Lost Memory of Skin (13 page)

The Professor glances left at the sound of a door opening and sees a thin woman in her late forties or early fifties step from the Airstream trailer, followed by a slightly older man in jeans and motorcycle boots and a muscle shirt. He has short, stiff, shoe-polish-black hair and a pure white handlebar mustache. He’s a man who lifts weights regularly—broad meaty shoulders, thick neck muscles, and slabbed biceps decorated with tattoos of overlapping dragons and unicorns. He falls into a bow-legged swagger as he nears the men. A competitive power-lifter who just got laid or a blow job, the Professor decides. Senior heavyweight division. Not a bodybuilder. Bodybuilders favor the deliberately cut look over bulk and brute strength and avoid tattoos. She must be the smoked marlin.

The man takes a position at the bar beside Trinidad Bob. The woman walks behind the bar, pulls two beers from the cooler and passes one to her companion. Her face is freckled and blotched from too much sun. She has a web of fine lines around her green eyes and a vertical cluster of smoker’s lines above her upper lip. Her thick coppery hair is cropped short, chopped rather than layered, and streaked with gray, as if the copper-red dye needs to be replenished. She’s her own hairdresser, the Professor observes. She’s full-breasted for such a thin woman and wears a loose, black chenille skirt with a dangling, ripped hem and a faded red T-shirt with
I
GOT
CRABS
AT
H
ALEY
’
S
C
RAB
S
HACK
printed across the front.

She smiles and says to the Professor,
How’re you doin’ today, big man?

Trinidad Bob says,
Boom-Boom thinks he’s a cop!

That’s interestin’. Are you?

I’m a professor at CSU. Calusa State. I’m looking for a young friend who was supposed to meet me here.

One of your students?

Sort of. A small young man in his early twenties with a buzz cut and big ears. I think he hoped to camp out here on the Key for a few days.

Sure, the Kid. He’s here. He’s still here, ain’t he, Boom?

Shut the fuck up, Yvonne.

You don’t look like a cop. Or a professor, either. I mean the way you’re dressed an’ all. What’s with the overalls?

I said shut the fuck up, Yvonne.

The weight lifter takes a final gulp from his beer and cleans his mustache with his paw like a schnauzer.
I’m outa here. Check you later
,
Boom.
He steps away from the bar, drops the can into the barrel, and walks quickly to his motorcycle. In seconds he is gone.

Yvonne smirks after him.
No good-bye even? Jeez.

Cops make Paco antsy.

He said his name was Tom.

Yeah. Whatever.

Trinidad Bob looks over at the Professor.
If you ain’t a cop how’d you know so much about me an’ Boom-Boom so fast? You a vet? You in ’Nam?

Would it make a difference if I were?

Without looking away from
Jeopardy!
Benbow says,
What branch?

101st Airborne.

Yeah, you an’ everybody else. The 101st’s like Woodstock. Everybody and his brother over fifty got high and got laid at Woodstock. What year were you in ’Nam?

In-country from December fourth, 1968, to September twentieth, 1969.

Based where?

Long Binh. And mostly up in the A Shau Valley. What is this, a quiz show? Benbow’s version of
Jeopardy!
?

Yeah. Except in
Jeopardy!
you get told the answer first and the contestant has to come up with the right question.

Fair enough. Here’s an answer. “Pup tent.”

Trinidad Bob slaps his hand on the plank to ring the buzzer.
I got it! “Where’s the Kid?”

Right. Next answer, “On the beach on the far side of the trailer.”

“Where’d the Kid pitch his pup tent?” Man, this is too fucking easy!

Shut the fuck up, Bob.

Here’s the final answer. Get it right, I buy a round of beers. “Yes.”

“Yes”? What the fuck kind of answer is that?

Think of a question that’s answered with “yes.”

Trinidad Bob scratches his head in puzzlement. Yvonne peers around Bob and Benbow at the Professor and says,
Ah, how about, “Okay if I visit the Kid in his pup tent on the beach on the far side of the trailer?”

The Professor smiles and pulls a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and lays it on the counter.
Correct. She beat you, Bob. But here’s a couple of rounds’ worth. A bonus prize.

