Lost Memory of Skin

CHAPTER ONE

IT ISN’T LIKE THE KID IS LOCALLY FAMOUS for doing a good or a bad thing and even if people knew his real name it wouldn’t change how they treat him unless they looked it up online which is not something he wants to encourage. He himself like most of the men living under the Causeway is legally prohibited from going online but nonetheless one afternoon biking back from work at the Mirador he strolls into the branch library down on Regis Road like he has every legal right to be there.

The Kid isn’t sure how to get this done. He’s never been inside a library before. The librarian is a fizzy lady — ginger-colored hair glowing around her head like a bug light, pink lipstick, freckles — wearing a floral print blouse and khaki slacks. She’s a few inches taller than the Kid, a small person above the waist but wide in the hips like she’d be hard to tip over. The sign on the counter in front of her says REFERENCE LIBRARIAN, GLORIA… something — the Kid is too nervous to register her last name. She smiles without showing her teeth and asks if she can help him.

Yeah. I mean, I guess so. I dunno, actually.

What are you looking for?

You’re like the reference lady, right?

Right. Do you need to look up something in particular?

The air-conditioning is cranked and the place feels about ten degrees cooler now than it did when the Kid came through the door and he suddenly realizes he’s shivering. But the Kid’s not cold, he’s scared. He’s pretty sure he shouldn’t be inside a public library even though he can’t remember there being any rules specifically against entering one as long as he’s not loitering and it’s not a school library and there’s no playground or school nearby. At least none that he’s aware of. You can never be sure though. Playgrounds and schools are pretty much lurking everywhere. And children and teenagers probably come in here all the time this late in the day to pretend they’re doing homework or just to hang out.

He looks around the large fluorescent-lit room, scans the long rows of floor-to-ceiling book-lined shelves — it’s like a huge supermarket with nothing on the shelves but books. It smells like paper and glue, a little moldy and damp. Except for a geeky-looking black guy with glasses and a huge Adam’s apple and big wind-catching ears sitting at a table with half-a-dozen thick books and no pictures opened in front of him like he’s trying to look up his ancestors there’s no other customers in the library.

A customer — that’s what he is. He’s not here to ask this lady for a job or looking to rent an apartment from her and he’s not panhandling her and he’s for sure not going to hit on her — she’s way too old, probably forty or fifty at least and pretty low on the hotness scale. No, the Kid’s a legitimate legal customer who’s strolled into the library to get some information because libraries are where the information is.

So why is he shaking and his arms all covered with goose bumps like he’s standing naked inside a meat locker? It’s not just because he’s never actually been inside a library before even when he was in high school and it was sort of required. He’s shivering because he’s afraid of the answer to the question that drove him here even though he already knows it.

Listen, can I ask you something? It’s kinda personal, I guess.

Of course.

Well, see, I live out in the north end and the people in my neighborhood, my neighbors, they’re all like telling me that there might be like a convicted sex offender living there. In the neighborhood. And they tell me that you can just go online to this site that tells you where he’s living and all and they asked me if I’d check it out for them. For the neighborhood. Is it true?

Is what true?

You know, that you can just like go online and it’ll tell you where the sex offender lives even if you don’t know his name or anything.

Well, let’s go see, she says like he asked her what’s the capital of Vermont and leads the Kid across the room to a long table where six computers are lined up side by side and no one is using them. She sits down in front of one and does a quick Google search under convicted sex offenders and up pops the National Sex Offender Registry which links straight to www.familywatchdog.us. The Kid stands at a forward tilt behind her shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He thinks he should run now, get out of here fast before she clicks again but something he can’t resist, something he knows is coming that is both scary and familiar keeps him staring over the librarian’s shoulder at the screen the same way he used to get held to the screen when cruising pornography sites. The librarian clicks find offenders and then on the new menu hits by location and another menu jumps up and asks for the address.

You’re from Calusa, right? What’s your neighborhood’s zip code?

It’s… ah… 33135.

Any particular street you want to look up?

He gives her the name of the street where his mother lives and he used to live and she types it in and hits search. A pale green map of his street and the surrounding twenty or so blocks appears on the screen. Small red, green, and orange squares are scattered across the neighborhood like bits of confetti.

Any particular block?

The Kid reaches down to the screen and touches the map on the block where he lived his entire life until he enlisted in the army and where he lived again after he was discharged. A red piece of confetti covers his mother’s bungalow and the backyard where he pitched his tent and built Iggy the iguana’s outdoor cage.

The librarian clicks onto the tiny square and suddenly the Kid is looking at his mug shot — his forlorn bewildered face — and he feels all over again the shame and humiliation of the night he was booked. There’s his full name, first, last, and middle, date of birth, height, weight, his race, color of his eyes and hair, and the details of his crime and conviction.

Slowly the librarian turns in her chair and looks up at the Kid’s real face, then back at the computerized version.

That’s… you. Isn’t it?

I gotta go, he whispers. I gotta leave. He backs away from the woman who appears both stunned and saddened but not at all afraid which surprises him and for a few seconds he considers trying to explain how his face and his description and criminal record got there on the computer screen. But there’s no way he can explain it to someone like her, a normal person, a lady reference librarian who helps people look up the whereabouts and crimes of people like him.

Wait. Don’t leave.

I gotta go. I’m sorry. No kidding, I’m really sorry.

Don’t be sorry.

No, I’m prob’ly not even supposed to be here, he says. In the library, I mean. He turns and walks stiff-legged away and then as he nears the door he breaks into a run and the Kid doesn’t stop running until he’s back up on his bike heading for the Causeway.

LIKE EVERYONE OVER A CERTAIN AGE THE KID has a name naturally but none of his neighbors under the Causeway knows it and he has no intention of giving it out unless the alternative is getting beat up or cut by one of the more occasionally violent wing-nuts living down there — although violence is not really their thing or why they’re down there. Or unless he’s required by law to give his full legal name which happens often enough to make the Kid stash his ID in his right sneaker where he can snatch and deliver it quickly if he needs to prove his age to buy booze or cigarettes or if a cop or an officer of the court or a social worker calls for it. Everyone else — the men who live alongside him under the Causeway and the waiters and waitresses and the other busboys he works with at the Mirador and even his boss Dario who because he hands out the paychecks actually does know his real name — everyone else calls him Kid and refers to him in his absence as the Kid.

I’ve been meaning to ask, what’s he doing down here? Has the fellow a name?

“Meanin’ to ask.” That’s funny. What’re you doin down here? “Fellow.”

Same as you, I assume.

Who the fuck you talkin ’bout anyhow?

The little white guy with the bike. Lives in the tent with the lizard.

Ask him yourself.

