Lost Memory of Skin (14 page)

Thanks.

You’re welcome.

For several minutes they are silent until the Kid stands and visits his tent and returns with the carton of eggs, a gallon jug of water, and a blackened saucepan. He pours three inches of water into the pan and sets it on the stove and sits back down on the ground beside the Professor.

Fresh eggs, man. Organic.

Pretty thin pickings, I’d say. For a growing boy.

Yeah? You into hitting on me or something? You some kinda faggot?

The Professor chuckles.
Not in a million years, Kid.

What’s with them old-timey overalls, then? They look pretty faggoty to me, if you wanna know the truth. Especially on a guy built like you.

I just spent the day pretending I’m a carpenter building a house. It’s a volunteer project, Habitat for Humanity.

What’s that?

We build houses for poor people. Remember Jimmy Carter?

Yeah. Sort of. He was like the president way back.

Correct. The thirty-ninth president of the United States
,
and afterward he did volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity. Among other good things.

I s’pose he wore old-timey overalls too? And hippie sandals.

Not while he was president.

That’s good.

So how do you like it here at Benbow’s? Better than under the Causeway?

The water in the saucepan has come to a boil. With a spoon the Kid carefully places two eggs into the pan. He seems to consider the Professor’s question for a moment. Finally he points to his electronic ankle bracelet and says,
I can’t stay here, except for a coupla days at most.

You can’t? Why not? Benbow’s is surely more than twenty-five hundred feet from a school or playground.

Yeah. But I don’t think Benbow’s is what it seems.

What is it
,
then? If it’s not what it seems.

I dunno. It’s sort of like a movie set maybe. That dude Trinidad Bob says among other things they shoot lots of commercials here but my parole officer says they’re only pretending like it’s some kind of funky island beach club with old guys hanging out making like they’re fucked-up Vietnam vets or something. They’re like wearing Vietnam vet costumes, she says. For TV and fashion magazines an’ shit. Mostly models in bathing suits and underwear and other filmy items. A lot of the models are under eighteen. At least that’s what my parole officer told me. I hadda let her know where I was living after I left the Causeway, and she checked in with Benbow, who ended up telling her they had a shoot scheduled this week for Gap Kids or something and there’s gonna be lots of little kids running around posing for the cameras in bathing suits and underwear. Besides, Benbow’s sort of paranoid about having me camped out here in the first place. Me and people like Paco, we attract attention from cops an’ shit. There’s probably a certain amount of illicit substances being circulated, if you know what I mean. Due to the fashion industry being here so much. And who knows what the fuck they really photograph and film out here? Other than Gap and magazine fashion ads.

Who’s Paco?

A biker dude from under the Causeway. Friend of mine. He came out here when I did.

We just met. I think he suspects I’m an undercover cop.

Paco’s like a part-time mechanic at a biker garage up in North Calusa. He’s got a job at least. Unlike me. But Benbow’s not cool with him being a permanent resident. He told me he’s gonna move back under the Causeway tomorrow. I guess I will too.

But why?

No place else to go
,
man. Same as with Paco. Same as with everybody who was living there. They’re all gonna come drifting back to the Causeway eventually. Too bad. I kinda like the view here. The sewer factory stinks when the wind’s offshore, but that’s only about half the time. Plus I was hoping maybe I could get Benbow to hire me to help smoke the fish when it comes in and sell it to people or tend bar or something. Or just keep the place cleaned or painting it. I’m good at that. But he doesn’t want it cleaned or painted. They need it looking fucked-up and funky. For the cameras. I guess it turns people on. The desert island fantasy.

I rather doubt he’d hire you to help sell the smoked fish. But maybe he could use you to tend bar.

All he needs for that is the other dude, Trinidad Bob. Trinidad Bob’s part of the act. Like he’s a prop. Even the old dog out there is a prop. And the parrot. You see the parrot in the cage by the bar?

I did.

The whole fucking island’s like a movie set. Probably the whole city of Calusa is. Maybe we’re all only props, like Trinidad Bob and that old broken-down dog and the parrot. You kinda look like a prop
,
y’ know. Like one of those TV wrestlers from WWF. You could be Professor Humungous Haystack.

Very funny. But won’t the police just come back to the Causeway and throw you out again?

Yeah. Prob’ly.

Where will you go then?

I’m starting to think three hots and a cot.

What do you mean?

Jail, man. Get myself busted for shoplifting a six-pack from a 7-Eleven.

You can’t mean that!

No money, no job, no legal squat. You got any better ideas, Humungous?

The Kid reminds the Professor of Huckleberry Finn somehow. Here he is now, long after he lit out for the Territory, grown older and as deep into the Territory as you can go, camped out alone where the continent and all the rivers meet the sea and there’s no farther place he can run to. The Professor wants to know what happened to that ignorant, abused, honest American boy between the end of the book and now. After he ran from Aunt Sally and her “sivilizin’,” how did he come years later to having “no money, no job, no legal squat”? In twenty-first-century America.

How old are you, Kid?

Twenty-two. Why?

Just wondering. How long have you been living like this?

Like what?

Well, under the Causeway. And now here. Homeless. And on permanent parole, so to speak.

Little over a year. Since I did my time. And I’m not on permanent parole. Just ten years. Nine to go.

How much actual time did you do?

Three months up in Hastings. Minimum security. I got three months off for good behavior, though. Or it would’ve been six months.

You want to tell me what you were convicted of ?

No, not especially. Anyhow, you can look it up.

Not if I don’t know your real name.

No shit.

So do you want to tell me your real name?

What is this, a fucking quiz show?