Yvonne reaches into the cooler and pulls out two cans of Miller and sets them on the counter in front of her. Trinidad Bob does the same. Benbow pockets the twenty. He says,
You may not be a cop. But you ain’t no Vietnam vet.

The Professor moves away from the bar and starts walking toward the Airstream.
Well
,
I sure wasn’t getting I-and-I at Woodstock the third week in August of 1969. So I must’ve been getting stoned and laid in Vietnam.

Benbow calls after him,
Here’s an answer, fat man! “BOHICA”!

The Professor stops, turns, looks over at the quiz master, and coolly smiles. He tilts his head back a notch and crosses his arms over the bib of his overalls:
What’s
“
Bend over, here it comes again”? Don’t worry, Benbow
,
nobody’s gonna get fucked this time.
He turns and shambles on.

Trinidad Bob says,
Did he get it right, Boom?

Shut the fuck up an’ drink your beer.

Yvonne says,
He ain’t no cop. But he ain’t no Vietnam vet, neither.

How do you know that?

He’s too fuckin’ fat.

What is he then?

I dunno. A fuckin’ professor. Like he said.

Yeah, like you’re a cabdriver, Yvonne.

Trinidad Bob laughs and slaps his palm on an imaginary buzzer.
I got it! “How does Yvonne make a living?”

Benbow says to Yvonne,
Gimme,
and extends his hand palm up.

Yvonne pulls two twenties from her pocket and passes them over to him.

Trinidad Bob laughs.
How does Benbow make a living?

Just shut the fuck up, Bob.

The big gray parrot in the cage squawks and says,
Shut the fuck up, Bob!

CHAPTER THREE

A
PAIR
OF
WHITE
-
BREASTED
TERNS
DANCES
along the shoreline. Farther out a cackling gang of gulls spots a cruise ship passing slowly from the Bay through Kydd’s Cut into the Atlantic, wheels, and speeds off to hunt and gather in the ship’s garbage-strewn wake. The Kid has pitched his tent and dropped his duffel and cooler beside the crumbling concrete breakwater where Benbow’s property meets the sea, a spot of bare ground with a clear view of the city and the Bay and in the distance the Causeway and the Barriers. The Kid’s bicycle leans against the spindly crutchlike limbs of a nearby screw pine that’s large enough to cast a platter of all-day shade over the nylon tent. It’s an intelligent almost picturesque campsite.

A little exposed to the wind however. The Kid squats in front of his butane stove and with one hand cups his lighter flame against the blustery offshore breeze and struggles to get the stove lit. The wind keeps blowing his flame out, forcing him to start over: turn off the gas, pump up the pressure again, turn on the gas, shield the Bic, and flick it. The Kid curses—
Shit, shit, shit!—
and lets himself fall backward into a sitting position on the ground and stares angrily at the cold windblown stove.

He ate half a watermelon for breakfast and a chunk of raclette cheese and most of a box of Kashi seven-grain stone-ground crackers for lunch but he specifically wants hard-boiled extra-large organic eggs for supper, at least two from the box of eleven perfect brown eggs plus one slightly cracked egg that he grabbed last night along with the watermelon, cheese, and crackers out behind Bingo’s Wholesome Foods. He’s got a craving for healthy food and knew he needed a nutritional break from his usual diet of Cheetos and canned stew. He rode his bike over to the mainland after dark arriving early at the Dumpster an hour before the store closed catching a primo spot where the hungry and the homeless Dumpster-divers line up by the chain-link fence behind the store all waiting as patiently and politely as the paying customers inside with their overflowing carts at the cash register. When the store closes and the workers shut off the lights and go home the scavengers one by one scale the fence each in his turn.

