Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  But it’s the only signal he can get way out here in the Panzacola so he leans back on his cot with the one pillow propped behind his head and smokes his ninth cigarette and listens to news about the stock market and the Federal Reserve Board that makes no sense to him since he has no idea of what they sell at a stock market or what’s reserved at a reserve board. As the newscasters drone on and on from national to regional to local news the Kid starts to nod and his eyes close. His cigarette drops from his hand onto his belly and burns through his T-shirt and abruptly wakes him. He slaps at the hole in his shirt and rubs the still-burning cigarette out in the empty Dinty Moore can and says aloud, Dude, whoa! Fucking bad idea, smoking in bed!

  The Kid checks his belly and decides that he needn’t break out the first aid kit. Besides the T-shirt with the burn hole looks cool to him, as if he took a bullet and somehow survived, when he realizes that the NPR local newscaster is talking about the mysterious disappearance of a well-known Calusa University professor of sociology once described as a genius and the smartest man in Calusa County.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE KID WANTS TO WEIGH ANCHOR AND start back right now but it’s already dark and he knows he’ll get lost even with a nearly full moon and clear sky so he waits all night half awake—not dreaming this time, no way he’s going back there—and restless until the sun finally comes up and he can see the markers and follow his map back through the swamp the way he came. It’s downstream all the way and only takes him half the day to get from Little Mullet back to Turner’s Slough and down the Appalachee to the Bay where as soon as he ties up the Dolores Driscoll he hurries down the pier, enters Cat Turnbull’s store and without even a hello as if he’s just stepped out for a minute instead of most of three days he asks Cat for a copy of today’s Calusa Times-Union.

  In a flat expressionless voice Cat says, Over there on the rack by the door, and turns his attention back to a man standing at the counter in front of him, a heavyset fellow in his mid- to late sixties. He has short white hair and a close-cropped white beard and sunburnt face. He wears a Boston Red Sox cap pulled low over aviator sunglasses, a white short-sleeved guayabera shirt, cargo shorts, and running shoes with no socks. Now that the Kid notices him he thinks the guy looks like the famous writer Ernest Hemingway whose books the Kid has never read of course but he’s seen his picture in magazines and on TV even though he’s pretty sure the writer’s been dead for a long time. He must be really famous though if the Kid’s heard of him.

  The Kid quickly opens the newspaper and leafs through it, taking special care to scan the Metropolitan section carefully. Nothing. He refolds the paper and lays it down on the counter and says to Cat, You hear anything about that professor who disappeared?

  Cat shakes his head no—he’s been to the National Sex Offender Registry online and doesn’t really want to talk to the Kid if he can avoid it—but the man who looks like the famous writer says, I saw a bit about it on TV in my hotel over in Calusa last night. It was on the late-night local news.

  They show a picture of him or anything? The guy who disappeared?

  Yeah. Big fat bearded guy. Sort of a mug shot, actually. I didn’t catch his name though.

  Dolores has come out of the back room and has been listening. Unlike Cat she’s actually glad to see the Kid and relieved that he’s apparently no worse for wear for having been in the swamp for most of three days and two nights. He’s more resourceful than he seems. It’s none of her business, but she does want to ask the Kid about his appearance on the sex offender registry and find out what he did to get himself on that list, because to her he doesn’t seem in the least dangerous or creepy and not especially weird, either—at least not in the way she’d expect a sex offender to look and act. A little eccentric maybe, and there’s a lot about him that’s not easily explained without having a good long personal conversation with him, which is what she’s interested in initiating somehow. She asks the Kid, Do you think it might be your friend? The man who drove you out here?

  It’s possible. I heard about it last night on the radio and didn’t hear all of it. They might have said his name but I didn’t listen to the whole story until it was almost over. And there wasn’t anything about it when I checked this morning. I could only get NPR out there.

  Dolores says, We don’t even get that here. No cable TV either. And all we’ve got for Internet is dial-up. Slow as molasses. Makes you not even want to use it. I keep telling Cat we need a satellite dish, but he isn’t much interested in TV or the Internet. He likes things slow. Don’t you, honey? Cat’s a real nineteenth-century man. A swamp fox.

  Cat casts a hard look at the Kid. I don’t watch TV maybe, but I do use the Internet from time to time. To look stuff up. Research. He turns to the other man and asks him if he ever uses the Internet for research in his line of work.

  Dolores says to the Kid, He’s a travel writer. He’s writing an article about the Panzacola for a big fancy magazine in New York. He promised we’re gonna be in it.

  That explains the Hemingway look, the Kid thinks.

  She asks the Writer to remind her what the magazine is called.

  Outsider. It’s not really that fancy. The Writer has a crooked smile and speaks partially from the left side of his mouth as if he may have suffered a minor stroke long ago and did not fully recover his speech. He turns to Cat and says that he does indeed use the Internet for research. It was how he learned about Cat and Dolores’s store and their houseboat and canoe rental service.

  Cat notes that you can also learn about individual people on the Internet. He tells the Writer, as if it were news to him, that if you know an individual’s name all you have to do is type it in and everything about the individual that’s posted on the Internet will pop up on the screen immediately.