Most of the people he knew when he was a boy and in high school know the Kid by his real name and the guys he went through basic training with and his mother of course and some of her friends, they know it. But he hasn’t spoken to any of them not even his mother in over a year and whenever he accidentally on the street spots somebody he once knew slightly from school or from hanging out at the mall in the old days or his job at the light store before he enlisted in the army which happens every now and then even though he never visits his old neighborhood anymore he stares straight ahead and keeps pedaling or if on foot cuts across the street or just turns on his heels and walks the other way.

No one he knew before wants to meet up with him anyhow so when they recognize him they do the same thing — turn around and walk the other way or check out the shoes in a Payless window or if there’s no other way to avoid eye contact cover their face with a cap brim or sunglasses or even with their hands. In that sense things aren’t much different now than they’ve always been. The way he sees it people have been avoiding him all his life except for the people he’s become acquainted with in the past year. Not counting those who work for the state and have read his file as part of their job the men under the Causeway are in a sense the Kid’s new and true friends and know nothing whatsoever about his private or public past and therefore do not noticeably avoid him and are okay with calling him Kid. It’s superficial but it’s what he’s always preferred and maybe needs — strictly enforced surface relations with people — and with his buzz cut and thin pointed nose and nub of a chin and his big ears and being short and skinny as a jockey although pretty muscular if he says so himself it’s what he looks like anyhow: a kid.

So what’s your name, kid?

Dude, that is what it is. Thankyouverymuch. Good-bye.

What, like the Sundance Kid? Captain Kydd? The Cisco Kid? Billy the Kid?

Yeah, sure, all those guys. Who the fuck’re you?

The Kid turns away and locks his bike to the concrete pillar next to his pup tent. The bike is an old dented Raleigh three-speed that he spotted unlocked in an alley between Rafer and Island Drive on his way to work one day and when he came back that evening it was still there. The bike was dark green and had a wire basket in front and a wide rack over the rear fender and no lock. He figured it was a rental abandoned by a drunk tourist who forgot where he left it or a throwaway or maybe a Chinese food delivery bike the delivery guy was too lazy to lock. He grabbed it and rode it back to the Causeway and later took it apart and spray painted it black just in case and bought a black carbon steel cable-lock for it.

Leashed to a cinder block by a somewhat longer link-chain is the Kid’s iguana. Its name is Iggy which the Kid now thinks is sort of dumb but he was only ten when his mother presented him with the iguana and the singer Iggy Pop for some reason was the first thing that came into his head and eventually the iguana and its name became one the way he and his name Kid have become one and it was too late by then to change it. When it was a baby it was only eight or ten inches long and quick and bright green and cute. Almost decorative. Twelve years later it’s the length and weight of a full-grown alligator — six feet long head to tail and twenty-seven pounds — and no longer cute. Definitely not decorative. Its thick muscular body is covered with dark gray scales. A raised jagged dorsal fin runs from its head along its back and down the long tail. It’s a beast straight from the age of dinosaurs but to the Kid its appearance is as normal as his mother’s. Dewlaps drape in soft fans from its boney jaw and there are thin fringes of flesh on its clawed toes that stiffen and rise as if saluting him when the Kid approaches. It wears its eardrums on the outside of its head behind and below the eyes. On top of its head is a primitive third eye — a gray waferlike lens that keeps a lookout for overhead predators which are large birds mainly. According to some experts the third eye tracks the sun and functions as a guidance system. Early on the Kid made a systematic online study of iguanas. He learned everything he could about the creature’s body, its needs and desires, habits, fears, strengths and weaknesses. In school he never got a grade higher than a C- but if iguana had been a subject he would have received an A+. Iggy was the only creature other than himself that he had ever been obliged to care for and he decided to do it the way he wished someone had cared for him — as if the iguana were a human child and he were its parent.

He fed it a strictly vegetarian diet — bell peppers, okra, squash, and plenty of leafy greens and tropical fruits like papaya, mangoes, and melons — taking care to avoid vegetables known to be toxic to iguanas like potatoes and tomatoes and fruits with pits like plums and apricots. In the beginning he talked to it in his few words of junior high school Spanish because it was originally from Mexico but after a while when he got nowhere with Spanish he switched to English and still got nowhere. Eventually he stopped talking to the iguana altogether because he came to enjoy and trust the silence between them as if the two of them were buddies in an old-time silent movie. Mostly they spent a lot of time just staring at each other and making faces.

At first he kept it in his bedroom in a forty-gallon glass aquarium furnished with mossy rocks and coconut fiber and gravel. But iguanas grow fast and as it grew he had to buy bigger and bigger aquariums. Before long there were no pet store aquariums large enough. Also iguanas are arboreal and are happiest when they think they’re in a tree. So after about two years when Iggy was a teenager the Kid pushed all the furniture in his room to one side and built a floor-to-ceiling chicken-wire cage that filled the other half of the room. He covered the floor of the cage with crushed bark and installed the trunk and leafless branches of a dead lemon tree he found at a construction site. He kept the temperature constant with a heat lamp and controlled the humidity with a small humidifier. It was Iggy’s own private jungle.

Lawrence. Larry.

Larry what?

Somerset.

Larry Somerset. Lawrence Somerset. Rings a bell. You must’ve been famous once. Like in the news.

I had my fifteen minutes.

Yeah, tell me about it sometime. I got to feed my man here.

The Kid ducks into his tent and rummages through a plastic tub for the bag of wilted spinach and the overripe cantaloupe he foraged yesterday from the Dumpster behind the Whole Foods store on Bayfront Street. He wonders about this new guy. Except for the wrinkled pale gray suit and stained dress shirt he looks like another of the two dozen or so middle-aged and older homeless weirdos who’ve come to a final stop under the Causeway and like the others he acts as if everyone down here belongs to the same club and thinks the Kid in spite of his youth is a member too. He’ll learn differently before long. The Kid is not a member of any club. At least not willingly. Other people can put him in this category or that and say he’s one of those or these but in the Kid’s mind he’s a one-and-only one of a kind. A loner. That’s what kind he is. And even among loners he’s unique. Singular. Solo-fucking-mee-o.

The man named Larry Somerset is a little taller than the rest and soft in the face and belly like he’s spent his life sitting in a padded chair signing official documents and giving orders to underlings. He wears a plain gold wedding ring. The Kid notices it at first glance because a wedding ring is unusual down here and the guy has a black brush of a goatee that looks dyed and long graying hair combed straight back to where it curls over the dirty collar of his shirt. The Kid is sure he’s never met him before but something about the guy is familiar especially the name like he maybe read it in the Calusa Times-Union.

