Lost Memory of Skin (25 page)

As long as we obey Calusa city and county rules and regulations and don’t commit no crimes down here the cops’ll leave us alone.
The Kid has bought the Professor’s party line. To which in his wisdom he adds one further prohibition:
No sex offending down here. No weenie-wagging. No knob-jobbing.
He makes it clear in a way the Professor never could or would that in spite of the presence among them of predatory wolves and ex-prison punks, come-freaks and chubby-chasers, Charlies and chomos—all kind of sexual weirdos who’ve been arrested, tried, and convicted for their acts—none of them, no matter how much or what kind of therapy and rehab they’ve done, none of them is not a sexual weirdo. They are all sexually offensive. Some in fact may have been made even more obsessed with committing illegal and strange sexual acts by their conviction and time in prison than they were before being arrested. But not here beneath the Causeway. What they do with their dicks and hands and mouths and assholes anywhere else is their business. What they do here is his business, the Kid’s.

The Kid likes his new authority. He might in some oddly undefined way be working for the Professor but he’s never before held any power over anyone else. Except for Iggy. And now Einstein and Annie. A parrot who won’t talk and a watchdog too sick to bark. Now however he has the power to admit or exclude at his discretion any of the growing number of applicants for a spot under the Causeway.

By midafternoon of the second day of his return from Anaconda Key there is a total of nineteen residents, twelve more than the seven who are now running the place. And more will come. The word is spreading that it’s safe beneath the Causeway now and relatively clean. Police cruisers pass overhead without even slowing so word must have reached them too. Just as the Professor predicted the cops are practically relieved to know where all the convicted sex offenders are located at least at night and except for those who have jobs to go to most days as well. They’re fishing in the Bay, scavenging food from the Dumpsters and trash bins behind restaurants and supermarkets, repairing and cleaning their tents and huts, and have even started picking up the trash tossed from cars passing over the Causeway between the mainland and the Great Barrier Isles, bagging beer cans, food wrappers, plastic bottles, as if they’ve adopted that section of the highway like any other civic organization. This place is theirs.

CHAPTER FOUR

T
HE
MORNING
OF
THE
THIRD
DAY
OF
THE
Kid’s return to the Causeway the Professor shows up early and checks the place out and is pleased by what he sees. He’s red-faced and sweating from the effort of descending from his van on the roadway above. The Kid remembers reading in Shyster’s Bible the story of Genesis. The Professor is like God stopping by to visit the Garden of Eden and approving the way his human beings are running the place.

Nice work, Kid. The number of residents is multiplying. But that means it’s going to be harder to keep order,
the Professor notes and suggests adding two or more members to the security committee.

The Kid says he’ll take that under consideration. He doesn’t want the Professor to think he’s God and in charge down here even though in a sense he is.
I’ll talk it over with Paco
. He informs the Professor that he’s thinking of forming a construction and maintenance committee. They need to build a shower stall and some of the shanties have to be rebuilt.
Most of these guys can’t buckle their belts or tie their fuckin’ shoes right let alone pitch a tent or build a hut outa old boards and plastic.

The Professor nods as if approving and tells the Kid to follow him and leads the Kid away from the others out of earshot. He sits his enormous body down on a grassy slope near the path down from the roadway and pats the ground next to him.
Take a seat. I have something to show you.

The Kid doesn’t quite sit where he’s told; he squats three feet away ready to stand up in case the Professor reaches out and lays one of his meaty paws on his thigh. He still doesn’t quite get the Professor’s interest and deepening involvement with the men living under the Causeway. Unless he’s a sex offender himself only not convicted. Although for the Kid it’s very hard to imagine a guy that fat having any kind of sex life at all, even in his head. He knows about chubby-chasers, guys who are into sex with fatties, but they usually aren’t fatties themselves. And the Professor’s not just fat, he’s two or three times fat. He’s enormous all over and wears clothes that make him look even fatter than he is as if he’s trying to warn people off his mountain of flesh. His three-piece suit and buttoned-up shirt and wide necktie strangling his neck with a Windsor knot the size of a fist and his hard leather brogans are like body armor. Plus his beard and long hair enlarge his head and make him look like he’s wearing a hair helmet.

