Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

The Kid checks his belly and decides that he needn’t break out the first aid kit. Besides the T-shirt with the burn hole looks cool to him, as if he took a bullet and somehow survived, when he realizes that the NPR local newscaster is talking about the mysterious disappearance of a well-known Calusa University professor of sociology once described as a genius and the smartest man in Calusa County.

THE KID WANTS TO WEIGH ANCHOR AND start back right now but it’s already dark and he knows he’ll get lost even with a nearly full moon and clear sky so he waits all night half awake — not dreaming this time, no way he’s going back there — and restless until the sun finally comes up and he can see the markers and follow his map back through the swamp the way he came. It’s downstream all the way and only takes him half the day to get from Little Mullet back to Turner’s Slough and down the Appalachee to the Bay where as soon as he ties up the Dolores Driscoll he hurries down the pier, enters Cat Turnbull’s store and without even a hello as if he’s just stepped out for a minute instead of most of three days he asks Cat for a copy of today’s Calusa Times-Union.

In a flat expressionless voice Cat says, Over there on the rack by the door, and turns his attention back to a man standing at the counter in front of him, a heavyset fellow in his mid- to late sixties. He has short white hair and a close-cropped white beard and sunburnt face. He wears a Boston Red Sox cap pulled low over aviator sunglasses, a white short-sleeved guayabera shirt, cargo shorts, and running shoes with no socks. Now that the Kid notices him he thinks the guy looks like the famous writer Ernest Hemingway whose books the Kid has never read of course but he’s seen his picture in magazines and on TV even though he’s pretty sure the writer’s been dead for a long time. He must be really famous though if the Kid’s heard of him.

The Kid quickly opens the newspaper and leafs through it, taking special care to scan the Metropolitan section carefully. Nothing. He refolds the paper and lays it down on the counter and says to Cat, You hear anything about that professor who disappeared?

Cat shakes his head no — he’s been to the National Sex Offender Registry online and doesn’t really want to talk to the Kid if he can avoid it — but the man who looks like the famous writer says, I saw a bit about it on TV in my hotel over in Calusa last night. It was on the late-night local news.

They show a picture of him or anything? The guy who disappeared?

Yeah. Big fat bearded guy. Sort of a mug shot, actually. I didn’t catch his name though.

Dolores has come out of the back room and has been listening. Unlike Cat she’s actually glad to see the Kid and relieved that he’s apparently no worse for wear for having been in the swamp for most of three days and two nights. He’s more resourceful than he seems. It’s none of her business, but she does want to ask the Kid about his appearance on the sex offender registry and find out what he did to get himself on that list, because to her he doesn’t seem in the least dangerous or creepy and not especially weird, either — at least not in the way she’d expect a sex offender to look and act. A little eccentric maybe, and there’s a lot about him that’s not easily explained without having a good long personal conversation with him, which is what she’s interested in initiating somehow. She asks the Kid, Do you think it might be your friend? The man who drove you out here?

It’s possible. I heard about it last night on the radio and didn’t hear all of it. They might have said his name but I didn’t listen to the whole story until it was almost over. And there wasn’t anything about it when I checked this morning. I could only get NPR out there.

Dolores says, We don’t even get that here. No cable TV either. And all we’ve got for Internet is dial-up. Slow as molasses. Makes you not even want to use it. I keep telling Cat we need a satellite dish, but he isn’t much interested in TV or the Internet. He likes things slow. Don’t you, honey? Cat’s a real nineteenth-century man. A swamp fox.

Cat casts a hard look at the Kid. I don’t watch TV maybe, but I do use the Internet from time to time. To look stuff up. Research. He turns to the other man and asks him if he ever uses the Internet for research in his line of work.

Dolores says to the Kid, He’s a travel writer. He’s writing an article about the Panzacola for a big fancy magazine in New York. He promised we’re gonna be in it.

That explains the Hemingway look, the Kid thinks.

She asks the Writer to remind her what the magazine is called.

Outsider. It’s not really that fancy. The Writer has a crooked smile and speaks partially from the left side of his mouth as if he may have suffered a minor stroke long ago and did not fully recover his speech. He turns to Cat and says that he does indeed use the Internet for research. It was how he learned about Cat and Dolores’s store and their houseboat and canoe rental service.

Cat notes that you can also learn about individual people on the Internet. He tells the Writer, as if it were news to him, that if you know an individual’s name all you have to do is type it in and everything about the individual that’s posted on the Internet will pop up on the screen immediately.

Not immediately, honey. Not if you’re stuck using dial-up. Now let’s change the subject, shall we? Do you think we could learn from the Internet if the professor who disappeared is this young man’s friend? I really hope not. I mean I hope we don’t learn that it was his friend.

Cat ignores her. He says to the Writer, Say I happened to know a young fellow’s name because he rented a boat from me and showed an ID to do it. Paid cash in hundred-dollar bills. Claimed to be U.S. Army just back from Afghanistan. Said he was home on dwell-time. Say for the hell of it I typed his name into the computer. You know, just to check, since he’s got my five-thousand-dollar houseboat out there in the swamp. You might do that yourself in your line of work, right?

Let it go, Cat. He’s worried about his friend who’s disappeared, Dolores says.

The Writer shrugs and says yes, he might do that. To check a source’s background.

What if your source turned out to be a convicted sex offender? Listed in the national registry of sex offenders? And he wasn’t in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army like he said.

Could be meaningless. Or it could be a negative. Could even be a plus. Depends on what I’m using him as a source for.

Cat wonders what the Writer means, especially what he means by saying it could be a plus. How could secrets and lying be a plus?

Say I’m writing about the swamp, not sex offenders, and my source simply withholds the fact that he happens to be on the national registry. A meaningless omission, right? Or he mentions in passing that he saw combat in Afghanistan. A meaningless lie. No one has to tell you everything about himself, and no one has to tell you the truth about himself. But let’s say I’m interviewing a guy here for a piece about sex offenders and he lies and says he’s not a convicted sex offender. That would be a negative. Same thing if I’m writing about the war in Afghanistan and later it turns out my source lied about having served there. Definitely a negative.

Cat says, Okay, but how’s keeping secrets and lying a plus? A positive.

Well, let’s say I’m writing an article about sex offenders and for some reason neglect to ask the guy if he’s one himself and he doesn’t volunteer the information, and later it turns out he is one. That would be a plus. Because his secrecy would become part of the piece, maybe the key to it. Same thing with the war. Say I’m writing about why so many American men falsely claim to have seen combat, and I never bother to ask my military source if he’s one of those liars himself, but then discover on the Internet that actually he never served in the military. That’s a plus, too. He’d be my Exhibit A.