Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Before Cat and Dolores arrive at the store the Kid walks the length of the pier to the end. It’s a bright cloudless morning and off to his left metallic plates of sunlight glitter on the Bay. He sits down on the concrete pier beside a rough plywood belt-high table used mainly for cutting bait and cleaning fish. Folding his right leg under him he extends the other, exposing the electronic monitor clamped to his ankle. In the Bay a short ways off the pier a pair of dour pelicans perched atop two channel-marking pylons watches him carefully as if puzzled by the way he’s seated himself on the pier. Usually people stand behind the table and gut and chop the bodies of fish and toss the gooey insides and bits of flesh into the water for the pelicans and gulls to fight over. It’s not clear what this one is up to.

He unravels a stringy black charger cable and jacks one end into a socket on the anklet and plugs the other into an electrical outlet bolted to the table’s two-by-four wood frame. The metal shackle presses against the bare skin of his leg, and the Kid feels the juice flow not from the battery into his body but from his body out to the battery as if instead of being filled with electrical power he were being drained of it. It happens every time he gets the battery charged: he imagines his way from his body out to what he rationally knows is the source of the current but visualizes it instead as the ultimate receptacle for the current — as if he and millions like him were spinning the turbines at the farthest end of the line and not vice versa. He sits on the pier and stares at the dime-size battery linking his skin to the charger cord.

It takes half an hour to fully charge his monitor battery and during that half hour the Kid feels intimately connected to the millions of other convicted sex offenders young and old and in-between, rapists and child abusers and men who exposed their genitals on a bus, public masturbators, voyeurs and escalator gropers, compulsive seducers of teenage boys, coaches who couldn’t keep their hands off their athletes, men who talked dirty in Internet chat rooms to people they thought were teenage girls and then arranged to meet them for sex, fathers and uncles who drunkenly reached out for their teenage daughters as they passed by the sofa, porn addicts and fantasists lost in the misty zone between reality and imagery, no longer able to tell the difference — all of whom at this moment have plugged their electronic shackles into outlets and are sitting in the bedrooms, living rooms, and basements of houses and apartments and mobile homes, in garages, homeless shelters, public parks, in airports and train stations, in waiting rooms, offices, and the back rooms of fast-food restaurants and under causeways and overpasses — as if they were all trembling leaves on the branches large and small of a vast electrical tree that casts its shadow across the entire country.

AN HOUR LATER THE KID DROPS HIS DUFFEL and backpack beside the Writer’s Town Car. Leading Annie on her rope leash, lugging Einstein in his cage, he steps inside the store. Dolores is sweeping the floor behind the deli counter and Cat is in the back room breaking down cardboard boxes. Smiling warmly at the sight of him Dolores puts aside her broom and comes around to the front of the counter and asks what’s he got planned for today, another voyage into the heart of darkness?

She’s never read the book but has caught onto the phrase and knows it’s supposed to refer to the African jungle and be scary. She thinks the Panzacola must resemble Africa and is dangerous in spite of being so close to civilization, which is one of the things that attracted her to Appalachee when she first arrived from upstate New York — that and Cat Turnbull who resembled an old-time expat running a store at the mouth of the river for the natives who come in and trade their crafts and pelts for goods manufactured in Europe and the cities of America. Except that the natives are mostly tourists and fishermen. But she lived all her life in the mountains of the North far inland and has romanticized the South and the sea and the slow-moving meandering dark rivers that empty into it and the people who live there and even the people who visit there.

The Kid says, Actually, I gotta move on.

Listen, it’s okay by us if you keep the houseboat a while. We won’t get much call for houseboat rentals for another month anyhow. Cat’ll want you to pay for it, of course. But he’ll give you a discount.

Naw. I got to get back to where I belong.

Where’s that?

It’s where they put all us convicted sex offenders. Out here I’m the only one. And it’s kind of uncomfortable.

I don’t understand.

That’s okay. You don’t have to.

You don’t look very happy about it. But I guess you know what’s best for you.

Listen, can I ask a favor of you? You and Cat?

Certainly.

It’s about Annie and Einstein, he explains. He tells Dolores that where he’s going will be rough on them. There’s grass here for Annie to walk on and fresh air and normal people coming and going and lots of interesting birds including other parrots for Einstein to relate to. Maybe she and Cat could use a watchdog with a good bark even though she’s old and a little decrepit and a friendly tame talking parrot to amuse the tourists even though he’s kind of eccentric. He’ll leave enough money to pay for their food for a month and if it works out, once a month he’ll send whatever it costs for their upkeep.

I don’t know. They seem awfully attached to you. Why would you give them up?

I can’t provide them with the kind of home they deserve.

Look at you, hon, she says and pats his hand. You’re tearing up. Someone should give you the kind of home you deserve.

They have, he says. He retrieves his hand and turns away from her. He stares manfully out the window and sees the Writer strolling down the pier toward the store. I gotta go now, he says. Here comes my ride.

Dolores nods and reaches out and takes Annie’s leash from his hand and lifts Einstein’s cage and places it on the counter. The Kid digs into his pocket and pulls out a single hundred-dollar bill and passes it to her. Then he turns and quickly walks away.

THE WRITER’S TOWN CAR APPROACHES THE Causeway from Calusa heading toward the Barrier Isles. It crosses over the concrete arch to the far side where the Writer pulls the wide vehicle onto the gravel shoulder and parks it next to the guardrail. Cars and trucks and motorcycles roar past in both directions. He cranes his neck and peers down the steep slope into the shadows beneath the six-lane bridge. He can’t see much down there — flotsam and jetsam, a jumbled mix of building materials, trash, cardboard boxes, torn sheets of polyethylene. A tidal dump.

The Writer says to the Kid, You’re not going down there, are you?

Without answering, the Kid steps from the car and retrieves his backpack and duffel from the backseat. He walks up to the passenger’s side window and the Writer lowers it. The Kid leans in and says, Thanks for the ride, man. For all the rides, I mean. Thanks for everything.

Not a problem, Kid. But I’m a little worried about you going down there. You know, to live. It looks… dangerous.

It’s not. Not for me anyhow. Listen, the Kid says, I gotta ask you not to write about this. About any of it. You know what I’m saying? Like for a magazine or something. Or for the Internet. Definitely not for the Internet. Blogs and shit. Or on Facebook .

Why not?

I dunno. It’s just sort of private. My life, I mean. And the Professor’s and even the fucking Shyster’s. In spite of the fact that we’re on the Internet and anybody who wants to can look us up and think they know all about us, it’s still our life. It’s all we got. Know what I mean?