Whaddaya got?

What you’ve been waiting for, my friend.

The Professor pulls a folded sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket, carefully unfolds it and passes it to the Kid.

The map! Very cool. Very very cool
.

It’s only a copy of the original. A copy of a copy, actually. The original is in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress, where I expect no one except for me has seen it in two hundred years.

The Kid gives it a once-over, then a closer look, then gazes a little wistfully out across the Bay to the Calusa skyline and beyond to Anaconda Key and west to the Barriers and the stacked hotels facing the ocean there. He’s trying to place the map of the island onto the world that surrounds him. The map is hand drawn and to the Kid looks old-fashioned enough to have been made by Captain Kydd himself even though it’s on a standard sheet of typing paper but like the Professor said it’s a copy of a copy. The original is probably an old sheet of parchment and much larger and faded by time.

The island is shaped sort of like a diving whale with its mouth wide open as if about to swallow a much smaller island. The smaller island has the words
S
KELETON
I
SLAND
written next to it. The mouth of the whale looks like a bay, unnamed like the whale-shaped island which has a second segment attached to its backside as if a shark were riding piggyback on the whale or maybe it’s the whale’s baby and the mother whale is diving for a chunk of food for her baby. There are other words written on the map:
C
APE
OF
Y
E
W
OODS
,
S
PYEGLASS
H
ILL
,
N
ORTH
I
NLET
,
S
WAMP
,
W
HITE
R
OCK
,
and so on, and in the water surrounding the island are numbers indicating the depths, the Kid figures, none of them over 14 and most of them low numbers, 3, 4, and 5 and so on.

Pretty shallow waters, the Kid observes to himself. Maybe Calusa Bay didn’t used to be as deep as it is now since they dredged it out to make the Barrier Isles and the Cut between the Barriers and Anaconda Key for deep-water freighters and cruise ships to come and go. Maybe back then two hundred or more years ago this place didn’t look like it does now. He’s sure the sky was the same huge blue dome spreading from horizon to horizon from the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean in the east and south and in a vast sweep overhead to the endless Great Panzacola Swamp on to the far side of the swamp to the Thousand Islands and west of the islands the Gulf of Mexico. The sky never changes. He knows that the land between the horizons was flat as a table from shore to shore barely two or three feet above sea level with low sandy ridges and mounds heaped up in places here and there by the hurricanes that for centuries roared out of the Gulf and the Caribbean every summer and fall just as they do today. There were no buildings anywhere then—no skyscrapers, no hotels, no miles and miles of condo developments, gated communities, suburban ranches, and bungalows. No geometrically laid-out fields of sugarcane, vegetables, strawberries, citrus orchards. No mile after mile of drainage and irrigation dikes and canals carrying off the waters of the Great Panzacola Swamp and the overflow from the huge lakes in the central portion of the state. No highways, cloverleafs, bridges, overpasses and underpasses, no causeways. No Claybourne Causeway for sure. No Great Barrier Isles. No Mirador Hotel & Restaurant, Rampart Road with its boutiques, cafés, restaurants, tourists, and hustlers. No airport or Boeing 747s cutting across the sky. No cars, trucks, buses rumbling back and forth day and night between the mainland and the Barriers. No Barriers even, because they’re man-made. No people! Mainly that. No people and everything they’ve done to the land and the water and all the animals that live on the land and the creatures that swim in the waters and the birds that fly above.

The Kid is imagining his city the way the pirates under Captain Kydd saw it when they first sailed into what’s now called Calusa Bay. He doesn’t know their story or the history of this place but with the map in his hand he can imagine it. They’d approach the mainland from the east-southeast sailing up from the Caribbean atop that deep green current called the Gulf Stream. They’d be on the run after pulling off a set of daring raids in the waters off the coast of Hispaniola, their ship loaded down with bars and coins of stolen gold. The Kid would’ve climbed to the crow’s nest atop the mainmast, sent up by the Captain to keep a sharp lookout:
Keep your starboard eyeball on the glass for ships sailing north behind us, lad. And use your portside eye for the dear old harbor on the east coast of the mainland.
That dear old harbor would be Calusa Bay though it’s not yet named and isn’t on any maps yet, not even the Captain’s.

