartoon character. On the other hand he didn’t particularly dislike the Professor either, not the way he disliked the Shyster and certain other deviants under the Causeway or O. J. Simpson for instance whom he never actually knew personally but definitely did not want to know personally anyhow, not just because he was a stone-cold wife killer but because he was an arrogant asshole. On the likability scale until this moment the Professor has fallen somewhere between the Rabbit and O. J. Simpson. Which for the Kid is about where most people fall. Even his mother. That’s how he prefers it. It’s how he’s always preferred it.

  You know all that shit you told me in the interview? About how you’re gonna get whacked and everything from becoming “expendable and therefore dangerous”? Only it’s supposed to look like it’s a suicide?

  Yes.

  That’s not true, is it? You just made it up so your wife will feel better if you kill yourself.

  Kid, it’s all true. You don’t believe me?

  Why do you want to kill yourself, Professor? If your wife and kids come back, except for being so fat you got a lot to live for. Even if they don’t come back and she wants a divorce, you still got a lot to live for. Nice house, big prestigious job at a college, all those books and pictures and nice stuff you live with. You can travel wherever you want, live wherever you want, get credit cards and bank loans, take friends out to fancy restaurants for dinners. If you lost some of that weight you could even probably get a fairly good-looking girlfriend if you wanted one. Christ, look at me, I’m the one who shou
ld be talking about suicide, not you. I can’t even vote in this state. Why do you want to kill yourself ?

  I don’t. And I won’t. Someone else will do the job. Only he’ll be masquerading as me. As it were.

  That means he won’t really be you? People will just think he’s you?

  Correct. Except for you and Gloria.

  It doesn’t add up, Professor. You must be really bored with life. Like you’re too frigging smart for reality and other people so you make up this complicated spy story about how you’re not really gonna kill yourself, some secret government agent’s gonna do it, and then you go and kill yourself anyhow but you get to feel superior about it. ’Course, that doesn’t make much sense either. Once you’re dead you don’t get to feel superior to anybody. You don’t feel anything. Unless you’re a Christian who believes in God and heaven and all. But you’re a professor, so you don’t believe in any of that, do you?

  No.

  Me neither. Maybe you’re too tricky for your own good, Professor. You ever think of that?

  I’m touched by your concern, Kid. Seriously.

  Yeah, well, I guess the truth is I’m gonna miss talking with you. I kind of wish what’s gonna happen wouldn’t . . . you know, happen. Maybe it won’t. I actually hope it doesn’t. No shit. But if it doesn’t, do I get to keep the money anyhow? You know, in case you don’t end up dead. Otherwise I’ll be back to squatting under the old Causeway with the rats again.

  The Professor smiles and says, The money’s yours, Kid. No matter what happens. He extends his hand and the Kid shakes it firmly. Listen to the news on that radio I gave you, Kid. And check the newspapers whenever you can.

  The Kid nods, and the Professor hands him Annie’s leash. He turns away and the Kid watches him waddle slowly up the long slope toward the parking lot and his van. He watches him the whole way. That’s the last time the Kid will see the man: a huge hairy figure sweating inside the ten yards of brown cloth it takes to cover him with a suit, a man submerged in a body as large as a manatee’s, graceless, slow moving, arms and thighs rubbing themselves raw, spine and knee and ankle joints stressed nearly to the breaking point by the weight they must support, enlarged heart thumping rapidly from the effort of shoving blood and oxygen through all that flesh, overheated lungs gasping from the work of getting that enormous bulk up the incline to the parking lot, liver, kidneys, glands, digestive tract, all his organs overworked for half a century to the point of exhaustion and collapse—a man with two bodies, one dancing inside his brain, a hologram made of electrons and neurons going off like a field of fireflies on a midsummer night, the other a moist quarter-ton packet of solid flesh wrapped in pale human skin.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IF YOU’VE NEVER PADDLED A CANOE BEFORE it can at first be surprisingly difficult—you have constantly to correct the tendency of the bow of the canoe to swing in the direction opposite your paddle. At first you may try correcting the tendency by alternately dipping your paddle into the water on one side of the canoe, then switching to the other, but all this does is drive the bow from right to left and back again, and you waste a great deal of energy and time making corrections instead of moving straight ahead on your desired course. Eventually to keep the canoe from wagging its bow from side to side you learn to lean forward from your seat in the stern, dip, pull, and curl the paddle away from the canoe in what’s called the J-stroke. A beginning canoeist who is physically intuitive can figure all this out on his own fairly quickly, and if there is no strong current to fight or the water is still, in a matter of minutes he will be on course, slipping smoothly upriver through overhanging foliage, past mangroves and dense palmettos, the only sound the soft plash of each stroke of the paddle as it breaks the surface of the dark water. Overhead, bands of sunlight streak the bright greenery of swamp willows, gumbo-limbo trees, and strangler figs, drift downward past epiphytes and flowering red mangroves and end up lying across the water in flattened stripes.

  The canoe rounds a long slow S-bend in the narrow stream startling a snowy egret into awkward flight. A pair of small chartreuse parrots stares down at the slender craft from high in the branches of a cottonwood tree. As the canoe comes out of the S-bend the streambed straightens for twenty or thirty yards and the canoeist sees the first houseboat tied to the trunks of three stout cypress trees. The houseboat is nearly as wide as the stream, a raftlike platform carried on tubular aluminum pontoons with a small box of a cabin set in the center, a short deck aft and another at the squared bow. As he approaches the houseboat he makes out two more beyond it, also tied to cypress trees. He brings the canoe alongside the first, steps aboard, and ties the canoe to the stern. Five minutes later he has the outboard motor started and has untied the moorings and is ready to bring the houseboat back downstream to the settlement at the estuary, where he will by then be feeling utterly competent at this, and with a certain pride he will bring the rectangular boat out to the end of the pier and pull it into a slip, shut down the motor, and tie the boat to a pair of stanchions there.

