Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

The Kid likes his new authority. He might in some oddly undefined way be working for the Professor but he’s never before held any power over anyone else. Except for Iggy. And now Einstein and Annie. A parrot who won’t talk and a watchdog too sick to bark. Now however he has the power to admit or exclude at his discretion any of the growing number of applicants for a spot under the Causeway.

By midafternoon of the second day of his return from Anaconda Key there is a total of nineteen residents, twelve more than the seven who are now running the place. And more will come. The word is spreading that it’s safe beneath the Causeway now and relatively clean. Police cruisers pass overhead without even slowing so word must have reached them too. Just as the Professor predicted the cops are practically relieved to know where all the convicted sex offenders are located at least at night and except for those who have jobs to go to most days as well. They’re fishing in the Bay, scavenging food from the Dumpsters and trash bins behind restaurants and supermarkets, repairing and cleaning their tents and huts, and have even started picking up the trash tossed from cars passing over the Causeway between the mainland and the Great Barrier Isles, bagging beer cans, food wrappers, plastic bottles, as if they’ve adopted that section of the highway like any other civic organization. This place is theirs.

THE MORNING OF THE THIRD DAY OF THE Kid’s return to the Causeway the Professor shows up early and checks the place out and is pleased by what he sees. He’s red-faced and sweating from the effort of descending from his van on the roadway above. The Kid remembers reading in Shyster’s Bible the story of Genesis. The Professor is like God stopping by to visit the Garden of Eden and approving the way his human beings are running the place.

Nice work, Kid. The number of residents is multiplying. But that means it’s going to be harder to keep order, the Professor notes and suggests adding two or more members to the security committee.

The Kid says he’ll take that under consideration. He doesn’t want the Professor to think he’s God and in charge down here even though in a sense he is. I’ll talk it over with Paco . He informs the Professor that he’s thinking of forming a construction and maintenance committee. They need to build a shower stall and some of the shanties have to be rebuilt. Most of these guys can’t buckle their belts or tie their fuckin’ shoes right let alone pitch a tent or build a hut outa old boards and plastic.

The Professor nods as if approving and tells the Kid to follow him and leads the Kid away from the others out of earshot. He sits his enormous body down on a grassy slope near the path down from the roadway and pats the ground next to him. Take a seat. I have something to show you.

The Kid doesn’t quite sit where he’s told; he squats three feet away ready to stand up in case the Professor reaches out and lays one of his meaty paws on his thigh. He still doesn’t quite get the Professor’s interest and deepening involvement with the men living under the Causeway. Unless he’s a sex offender himself only not convicted. Although for the Kid it’s very hard to imagine a guy that fat having any kind of sex life at all, even in his head. He knows about chubby-chasers, guys who are into sex with fatties, but they usually aren’t fatties themselves. And the Professor’s not just fat, he’s two or three times fat. He’s enormous all over and wears clothes that make him look even fatter than he is as if he’s trying to warn people off his mountain of flesh. His three-piece suit and buttoned-up shirt and wide necktie strangling his neck with a Windsor knot the size of a fist and his hard leather brogans are like body armor. Plus his beard and long hair enlarge his head and make him look like he’s wearing a hair helmet.

Whaddaya got?

What you’ve been waiting for, my friend.

The Professor pulls a folded sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket, carefully unfolds it and passes it to the Kid.

The map! Very cool. Very very cool .

It’s only a copy of the original. A copy of a copy, actually. The original is in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress, where I expect no one except for me has seen it in two hundred years.

The Kid gives it a once-over, then a closer look, then gazes a little wistfully out across the Bay to the Calusa skyline and beyond to Anaconda Key and west to the Barriers and the stacked hotels facing the ocean there. He’s trying to place the map of the island onto the world that surrounds him. The map is hand drawn and to the Kid looks old-fashioned enough to have been made by Captain Kydd himself even though it’s on a standard sheet of typing paper but like the Professor said it’s a copy of a copy. The original is probably an old sheet of parchment and much larger and faded by time.

The island is shaped sort of like a diving whale with its mouth wide open as if about to swallow a much smaller island. The smaller island has the words SKELETON ISLAND written next to it. The mouth of the whale looks like a bay, unnamed like the whale-shaped island which has a second segment attached to its backside as if a shark were riding piggyback on the whale or maybe it’s the whale’s baby and the mother whale is diving for a chunk of food for her baby. There are other words written on the map: CAPE OF YE WOODS, SPYEGLASS HILL, NORTH INLET, SWAMP, WHITE ROCK , and so on, and in the water surrounding the island are numbers indicating the depths, the Kid figures, none of them over 14 and most of them low numbers, 3, 4, and 5 and so on.

Pretty shallow waters, the Kid observes to himself. Maybe Calusa Bay didn’t used to be as deep as it is now since they dredged it out to make the Barrier Isles and the Cut between the Barriers and Anaconda Key for deep-water freighters and cruise ships to come and go. Maybe back then two hundred or more years ago this place didn’t look like it does now. He’s sure the sky was the same huge blue dome spreading from horizon to horizon from the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean in the east and south and in a vast sweep overhead to the endless Great Panzacola Swamp on to the far side of the swamp to the Thousand Islands and west of the islands the Gulf of Mexico. The sky never changes. He knows that the land between the horizons was flat as a table from shore to shore barely two or three feet above sea level with low sandy ridges and mounds heaped up in places here and there by the hurricanes that for centuries roared out of the Gulf and the Caribbean every summer and fall just as they do today. There were no buildings anywhere then — no skyscrapers, no hotels, no miles and miles of condo developments, gated communities, suburban ranches, and bungalows. No geometrically laid-out fields of sugarcane, vegetables, strawberries, citrus orchards. No mile after mile of drainage and irrigation dikes and canals carrying off the waters of the Great Panzacola Swamp and the overflow from the huge lakes in the central portion of the state. No highways, cloverleafs, bridges, overpasses and underpasses, no causeways. No Claybourne Causeway for sure. No Great Barrier Isles. No Mirador Hotel & Restaurant, Rampart Road with its boutiques, cafés, restaurants, tourists, and hustlers. No airport or Boeing 747s cutting across the sky. No cars, trucks, buses rumbling back and forth day and night between the mainland and the Barriers. No Barriers even, because they’re man-made. No people! Mainly that. No people and everything they’ve done to the land and the water and all the animals that live on the land and the creatures that swim in the waters and the birds that fly above.