Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Dude, forget about it. I don’t need your money. I only got room for me and Iggy anyhow.

Shadowy figures have slowly gathered around Plato the Greek’s generator silently waiting their turn to charge their anklets and cell phones. There are small driftwood fires burning here and there in barrels and fire pits lined with cinder blocks and the occasional blue-flamed butane camp stove like the Kid’s. The smells of burning charcoal and woodsmoke and food cooking — burgers and beans and franks and coffee — mingle with the salt-smell off the Bay.

It is hard to know if there are twenty men living under the Causeway or fifty or even a hundred. What little conversation that takes place among them is low and mumbled and is scattered into the night by the steady thumping of the traffic overhead and the offshore breeze. Every now and then the beam of a flashlight snaps on as someone makes his way down to the water and stands there and pees into the Bay or just stares out at the lights of the city. Farther down a man fishes for his supper with a bamboo pole. Other figures stand in pairs in the shadows smoking and swapping pulls from a bottle. Where the off-ramp descends to the mainland the concrete isle underneath is closed off on both sides and beneath the sloped ceiling is a wide dark cavern. Deep inside the cavern a Coleman lamp flares up illuminating a half-dozen low shanties made of salvaged lumber. The shanties belong to the old-timers, men who have been in residence here the longest like Otis the Rabbit who is finishing his fifth year under the Causeway. The shanties look almost permanent and in the white glow of the lamp the four men playing dominoes are seated on overturned buckets around a spindly table made from a cast-off scrap of Masonite.

C’mon, Kid, just this one night, till I get my own set-up. It’s probably a little dangerous for me to be sleeping out in the open, right? I mean, some of these guys are a little weird, I think, and some of them are on drugs. And what about rats? I’ve seen a couple of rats already. This is not what I expected or I’d have come a little better prepared.

How long you been down here?

Oh, just a couple hours. My wife dropped me off at the Park yesterday and I walked over from there.

Your wife.

Yes.

Larry. Larry Somerset. Are you the Lawrence Somerset I’m thinking of? The asshole state senator who got bagged last spring at the airport hotel with a coupla little girls?

You don’t have to put it quite that way. There weren’t any little girls. It was a set-up. A sting.

Yeah, sure. That’s what everybody says. I read about you in the papers. Came to the door of a hotel room naked with all kinds of sex toys. Not very smart for a state senator.

It wasn’t quite like that. It was a sting. Entrapment.

It always is. But I don’t have to ask what brings you here. Do I?

I might say the same for you.

You might. But don’t.

The Kid needs advice from an elder. He throws a wave in the direction of the Rabbit.

The Rabbit saunters over to the Kid’s tent. Seventy-five or eighty-five, it doesn’t matter, he walks like a man half his age with more grace than sprightliness although he watches where he puts his feet as if his eyesight is bad. Which it is. He just can’t afford eyeglasses, he says. Or false teeth. The Kid thinks he wants people to believe he’s older than he really is so he’ll get more respect from the younger men down here. He’d rather be seen as a very old toothless and nearly blind ex-boxer than just another pathetic homeless old drunk.

He keeps silent while the Kid explains the newcomer’s situation. The Rabbit doesn’t particularly cotton to the man who seems to have an attitude as if he thinks he doesn’t belong down here and they do. And he doesn’t trust the cat’s interest in the Kid. But maybe there’ll be something in it for the Kid since the guy obviously has money in his pocket and if so then there will likely be something in it for the Rabbit too. The Kid can be a generous little bugger sometimes.

So what d’you think? Should I give Mr. Somerset here Iggy’s bed for the night?

You running a fuckin’ flophouse for Level Threes?

No way.

How do you know I’m a Level Three?

You wouldn’t be down here if you wasn’t, amigo. Charge him what he’d hafta pay a hotel on the Barriers, Kid. Coupla hundred bucks a night.

Whaddaya say, Mr. Somerset? Two hundred bucks for the night in the comfort and safety of my bayside condo? Good views of the water. Breakfast not included however. Payable in advance. Cash only. We don’t take credit cards.

What about the lizard?

What about him?

Does he sleep in the tent too?

You can have Iggy’s bed. He’s fine sleeping outside if it don’t rain. It’s still summer. If it rains though I’ll hafta bring him in. Iguanas don’t like rain.

The man gives it a moment’s thought, then agrees and turns away from the Rabbit and the Kid. He removes two one-hundred-dollar bills from his money belt. The Kid and the Rabbit watch and talk on as if the man can’t hear them. The Kid tells the Rabbit he’ll take care of him in the morning. He thinks maybe twenty bucks ought to be enough of a thanks. More than twenty is a retainer for future services, less is a cheapjack insult. When you’re in the Kid’s position sharing is carefully calculated. His golden rule is do no more for others than you expect you’ll need them to do for you. Even with friends. Although the Kid doesn’t really believe he has any friends. People he likes, yes. The Rabbit for instance. But no friends.

Just gimme a holler the guy gives you any trouble.

I don’t think he’s into guys. Paco thinks he’s a baby-banger, I’m betting he’s into little girls. Tweeners.

You sure he ain’t into iguanas?

IT’S AN HOUR BEFORE DAWN. THE TIDE HAS turned and the sulfur stink of the mudflat beyond the Causeway and the nearby mangrove marshes laces the cool night air. In the east where the sea meets the sky a gray velvet blanket of clouds leaches darkness from the night and dims the stars overhead one by one. It’s still too early for the traffic to commence its daily rumble over the Causeway. There are the steady slaps of low waves against the edge of the concrete peninsula below the Causeway and the sporadic cries of solitary seagulls cruising low over the Bay. There are the occasional coughs of sleepers in their huts and the low drawn-out groan of a man curled in a thin blanket sheltered from the salty dew by a plastic tarp. There are the snores of the deepest sleepers like the Kid’s new and decidedly temporary tent-mate whose raucous adenoidal snoring has kept the Kid awake most of the night.

The encampment is otherwise silent and still and lies in darkness invisible to the world. The fires have all burned to cold ash. Fully clothed the Kid lies awake in his sleeping bag and for a few seconds he imagines the dream of the man snoring in the sleeping bag next to his and shudders and stops himself cold. Children have come onto his radar and entered his no-go zone. Little pink-skinned girls barely older than toddlers. How do you even talk to kids that young? he wonders. He’s never been able to figure out what to say to children anyhow. Or at least children under the age of twelve or thirteen. They always make him self-conscious and insecure. Especially girls.

Little girls. Just thinking about them — never mind talking to them — makes him self-conscious and insecure. And oddly scared. With little boys he can at least pretend they’re as old as he is himself no matter how young they are in reality and he can talk to them the same as he would a grown man. Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men — at least he always did when he was a kid — because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives. Even old men playing golf or pinochle or watching TV in their retirement homes or sitting half-asleep in a Jacuzzi tub are only pretending to be adult men. But little girls are more complicated and mysterious than little boys. At least to the Kid they are. They don’t want you to talk to them like they’re grown-up women. Maybe it’s because grown-up women aren’t like men. Maybe women really are adults and not little kids in disguise.