Lost Memory of Skin (39 page)

K:
Are you ashamed, though? Like you asked me when you were interviewing me about brandi18.

P:
Ashamed? Of what?

K:
You know, of spying and shit. Being an informant and a mole and a double agent. All that.

P:
No, I’m not ashamed. And I don’t feel guilty for all those years of deceit and betrayal, secrecy and lies. That was the nature of the world then and now, and those are the rules of the game that runs the world. And once you know that, you either play the game or it plays you. I only regret that I stopped playing the game. Now it’s playing me. Except for this one last move. . . .

K:
Maybe we should shut off the camera and discuss my fee.

P:
Fair enough.

CHAPTER FIVE

T
HE
UNBLINKING
EYE
OF
THE
HURRICANE
swerves east of Calusa and crosses over the Barriers and out to sea. Then the second half of the storm pounces. The wind speed jacks up to eighty and ninety miles an hour and gusts start to reach a hundred and above. Torrential rain floods the streets of the Professor’s neighborhood and surrounding yards. At the edge of the neighborhood a tall live oak tree is uprooted and falls against a utility pole, blowing out the transformer and shutting down the electricity for a dozen blocks, including the Professor’s.

The Professor breaks out a bundle of candles and several hurricane lamps and lights up the living room. He hands a candle to the Kid, picks up a hurricane lamp for himself, and tells the Kid to follow him.
And bring your bags,
he adds. He waddles back to his study at the far end of the house, his flickering lamp casting a wedge of lemony light against the walls and ceiling as he goes. The reenergized wind slaps relentlessly at the sides of the darkened house.

The study is a small, book-lined room with an enormous blue leather recliner chair and a wide desk cluttered with books and papers. Next to the desk is a black, old-fashioned floor safe. The Professor places his lamp on top of the safe and grunting from the effort gets down on his hands and knees in front of it. He puts his eye close to the dial, spins the numbers several times each way, clockwise, then counterclockwise, and swings open the heavy door. The Kid steps forward and lowers his candle so he can see what’s inside. Filling the interior of the safe are stacks of neatly bundled cash.

He says to himself,
Excellent! Finally, Captain Kydd’s treasure!

The Professor turns and looks up at the Kid.
How much is this going to cost me?

The Kid is silent for a minute. He thinks: If we’re supposed to be negotiating my fee, he probably shouldn’t have let me see this. But it does make the hard-to-believe ex-spy story a little more believable. He takes a stab at how much cash is in the safe and says,
Ten K.

No, that’s way too much. Try twenty-five hundred dollars. That’ll buy a lot of dog food and birdseed.

The Kid remembers that everything the Professor does has a game plan. This money was probably intended for him from the beginning. All of it. Pretending to negotiate is just another of the Professor’s little mind games. The Kid says,
If you’re gonna get turned into a suicide you’re not gonna be needing any extra cash. So how about you put all the money that’s in the safe into my duffel and we’ll call it a deal. I’ll count it later.

I’ll give you five thousand dollars for your services. I need to hold back as much as possible for my family’s use. After I’m gone.

Come on, man, your wife don’t even know this money’s here. If what you told me in the interview is true, you stashed it strictly for this occasion way back. Like you say, you wrote the script. I bet your wife don’t know the combination and you don’t plan on telling it to her or writing it down for her, neither. If the cops or one of your secret agent ex-buddies decides to crack open this safe after you disappear or after they find your body, you’d want it to be empty. A whole lotta cash left here would make your suicide look real. An empty safe will help back your story in the interview.

The Professor makes his usual fat man’s professorial chuckle,
Heh-heh-heh
.
Okay, Kid, you win this one.

Yeah, except sometimes with you it seems like whatever I think and say is what you planned for me to think and say. Maybe all you really wanted was getting me to believe your spy story.

Nonsense. I’m barely in control of what I think and say myself, never mind controlling your words and thoughts too.

You’re supposed to be a fucking double agent or maybe a triple agent times two. You guys plan everything out in advance. Or maybe you’re just playing a made-up role. So who knows what you’re in control of ? Not me, that’s for sure. I’ll do what you want me to, though. With the DVD, I mean. A deal is a deal. It don’t actually matter to me what’s true about you and what isn’t. It ain’t like this is in a novel or a movie where the whole point is figuring out what’s true.

