Russell Banks: Lost Memory of Skin

The Kid listens to the rumble and roar overhead of day’s-end traffic crossing the Claybourne Causeway and trying to hear his thoughts he turns and looks south across the lower Bay at the clustered skyscrapers of downtown Calusa — fifty-story towers of smoked glass and gleaming sheets of aluminum and steel high-rise hotels here too, but these are Marriotts and Hyatts and Holiday Inns built for business travelers instead of tourists. There are domed convention centers and international banking and insurance company office buildings and whole colonies of condominiums stacked on top of one another like gigantic poker chips. A condo downtown would be fine, he thinks. He doesn’t need to live on the Barriers. Even a small studio on a low floor without a view would do. He’d furnish it simply for one person alone with a single bed and a table and two chairs and a lamp or two and a dresser. Maybe a few small pictures. Some dishes and pots and pans. Sheets and blankets and towels. Keep it simple. Keep it neat and clean. He doesn’t really require a view but it would be nice to have one. To stroll to the fridge and take out a frosty Corona and crack it open and flop in his La-Z-Boy recliner and check out the city below.

At this time of day he’d watch the glass and metal towers cast their long shadows over the cluttered port where cranes and gigantic elevators load and off-load rows of room-size steel shipping containers from wheezing freighters headed to or from China, India, and Brazil. He’d consider the three creamy cruise ships lined up like floating amusement parks beside the docks and warehouses sleepily waiting to be restocked with food and liquor and refilled with fresh island-hopping limbo-dancing tourists from the North. If the Kid were a deckhand he’d have his own bunk in one of those ships. He’d have access to a galley where the cook prepares meals and the crew eats them. A recreation room for watching TV and movies on DVD. He’d be able to travel to Asia or South America or to the islands of the Caribbean.

Out where the sprawling city dwindles and finally ends, beyond where the malls and bungalows and gated communities of the suburbs turn into trailer parks and the trailer parks eventually merge with palmetto scrub and cane fields and mangrove marsh, out beyond the Great Panzacola Swamp a flattened red sun glimmers near the low unbroken horizon. Streaked with tangerine strips of cloud the western sky turns turquoise and then orange all over and finally scarlet. The Kid can see that evening sky from here beneath the Causeway but only if he walks out to the end of the concrete peninsula and stands at the water’s lapping edge and looks up. A pair of 747s departs simultaneously from the international airport west of downtown. Parallel white contrails scratch the darkening sky. Then directly overhead one plane slowly veers northeast in a long arc toward England while the other bisects the dark sky above the blackened green Gulf Stream on a line that follows the Tropic of Cancer straight east all the way to North Africa and beyond.

Here below the Causeway he gazes along the smaller Great Barrier Isles and the canals between them and the bayside backsides of the palatial homes of singers, professional athletes, and movie stars and the men and women who import and export drugs and manage and launder other people’s ill-gotten and sometimes inherited money in hedge funds and offshore accounts in the Caymans, Turks and Caicos, and Bahamas. Along the canals the mostly Moorish-style estates hide floodlit manicured gardens, terraces, and Olympic-size pools behind ten-foot walls alarmed and topped with razor wire. Looking east beyond them he can see the tall seaside hotels, their pastel walls splashed with warm light. Neon signs chum the names of the hotels against the purple eastern sky and blot out the stars: CONQUISTADOR. CASA CALUSA. MONTAGUE. MIRADOR.

The cars, buses, and trucks on the Causeway and bridges and the north-south Interstate and the traffic-jammed turnpikes to the suburbs have switched their headlights on. In the high-rises and skyscrapers downtown fluorescent night-lights ignite floor after floor as the cleaners and janitors and watchmen begin their night’s work and from the rooftops and penthouses slender beacons reach like long pale arms into the darkness. An offshore breeze puts a sudden chill in the air. Night has fallen in the city of Calusa and along the Great Barrier Isles and down here under the wide loud Causeway that connects the two.

THE KID CLICKS HIS HEADLAMP ON. HE shuts off his stove and holds the hot tin can with a gloved hand and spoons chili con carne onto a paper plate and starts eating his supper, washing it down with a warm can of Corona beer. The iguana settles in beside him and watches while he eats as if waiting for leftovers but there are none. Iggy’s an herbivore anyhow. Pure vegan. The Kid crushes the chili can underfoot and drops it into his recycling bag and lights and burns the paper plate on the ground. He opens a second Corona and places the empty into the bag where he stores returnables.

Waste not want not. Carry out what you carry in. The Kid is a good camper. His habits go back to when he was fourteen and behind his mother’s house pitched the same Boy Scout pup tent that he lives in now. He placed it in the shade of the mango tree where the toolshed that became his bedroom had been located before his mother’s then-boyfriend Kyle attached it to the house. That first summer he rarely spent more than a single night at a time out there but he discovered that he loved the privacy and solitude of it. When later that summer his mother got her own computer and a wireless router he had Internet access in the tent. He strung a long extension cord from the house to the tent for charging his laptop and cell phone. In the fall when he started attending North Village High where he didn’t know anybody and no one wanted to hang with him and wouldn’t let him join any of the sets which were mostly black kids anyway he made the tent his semipermanent residence.

Next to his tent he built a new outdoor cage for Iggy six feet high and four feet wide and deep with a perch, a bathtub, a bed of mulch, and a heat lamp. Nights when he needed company or when the temperature dropped into the fifties and occasionally into the forties as winter came on he brought Iggy into the tent with him and visited the house only when his mother wasn’t home for food supplies and to use the toilet and every few days to shower and do his laundry. Most of the time when he wasn’t at school or taking care of Iggy or the two of them were just sitting there staring at each other he watched pornography online and charged it to his mother’s Visa.

At first his mother didn’t seem to know. He told himself he didn’t care. He did care but didn’t want to be the one who drew her attention to the facts. But she barely noticed that he’d moved out or that he was running up bigger and bigger monthly charges on her Visa — although she did notice and complained when he took food from the cupboard and fridge that she’d bought for herself and whomever she was sleeping with and making breakfast for. She said, For Christ’s sake, why don’t you get a part-time after-school job and buy your own damn groceries? And no more drinking my beer! Or smoking my cigarettes! It’s enough already that I’m putting a roof over your head and buying your clothes. Besides, that food, beer, and cigarettes aren’t always only mine, you know.

A few weeks into October walking home alone one afternoon after class he saw a hand-painted sign, PART-TIME HELPER WANTED, in the window of a wholesale lighting store on Northwest Primavera Street on the edge of Haiti Town. The owner’s name was Tony Perez, a gaunt pale-skinned Cuban in his early fifties with a shaved head and Fu Manchu mustache and a small gold hoop in each earlobe. He needed someone a few hours a day to sweep the place and dust the thousands of lamps hanging from the ceiling and pack the sold lamps for shipping. He said he was the first cousin and had the same name of the famous Cincinnati Reds first baseman Tony Perez who the Kid had never heard of which Tony said was too bad, he was a great first baseman.