  Not immediately, honey. Not if you’re stuck using dial-up. Now let’s change the subject, shall we? Do you think we could learn from the Internet if the professor who disappeared is this young man’s friend? I really hope not. I mean I hope we don’t learn that it was his friend.

  Cat ignores her. He says to the Writer, Say I happened to know a young fellow’s name because he rented a boat from me and showed an ID to do it. Paid cash in hundred-dollar bills. Claimed to be U.S. Army just back from Afghanistan. Said he was home on dwell-time. Say for the hell of it I typed his name into the computer. You know, just to check, since he’s got my five-thousand-dollar houseboat out there in the swamp. You might do that yourself in your line of work, right?

  Let it go, Cat. He’s worried about his friend who’s disappeared, Dolores says.

  The Writer shrugs and says yes, he might do that. To check a source’s background.

  What if your source turned out to be a convicted sex offender? Listed in the national registry of sex offenders? And he wasn’t in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army like he said.

  Could be meaningless. Or it could be a negative. Could even be a plus. Depends on what I’m using him as a source for.

  Cat wonders what the Writer means, especially what he means by saying it could be a plus. How could secrets and lying be a plus?

  Say I’m writing about the swamp, not sex offenders, and my source simply withholds the fact that he happens to be on the national registry. A meaningless omission, right? Or he mentions in passing that he saw combat in Afghanistan. A meaningless lie. No one has to tell you everything about himself, and no one has to tell you the truth about himself. But let’s say I’m interviewing a guy here for a piece about sex offenders and he lies and says he’s not a convicted sex offender. That would be a negative. Same thing if I’m writing about the war in Afghanistan and later it turns out my source lied about having served there. Definitely a negative.

  Cat says, Okay, but how’s keeping secrets and lying a plus? A positive.

  Well, let’s say I’m writing an article about sex offenders and for some reason neglect to ask the guy if he’s one himself and he doesn’t volunteer the information, and later it turns out he is one.
That would be a plus. Because his secrecy would become part of the piece, maybe the key to it. Same thing with the war. Say I’m writing about why so many American men falsely claim to have seen combat, and I never bother to ask my military source if he’s one of those liars himself, but then discover on the Internet that actually he never served in the military. That’s a plus, too. He’d be my Exhibit A.

  Dolores asks the Writer what he’d do then.

  I’d go back and interview them both again. And one of my main questions would be to ask the first guy why he withheld the fact that he was a sex offender. I’d ask the second why he lied about having seen combat.

  And what if it was the meaningless case? Dolores wants to know. She has caught the Writer’s drift. The case where you weren’t writing about the subject in the first place. What would you do with the new information that you took off the Internet?

  Nothing, I guess. Like I said, no one has to tell you everything about himself. And no one’s obliged to tell you the truth about himself either. We all have our little secrets, no? And we all tell little lies, sometimes for innocent reasons. To make friends, for instance, or to avoid embarrassment. Or just to keep things simple. Sometimes the truth is too complicated to pass along in a short conversation or interview. And sometimes it’s just irrelevant.

  Dolores says, There you go, Cat. Irrelevant. Meaningless. Got that? You’ve kept a few secrets yourself, you know. We both have. And told a few lies over the years, even to each other. And I’m here to tell you that it’s not always useful to know all of someone’s secrets or every truth behind every lie. You know that as well as I do.

  The Writer agrees. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

  Cat feigns a large sigh of capitulation and smiles at his woman. She’s a better person than he is, and he loves her for that. He believes that a person’s weaknesses are also his strengths: Cat’s weaknesses are skepticism and suspiciousness; Dolores’s are trust and open-mindedness; and if her weaknesses are morally superior to his, and Cat believes they are, then so are her strengths. Ergo, she’s a better person than he is. He’s a lucky man and he knows it. And when he forgets it she’s there to remind him. He says to Dolores, You’re right. Compared to you I’m a total pain-in-the-ass estupido.

  Throughout the conversation the Kid has remained silent. At first he was freshly ashamed for not having told the man that he was a convicted sex offender and felt once again like a chomo like the Shyster and then when he saw that Cat also knew that he had lied about having been in combat in Afghanistan he felt like he was O. J. Simpson again. But listening to Dolores and the Writer lay out what kinds of secrets and lies were meaningful and what kinds were meaningless he began to feel a little better about himself and when even Cat came around to essentially forgiving the Kid for his secrets and lies he was able to see himself briefly through Cat’s eyes—although not through Dolores’s which were a little too wet with sympathy for him and not through the Writer’s either who for all he knew might now be thinking about writing an article for a fancy magazine about sex offenders or about American males who lie about having fought in a war instead of writing an article about the Great Panzacola Swamp and will next be wanting to interview the Kid on one or both of those subjects.