With rare exceptions they honor the three rules of Dumpster diving: first-come first-dibs; never take more than you need; leave it cleaner than when you arrived. Since you can only take what the Dumpster gives, you can’t control your menu much. But everyone on the streets knows that upscale shoppers and the people who prepare their food are fussy about their diet and in a nice convergence of economics and marketing the high-end organic and natural foods stores like Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Bingo’s throw out more and better food—especially fresh produce, meats, fish, bread, and dairy products—than the big chain supermarkets like Publix and Price Chopper. If there’s a single cracked egg in a dozen the entire box goes into the Dumpster. If one avocado is bad the entire bag gets tossed. A spot of mold on a cheese wheel disqualifies the wheel, one head of lettuce with rusted tips ruins the crate, and a few bruised apples in a basket spoil the basket. The day before their sell-by date whole boxes and trays of baked goods, milk, hamburger, chickens, even steaks and chops get thrown out. It’s a feast of imperfect but perfectly edible organic and all-natural pesticide- and preservative-free groceries.

Back when the Kid was gainfully employed he had enough cash in hand to pay for his food and though no one ever told him he knew there was a fourth rule in the Dumpster-divers’ code: If you can afford to pay at the register inside, do it. Leave the castoffs for those who have no choice but to forage for food or starve. Now that he’s been fired and has no prospects for future employment he’s decided that even though he’s still got a few bucks left in his pocket it’s okay to hit the high-end Dumpsters and fill his pantry. With no more than what he can carry back in his bicycle basket however—the watermelon, cheese, crackers, and eggs. Enough for two days, possibly three. If he can get his fucking stove lit so he can cook some of these eggs.

The Professor approaches the Kid slowly from behind, unseen. He’s wary and anxious and not sure why. He has no reason to be afraid of the Kid and is confident that the fellow will eventually consent to be interviewed on the subject of his present circumstance. How a citizen of Calusa becomes homeless is common knowledge. At least among Calusans who, like the Professor, view homelessness as a social blight, who regard it sociologically as a community’s debilitating, possibly fatal disease and who, when naming its causes, point to alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness. Commonplace observations. It’s not as easy, however, to identify how a citizen of Calusa becomes a convicted sex offender. It’s the combination of the two that intrigues the Professor—men who are both homeless and convicted sex offenders—and their growing numbers here in Calusa and across the country. It shouldn’t be hard to get the Kid talking about his homelessness. But it may be difficult to get him to tell the truth about what he did to end up a convicted sex offender. He’s bound to be evasive about that. They all are.

Once again the Professor feels like an anthropologist who has ventured deep into the jungle and has stumbled upon a survivor of a tribe long thought to be lost or exterminated. He mustn’t frighten or anger the lad. He needs to be sensitive to the Kid’s cultural norms, even though he’s mostly ignorant of them. He can’t project onto the young man his own middle-class, academic cultural norms and assumptions. His first task will be to obtain the fellow’s trust, to overcome his understandable suspicion that he’s being objectified in the Professor’s eyes, that he’s viewed as a curiosity or as part of a social science research project, rather than as a human being.

Once he’s obtained the Kid’s trust, he’ll try for friendship. He can’t pay him for his trust and friendship, of course; that would corrupt the truthfulness of the subject’s narrative. But when the Professor learns what the fellow needs—other than a safe, more or less permanent home and social respectability, both of which the Kid will probably never be allowed to possess again, if he even had them in the first place—he can offer him certain types of small help. Occasional transportation, the odd household item that the Professor and his wife would otherwise put into a yard sale, and possibly, if he needs a job, help finding one.

This could turn into a long-term project and could eventually produce important data and proposals for dealing with both sexual offenders and the problem of homelessness here and elsewhere. For the Professor, the stakes, like the opportunities, are high. He has tenure but wouldn’t mind acquiring a Distinguished University Professorship. Or an offer from a Washington think tank.

Can I give you a hand with that?

The Kid turns and peers up at the huge man blocking the late- afternoon sun.
Yeah. Stop the fucking wind. You’re big enough.

The Professor chuckles. He’s used to chuckling; it’s his default form of laughter. He believes that overt, open-mouthed laughter makes him look too much like a jolly fat man; thus he tends not to laugh at all and rarely even smiles. If he must show pleasure or amusement or delight, he’d rather be seen as a chuckler, another stereotype, perhaps, but a slightly more serious one than that of the jolly fat man. He eases himself down to the ground and takes a position next to the Kid that effectively blocks the wind. The Kid tries again to light his stove and this time succeeds. The two sit there and watch the flame flare yellow and settle quickly back into a steadily purring blue blur.