The Professor chuckles. Quiz shows seem to be on everyone’s mind today. The coincidence amuses him and the irony comforts him: quizzes, tests, exams of all kinds are his specialty and have been since he was a schoolboy answering every question correctly on every test from kindergarten through graduate school; going off the charts on IQ tests, pulling perfect scores on his SATs and GREs; and even after graduate school rising through the ranks and becoming the highest nationally rated Mensa member before he was thirty years old. More recently he has moved beyond Mensa to the even more exclusive Prometheus Society, which requires applicants to take the Langdon Adult Intelligence Test, a test specifically designed to winnow qualified membership down to the one-per-million level, compared to Mensa’s paltry one-per-thirty-thousand. The Professor likes tests. It would be more accurate to say that he likes questions, questions with answers that nearly no one other than the Professor can answer. One person in a million.

It shouldn’t be difficult to answer the question of the Kid’s real name. No need to sit around waiting for the Kid to volunteer it. All he has to do is Google his way onto the National Sex Offender Registry, click
find offenders,
then
search by location
, and type in
Calusa
. A map will pop up pocked with little colored boxes, each box representing the location of a convicted sex offender, color-coded red, yellow, blue, and green to indicate the nature of the offense. Red is for offenses against children; yellow is for rape; blue is for sexual battery; and green is for “other offenses,” which is everything from “second-degree sodomy” and “second-degree sexual abuse” to “lewd and lascivious behavior.” That’s probably the Kid’s color, given the relatively short length of his sentence.

Blank boxes indicate the location of a school or playground. For a city the size of Calusa there would be thousands of blank squares and hundreds of green squares on the map, and it would take a while, unless he were lucky, for the Professor to click randomly onto the Kid’s box, and suddenly there on the screen he’d see a mug shot of the Kid, with his real name beneath it, a descriptive history of his convictions, his age at the time of the offense and the age of his victim, last known address, employer’s address, his race, height, weight, eye color, date of birth, and markings. Everything the Professor needs to know in order to start finding out what he wants to know.

It would be more pleasing to him, however, if he could pop the Kid’s real name into the conversation unaided. Relying on the National Sex Offender Registry feels a little like cheating, not that different from his students’ reliance on Wikipedia and other search engines to research their papers. It’s not exactly plagiarism, especially if they acknowledge the source, which they seldom do, but it is lazy and topic specific, so the students rarely learn anything beyond the narrow subject they’ve typed into the subject line. And what they do learn about the subject is no more reliable or authoritative or detailed than what the little colored squares reveal about the Kid’s offense. Yes, his mug shot may come up from under a green box, and maybe he will turn out to have been convicted on a certain date of “second-degree sexual abuse” against an unnamed victim who was eleven years old at the time, let’s say. But was the victim a girl or a boy? Was he or she a family member, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger? What exactly did he do to that little girl or boy? Was it a first offense? Was he alone? And why did he do it?

From his past study of the sexual offender laws of his home state of Alabama, he remembers that a person commits “sexual abuse in the second degree” (1) if he subjects another person to sexual contact who is incapable of consent by reason of some factor other than being less than sixteen years old; or (2) if he, being nineteen years old or older, subjects another person to sexual contact who is less than sixteen years old, but more than twelve years old. The Professor also remembers that in Alabama sexual abuse in the second degree is a Class A misdemeanor, unless that person commits a second or subsequent offense of sexual abuse in the second degree within one year of another sexual offense, in which case the offense is a Class C felony. Calusa’s not in the state of Alabama, but the Professor believes the definition is boilerplate for most southern states. He can check it easily enough. The Professor calls to mind the Internet address of the statute: Code of Alabama/1975/13A-6-67. Acts 1977, No. 607, p. 812, §2321; Act 2000-728, p. 1566, §1.

“Kid” is an alias, I take it.

You could say that.

Is it a first name or a last?

Both.

Sort of like Kydd’s Cut, then.

What d’ you mean?

The deep-water channel out there running between the Barriers and Anaconda Key. Kydd’s Cut. It leads from the Bay out to the ocean.

News to me.

Supposedly, the famous pirate Captain Kydd used it when he was prowling the Spanish Main and Calusa was his base of operations. All the other channels between the ocean and the low mangrove islands that were filled in and are now called the Barriers were too shallow for a ship to enter. The only way in or out of the Bay was through that one channel, which Kydd could easily defend with the cannon emplacements that he located here on Anaconda Key and over there by the high-rises on what’s now called Bougainvillea Shores.

No shit.
The Kid has finished his eggs. He lights a cigarette and extends the pack to the Professor.
Smoke?

No, thanks.

Quit?

Never smoked cigarettes.

Yeah, well, I’m in the process of quitting myself. Tell me more about this Captain Kydd dude, the pirate. How’d he spell it? Like, was it K-I-D, or what?

Variously, as
K-Y-D-D
and
K-I-D-D
. A few documents have it as
K-I-D-D-E
. He was Scottish, born around 1645, a commoner who ran away to sea at a young age. He was executed in London by the British crown in 1701. Actually, he was executed twice. The rope broke the first time, and they had to do it over. Then, as a warning to would-be pirates, they locked his body in an iron cage and hung it from a pole over the Thames River to rot. It hung there for twenty years until it finally disintegrated and the remaining parts fell into the river.

That’s hard, man. The fucking Brits. They’re fucking hard.

He left among his papers a piece of a coded map of the island where he buried his treasure, but no one’s been able to figure out where the island is located. Some think it was off Long Island, others say it’s Oak Island in Nova Scotia. There’s even a possibility he buried his loot on an island off the coast of Vietnam, where he sailed late in his career. On his map the body of water that surrounds the island is called the China Sea, which most people take to be code for Long Island Sound or the Bay of Fundy. But some of us believe it may refer to the actual China Sea, Nan Hai. Which would suggest the island of Cu Loo Hon or possibly Hon Tre, off the coast of Vietnam. I got a little bit involved with that myself back in the early 1980s.