It’s obvious even with his floppy wide-cuffed trousers that the guy’s got a TrackerPAL GPS clamped to his right ankle. The Kid wonders if it’s the same as his or if it’s one of those cool new units he’s heard about with the built-in cell phone that’s connected to a monitoring center 24/7 and even pokes your caseworker’s beeper if you forget to recharge your battery so the caseworker can phone in to make sure you haven’t died. It’s like being followed around by a CIA drone with a heat-seeking missile ready to fire. The new style TrackerPAL with the cell phone attachment intrigues the Kid simply because he’s into the technology of surveillance but no way he wants an upgrade. The Kid’s anklet is more like a simple antitheft tracking device for a stolen car that at least lets him piss in privacy.

The Kid sits down on his folding canvas camp-chair in front of his tent and lights his first cigarette since leaving work and right on schedule up under the Causeway the motor for the generator gasps and coughs and after a few seconds settles into a clattering diesel chug. Plato the Greek owns the generator and buys the fuel for it and runs it every evening from seven till nine and sometimes later depending on business. He has it wired to a twelve-outlet surge protector and the residents pay him a dollar each to recharge their cell phone if they have one and their anklet battery. Which they are required to do every forty-eight hours or more depending on the model or else in an office somewhere on the mainland a beeper will go off and in a few hours you’ll see someone’s caseworker or parole officer prowling through the camp looking for a guy he calls his client but who in actuality is his legal electronic prisoner and is probably only in his squat sleeping off a drunk or nodding off without having remembered to charge his now very dead battery. Sometimes though it’s only a resident who has fallen into despair from living down here — a man with no job who’s become a scavenger supporting himself by wandering the city with a shopping cart collecting and redeeming cans and bottles — and after months and even years of it opts for three hots and a cot because if you refuse to charge the battery that powers your electronic anklet you violate a key term of your parole and back you go to prison. Voluntary incarceration.

Outside the tent Larry Somerset takes a few cautious steps closer to the iguana and gives it a once-over. He says that he’s not seen an iguana this large before and has to admire the Kid’s use of it to guard his home and property. Better than a pit bull, he says. Certainly uglier than a pit bull.

Iggy’s chain-link leash is long enough to let him lie in the front entry of the tent but still able to scramble around to the back if someone tries sneaking in that way. The iguana looks lethargic and slow but they’re often seen streaking across golf course fairways and putting greens at astonishing speed — low to the ground on short legs but fast as a greyhound. The eyes of the iguana are round and large as marbles and watchful and like its scales dry and cold. It stares motionless at Larry — eyelids sliding slowly up and down like thin scrims. Every few seconds its forked tongue slips from between its jaws and flicks the air as if tasting it for flavor, passes quickly in front of its nostrils to read the odor of the air and withdraws. When the iguana swallows, its dewlaps loosely flap.

Larry keeps a respectful distance from the iguana. Everyone does. Except for the Kid. He loves the lizard. He could say Iggy is the only person he loves. But he wouldn’t. It was a birthday present from his mother. The summer before he turned eleven she left him home alone and took off a week from the beauty parlor where she was and still is a hairdresser and traveled with a group of seven other women to Mexico to participate in a summer solstice sun ceremony in the Yucatán. It was an annual spiritual rebirthing ritual designed and led by her yoga teacher and held in the main plaza of the Mayan ruins at Chichén Itzá. During the overnight layover in Mérida on the way home she purchased a baby iguana from a street vendor and smuggled it into the States in her suitcase. It was illegal but three other women in the group — all mothers — did the same for their kids and none of them got caught by customs because except for the yoga teacher they were women in their forties traveling home as a group to the same city and looked like American sex tourists which in a sense they were because all of them had gotten laid by Mexicans while in Mérida.

His mother’s name is Adele and she was not married to the Kid’s biological father who was a roofer who drove his pickup down from the North for work after one of the bigger hurricanes and was a sort of boyfriend for a few months but when she got pregnant with the Kid the roofer moved back to Somerville, Massachusetts, where he was from originally. She told the Kid his father’s name and not much else because there wasn’t much else to tell or so she said. Except that he was a short good-looking Irishman and had a funny accent and drank too much. After the roofer left and the Kid was born she had boyfriends pretty constantly who lived in her house with her and the Kid for up to six months on a few occasions but none of them stuck around long enough to claim the Kid as his own or take responsibility for educating or protecting him. Adele needs men to want her but she doesn’t want men to need her. In fact she doesn’t want anyone to need her — not even the Kid although she does not know that and would deny it if asked. She believes that she loves her son and has done everything for him that a single parent could and has sacrificed much of her youth for him and therefore cannot be blamed for the way he’s turned out.

It might have been different she believes and has often said if she’d had a husband to help raise her son and be a role model for him but most men at least the men she was attracted to as soon as they found out she shared her concrete block shotgun bungalow in the north end of the city with a young son weren’t interested in much more than sex for a while and someone to cook breakfast for them the next morning. There may have been men out there hoping to marry a good-looking red-haired woman with a terrific body in her thirties and then forties who owned her own house and had a steady job and was raising a boy on her own but she hadn’t met any. At least not any who turned her on sexually or even had a good sense of humor which she likes to say is as good a substitute for sex as anything else. She says she can live without one or the other — humor or sex — but not both. But then after her son turned eighteen and joined the army and moved out she looked in the mirror one day and she was fifty years old and was coloring the gray out of her red hair and unable to keep the weight off her hips and waist and almost any man who paid attention to her would do. Forget sense of humor. Forget good sex.

What about him, the lizard? Does he have a name?

Yeah, sure. Iggy. He’s not a lizard by the way. He’s an iguana. Iggy’s short for iguana. It’s a stupid name, I know, but we’re both used to it.

How long have you owned him?

Eleven-twelve years maybe. Since I was a kid. But I don’t exactly own him. I mean it’s not like he’s my slave or something.

He’s your friend.

Yeah. You could say that. You know, if you’re the guy named Lawrence Somerset I’m thinking of you’re kind of a freak. Even down here.

Don’t believe everything you read.

I don’t. But be careful of Iggy. He doesn’t like freaks.

On the flat a short ways behind the Kid’s tent a shirtless yellow-skinned man named Paco lies on his back on a homemade weight bench pumping iron. Paco is a surly Dominican with muscles in his arms like tattooed bowling balls and a stomach like corrugated iron. He drops the barbell onto the rack with a loud clank. He sits up straight and calls over to the Kid, Just blow him off, man! The dude’s a fuckin’ baby-banger.

That true, Larry? You a baby-banger?

God, no!

If you are then you must not be the dude I’m thinking of. He was into little girls.

Everyone down here is the same, I thought. Everyone’s here for the same reasons, right?