Between the string of low-lying coastal islands and the mainland a meandering river that drains the mainland dissolves in a marshy delta and empties into a broad bay so that when you enter the bay your first sight of the mainland is of a long green line dividing the sea from the cloudless sky. It’s midday with a light breeze out of the east and where the bow slides through the low waves the water glitters like silver coins. After decades of pillage and flight Captain Kydd knows these waters better than any other man. He takes the wheel himself, orders the mainsails down, and brings his ship straight in toward shore as if he plans to run it aground on the offshore mangrove islets. It’s high tide and from above in the crow’s nest you can see the narrow cut between two of the islets, a channel deep enough at high tide and just wide enough to let the ship slip past the islets into the broad blue-green bay.

The waters on the seaward side of the mangrove isles are thick with schools of silver fish surging and turning in huge sweeping motions, wide rivers of fish just beneath the surface so closely crowded that you can drop a bucket into the sea and bring it back filled with flopping gasping fish. You can drag a weighted basket across the sandy bottom and a minute later pull it back to the ship and dump dozens of large spiny lobsters onto the deck. As the ship approaches, flocks of birds—anhingas, pelicans, cormorants, egrets, and herons—rise from the mangroves into the sky where they thicken into layers of birds and spread out until they block the sun and cover the sea and ship below in darkness as if evening has come on. Herds of sea cows, enormous lumbering manatees, part for the ship, making room for it to pass from the sea into the bay, then gather behind it into a massed crowd of animals, hundreds of them, gently watchful, trusting, and almost politely deferring to the ship.

All sails are furled now and the crew has been sent to man the lifeboats and tow the ship slowly across the bay toward the mainland. As the Kid rows, he looks back over his shoulder at the lush flowering trees, the jacaranda and lignum vitae and the flame-colored poincianas and the forests of thatch palms and palmettos and groves of slash pine spreading inland from the sandy shore. There are sea grapes and along the islets where the streams empty into the bay white, red, and black mangroves float on their stilts.

Captain Kydd stands in the bow of the lead lifeboat. The first mate sits in the stern manning the rudder while the Captain indicates with his one good arm where to aim the boat. There are eight men rowing, their backs bent to their destination, and though the Kid doesn’t want to be seen slacking off every now and then he turns in his seat and steals a look at where he’s headed. They’re moving north in the bay a few hundred yards off the mainland, slowly towing the ship toward what appears to be a large low-lying island at the far end of the bay. He spots a protective shelf of land with hills high enough to look out over the tops of the mangrove islets one way to see if danger is approaching by sea and over the tops of the pines and palms and lush flowering trees the other way to see if danger is approaching by land.

From the top of the highest hill which the Captain has named Spyeglass Hill you can survey the entire island. It’s shaped like a whale with a shark riding its back. The mouth of the whale is wide open and about to swallow the smaller island. The ship has been anchored in the shallow waters on the leeward side of the smaller island. When the tide turns and the waters empty from the cove turning it into a mudflat the ship’s hull will be exposed to the sun and air. One crew will go to work scraping it free of barnacles and sea worms. A second crew will cut trees and construct a small fort atop Spyeglass Hill and a palisade in case they are attacked either by the murderous Indians or by a contingent of European or American sailors. A third crew carefully selected by the Captain for their loyalty to him will carry from the ship his treasure—trunks and wooden cases filled with gold bars and coins, jewels and precious stones, a ton or more in all—sweating in the afternoon sun, lugging the booty from the ship across the mudflat into the jungle to a spot near the center of the island that only the Captain knows how to find, where there is a cave that he has used for years as a hiding place for his stolen cargo. The cave is like an enormous vault known only to a handful of men who have been sworn to secrecy in exchange for a promise to share out the treasure when the time comes for the Captain to give up piracy on the high seas and return to land and a life of respectable law-abiding luxury. The Captain holds five shares of the treasure and the five men he’s chosen to divide it with hold one share each.