Russell Banks: Lost Memory of Skin

The man named Larry Somerset is a little taller than the rest and soft in the face and belly like he’s spent his life sitting in a padded chair signing official documents and giving orders to underlings. He wears a plain gold wedding ring. The Kid notices it at first glance because a wedding ring is unusual down here and the guy has a black brush of a goatee that looks dyed and long graying hair combed straight back to where it curls over the dirty collar of his shirt. The Kid is sure he’s never met him before but something about the guy is familiar especially the name like he maybe read it in the Calusa Times-Union.

It’s obvious even with his floppy wide-cuffed trousers that the guy’s got a TrackerPAL GPS clamped to his right ankle. The Kid wonders if it’s the same as his or if it’s one of those cool new units he’s heard about with the built-in cell phone that’s connected to a monitoring center 24/7 and even pokes your caseworker’s beeper if you forget to recharge your battery so the caseworker can phone in to make sure you haven’t died. It’s like being followed around by a CIA drone with a heat-seeking missile ready to fire. The new style TrackerPAL with the cell phone attachment intrigues the Kid simply because he’s into the technology of surveillance but no way he wants an upgrade. The Kid’s anklet is more like a simple antitheft tracking device for a stolen car that at least lets him piss in privacy.

The Kid sits down on his folding canvas camp-chair in front of his tent and lights his first cigarette since leaving work and right on schedule up under the Causeway the motor for the generator gasps and coughs and after a few seconds settles into a clattering diesel chug. Plato the Greek owns the generator and buys the fuel for it and runs it every evening from seven till nine and sometimes later depending on business. He has it wired to a twelve-outlet surge protector and the residents pay him a dollar each to recharge their cell phone if they have one and their anklet battery. Which they are required to do every forty-eight hours or more depending on the model or else in an office somewhere on the mainland a beeper will go off and in a few hours you’ll see someone’s caseworker or parole officer prowling through the camp looking for a guy he calls his client but who in actuality is his legal electronic prisoner and is probably only in his squat sleeping off a drunk or nodding off without having remembered to charge his now very dead battery. Sometimes though it’s only a resident who has fallen into despair from living down here — a man with no job who’s become a scavenger supporting himself by wandering the city with a shopping cart collecting and redeeming cans and bottles — and after months and even years of it opts for three hots and a cot because if you refuse to charge the battery that powers your electronic anklet you violate a key term of your parole and back you go to prison. Voluntary incarceration.

Outside the tent Larry Somerset takes a few cautious steps closer to the iguana and gives it a once-over. He says that he’s not seen an iguana this large before and has to admire the Kid’s use of it to guard his home and property. Better than a pit bull, he says. Certainly uglier than a pit bull.

Iggy’s chain-link leash is long enough to let him lie in the front entry of the tent but still able to scramble around to the back if someone tries sneaking in that way. The iguana looks lethargic and slow but they’re often seen streaking across golf course fairways and putting greens at astonishing speed — low to the ground on short legs but fast as a greyhound. The eyes of the iguana are round and large as marbles and watchful and like its scales dry and cold. It stares motionless at Larry — eyelids sliding slowly up and down like thin scrims. Every few seconds its forked tongue slips from between its jaws and flicks the air as if tasting it for flavor, passes quickly in front of its nostrils to read the odor of the air and withdraws. When the iguana swallows, its dewlaps loosely flap.

Larry keeps a respectful distance from the iguana. Everyone does. Except for the Kid. He loves the lizard. He could say Iggy is the only person he loves. But he wouldn’t. It was a birthday present from his mother. The summer before he turned eleven she left him home alone and took off a week from the beauty parlor where she was and still is a hairdresser and traveled with a group of seven other women to Mexico to participate in a summer solstice sun ceremony in the Yucatán. It was an annual spiritual rebirthing ritual designed and led by her yoga teacher and held in the main plaza of the Mayan ruins at Chichén Itzá. During the overnight layover in Mérida on the way home she purchased a baby iguana from a street vendor and smuggled it into the States in her suitcase. It was illegal but three other women in the group — all mothers — did the same for their kids and none of them got caught by customs because except for the yoga teacher they were women in their forties traveling home as a group to the same city and looked like American sex tourists which in a sense they were because all of them had gotten laid by Mexicans while in Mérida.

His mother’s name is Adele and she was not married to the Kid’s biological father who was a roofer who drove his pickup down from the North for work after one of the bigger hurricanes and was a sort of boyfriend for a few months but when she got pregnant with the Kid the roofer moved back to Somerville, Massachusetts, where he was from originally. She told the Kid his father’s name and not much else because there wasn’t much else to tell or so she said. Except that he was a short good-looking Irishman and had a funny accent and drank too much. After the roofer left and the Kid was born she had boyfriends pretty constantly who lived in her house with her and the Kid for up to six months on a few occasions but none of them stuck around long enough to claim the Kid as his own or take responsibility for educating or protecting him. Adele needs men to want her but she doesn’t want men to need her. In fact she doesn’t want anyone to need her — not even the Kid although she does not know that and would deny it if asked. She believes that she loves her son and has done everything for him that a single parent could and has sacrificed much of her youth for him and therefore cannot be blamed for the way he’s turned out.

It might have been different she believes and has often said if she’d had a husband to help raise her son and be a role model for him but most men at least the men she was attracted to as soon as they found out she shared her concrete block shotgun bungalow in the north end of the city with a young son weren’t interested in much more than sex for a while and someone to cook breakfast for them the next morning. There may have been men out there hoping to marry a good-looking red-haired woman with a terrific body in her thirties and then forties who owned her own house and had a steady job and was raising a boy on her own but she hadn’t met any. At least not any who turned her on sexually or even had a good sense of humor which she likes to say is as good a substitute for sex as anything else. She says she can live without one or the other — humor or sex — but not both. But then after her son turned eighteen and joined the army and moved out she looked in the mirror one day and she was fifty years old and was coloring the gray out of her red hair and unable to keep the weight off her hips and waist and almost any man who paid attention to her would do. Forget sense of humor. Forget good sex.

What about him, the lizard? Does he have a name?

Yeah, sure. Iggy. He’s not a lizard by the way. He’s an iguana. Iggy’s short for iguana. It’s a stupid name, I know, but we’re both used to it.