Lost Memory of Skin (43 page)

Cat, my dear, underneath that good nature of yours lies a suspicious nature. He’s just one of those born-to-lose kids who probably lives most of the time in his head because he hasn’t got any friends, except that big fat guy.

You could use a little more suspiciousness yourself.

As my dear departed late husband Abbott used to say, I have a sanguine personality.

Cat grins and pats Dolores on her rump and nuzzles her with his leathery face.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that dear departed late husband of yours. Him and his unforgettable words of wisdom. “Short-term profits make long-term losses.” “The biggest difference between people is their quality of attention.” “Everyone must sometimes serve.”

She nuzzles him back.
Sweet of you to remember.

You never let me forget. Still, despite your sanguine nature, whatever the hell that is, I’m gonna go over to the trailer and crank up the computer and see what I can find out about the kid.

You think the computer’s going to tell you about a total stranger?

’Course! Everybody’s on the Internet now. Even you, sweetheart.

CHAPTER TEN

T
HE
K
ID
IS
IN
AS
BLISSFUL
A
STATE
AS
HE
has ever experienced and he knows it and truly appreciates it. He’s not thinking about his past for once and he’s not thinking about his future either. It’s late afternoon and he’s miles upriver not far from where the Appalachee flows out of Turner Slough on its winding way to Calusa Bay. From the map the slough appears to be a quarter-mile wide and two miles long, a narrow shallow collecting basin for a veiny network of streams draining the farther reaches of the swamp and the watery saw grass prairies beyond. The slough is where he intends to anchor and spend the night.

Annie lies half asleep on the foredeck in shifting splotches of afternoon sunlight falling through the breaks in the overhanging foliage and Einstein released from his cage has taken a watchful position on the flat roof of the cabin. It’s the first time the Kid has let Einstein out of his cage—a true experiment because he conducted it without preferring one result over another: all he wanted was knowledge of whether the parrot despite his broken wings could fly up into the cypress trees and into the jungle where he could join a flock of other parrots most of whom are descended from escapees from urban and suburban cages themselves and live a normal free life up there among his own kind which would have seemed natural to the Kid. Or would he hang around the boat with him and Annie like a regular member of the crew where he didn’t have to hunt for food in a strange land or need protection from predators? Which also would have seemed natural to the Kid. But when the parrot stepped from his cage and did a little dance on the deck and showed no inclination to fly any farther than up onto the roof of the cabin the Kid was relieved and smiled and said,
Looks like you got first watch, man.
He decides it’s time to teach Einstein some new words and expressions. Like
Land ho!
and
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest
and
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
Time to teach the parrot how to be a proper shipmate. Annie, the Kid figures, due to her age and condition, is more of a ship’s mascot. Retired.

So far on his trip upriver he’s seen dozens of wading birds—egrets and ibises, great and blue herons, anhingas and even a huge brown stork, although he doesn’t know what they’re called, they’re just beautiful strange birds to him that stand or walk slowly in the water looking to snag a fish or a frog near the banks and in among the mangrove tunnels that branch off the Appalachee. When the houseboat approaches they flutter clumsily to the upper branches of nearby cypress trees or take a position among the clusters of bright green fan blades that top off the tall Panzacola palms where they stare down at the Kid and his crew with what looks like irritation and when the boat has passed return to the water to resume their interrupted hunt for food. He’s seen dark brown mahogany trees hugged almost to death by strangler figs and peeling red gumbo-limbo trees looking like sunburnt tourists. He’s seen six-foot-long alligators and their babies that look like mechanical toy alligators and striped mud turtles the size of bicycle helmets all snoozing together side by side in the muck. He watched a water moccasin as thick and long as his arm slip from a boney black mangrove root into the water and swim slowly alongside the boat for a few moments as if hoping for a handout before veering back toward shore and he decided right then that he’ll be bathing aboard the boat with water taken from the slough with a bucket and not do any swimming which he almost never does anyhow because he doesn’t know how to swim and for once is glad. He saw an otter dive off a log into the stream and at first thought it was a giant rat but quickly realized it was an animal that lives off the land and the slow-flowing waters of the Panzacola instead of eating human waste beneath the Causeway and took comfort in the thought and was once again very glad to be exactly where he was. He’s seen soft white orchids dangling from the trees among long strands of Spanish moss and orchids with strings of blossoms like small yellow butterflies and three-foot air plants with blushing red blooms pushing through long green wraps and thickets of gigantic ferns some of them growing on dead logs, ferns so large and ancient-looking that as a private joke he keeps an eye out for dinosaurs. From time to time he’s cut the speed of the boat almost back to zero and peered down into the water and spotted crayfish and whole schools of bluegills and sunfish and once saw what he thought was a largemouth bass and decided then and there that when he anchors at Turner Slough later he’ll make like the egrets and herons he’s been disturbing and for his first supper aboard the old
Dolores Driscoll
he’ll serve fresh-caught fish.