Fuck no. Baby-bangers, man, those guys are the worst. The lowest of the low.

What, some of us are worse than others? C’mon. I don’t buy it.

Buy it, man. Guys here for rape or what they call sexual contact with teenaged girls, they’re on top. Like ol’ Paco there. He claims to be a rapist. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. Then come guys convicted of sexual contact with young boys. And below them are guys who did time for sexual contact with young girls. And way way below them are the baby-bangers. There’s other categories too. Like fags and straights. Straights are ranked higher than fags.

Well, I’m certainly straight. And I’m no baby-banger. Jesus! That’s disgusting.

You’re disgusted, eh? I told you there was a kind of ranking.

What about you, Kid? Where are you in the offender hierarchy?

The Kid turns his back and ducks into his tent. Figure it out for yourself, man. I gotta feed my pit bull.

CHAPTER TWO

IGGY HAS BEEN THE KID’S MAIN FRIEND FOR all these years and sometimes his only friend but their relationship did not get off to a good start. The Kid’s mom arrived home from her trip to Mexico in a cab and lugged her suitcase up the crumbling cement walk to the porch and when she couldn’t find her key she banged impatiently on the screened door. The Kid was alone in his bedroom at the back of the house, a small dark room that was once a toolshed made of plywood located under a mango tree at the far end of the backyard until Kyle who was one of his mother’s boyfriends and wanted a little more privacy shoved the shed on two-by-four skids up to the back of the house where he bolted the shed to the exterior wall with metal straps and cut a door into the cinder block wall where a window off the kitchen had been. Until then it had been a single-bedroom house and the one bedroom had belonged to his mom and whoever was sleeping with her and the Kid slept on the couch in the living room which wasn’t too bad since he got to watch a lot of what he wanted on TV. At first when thanks to Kyle he got his own room he missed having all-night access to the TV and being able to keep track of the men who passed back and forth through the living room on their way to the kitchen from his mother’s bedroom but when his mother finally bought him a laptop computer which was required that year for every middle school student in the state he was glad to spend all his time in the new little dark room in back and lost track both of what was on TV and who was sleeping with his mother. Although now and then he took a peek at both. More than now and then actually. Especially the TV. When she was out at night he watched porn on pay-per-view until finally the monthly bills from the cable company got so high she checked the specific charges and ordered the parental control option. No more watching porn on my dime, mister!

She banged on his bedroom window which was opposite his computer screen and could have given her a view of what he was watching there so he clicked away to a different website and then looked over at his mother. Her face was red and sweating from the summer heat.

For God’s sake open the damn door and let me in! Didn’t you hear me knock?

He got up and slid open the window and smiled in the way he knew calmed people when they were excited or angry.

I had the air conditioner on high, Mom. I couldn’t hear you. Welcome home, Mom.

I can’t find my keys. Come and open the door and help me with my suitcase. I’ve got a present for you. The house better not be a mess.

It’s not, Mom. Don’t worry.

And it wasn’t. He was a neat boy, more orderly and in fact a better housekeeper than his mother and whenever she left him alone at home and came back the house was cleaner than when she left. He actually enjoyed the chance to live in the house alone for a few days and nights and put everything right — squaring the pillows on the couch and mopping the tile floors and scrubbing the kitchen counters and restacking the dishes according to size and use and lining up the cups and glasses in military rows. When he could busy himself cleaning and rationally organizing the house he was less lonely and almost didn’t notice his mother’s absence and sometimes even forgot to remember when she was returning.

He opened the door and grabbed onto her suitcase and dragged it into the living room and she followed. She kissed him on the cheek and chucked him under the chin with her thumb and forefinger as was her habit. Her smell was a vinegary mix of sweat and cologne and her thick red hair was damp and tangled and her mascara was smeared from the heat. She wore a pale blue nylon tracksuit for comfort and bright yellow high-top sneakers as a fashion statement. She looked tired and not especially happy to be home from Mexico.

I thought you wasn’t coming back till tomorrow or the next day.

I brought you a present you’re gonna just love. Wait’ll you see it.

She lifted the suitcase onto the sofa and flipped the latches, opened it, and took out a shoe box — size carton with a thin blue ribbon around it. She handed him the carton and hugged him.

It’s for your birthday! Happy birthday, little buddy.

My birthday’s not till September.

So? It’s a problem I’m a little early?

Two months early.

Better than two months late, ingrate. Go ahead, open it!

He slowly untied the ribbon and lifted the top off the box and there in a pile of straw lay the pepper green baby iguana, eyes closed, its body shaped like a carving knife unmoving as if sleeping or maybe dead, he couldn’t be sure which. Or maybe neither sleeping nor dead but instead carved out of jade. It was a beautiful thing. It looked like an ancient piece of Mayan jewelry on a fine gold chain that a brocaded priest dressed in robes for a religious ceremony hangs from his neck.

The Kid reached into the cardboard box and picked up the iguana and suddenly it came to life and twisted its body around as if it were a snake and bit the Kid on the meat of his hand between his thumb and forefinger, clamping onto it like pliers and refusing to let go even when the Kid as if he’d been scalded shook his hand in the air trying to get rid of it. He yowled in pain and kept flipping his hand to shake off the lizard but it clung by its dry-boned mouth to the soft lump of skin and muscle, not chewing or biting hard enough to break through the flesh but clipped precisely to it by rows of small inward-slanting serrated teeth so that it could not be removed without tearing the flesh.

Get it off me! Ma, get it off!

She yanked on the iguana but it wouldn’t let go. She was afraid that if she pulled any harder she would rip away a chunk of her son’s hand which was already swelling around the creature’s beak. The Kid was bawling now. She decided to call 911. Fifteen minutes later the ambulance arrived and the EMT aides and the driver took one look at the iguana and the Kid’s hand and half-laughed and drove him and his mother to the emergency room way over at Cameron-Kelly Hospital on Northwest Fiftieth.

They waited for thirty or so minutes before a doctor could see them. By then the Kid had stopped crying. His hand had ballooned out like a baseball glove and had gone numb and he had gotten used to the sight of the iguana clamped onto him and because the bite didn’t hurt now it seemed almost affectionate, a kind of hard ongoing kiss, and he wasn’t afraid of the creature anymore. In the waiting room the eight or ten other people waiting for a doctor stared at the iguana, repelled by it, and felt sorry for the Kid even though most of them were in much worse shape than he with busted feet and cuts and concussions and mysterious pain from places deep inside their bodies, but all their attackers had long since fled or been arrested and here he was still under attack.