Despite what he says, the Kid is a little scared of the Professor. Especially now. The more the fat man reveals what he claims to be the truth about himself the less the Kid knows who or what the fat man is. Other than weird. If he’s telling the truth he’s the weirdest dude the Kid has ever known and if he’s lying he’s still the weirdest dude the Kid has ever known.
Just gimme the fucking money and the DVD of the interview and I’m outa here. I don’t know where I’m going but wherever it is, it has to be in Calusa County, so I’ll be checking the news for when they find your body.

The Professor points out that he can’t download the interview onto his computer and burn the DVD until the electricity comes back on. The Kid will have to stay a while. Besides, with debris flying through the air and fallen tree limbs and rising waters, it’s dangerous out there for someone on foot. He reminds the Kid, who needs no reminding, about Annie and Einstein and suggests that the Kid use the guest room for the night.

The Kid says no way. He’s willing to stay put until the storm blows over—but not inside the house. He and Annie and Einstein will sleep in the Professor’s van in the garage.

The Professor says all right and proceeds to empty the contents of the safe into the Kid’s duffel while the Kid peers down from above. He counts ten bundles of hundred-dollar bills and is pretty sure now that his first guess of ten thousand dollars was correct. Very cool ending to a treasure hunt, he thinks, even though he wasn’t exactly hunting. All he was looking for tonight was shelter for himself and Annie and Einstein.

The Kid grabs his duffel and follows the Professor into the kitchen where the Professor sets out a new meal for himself at the table. Before he sits down to eat, he makes a ham and cheese sandwich for the Kid to take with him to the garage and gives the Kid a flashlight and an extra candle. The Kid stands by the door for a minute and watches the fat man go back to the refrigerator and load a second plate with pie and ice cream and he decides to keep the doors of the van locked when he’s sleeping. Even though most of what he’s heard and seen tonight is probably a lie or a trick or part of a game whose rules he’ll never really
get,
he knows too much about the Professor now to turn his back on him. The guy never says or does anything without a hidden agenda. For all the Kid knows it could be sexual and the Professor could have a thing about the Kid’s thing. He wonders how a guy that fat can even have sex anyhow. Unless his dick is humungous—longer for instance than the Kid’s—he’d have a hard time getting his hands on it under all those rolls of fat.

Maybe he’s into giving BJs, the Kid thinks. Not for him. No BJs for the Kid these days or maybe ever. Especially not from the Professor. Not in return for the ten K. Not for any amount of money. Since getting busted that night by Brandi’s dad and the cops he hasn’t jerked off even once. He actually doesn’t like looking at his dick anymore or touching it and he sure doesn’t want anyone else looking at it or touching it. He doesn’t mind if Annie or Einstein happen to see his dick when he’s naked from a shower or changing clothes like earlier in the Professor’s guest room and bath. They’re only a sick old dog and a trash-talking bird. But no humans, male or female, are going to see it. Or touch it.

CHAPTER SIX

T
HE
AREA
OF
A
CIRCLE
IS
PI
TIMES
THE
square of its radius. Which means: if you’re required to reside 2,500 feet away from anyplace where children regularly gather—a school or a playground, for instance, or a video arcade—you have to live outside a closed circle of 9.25 million square feet. Since every school, playground, or video arcade lies at the center of such a circle and nearly all of the circles partially overlap and often extend well beyond the others, when you step clear of one 9.25-million-square-foot forbidden zone, you immediately step into part of another.

Thus, if you’re a sex offender tried and convicted in Calusa County and are required by the terms of your parole to stay in Calusa County, as is almost always the case, there are only three places where you can legally reside: under the Causeway that connects the mainland with the Barrier Isles; in Terminal G out at the International Airport; or in the eastern end of the Great Panzacola Swamp.

