Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Not cool, the Kid thinks. Even lepers deserve a break and shouldn’t be abandoned and put under a bridge someplace outside the city like garbage just because they’re sick. That’s what hospitals are for. And who doesn’t have issues anyhow? Everybody’s got issues with something. You don’t have to be a convicted sex offender to have issues. He’s not sure what it means to be defiled by the dead but it can’t be as bad as defiling the dead which he thinks means sex with dead people, a thing he’s heard about but has almost as hard a time imagining as sex with little children like the Shyster and most of the other guys under the Causeway are guilty of doing. Even they wouldn’t have sex with dead people but if they did instead of putting them outside the city you’d want to get them to try and talk about it and figure out why it interested them so much. Which probably goes back to their early childhoods and not having any confidence because of stuff that happened to them back then so that the only people they could picture having sex with was people who couldn’t reject them. Like dead people. Or little kids. The trick would be getting them to have enough confidence not to be sexually attracted to dead people. Or little kids.

Maybe the Professor’s theory about sex offenders is right, he thinks. Put them in charge of something. Something they can’t fail at. So they’ll get enough confidence not to worry about being rejected if they decide to hit on a living adult woman instead of a little kid or a dead person.

The Kid has charged his windup radio and with the volume up as high as it will go is listening on earbuds to WBIG which plays mostly rap with very few advertisements and no news. Rap suits him fine as background music because he can’t understand most of the words and doesn’t especially want to since all the music with words that he’s ever heard hasn’t got anything to do with his real life unless of course it’s used as background music for pornography or for a pole dancer in a strip club for instance. Songs that are just songs are sung by and to people whose lives aren’t anything like his and all they do is remind him of that fact. It’s the steady pulsing beat of rap and the rhymes — the pure sound of the words and not their meaning — that he likes. It’s the same for him with any music, even when it’s just a soft-rock or pseudosamba sound track for a porn film. When the words happen to come in standard white people’s English which is the only language he understands except for a little Spanish he almost always tunes them out and hears only the rhythm and the instrumentation and the rise and fall of the human vocal sounds and uses them to help him concentrate on what he’s looking at which in this case instead of pornography or a stripper is a page of the Shyster’s Bible.

So he hears neither the rising wind that batters the sides of his tent nor the angry shouts and frightened cries of his fellow residents. The water off the Bay has risen over the sloping ledge at the edge of the concrete island and is now flooding the low-lying flats where many of the men have built their shanties and pitched their tents. Several of the shanties have already been demolished by the surging waves and washed into the Bay. The nearly completed latrine has been tipped over by the wind and floats like a narrow coffin-shaped raft toward one of the support pillars where it is smashed back into scrap lumber. The Greek has pulled his generator up under the overpass to the highest level place he can find there and parked it in the dark cavelike area where until now none of the residents has elected to settle because there’s barely room to stand and it smells of rotted food and human feces and urine. It’s where only the rats have made their nests. No people.

Otis the Rabbit and Paco have abandoned their flooded tents and moved their possessions including Paco’s Harley up the steep grassy slope toward the highway and have stopped there in the wind-driven rain to take what appears to be a last look back at the disappearing encampment. Their island home is being absorbed by the Bay. The Shyster and most of the others stand in the doorways of their camps, shacks, and tents helpless and confused, unsure of whether to wait out the storm or flee. If they stay and try to protect their possessions from the rising water and the winds which have now reached Category 3 hurricane force, will they be blown into the Bay and drowned? But if they give it up and flee their island, where will they go? For the men who live beneath the Causeway there is no private or public shelter from the storm anywhere in the city or the adjoining suburbs.

The Rabbit says to Paco, Where the fuck’s the Kid? You seen the Kid?

Paco can’t hear him over the roar of the wind. He cups his ear and leans in close and the Rabbit asks it again.

Must still be in his tent! Paco hollers back. With his dog and the bird!

We better get him outa there! Water’s almost up to his tent! Wind’s gonna fucking blow it away any minute anyhow! the Rabbit shouts. He starts to hobble on his crutch back down the slope and stumbles and nearly falls.

Paco grabs the old man by the arm and steps in front of him and tells him to stay here by the Harley, he’ll get the Kid. He likes being a hero. He’s wearing a black muscle shirt and gym shorts and high-tops, his usual workout clothes. His tanned shoulders and biceps flex and glisten in the rain as he descends to the encampment, makes his way along the embankment and crosses under the Causeway toward the Kid’s flapping tent.

The waters off the Bay have risen to within a yard of the tent and the wind pummels its thin nylon skin and yanks on the taut cords the Kid so carefully tied to cinder blocks and stanchions when he pitched it. The Kid thinks of himself as ex-military and therefore an expert by-the-book camper who as head of the Executive Committee tries to set military standards for the rest of the men even though in spite of his and the Professor’s exhortations and warnings most of them seem not to care about keeping their quarters foursquare, neat and clean. The Kid doesn’t understand why everyone isn’t as orderly and fastidious as he is especially when it’s the only way to keep the police and the sanitation department from coming back and breaking up their camp again like it’s a filthy rats’ nest and sending them scampering away to darker dirtier more dangerous hideouts. Or if they can’t escape, if they don’t scamper into greater darkness and invisibility, putting them in cages, tossing away the key. Next time they’ll lock them up permanently, even the Shyster unless the men beneath the Causeway demonstrate that they’re basically good neighbors and citizens of Calusa who aren’t violating any municipal regulations or laws.

A few of them have tried to follow the Kid’s example — Otis the Rabbit and Paco and P.C. and Plato the Greek have pitched their tents correctly or built themselves foursquare huts out of plywood scraps and polyethylene with the Shyster paying them to build his to the same high standard and were instrumental in constructing the latrine and organizing trash and garbage collection and disposal — but the rest have set up their households like drunks and druggies who all they think about is getting or staying high so they pay minimum attention to how and where they actually live. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone since many of the residents down here in fact are drunks and druggies in spite of having settled beneath the Causeway solely because they’re convicted sex offenders who have served their time for their crime and have nowhere else in the city to live.

In most cases it’s the only reason they’re homeless. It’s the one thing they have in common. A bond that unites them against everyone else, even other homeless people. Just yesterday a bushy-haired bearded guy in a long topcoat who wasn’t a convicted sex offender wandered down under the Causeway from a park or abandoned building elsewhere in the city and tried to settle among them but they stood together shoulder to shoulder and cast the guy out. The Kid as spokesman for the group explained to the guy that standard-issue homeless people have easy access to dozens of public and church-run shelters that are not available to convicted sex offenders because sometimes there are children being sheltered, So fuck off, dude, or I’ll turn Paco and our other security guys loose and let them kick the shit out of you.