His mother sat beside him and stroked his head with her left hand and flipped through a People magazine with the other. Finally a nurse called his name and led him and his mother down a long tiled hall. The nurse carefully averted her eyes from the Kid and the iguana which creeped her out and walked fast in front of him and his mom so they had to trot to keep up.

In the treatment room the Kid sat on a paper-covered bench while the doctor examined his hand and the iguana attached to it. The doctor was a slender light brown Asian-looking man with a shiny bald head and a thick black mustache.

Well, my friend, this is a problem, yes, but a problem easily solved. If you don’t object to a little blood. Okay?

What? No! Don’t cut off my hand! Please, mister, don’t!

I would not think of doing such a terrible thing as that. No, I am going to cut off the little animal’s head. A very simple solution to your problem.

Don’t worry, honey, it’ll be over in a minute. God, I wish I’d thought of that before calling the ambulance. I could’ve done it at home myself with a kitchen knife. This is going to cost me a pretty penny. I don’t have insurance.

No-o-o! Please don’t kill it!

When the head has no body, when its spinal cord has been severed that is, the muscles that contract to control the mouth relax. You are very fortunate that the iguana is only a little baby. They grow to be very big, you know. Where I come from they are known to kill and eat dogs and even people sometimes. Especially babies. They like to eat babies. They are dragons. They are known to inject their prey with a poison that causes fatal internal bleeding. This one is only a baby itself and is not of the poisonous type anyhow. Which is very fortunate for you, eh?

Can’t you just like put him to sleep or something? Like with a needle?

You want your little friend to live and grow big and eat dogs and babies, eh?

Yes.

Does it have a name?

The Kid suddenly thought that if the iguana had a name the doctor might not be so eager to cut off its head. He said the iguana’s name was Iggy.

Hmmm. Iggy. Cute.

Yeah. I guess.

The doctor reflected a moment and walked to a cabinet and removed a glass vial from a drawer of vials. He doused a large square patch of gauze with chloroform and wrapped it around the face of the iguana and after a few seconds the body of the iguana went limp and its color changed from green to gray. Its mouth opened and released the Kid’s hand. The iguana plopped onto the tiled floor. Ignoring it the doctor examined the Kid’s hand, saw that there were no breaks in the skin other than a curved line of pinpricks on the top of his hand and another on the bottom between the thumb and forefinger. After applying antiseptic to the Kid’s hand the doctor dropped Iggy into a plastic HAZMAT bag and sent the foolish boy and his even more foolish mother and their sleeping baby dragon on their way.

CHAPTER THREE

WHILE HE WAITS FOR THE BLUE BUTANE flame of his camp stove to heat his supper the Kid stands beside his tent in the damp semidarkness beneath the Claybourne Causeway and contemplates the smooth blue waters of the wide Calusa Bay and the southern outflow of the thousand-mile-long Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. Bumper-to-bumper cars, trucks, buses, and intermittent motorcycles rumble overhead crossing between the mainland and the barrier islands on the eastern side of the Bay. It’s the end of a long late-summer day. Everyone’s headed home. Everyone’s home is in one place or the other, the mainland or the islands. There. Or over there. Definitely not here. Not here on the broad flat concrete peninsula that anchors the rusting steel piers that hold up the Causeway.

He pretends that he is alone down here. He turns away from the polyethylene lean-tos and tents and the salvaged plywood huts nearby and the men who live in them standing around like bored ghosts and he gazes out at the Bay, thinking not of where he is but of where he would like to be. This is how he has learned to endure being where he is without bawling like a little lost boy. Or worse: trying to escape from this place.

He peers out at the Bay. He tracks charter fishing boats and a few large white yachts and dozens of small private fishing and pleasure boats returning from open waters after a long day’s pleasure at sea and in some cases work. He would like to be aboard one of those boats. A pleasure boat or a charter fishing boat or a shrimper. Any one of them would do. That one. Or that one. Or that fifty-foot cabin cruiser shaped like an arrow. The flotilla passes through Kydd’s Cut from the open sea into Calusa Bay and plows steadily northward keeping downtown Calusa portside and the Great Barrier Isles off to starboard. Individual boats peel off and make their way to the thousands of marinas, dockyards, and piers scattered along the mainland and the islets and canals that filigree both the mainland side of the Bay and the Barriers, where the fleet finally disintegrates.

The official name for the twenty-mile linked chain of narrow flat mostly man-made islands between the Bay and the open sea is the Calusa Great Barrier Isles. Real estate developers, speculators, politicians, and hoteliers a hundred years ago invented the Calusa Great Barrier Isles by dredging muck and crushed limestone from the bottom of the shallow Bay and filling in the mosquito- and crocodile-infested mangrove swamps from Bougainvillea Shores twenty miles to the north all the way south to Kydd’s Cut, the deep-water channel that opens the international port of Calusa to the Atlantic Ocean. The Realtors, speculators, politicians, and hoteliers hauled ten thousand tons of white sand from beaches in another state hundreds of miles north of here and made with it a wide fine-grained sun-reflecting beach running along the ocean side of the islands from one end of the Barriers to the other. They connected the island chain to the mainland with bridges at each end and a four-lane causeway in the middle — the Archie B. Claybourne Causeway, named after the president of the corporation that financed the development — and laid down a grid of streets, carved out Venetian-style canals, planted palms, and built marinas, beachfront hotels, golf courses, and high-rise apartment buildings with ocean views.

The value of real estate rose by 10 and 15 percent a year for a hundred years. And as the price per square foot of land rose the height of the hotels and apartment buildings rose and now the Barriers are lined for twenty miles with terraced pastel-glass towers filled with northern retirees and tourists, South American entrepreneurs and drug lords, European fashion models and the men who photograph them, aging out-of-work Latin American dictators and generalissimos. Most of the people who serve them, sell to them, park their cars, and clean their condos and hotel rooms live on the mainland north of downtown Calusa in barrios, slums, ghettos, and subsidized housing projects and ride the buses across the Causeway and bridges to work and back. Most of their supervisors and managers live west of downtown in middle-class suburbs and gated communities and drive east in their cars daily through ten, twenty, and even thirty miles of clotted traffic to the Barriers and in the evening drive back again through the same jams.

The Kid listens to the rumble and roar overhead of day’s-end traffic crossing the Claybourne Causeway and trying to hear his thoughts he turns and looks south across the lower Bay at the clustered skyscrapers of downtown Calusa — fifty-story towers of smoked glass and gleaming sheets of aluminum and steel high-rise hotels here too, but these are Marriotts and Hyatts and Holiday Inns built for business travelers instead of tourists. There are domed convention centers and international banking and insurance company office buildings and whole colonies of condominiums stacked on top of one another like gigantic poker chips. A condo downtown would be fine, he thinks. He doesn’t need to live on the Barriers. Even a small studio on a low floor without a view would do. He’d furnish it simply for one person alone with a single bed and a table and two chairs and a lamp or two and a dresser. Maybe a few small pictures. Some dishes and pots and pans. Sheets and blankets and towels. Keep it simple. Keep it neat and clean. He doesn’t really require a view but it would be nice to have one. To stroll to the fridge and take out a frosty Corona and crack it open and flop in his La-Z-Boy recliner and check out the city below.