The Kid knows he can’t go back to the Causeway again. Whatever they had going for themselves down there before the hurricane, it’s totally smashed now. The Rabbit is dead. And Iggy is dead. Their ghosts will haunt the place forever. The Shyster, Paco, the Greek, P.C., Froot Loop, Ginger, all the residents are scattered across the city like cockroaches and in any case will be looking out only for themselves now. It’s like Paco said when he rode off into the rain. The Kid’s got to do the same. Look out only for himself. Forget communal living, collaboration, cooperation. Forget community completely. Except for Annie and Einstein, you’re on your own now, Kid.

He can’t set up camp in the parking garage at Terminal G or sleep on one of the benches in the waiting area inside. The airport’s a favorite cul-de-sac for homeless crazies, drug addicts, and alcoholics to panhandle harried travelers who are usually flush with cash and more or less confined to the terminal waiting for their delayed flights to arrive or depart. People like that are easily hit for a buck or two just to make the panhandler go away, since they’re stuck at the airport and can’t go away themselves. The homeless crazies, addicts, and alcoholics end up nodding out or falling asleep on a modernist stainless steel bench inside the terminal stinking up the place or else they look for an unlocked car in the garage or failing that break into a locked car where they can hole up till the owner comes back from his trip. Which is why there are so many cops patrolling the area. The Kid would be busted in an hour for vagrancy and sent back to prison for violating parole.

That leaves the Great Panzacola Swamp. The vast grassy marshland is a fourteen-thousand-square-mile national park that sprawls across the entire southwest quarter of the state, extending all the way east into Calusa County to where it was partially drained a generation ago by a concrete grid of thirty-foot-deep canals creating the cane fields, citrus groves, and truck farms that bump up against the expanding suburbs and tract-house developments of Greater Calusa. West of the suburbs, fields, farms, and groves, there is a sizable chunk of the swampy waters, lakes, slow shallow streams, mangrove islands, low hummocks, and grasslands—some five hundred thousand acres of the Panzacola National Park—that remains within the borders of Calusa County. The Kid can legally reside there.

Though less than thirty miles from so-called civilization, the swamp is home to alligators, small deer, the last of the American cougars, and hundreds of species of birds. Out where the freshwater streams and the shallow run-off from the lakes farther north mingle with the saline waters of Calusa Bay and the Gulf there are diminishing numbers of crocodile colonies and manatee pods. Also in recent years many Calusans have released into what looks to them like the wild exotic pets grown too large for their cages or too dangerous for domestic life with humans. The swamp has become the home away from home of twenty-foot-long Burmese pythons and other large Asian, African, and South American snakes, huge snapping turtles captured as babies in Georgia and Alabama ponds, pet wolves, feral cats, parrots and cockatoos, and in a few cases monkeys, macaques, gibbons, and at least two pet chimpanzees grown from cute little humanoids into powerful destructive adults that a year ago had to be shot by park rangers for attacking a group of their
Homo sapiens
cousins visiting the park from abroad.

At the ranger station located near the entrance to the park you can buy a ticket for a thirty-minute tour-boat ride through a small part of the swamp and out into Calusa Bay to watch the sunset. Or if you prefer to penetrate to the heart of the swamp on your own you can rent a canoe by the hour for the day. If you want to stay longer than a day but are not eager to sleep in a tent at one of the flea- and mosquito-infested campsites you can rent one of the half-dozen small underpowered flat-bottomed houseboats, stock it with water, food, iced beer or wine, fishing gear, and plenty of sunscreen and bug spray and with a topographical map of the entire multimillion-acre park in one hand and the tiller in the other you can disappear into the depths of the swamp for days or weeks or even longer if you can afford the rent.

Though he’s never been to the Great Panzacola Swamp in person and doesn’t know much about anything that he hasn’t experienced in person the Kid knows all this. He learned about the swamp and the houseboats from the Rabbit one night back when he first pitched his pup tent under the Causeway. Still unused to the noise of the traffic overhead, the filth, stench, and crowdedness of the place and the sometimes erratic scary behavior of the other residents, he was grousing to the Rabbit who was the only one living down there who had befriended him and didn’t seem to want anything from him in return. The Kid whined that there’s got to be a better place than this rat hole where they could legally reside.