Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Cat grins and pats Dolores on her rump and nuzzles her with his leathery face. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that dear departed late husband of yours. Him and his unforgettable words of wisdom. “Short-term profits make long-term losses.” “The biggest difference between people is their quality of attention.” “Everyone must sometimes serve.”

She nuzzles him back. Sweet of you to remember.

You never let me forget. Still, despite your sanguine nature, whatever the hell that is, I’m gonna go over to the trailer and crank up the computer and see what I can find out about the kid.

You think the computer’s going to tell you about a total stranger?

’Course! Everybody’s on the Internet now. Even you, sweetheart.

THE KID IS IN AS BLISSFUL A STATE AS HE has ever experienced and he knows it and truly appreciates it. He’s not thinking about his past for once and he’s not thinking about his future either. It’s late afternoon and he’s miles upriver not far from where the Appalachee flows out of Turner Slough on its winding way to Calusa Bay. From the map the slough appears to be a quarter-mile wide and two miles long, a narrow shallow collecting basin for a veiny network of streams draining the farther reaches of the swamp and the watery saw grass prairies beyond. The slough is where he intends to anchor and spend the night.

Annie lies half asleep on the foredeck in shifting splotches of afternoon sunlight falling through the breaks in the overhanging foliage and Einstein released from his cage has taken a watchful position on the flat roof of the cabin. It’s the first time the Kid has let Einstein out of his cage — a true experiment because he conducted it without preferring one result over another: all he wanted was knowledge of whether the parrot despite his broken wings could fly up into the cypress trees and into the jungle where he could join a flock of other parrots most of whom are descended from escapees from urban and suburban cages themselves and live a normal free life up there among his own kind which would have seemed natural to the Kid. Or would he hang around the boat with him and Annie like a regular member of the crew where he didn’t have to hunt for food in a strange land or need protection from predators? Which also would have seemed natural to the Kid. But when the parrot stepped from his cage and did a little dance on the deck and showed no inclination to fly any farther than up onto the roof of the cabin the Kid was relieved and smiled and said, Looks like you got first watch, man. He decides it’s time to teach Einstein some new words and expressions. Like Land ho! and Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest and Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. Time to teach the parrot how to be a proper shipmate. Annie, the Kid figures, due to her age and condition, is more of a ship’s mascot. Retired.

So far on his trip upriver he’s seen dozens of wading birds — egrets and ibises, great and blue herons, anhingas and even a huge brown stork, although he doesn’t know what they’re called, they’re just beautiful strange birds to him that stand or walk slowly in the water looking to snag a fish or a frog near the banks and in among the mangrove tunnels that branch off the Appalachee. When the houseboat approaches they flutter clumsily to the upper branches of nearby cypress trees or take a position among the clusters of bright green fan blades that top off the tall Panzacola palms where they stare down at the Kid and his crew with what looks like irritation and when the boat has passed return to the water to resume their interrupted hunt for food. He’s seen dark brown mahogany trees hugged almost to death by strangler figs and peeling red gumbo-limbo trees looking like sunburnt tourists. He’s seen six-foot-long alligators and their babies that look like mechanical toy alligators and striped mud turtles the size of bicycle helmets all snoozing together side by side in the muck. He watched a water moccasin as thick and long as his arm slip from a boney black mangrove root into the water and swim slowly alongside the boat for a few moments as if hoping for a handout before veering back toward shore and he decided right then that he’ll be bathing aboard the boat with water taken from the slough with a bucket and not do any swimming which he almost never does anyhow because he doesn’t know how to swim and for once is glad. He saw an otter dive off a log into the stream and at first thought it was a giant rat but quickly realized it was an animal that lives off the land and the slow-flowing waters of the Panzacola instead of eating human waste beneath the Causeway and took comfort in the thought and was once again very glad to be exactly where he was. He’s seen soft white orchids dangling from the trees among long strands of Spanish moss and orchids with strings of blossoms like small yellow butterflies and three-foot air plants with blushing red blooms pushing through long green wraps and thickets of gigantic ferns some of them growing on dead logs, ferns so large and ancient-looking that as a private joke he keeps an eye out for dinosaurs. From time to time he’s cut the speed of the boat almost back to zero and peered down into the water and spotted crayfish and whole schools of bluegills and sunfish and once saw what he thought was a largemouth bass and decided then and there that when he anchors at Turner Slough later he’ll make like the egrets and herons he’s been disturbing and for his first supper aboard the old Dolores Driscoll he’ll serve fresh-caught fish.

At half past four in the afternoon the houseboat reaches the headwaters of the Appalachee and slips through the grassy marsh into the glistening still waters of the slough. There is no overhanging foliage here, no deep dark mangrove tunnels off the stream to peer into. The sky is enormous, the light bright enough to make him wish he’d bought a pair of sunglasses back at Cat Turnbull’s store.

Now that he’s had some time to reflect on it he’s sorry that he lied to Cat about being just back from Afghanistan because he likes the man and respects him for having served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam. Whenever the Kid lies about himself or hides the facts that he’s a convicted sex offender who got kicked out of the army before completing basic training for distributing porn he feels like even more of a creep than he actually is. As if he’s something worse. A child molester like Shyster. And when he pretends that he served in Afghanistan like he did in person with Cat and online with brandi18 he feels as if he’s worse than a Shyster or a chomo. He feels like he’s a cold-blooded wife killer who got away with it, an O. J. Simpson. Secrets and lies, they eat your insides until all you have left is a hard thin skin that covers you like the shell of one of those eggs you poke a little hole in and draw out its eggy contents before you dye it for Easter.

He’s glad that Cat’s wife didn’t try to talk to him and instead just hung back and watched him with her smiling eyes because it’s harder to hide who you really are from a trusting woman like her than from a skeptical man like Cat Turnbull and he might have ended up telling her the truth about himself. Cat’s the kind of man who like most men expects you to lie to him but she’s the kind of woman who expects you to tell her the truth so before you know it you’re telling it to her. When you lie to a woman like that you feel twice as bad as when you lie to a man who expects you to lie anyhow. Most men take it for granted that people have secrets and tell lies. Most women, especially older ones, don’t. The Kid figures that’s because men have lots of secrets and tell lies on a regular basis like the Professor for instance and just about every other man the Kid has ever known. It’s just something in their masculine nature. Whereas most older women are pretty much who they seem to be and usually tell the truth at least when they’re not trying to get laid. Even the Kid’s own mother. With her what you see is what you get for better or worse. She’s 100 percent truth in advertising. Although maybe it would have been better for him growing up if she had kept a few things from him and had lied now and then about herself and about what she did in her spare time and after work in the bars of Calusa and later or when she went off with her girlfriends on cruises. Too much information, he thinks. TMI. He knows all that wasn’t his mother’s fault and he doesn’t blame her for the way his life ended up but knowing your mother’s secrets and always being told the truth by her can hurt you. Especially when you’re a child.