Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

FLATTENED AGAINST THE SIDE WINDOW OF the van, the Professor’s fat bearded face peers inside at the Kid stretched out asleep on the backseat. Annie and Einstein stare at the Professor from the rear cargo space. All hands on deck! Einstein screeches. All hands on deck! All hands on deck! Annie offers a weak whimpering bark — her first attempt to protect the Kid since he kidnapped her from Benbow’s. She’s gradually getting her strength and health back and evidently with it a small amount of confidence.

Slowly the Kid props himself up on his elbows and checks out the Professor face-to-face. The man looks sad and worried to the Kid, different from last night when he was spinning his tale and the Kid fears that he’s going to ask for the money back. Too fucking bad, the Kid thinks. He’s not getting it back no matter how sad and worried he looks. A deal’s a deal. He checks the van doors — still locked. The keys dangle from the ignition.

The Professor tries the door and when it won’t open he holds a DVD in a plastic case up to the driver’s window and offers a wan smile. The Kid scrambles into the driver’s seat and without starting the engine turns the ignition on and lowers the window an inch. He asks what time is it. The Professor says eight in the morning. This is yours now, he says and pushes the DVD through the slot to the Kid. The hurricane’s passed out to sea. It’s safe for you to leave now. He offers to drive the Kid back to the Causeway.

The Kid grabs the DVD and reaches around behind him and quickly shoves it inside his duffel next to the money. Forget that, man.

You can’t stay here, Kid. There’s a day care center on the next block and an elementary school three blocks over. Now that the storm’s over they’ll be checking your anklet’s location again.

I don’t need to be reminded. You want to take me someplace, Haystack, drive me and my stuff and Annie and Einstein out to the Panzacola Swamp ranger station. Otherwise call me a cab.

The Professor raises his bushy eyebrows in surprise. Why there?

The Kid briefly lays out his intentions and reasoning, and the Professor purses his lips and nods in agreement — he doesn’t think the Kid will last long out there on a houseboat but he agrees to drop him and his possessions and his two friends at the ranger station. Now will you unlock the van doors?

The Kid flicks the lock off and climbs into the back where he positions himself in the middle of the wide seat and waits for his driver to heave his huge bulk up and behind the wheel. The garage door rises and bright white daylight floods inside.

Cock-a-doodle-doo! Einstein cries. Cock-a-doodle-doo-o-o!

The Kid smiles and reaches around behind him and pats Annie on the head and gives a friendly wink to the parrot. This is better than he’s felt in at least two years. Maybe longer. He’s almost happy. If someone asked him if he was happy he’d say yes and he’d only be lying a little.

BEYOND THE SUBURBS MOST OF THE OTHER vehicles on the road this morning are pickup trucks and green and white city and county trucks carrying work crews out to begin repairing the downed lines and road signs and corporate vehicles headed to clean up the ravaged fields and the migrant workers’ overturned trailers and shacks. The sky is clear and sapphire blue. West of the city limits a few miles past the last of the industrial parks, gated communities, and suburban housing developments they pass along the concrete drainage canals that run like arteries from the swamp down to the Bay, irrigating the hundreds of square miles of sugarcane and citrus groves. The waters of the overflowing ditches and canals glisten brightly in the sunlight. It’s like a gigantic gleaming green game board out there despite the devastation caused to the crops and groves by the wind and the flooding of the canals and irrigation ditches. The blown-down bright green stalks of cane all lie on the ground in the same east-west direction and wide swaths of citrus trees are broken off at the same knee-high height.

The Professor has grown more animated as they drive and as is his wont is explaining to the Kid much of what the Kid is not the slightest interested in: the history of the canals and the draining of a huge chunk of the swamp for corporate agriculture, the political and economic battles waged for decades between the environmentalists who wanted to keep the swamp intact and the businessmen and politicians who wanted to carve it up piece by piece for industrialized farming and the real estate developers who had and still have designs on the fresh loamy soil for tract housing, gated communities, industrial parks, theme parks, stadia, and malls. The environmentalists lost their end of the battle years ago and have had to content themselves with guarding the remaining two million acres protected by the national park, but the fight between the agricultural interests and the real estate and banking interests continues. Meanwhile, the Professor goes on, these concrete canals have come to function not just as conveyors of water to drain and irrigate the land but also to serve a valuable service for the Calusa underworld. That’s the aspect of industrialization that particularly interests me, he says. Professionally. How the underclasses and the underworld end up making good use of social environments designed and built for altogether different purposes. Like your Causeway. Or the way you’re now planning to make use of the Panzacola.

The Kid perks up at this and asks how the underworld makes use of the canals. The Professor pulls the van over onto the shoulder near a thick hand-cranked lock on the farther bank where a smaller side canal feeds water into a thousand-acre cane field. If you want to get rid of a body or a gun or other incriminating evidence or a stolen car stripped of its resalable parts, you drive out here at night and drop it into a main canal like this. Look down. You can’t see a thing. It’s twenty to thirty feet deep. The water’s darkened by the tannin off the mangroves that grow around the lakes miles north of here, where most of the canal waters originate.

The Kid asks why the canals don’t eventually fill up with all those bodies and guns and stolen cars and shit and turn into like garbage dumps and clog up the canals and the Professor explains that once every few months the Calusa police and county sheriff’s departments send crews and divers out to drag and search the canals and when possible identify the bodies and whatever else they fish out of the dark waters and try to attach them to unsolved crimes. Usually in vain, of course. Bodies of missing persons can often be identified, and the serial numbers of guns are sometimes still there, and there’s usually a way to trace a stolen car back to where and from whom it was stolen. But there’s almost no way after it’s been in the canal for a month or two to determine who put the body there or who used the gun or stole the car.

That is very cool, the Kid says. I mean the way criminals and gangsters and what you’re calling the “underclasses” like me get to reuse things like canals and causeways and swamps for their own purposes. Sort of like recycling. So is that what you teach at the university?

It’s not of general enough interest to justify an entire course. It’s merely one of the things I like to investigate and think about. In the future it’s all that will be left to us, Kid. Recycling. You’re readier for the future than most people. Before long we’ll all be recycling buildings, roadways, industrial machinery, everything we’ve built for the last two hundred years or so, recycling them for purposes other than what they were originally designed and built for. And it won’t just be the underclasses and criminals doing it. We’ll all be living that way.