  The Kid has been interviewed enough for a lifetime thanks to the Professor and shrinks in prison and judges and public defender lawyers and cops and parole officers going all the way back to Brandi’s father and before that at his army discharge hearing. Except for Iggy the best thing about his life before he joined the army is that back then no one ever wanted to interview him which meant that he never had to lie and didn’t have to keep any secrets. He was no more or less than what he seemed to be—a fatherless white kid who graduated high school without ever passing a single test or turning in a single paper, a kid who could barely read and write or do math beyond the simplest level of arithmetic, who was hooked for years and maybe still was hooked on porn and jacking off and never had a girlfriend or a best friend and belonged to no one’s posse—but that was okay to the Kid back then. He might not be the kind of kid he wanted to be but at least back then he didn’t have anything to hide.

  The Writer asks the Kid if the missing person, the fat bearded professor, might really be a friend of his, and the Kid says, Yeah. I’m sure of it, in fact. He’s not exactly a friend, though. More of an acquaintance.

  You got any idea of where he is?

  Yeah. Sort of.

  The Writer is intrigued. So are Dolores and Cat. All three turn their full attention on the Kid and wait for him to say more. He stays silent for a long minute until finally the Writer asks if the missing professor has been having marital problems. The Kid shrugs as if he doesn’t really know. Maybe, he says. Although he knows of course that the Professor’s wife Gloria has recently taken their two children and gone to live with her mother.

  Financial problems?

  The Kid shrugs again.

  But you do have an idea of where he might be found. Correct?

  It’s only a guess. It’s probably not him anyhow. I’d hafta see a picture. Most professors are fat and wear a beard anyway, aren’t they?

  Dolores suggests they go over to the trailer and check out today’s Calusa Times-Union on the Internet. They print the paper a day early but the Internet’s up to the minute. There’ll likely be a photograph of the missing professor to accompany the article. And if it is your friend, and you have an idea of where he might be, then naturally you’ll want to help find him.

  The Writer thinks that’s a great idea, and Cat says, Yeah, sure, why not? He’s still a little embarrassed for having used the computer to check on the Kid. Maybe he’ll feel better if he apologizes to the Kid. Which is a little tricky for Cat to pull off, since he’ll be apologizing to someone who’s a convicted sex offender and has committed a sin that’s cardinal to a Marine vet by falsely claiming to have served his country in wartime. He tries anyhow, for Dolores’s sake and says to the Kid, No hard feelings, I hope. About me not believing you and all. And looking you up on the computer and such. I probably shouldn’t have done that. I mean, it isn’t like we was gonna hire you for a babysitter or something.

  My late husband Abbott, Dolores chimes in, used to say that a person’s private life ought to be kept private. That’s why it’s called private life. ’Course, that was before the Internet and all.

  Thank you, Dolores, for your late husband’s words of wisdom. Anyhow, sonny, I guess I just got a suspicious nature. Must come from dealing with tourists all the time out here.

  That’s okay, man. I’m actually kinda relieved. When people know the truth about me there’s not so much for me to keep track of.

  Ha! You’re starting to sound like Dolores’s late husband.

  The Writer is impatient to check out today’s online edition of the Calusa newspaper. He says so, and Dolores leads the group from the store along the pier and up the grassy slope to the double-wide trailer where she and Cat make their home.

  THAT’S HIM ALL RIGHT!

  How come it’s a whachacallit, a mug shot? Like he’s been arrested for something. What’s the article say? Is he a fugitive from justice?

  Says he’s a “person of interest” in an ongoing investigation but has not been arrested. Doesn’t say what kind of investigation, though.

  So how come they took his mug shot?

  Maybe it’s off his ID. Or from some previous arrest. Does it say anything about that?

  No. Just says he was last seen leaving his home in his car Sunday morning in the company of an unidentified teenage boy and when he didn’t show up for his Monday classes university officials called his home. His wife and two children were visiting her mother and have no idea of his whereabouts. I’m summarizing here.

  So he hasn’t been gone very long. Maybe he had a family emergency.

  He has two children? And a wife? Wouldn’t have figured that.

  Why not?

  Well, I guess on account of he’s so fat.


  Gimme a break, Cat. That’s a prejudice. Plenty of fat people get married and have kids.

  Mentions he’s well known in the city for his civic work and in academic circles. A popular teacher. That sort of stuff.

  Maybe he just wants to be alone. Or is on a bender. Is he a drinker?

  The wife’s gone ahead and filed a missing person report. She obviously doesn’t think he just wants to be alone.

  I don’t think he’s a drinker. But I don’t really know him that way. Like for drinking.

  What’s with the teenage boy? Is that a reference to you, sonny?

  Probably. Only I ain’t teenage.

  You look like it, sweetie. Especially to a stranger and from a distance.

  So maybe you were the last person to see him alive.

  Assuming he’s no longer alive. He might be living it up in Rio, for all we know.

  Actually, Cat and I were the last people to see him alive too.

  Where was he headed, sonny? After he left you off here?

  Didn’t say.

  But you think you know where he might be? Like you said earlier?

  Yeah. Actually, no. I don’t.

  C’mon. We all heard you.

  Okay, he maybe was doing some research. For his work as a professor. He’s interested in those old Army Corps of Engineers canals back toward Calusa. He was telling me all about how they get used by criminals and such for hiding the evidence of their crimes.