Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

He is a vampire, the Kid thinks. That’s what he’d name him if it was up to him — Vampire. Or Dracula. A guy who sucks the blood out of little girls, turning them into vampires too who can’t stand the light of day and have to live forever prowling the streets of Calusa at night and sneaking into the beds of other little girls and boys and sucking their blood while they sleep making more vampires forever and ever while the parents sit downstairs in the living room watching ha-ha TV shows.

The Professor introduces himself to Lawrence Somerset. The Kid won’t do it even though at one time barely forty-eight hours ago he was willing to share his tent with him. Something happened at Benbow’s that darkened his view of Lawrence Somerset. He’s not sure what but it wasn’t the weird film those guys were shooting of the kids dancing half-naked in the mist which was probably only for a TV ad or a music video even though it looked like a trailer for a kiddie porn film. Actually the Kid thought the filming was interesting to watch because from the start he’d been behind the scenes and saw the crew set up the fog machine and lights and cameras and knew all along that it was real so he never saw it transformed into fantasy on a screen. He never saw the illusion they were creating. Just the tools they were using. Even the kids were tools. They were actors, not half-naked children. They had mothers or people who acted like mothers and agents who brought them to Benbow’s in the family van and probably dropped them off at school after the shoot.

Maybe it was the story about the pirate and the treasure map and X marking the spot that the Professor told him about. When he first heard it the Kid felt his chest expand as if with helium and it made him feel lifted up. Literally uplifted as if he might float up and off the island and drift over the Bay high enough to see all the way west to the Great Panzacola Swamp. The Panzacola Swamp with its thousands of mangrove islands and mazelike waterways would have been a smart place to bury treasure. Maybe, the Kid thinks, the island on the Professor’s map is way inland someplace in the middle of the swamp. Maybe Captain Kydd and his men anchored their ship here in the Bay and rowed one of their lifeboats up the Calusa River for miles to where it originates in the endless shallow waters of the swamp where there are thousands of low hummocks and mangrove-covered islands and buried their treasure on one of the larger islands and using their compass and measuring rods drew a map of the island and wrote the exact longitude and latitude in code on it right where X marks the spot. A code the Kid with the Professor’s help could break.

Call me Shyster, Larry Somerset says to the Professor.

Really? Shyster. How’d you come by a name like that?

The fellow over there fishing, Rabbit, he started it. I didn’t care for it at first, but now I rather like it. The irony of it.

I take it you’re a practicing attorney.

In a past life. An earlier incarnation, let us say.

What was your name then?

It doesn’t matter. Shyster will do well enough, thank you.

Shyster looks a little beat up and bedraggled. He’s still wearing his suit coat and dirty white shirt but one sleeve of the jacket is half torn off at the shoulder and he has a raw contusion on his right temple the size of a poppy blossom. His narrow flat cheeks are covered with black and white stubble. He looks like he spent the last few nights sleeping in a Dumpster.

Kid, you abandoned me! I don’t mean to whine, but we were tent-mates.

Everyone for himself, Shyster.

The Professor interrupts to say that’s just the sort of mentality he’s trying to eliminate here and proceeds to unfold his plan to Shyster. The ex-legislator quickly agrees. He’ll gladly cooperate and will volunteer his expertise as sergeant at arms for the meeting and will provide pro bono legal advice for such matters as the composition of the charter and other questions regarding the law should any happen to arise.

I assume you’ve been disbarred, Shyster.

True. But I haven’t been subjected to brain surgery. I still know what I knew and am willing to share it with my cohabitors here. In our common interests, of course.

Thank you very much. Shyster, yours is precisely the attitude I’m hoping to foster here. We’ll see you at the meeting. We’ll be following Robert’s Rules of Order.

The Kid can tell the Professor likes Shyster which disappoints him in the Professor and when they part from Shyster and make their way back to the Kid’s tent he reveals the lawyer’s real name to the Professor who immediately recognizes it. He remembers the case. Three years ago it made big news all across the state. The Honorable Senator Lawrence Somerset arranged on the Internet to meet at a hotel close by the airport with a woman who claimed to be the mother of two little girls, nine and seven years old. She was to bring her daughters to his room and in exchange for five thousand dollars in cash leave them with him for the night. They were to be freshly bathed and wearing party dresses. When the senator at the prearranged time answered the knock on his hotel room door he was wearing only his underpants. There were some reports that he was stark naked. But there were no little girls awaiting him. The woman claiming to be their mother was a police officer and with her was a pair of state troopers. They arrested and handcuffed the senator, threw a blanket over his paunchy body, and marched him off to jail. They held a press conference the following day at the Calusa County Courthouse where it was revealed that the near-naked state legislator, who had sat on the state parole board, had brought to the hotel room his laptop computer on which were found dozens of downloaded child pornography films. He also had in his possession what were described as “miscellaneous sex toys” and a jar of Vaseline and “a tube of lubricant commonly used by male homosexuals to facilitate anal sex.” Although the senator’s wife in a written statement declared her ongoing support for him and after describing his long struggle with alcoholism her belief in his essential innocence, his two grown sons shut down their real estate business, moved out of state, and changed their names. The senator was sentenced to ten years in prison but after serving two was released because of good behavior which had included weekly attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and group therapy for sex offenders.

The Professor knew his story up to the time of his release from prison from the newspapers. Now he knows the rest of it.

The guy’s wife brought him here, the Kid adds. Dropped him off after he got out of jail and split. That’s what everybody does. Wives, mothers, girlfriends, it don’t matter, he explains. They fuckin’ stand by their man so long as he’s in jail but when he gets out they drop him off someplace where the sun never shines and don’t return his phone calls or answer his letters anymore. You can’t blame ’em though.

Why not?

People in prison. They’re not quite real people. Except to each other. It’s only when you get out that you’re real again. Only now you’re a registered sex offender. It’s like you’re a leper and they let you out of the leper colony.

Is that what happened to you? Your mother dropped you off here and now ignores your letters and phone calls?

I don’t give her the chance. Look, it’s complicated, okay? Forget about it . The Kid doesn’t want to think about his mother; it gives him a headache. It makes him start missing Iggy again.

I gotta feed my dog and my bird . He ducks into his tent and grabs a can of Spam for Annie and two plain doughnuts for Einstein. Tomorrow he’ll go to Paws ’n’ Claws and buy them proper dog and parrot food. He’s got to learn about parrot care. He’s never had to feed a bird before. He figures he’s got enough cash in his pocket and in his ATM account left from the money the Shyster laid on him his first night under the Causeway to last the three of them a week or possibly ten days although he thinks he’s soon going to be able to touch the Professor for what he’ll call a loan but it’ll actually be payment for these interviews he wants.