  He will do this twice again—paddle his canoe upstream to the houseboat, bring the houseboat down to the dock and tie it there. The convicts cleaning up the campground and the area surrounding the store will stop in their work and watch him come and go, and on his final trip downstream to the settlement as he passes the convicts he will impulsively smile and wave to them. Look at me, guys! They will look at him, but with expressions approaching disgust and irritation, and the guard will toss him a hard angry look and with a push of the flat of his hand will tell him to keep moving, unless you want to end up alongside these poor souls yourself.

  THE THINGS HE CARRIES FROM TURNBULL’S Store and stashes aboard the houseboat named Dolores Driscoll:

  waterproof charts of the channels, sloughs, and streams of the Great Panzacola Swamp

  topographical map of the Great Panzacola National Park

  compass

  fishing license

  filet knife

  fishing rod and reel with hooks and lures

  plastic container of earthworms

  mosquito netting

  mosquito repellent

  water purification tablets

  5 one-gallon jugs of drinking water

  first aid kit

  sunscreen

  10 cans Alpo dog food

  2 pounds mixed nuts

  1 pound sunflower seeds

  rice

  3 loaves Sunbeam bread

  peanut butter

  Rice Krispies

  powdered milk

  instant coffee

  sugar

  tub of coleslaw

  3 large bags Cheez-Its

  Tang

  6 cans Dinty Moore beef stew

  1 dozen eggs

  1 dozen oranges

  1 case Budweiser Light

  6 flashlight batteries

  6 candles

  20 pounds of ice

  10-gallon plastic cooler

  white gas for Coleman lantern

  1 rented one-man dome tent

  1 carton Newport 100 mentholated cigarettes

  When he’s paid Cat Turnbull for everything on his list he asks the old man if he can charge his cell phone battery from a wall plug he noticed when he used the restroom at the rear of the store, and Cat says yes indeed, adding that it’s probably a good idea to have a cell phone out there in case he needs to be rescued by the rangers. People wake up lost in the swamp all the time ’cause they forget how they got to where they anchored the night before. Some of ’em are just drunk, of course, or on drugs, but some of ’em are purely stupid. Good idea to mark on the topo each night exactly where you anchor. You ain’t stupid, sonny, I can see that, but you might decide to drink that whole case of Budweiser the same night or smoke too much pot sitting out there all alone in the swamp listening to the tree frogs.

  I don’t touch no drugs, the Kid says. No, sir. And I never drink more’n three cans a day. I keep count of everything. Same as with cigarettes. I’m d
own to eleven a day, and next week it’ll be ten. Ten weeks from now it’ll be one. And then none. Quit.

  That’s the military in you, sonny. Better than being a goddam Boy Scout Christian. Can’t trust those types. It’s always the damned Boy Scout Christians who get drunk or stoned ’cause they think they’re on vacation from the wife and nobody’s watching so they can do whatever the hell they can’t or won’t do the rest of the year, and either they get lost or they fuck up the boat somehow and don’t want to pay for it afterward.

  I ain’t no Boy Scout Christian. Though I’ve known a few, the Kid says, remembering the Shyster and his Bible in particular.

  He heads for the back of the store and locks himself into the restroom with a copy of the Calusa Times-Union and plugs the charge-cord for his anklet into the wall socket. He sits down next to it on the closed toilet seat with his ankle extended and reads the newspaper for a half hour until the battery is topped off with enough juice to report his whereabouts for the next seventy-two hours. He switches over to his cell phone charger’s cord, sets the phone on the back of the toilet and returns to the store and commences loading his large pile of purchases, his duffel and backpack, Annie and Einstein onto the Dolores Driscoll.

  The boat is the first that he brought in from the swamp. A floating house trailer, it has an eight-by-ten-foot cabin minimally furnished with a fold-down table and two stools, a pair of collapsible cots, a propane-powered stove and refrigerator and a row of low cabinets with cookware, plastic dishes, and eating utensils stored inside. He has his radio and flashlight, his own sleeping bag, the Shyster’s Bible and packet of purloined papers for reading material, clothes, the telescope given him by the Professor in case he wants to look at distant birds or stars at night, and the rented tent in case he decides to spend a night camping at one of the island campsites over near the Gulf.

  The Dolores Driscoll is named after Cat’s girlfriend and business partner, the same white-haired lady the Kid caught looking at him with such affectionate regard a while earlier. She watches him now from behind the deli counter as he comes and goes between the store and the boat. Then he disappears from her sightline for a while, gone to the ranger station for a park permit, she figures. She’d like to talk with him, find out where he’s from, who his people are, how old he is and so on, but instead when he returns to the store to pay Cat she hangs back in silence. She can see that he’s extremely shy and averts his eyes from her, and though he speaks forthrightly if a little stiff in an odd loud way when he’s talking with Cat, whenever he appears to know she’s in earshot he mumbles and looks down at the floor. He’s a strange boy with his derelict yellow dog and caged parrot and what looks like all his worldly effects paying for the boat and supplies with hundred-dollar bills like a sudden millionaire. He doesn’t ever smile, even with Cat who has a humorous way of putting things and is the friendliest man she’s ever known.