At this time of day he’d watch the glass and metal towers cast their long shadows over the cluttered port where cranes and gigantic elevators load and off-load rows of room-size steel shipping containers from wheezing freighters headed to or from China, India, and Brazil. He’d consider the three creamy cruise ships lined up like floating amusement parks beside the docks and warehouses sleepily waiting to be restocked with food and liquor and refilled with fresh island-hopping limbo-dancing tourists from the North. If the Kid were a deckhand he’d have his own bunk in one of those ships. He’d have access to a galley where the cook prepares meals and the crew eats them. A recreation room for watching TV and movies on DVD. He’d be able to travel to Asia or South America or to the islands of the Caribbean.

Out where the sprawling city dwindles and finally ends, beyond where the malls and bungalows and gated communities of the suburbs turn into trailer parks and the trailer parks eventually merge with palmetto scrub and cane fields and mangrove marsh, out beyond the Great Panzacola Swamp a flattened red sun glimmers near the low unbroken horizon. Streaked with tangerine strips of cloud the western sky turns turquoise and then orange all over and finally scarlet. The Kid can see that evening sky from here beneath the Causeway but only if he walks out to the end of the concrete peninsula and stands at the water’s lapping edge and looks up. A pair of 747s departs simultaneously from the international airport west of downtown. Parallel white contrails scratch the darkening sky. Then directly overhead one plane slowly veers northeast in a long arc toward England while the other bisects the dark sky above the blackened green Gulf Stream on a line that follows the Tropic of Cancer straight east all the way to North Africa and beyond.

Here below the Causeway he gazes along the smaller Great Barrier Isles and the canals between them and the bayside backsides of the palatial homes of singers, professional athletes, and movie stars and the men and women who import and export drugs and manage and launder other people’s ill-gotten and sometimes inherited money in hedge funds and offshore accounts in the Caymans, Turks and Caicos, and Bahamas. Along the canals the mostly Moorish-style estates hide floodlit manicured gardens, terraces, and Olympic-size pools behind ten-foot walls alarmed and topped with razor wire. Looking east beyond them he can see the tall seaside hotels, their pastel walls splashed with warm light. Neon signs chum the names of the hotels against the purple eastern sky and blot out the stars: CONQUISTADOR. CASA CALUSA. MONTAGUE. MIRADOR.

The cars, buses, and trucks on the Causeway and bridges and the north-south Interstate and the traffic-jammed turnpikes to the suburbs have switched their headlights on. In the high-rises and skyscrapers downtown fluorescent night-lights ignite floor after floor as the cleaners and janitors and watchmen begin their night’s work and from the rooftops and penthouses slender beacons reach like long pale arms into the darkness. An offshore breeze puts a sudden chill in the air. Night has fallen in the city of Calusa and along the Great Barrier Isles and down here under the wide loud Causeway that connects the two.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE KID CLICKS HIS HEADLAMP ON. HE shuts off his stove and holds the hot tin can with a gloved hand and spoons chili con carne onto a paper plate and starts eating his supper, washing it down with a warm can of Corona beer. The iguana settles in beside him and watches while he eats as if waiting for leftovers but there are none. Iggy’s an herbivore anyhow. Pure vegan. The Kid crushes the chili can underfoot and drops it into his recycling bag and lights and burns the paper plate on the ground. He opens a second Corona and places the empty into the bag where he stores returnables.

Waste not want not. Carry out what you carry in. The Kid is a good camper. His habits go back to when he was fourteen and behind his mother’s house pitched the same Boy Scout pup tent that he lives in now. He placed it in the shade of the mango tree where the toolshed that became his bedroom had been located before his mother’s then-boyfriend Kyle attached it to the house. That first summer he rarely spent more than a single night at a time out there but he discovered that he loved the privacy and solitude of it. When later that summer his mother got her own computer and a wireless router he had Internet access in the tent. He strung a long extension cord from the house to the tent for charging his laptop and cell phone. In the fall when he started attending North Village High where he didn’t know anybody and no one wanted to hang with him and wouldn’t let him join any of the sets which were mostly black kids anyway he made the tent his semipermanent residence.

Next to his tent he built a new outdoor cage for Iggy six feet high and four feet wide and deep with a perch, a bathtub, a bed of mulch, and a heat lamp. Nights when he needed company or when the temperature dropped into the fifties and occasionally into the forties as winter came on he brought Iggy into the tent with him and visited the house only when his mother wasn’t home for food supplies and to use the toilet and every few days to shower and do his laundry. Most of the time when he wasn’t at school or taking care of Iggy or the two of them were just sitting there staring at each other he watched pornography online and charged it to his mother’s Visa.

At first his mother didn’t seem to know. He told himself he didn’t care. He did care but didn’t want to be the one who drew her attention to the facts. But she barely noticed that he’d moved out or that he was running up bigger and bigger monthly charges on her Visa — although she did notice and complained when he took food from the cupboard and fridge that she’d bought for herself and whomever she was sleeping with and making breakfast for. She said, For Christ’s sake, why don’t you get a part-time after-school job and buy your own damn groceries? And no more drinking my beer! Or smoking my cigarettes! It’s enough already that I’m putting a roof over your head and buying your clothes. Besides, that food, beer, and cigarettes aren’t always only mine, you know.

A few weeks into October walking home alone one afternoon after class he saw a hand-painted sign, PART-TIME HELPER WANTED, in the window of a wholesale lighting store on Northwest Primavera Street on the edge of Haiti Town. The owner’s name was Tony Perez, a gaunt pale-skinned Cuban in his early fifties with a shaved head and Fu Manchu mustache and a small gold hoop in each earlobe. He needed someone a few hours a day to sweep the place and dust the thousands of lamps hanging from the ceiling and pack the sold lamps for shipping. He said he was the first cousin and had the same name of the famous Cincinnati Reds first baseman Tony Perez who the Kid had never heard of which Tony said was too bad, he was a great first baseman.

Tony didn’t mind that the Kid was small and underage. He was energetic at least and seemed intelligent enough and told Tony that he had no problema being paid in cash off the books. Tony admitted that he hadn’t wanted to hire Haitians from the neighborhood because most of them couldn’t speak English well enough and no way he was going to learn their lingo. Not at his age.