At half past four in the afternoon the houseboat reaches the headwaters of the Appalachee and slips through the grassy marsh into the glistening still waters of the slough. There is no overhanging foliage here, no deep dark mangrove tunnels off the stream to peer into. The sky is enormous, the light bright enough to make him wish he’d bought a pair of sunglasses back at Cat Turnbull’s store.

Now that he’s had some time to reflect on it he’s sorry that he lied to Cat about being just back from Afghanistan because he likes the man and respects him for having served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam. Whenever the Kid lies about himself or hides the facts that he’s a convicted sex offender who got kicked out of the army before completing basic training for distributing porn he feels like even more of a creep than he actually is. As if he’s something worse. A child molester like Shyster. And when he pretends that he served in Afghanistan like he did in person with Cat and online with brandi18 he feels as if he’s worse than a Shyster or a chomo. He feels like he’s a cold-blooded wife killer who got away with it, an O. J. Simpson. Secrets and lies, they eat your insides until all you have left is a hard thin skin that covers you like the shell of one of those eggs you poke a little hole in and draw out its eggy contents before you dye it for Easter.

He’s glad that Cat’s wife didn’t try to talk to him and instead just hung back and watched him with her smiling eyes because it’s harder to hide who you really are from a trusting woman like her than from a skeptical man like Cat Turnbull and he might have ended up telling her the truth about himself. Cat’s the kind of man who like most men expects you to lie to him but she’s the kind of woman who expects you to tell her the truth so before you know it you’re telling it to her. When you lie to a woman like that you feel twice as bad as when you lie to a man who expects you to lie anyhow. Most men take it for granted that people have secrets and tell lies. Most women, especially older ones, don’t. The Kid figures that’s because men have lots of secrets and tell lies on a regular basis like the Professor for instance and just about every other man the Kid has ever known. It’s just something in their masculine nature. Whereas most older women are pretty much who they seem to be and usually tell the truth at least when they’re not trying to get laid. Even the Kid’s own mother. With her what you see is what you get for better or worse. She’s 100 percent truth in advertising. Although maybe it would have been better for him growing up if she had kept a few things from him and had lied now and then about herself and about what she did in her spare time and after work in the bars of Calusa and later or when she went off with her girlfriends on cruises. Too much information, he thinks. TMI. He knows all that wasn’t his mother’s fault and he doesn’t blame her for the way his life ended up but knowing your mother’s secrets and always being told the truth by her can hurt you. Especially when you’re a child.

But these are thoughts he doesn’t want or need right now. It’s peaceful here. He’s anchored the houseboat about twenty feet off the eastern shore of the slough and he wants to concentrate on catching his supper which he just saw break the water in the weedy shadows cast by a stand of slash pines at the edge of the slough: a silvery swirl and slosh and then expanding rings of concentric ripples. It’s within easy casting distance from the boat even for the Kid who has never used a casting rod before. He’s seen it done of course by Rabbit and other denizens under the Causeway fishing in the Bay and can imitate them: a little flick of the wrist, an overhand toss of a squirming worm impaled on the hook, follow-through with the arm extended and the worm and red-striped white plastic bobber plops into the water and you watch the bobber go still until it’s suddenly pulled under and you jerk back on the rod and start reeling in what turns out to be a bluegill the shape and size of the Kid’s open palm.

