Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Not this late.

The Professor rumbles a laugh and says, No, son, not this late. He lowers his lamp and closes the tent flap and walks away. The Kid listens to his slick shoes crunching against the concrete. It must have been hard for a guy that fat to make his way down the path from the Causeway. And a lot harder getting back up. A guy his size could have a heart attack just getting out of his chair.

The Kid lights his stub of a candle and opens Larry Somerset’s Holy Bible again and picks up reading where he left off. But after the story of Cain and Abel he comes to a whole lot of begat s which except for the fact that everybody back then was living for hundreds of years at a time is really boring to the Kid.

He closes the Bible and blows out his candle and lies back in the darkness with his eyes wide open and as he has done nearly every night of his life even when he was a little boy he plans his day tomorrow step by step. Break camp. Pack tent sleeping bag clothes cooking utensils containers toilet kit and other gear into backpack and duffel. Include some of Larry Somerset’s stuff. Tie duffel to bike rack, wear backpack, and ride or if it’s too much stuff walk bike to South Bay Causeway four miles south and cross to Anaconda Key. Find Benbow’s. Find Benbow himself if P.C. didn’t lie and he’s a real person and talk him into letting him pitch his tent temporarily and maybe ask for a job there as a busboy if it’s a restaurant and try to cadge a meal or two. Meanwhile make a quick late-night Dumpster dive and replenish home food supply. And hope things change for the better soon. He’s pretty sure they can’t get worse.

THE PROFESSOR DIGS CLASSICAL JAZZ AND swing, music made in the 1930s, the decade before he was born in Clinton, Alabama, and in the 1940s, the decade of his early childhood. He was an only child, his mother the town librarian and his father an accountant for U. S. Steel. They were northerners, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Both his parents were college educated, Episcopalians, suspected locally of being supporters of Franklin Roosevelt, and despite his father’s white-collar job at U. S. Steel, pro-union.

The Professor’s father’s name was Jason. He kept the books that monitored the costs of inmates hired and often purchased outright from the state and county prisons and local jails. They were, with few exceptions, black men, de facto slaves housed in the company labor camps, serving out their sentences in the dark airless mine shafts deep beneath the red hills. His mother, a high-spirited, easily bored post-debutante from an old Pittsburgh banking family, was named Cynthia.

Classical jazz and swing was music made mostly by black people — Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, and Lester Young — and raffish whites like Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman. It was the dance music of the Professor’s parents’ northern youth. When he was a child, he watched them after supper spike a stack of records on the old Victrola, set the needle, and as the music began, they would stroll hand in hand from the living room to the wide screened porch that faced the tree-lined street. Invariably the boy put down his book and followed his parents and climbed onto the porch glider. With the soles of his sneakers barely touching the floor, the boy got the glider swinging back and forth in time to the music. His mother and father were already dancing. It was as if they were putting their northern sophistication on defiant display. He watched his handsome young parents happily dance on the open porch where their disapproving white Southern Baptist neighbors could see them, and he fell in love as much with their public defiance as with their private music.

But it’s music he himself never danced to, except when he was alone and no one, especially the neighbors, could see. Even after he went north at the age of fifteen to attend Kenyon College in Ohio and later in graduate school at Yale, he refused to be seen dancing to the music that he and his parents loved. He tapped his hands and feet to it and bobbed his head, keeping time. But he would not put himself on the dance floor for the simple reason that when he was a youngster he was both morbidly obese and taller by a head than any of his contemporaries. He was a child imprisoned in the body of a very fat adult, a boy who was strong and otherwise healthy but believed that when it came to taking part in physical activities of any kind — sports and outdoor games, hunting and fishing, even physical labor around the house, like mowing the lawn or planting flowers with his mother, but especially when it came to dancing — if he did not keep entirely to himself and out of public sight, he would look ridiculous.

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.