The Kid figured Tony was racist and wouldn’t have hired anyone who wasn’t white like him anyhow or someone almost white but that didn’t bother him and instead made him feel lucky that both his biological parents were white people. He had never met his real father or seen a picture of him but he was pretty sure if his father wasn’t a white guy his mother would have told him as she was in no way a racist and now and then actually seemed to be attracted to men who weren’t white since at least three of the boyfriends that he knew about were black dudes and two others were very dark Cuban or Dominican guys, one or the other, he wasn’t sure and they never said. She told him black men were sexier than white men and were better hung which he wasn’t sure of even after being in the army and seeing lots of black guys naked. She said it didn’t matter but he had a feeling it did. Because he’s never actually made love to a woman the value of having a large penis is one of the many things about sex and women that he still wonders about. He does know from watching porn that big looks better.

He kept the job at the light store all through high school and worked there full-time after he graduated right up until he enlisted in the army. Tony never promoted him or gave him a raise but the Kid was okay with that because he was able to cover all his expenses with what he made. He lived at his mother’s rent free so he only needed enough money to pay for cigarettes and his and Iggy’s food and his increasingly regular visits to Internet porn sites. He put most of his earnings into a savings account at the Wells Fargo neighborhood bank branch and was given a debit card that he could use to pay for his porn, his phone cards, and other incidental expenses. Once a week he gave Tony enough cash plus a ten-dollar surcharge to buy him a case of beer. He had no friends — only acquaintances — and no girlfriends and essentially no family either. He wasn’t sure if this should bother him but since he had no idea how to go about obtaining friends or girlfriends or family he made the best of the situation and not only never complained — who would listen, who would have cared? — he told himself that actually he preferred things this way because he at least had Iggy and didn’t have to answer to anyone except Tony Perez and even Tony he could say fuck you to and walk away if he felt like it. Back then there were all kinds of jobs — thousands of them — available to a kid like him that were just as good as his job at the light store.

Larry Somerset the new guy lugs a large dark green duffel bag over to the Kid’s tent and sets it on the ground and smiling in a contrived casual way hunkers down beside him on the side opposite Iggy like an overfriendly uncle. He’s positioned himself a little too close to the Kid for comfort and his breath smells like old moldy cheese. The Kid looks beyond him and over his shoulder thinking maybe he ought to pull somebody else into this conversation since this guy Larry is a little creepy somehow. Maybe he is a baby-banger. The Kid isn’t afraid of Larry. He just feels trapped by the bright insincere light of the guy’s smile. Very few people down here ever smile like that. Very few people down here smile at all. The Kid can’t remember the last time he smiled.

In the shadows he sees Otis the Rabbit leaning against a girder watching them. Otis is maybe the oldest resident although probably not eighty-five as he claims, more like seventy-five but being eighty-five gets him a certain amount of admiration and status as does his claim that he was a professional featherweight boxer who fought in Madison Square Garden on the undercard twice back in the 1950s. He’s a short dark-brown man tight and trim with a white grizzle of a beard and a bald head that he covers with a black beret. He has the professional fighter’s squashed nose and ridge of scar tissue above the eyes and he stammers a little which might be a result of too many blows to the head.

Otis the Rabbit Washington was his fighting name because of his quickness he likes to say but once he confessed to the Kid with a certain small pride that he got the name because he was an expert rabbit-puncher and could knock a man out with it and get away with it even though it was illegal. He says the reason he’s here is because he was caught pissing in a parking lot next to an apartment house in broad daylight and a white woman looked out a first-floor window a few feet away and saw him and claimed he was showing her his dick. He likes to say that a black woman would never have done that. But he was homeless to start with, he says, sleeping in the parks and behind Dumpsters and getting constantly rousted by cops and square-badge security personnel so for him becoming a sexual offender and landing under the Causeway with official permission was in a way a move up. He’s a juicer who supports his habit by canning recyclables and with as much of his Social Security check as his sister will give him after she takes her cut for acting as a mail drop.

Otis the Rabbit likes the Kid and the Kid likes him and unlike most of the other residents they do favors for each other. Now and then when they have nothing better to do Otis shows the Kid a few moves and has promised to show him his patented secret version of the rabbit punch someday. He says he taught a legal version to the welterweight champ Kid Gavilan that Gavilan made famous as the bolo punch. You deliver it with your left hand after a hopping side step to the left but need to set it up with a wide-swinging right which opens you up in front and makes it a risky punch. Otis thinks the Kid has possibilities as a bantamweight except that at twenty-two he’s almost too old to start now and is probably not allowed to train or fight in public anyhow especially wearing an electronic ankle bracelet.

The Kid stands up and ignoring Larry Somerset stretches his arms, rolls his neck, and touches his toes once. Larry stands too, still making that toothy smile. The Kid flips his cigarette butt in a bright arc into the Bay. He’s trying to quit smoking by cutting out one cigarette a day every week and is down to thirteen a day now. Next week he’ll be down to twelve a day. In twelve weeks one a day. Then zero. The Kid is nothing if not self-disciplined. Actually he’s more patient than self-disciplined.

Say, Kid, I’m wondering if you could give me a little advice, me being a newcomer here. So to speak.

What kind of advice?

Well… I need a place to sleep. You know, shelter from the storm, as the song says.

Can’t help you, man. Everybody here’s on his own. So to speak.

I can pay you, if that’s the problem. Really, I need help. I just need a place for tonight. Until I can set up my own place. You know, get my own tent set up. I had to sleep outside on the ground in Centennial Park last night. No fun. I’ll go downtown tomorrow. Pick up a tent and whatever I need for cooking and so on at a Target or something. I only just got here and wasn’t aware that it was so… open. I didn’t expect to be met with such hostility. I mean, they told me at the park that there were cots and so forth. Like it was a kind of unofficial shelter for people. People like us.

Yeah, well, you were told wrong.

Evidently.

I don’t think I’m like you anyhow. Nobody’s like anybody else down here.

What would you charge for letting me sleep in your tent? Just this one night. I have cash. I have my own sleeping bag in my duffel there.

Dude, forget about it. I don’t need your money. I only got room for me and Iggy anyhow.

Shadowy figures have slowly gathered around Plato the Greek’s generator silently waiting their turn to charge their anklets and cell phones. There are small driftwood fires burning here and there in barrels and fire pits lined with cinder blocks and the occasional blue-flamed butane camp stove like the Kid’s. The smells of burning charcoal and woodsmoke and food cooking — burgers and beans and franks and coffee — mingle with the salt-smell off the Bay.