Excellent first catch! Life as it was meant to be lived in the Bible when God gave human beings the Garden of Eden and told them to be fruitful and multiply. He cuts the fish open and guts and beheads it and realizes that without its head and tail it’ll barely provide two or at most three small bites so he’s going to need to catch five or six more bluegills if he wants to feed himself and his crew properly tonight. Which does not displease him. He’s happy to have to continue catching fish here in the Garden of Eden with Babylon completely out of sight and mind.

Except for the whir of the reel and the plop of the worm and bobber hitting the water at the end of his cast the only sounds are tree frogs creaking like rusty hinges and a chirping choir of crickets. The sun has slipped closer to the treetops on the western shore of the slough. Mosquitoes have begun to cloud around his face and arms but he has plenty of repellent which he spreads over his skin and he has a mosquito net to hang over his cot later. He catches two more bluegills in quick succession. Then two more. Almost enough. He cracks open a can of beer chilled in ice and takes a thrilling first gulp—the first swallow of a cold beer is always the best. It’s what you remember when you want another swallow and another beer and though they’re never as thrilling as the first the memory lingers on anyhow so you can’t complain. Reeling in his sixth bluegill in twenty minutes the Kid can’t complain about anything right now. If this isn’t heaven, which he doesn’t believe exists anyhow, it certainly is paradise.

PART V

CHAPTER ONE

I
T
’
S
A
N
EW
W
ORLD
THE
K
ID
IS
LIVING
IN
.
Literally as well as figuratively. In geological time the entire state, and especially its waterlogged southwestern corner, have only recently been delivered from the ocean. Toward the end of the Pleistocene period barely twenty thousand years ago the planet entered a last great ice age, and glaciers expanded south and north from the Poles. As the air cooled, evaporation of seawater into the atmosphere slowed, and for millennia sea levels dropped six and ten feet a century, until at last, in the shallow waters of the Caribbean off the blunt southern edge of North America, waves from the Gulf of Mexico and waves from the Atlantic begin to crash against one another and then to part and fall upon newly risen banks of coral and sand, and the long narrow subtropical peninsula gradually surfaces dripping and puddled from beneath the blue-green Caribbean.

Seeds from Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo float northward on the warm currents and winds and float south from the North American continent in the new streams and rivers and take root in the freshly emerged land, and soon there are grasses and tropical and subtropical trees and flowering shrubs and all manner of flora spreading over the land. And large schools of fish and mammals from the seas, porpoises, manatees, and seals, swim into the saline estuaries and up into the streams and marshes where they meet freshwater fish and mammals swimming down from the northern highlands into the rivers, lakes, marshes, and estuaries of the peninsula. Sun-blotting flocks of birds break their long winter migrations to the South American and Caribbean tropics and make landfall here and stay and build nests in the new trees and in among the mangroves and marshes and take up year-round residence and are fruitful and multiply. Solitary panthers and packs of red wolves in pursuit of smaller fangless prey, antelopes, squirrels, and rabbits, lope down from the wintry hills of the Alleghenies into the high-grass veldts expanding between islands of subtropical deciduous, pine, and palm trees and begin to thrive here. The large grass-eaters, bison, deer, and elk that have been roaming in hungry herds across the freezing upland plains, drift south, munching their way toward the abundant green year-round leaves and tall grasses. Behind them come lumbering onto the peninsula the very large animals slowest to roam, the megafauna—gigantic bears, mammoths, and mastodons, horse-size sloths and enormous land turtles. Until finally, following the megafauna, killing off the huge slow-footed animals with reckless abandon, come the humans—the spear-carrying, fire-making, highly intelligent and organized descendants of Asiatic hunters and gatherers migrating south and east onto the newly risen peninsula where there is a seemingly endless harvest available winter and summer from sea and land alike, where the temperature rarely drops below freezing or rises above what is pleasantly tolerable, a climate perfectly suited to their nearly naked, tattooed and painted, furless bodies.