Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

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 TV. 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.