It is hard to know if there are twenty men living under the Causeway or fifty or even a hundred. What little conversation that takes place among them is low and mumbled and is scattered into the night by the steady thumping of the traffic overhead and the offshore breeze. Every now and then the beam of a flashlight snaps on as someone makes his way down to the water and stands there and pees into the Bay or just stares out at the lights of the city. Farther down a man fishes for his supper with a bamboo pole. Other figures stand in pairs in the shadows smoking and swapping pulls from a bottle. Where the off-ramp descends to the mainland the concrete isle underneath is closed off on both sides and beneath the sloped ceiling is a wide dark cavern. Deep inside the cavern a Coleman lamp flares up illuminating a half-dozen low shanties made of salvaged lumber. The shanties belong to the old-timers, men who have been in residence here the longest like Otis the Rabbit who is finishing his fifth year under the Causeway. The shanties look almost permanent and in the white glow of the lamp the four men playing dominoes are seated on overturned buckets around a spindly table made from a cast-off scrap of Masonite.

C’mon, Kid, just this one night, till I get my own set-up. It’s probably a little dangerous for me to be sleeping out in the open, right? I mean, some of these guys are a little weird, I think, and some of them are on drugs. And what about rats? I’ve seen a couple of rats already. This is not what I expected or I’d have come a little better prepared.

How long you been down here?

Oh, just a couple hours. My wife dropped me off at the Park yesterday and I walked over from there.

Your wife.

Yes.

Larry. Larry Somerset. Are you the Lawrence Somerset I’m thinking of? The asshole state senator who got bagged last spring at the airport hotel with a coupla little girls?

You don’t have to put it quite that way. There weren’t any little girls. It was a set-up. A sting.

Yeah, sure. That’s what everybody says. I read about you in the papers. Came to the door of a hotel room naked with all kinds of sex toys. Not very smart for a state senator.

It wasn’t quite like that. It was a sting. Entrapment.

It always is. But I don’t have to ask what brings you here. Do I?

I might say the same for you.

You might. But don’t.

The Kid needs advice from an elder. He throws a wave in the direction of the Rabbit.

The Rabbit saunters over to the Kid’s tent. Seventy-five or eighty-five, it doesn’t matter, he walks like a man half his age with more grace than sprightliness although he watches where he puts his feet as if his eyesight is bad. Which it is. He just can’t afford eyeglasses, he says. Or false teeth. The Kid thinks he wants people to believe he’s older than he really is so he’ll get more respect from the younger men down here. He’d rather be seen as a very old toothless and nearly blind ex-boxer than just another pathetic homeless old drunk.

He keeps silent while the Kid explains the newcomer’s situation. The Rabbit doesn’t particularly cotton to the man who seems to have an attitude as if he thinks he doesn’t belong down here and they do. And he doesn’t trust the cat’s interest in the Kid. But maybe there’ll be something in it for the Kid since the guy obviously has money in his pocket and if so then there will likely be something in it for the Rabbit too. The Kid can be a generous little bugger sometimes.

So what d’you think? Should I give Mr. Somerset here Iggy’s bed for the night?

You running a fuckin’ flophouse for Level Threes?

No way.

How do you know I’m a Level Three?

You wouldn’t be down here if you wasn’t, amigo. Charge him what he’d hafta pay a hotel on the Barriers, Kid. Coupla hundred bucks a night.

Whaddaya say, Mr. Somerset? Two hundred bucks for the night in the comfort and safety of my bayside condo? Good views of the water. Breakfast not included however. Payable in advance. Cash only. We don’t take credit cards.

What about the lizard?

What about him?

Does he sleep in the tent too?

You can have Iggy’s bed. He’s fine sleeping outside if it don’t rain. It’s still summer. If it rains though I’ll hafta bring him in. Iguanas don’t like rain.

The man gives it a moment’s thought, then agrees and turns away from the Rabbit and the Kid. He removes two one-hundred-dollar bills from his money belt. The Kid and the Rabbit watch and talk on as if the man can’t hear them. The Kid tells the Rabbit he’ll take care of him in the morning. He thinks maybe twenty bucks ought to be enough of a thanks. More than twenty is a retainer for future services, less is a cheapjack insult. When you’re in the Kid’s position sharing is carefully calculated. His golden rule is do no more for others than you expect you’ll need them to do for you. Even with friends. Although the Kid doesn’t really believe he has any friends. People he likes, yes. The Rabbit for instance. But no friends.

Just gimme a holler the guy gives you any trouble.

I don’t think he’s into guys. Paco thinks he’s a baby-banger, I’m betting he’s into little girls. Tweeners.

You sure he ain’t into iguanas?

CHAPTER FIVE

IT’S AN HOUR BEFORE DAWN. THE TIDE HAS turned and the sulfur stink of the mudflat beyond the Causeway and the nearby mangrove marshes laces the cool night air. In the east where the sea meets the sky a gray velvet blanket of clouds leaches darkness from the night and dims the stars overhead one by one. It’s still too early for the traffic to commence its daily rumble over the Causeway. There are the steady slaps of low waves against the edge of the concrete peninsula below the Causeway and the sporadic cries of solitary seagulls cruising low over the Bay. There are the occasional coughs of sleepers in their huts and the low drawn-out groan of a man curled in a thin blanket sheltered from the salty dew by a plastic tarp. There are the snores of the deepest sleepers like the Kid’s new and decidedly temporary tent-mate whose raucous adenoidal snoring has kept the Kid awake most of the night.

The encampment is otherwise silent and still and lies in darkness invisible to the world. The fires have all burned to cold ash. Fully clothed the Kid lies awake in his sleeping bag and for a few seconds he imagines the dream of the man snoring in the sleeping bag next to his and shudders and stops himself cold. Children have come onto his radar and entered his no-go zone. Little pink-skinned girls barely older than toddlers. How do you even talk to kids that young? he wonders. He’s never been able to figure out what to say to children anyhow. Or at least children under the age of twelve or thirteen. They always make him self-conscious and insecure. Especially girls.

Little girls. Just thinking about them — never mind talking to them — makes him self-conscious and insecure. And oddly scared. With little boys he can at least pretend they’re as old as he is himself no matter how young they are in reality and he can talk to them the same as he would a grown man. Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men — at least he always did when he was a kid — because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives. Even old men playing golf or pinochle or watching TV in their retirement homes or sitting half-asleep in a Jacuzzi tub are only pretending to be adult men. But little girls are more complicated and mysterious than little boys. At least to the Kid they are. They don’t want you to talk to them like they’re grown-up women. Maybe it’s because grown-up women aren’t like men. Maybe women really are adults and not little kids in disguise.

But what about the women who when they were little girls got hurt somehow? Hurt so bad they got stuck there scared of having to grow up and as a result they never grow up and like men have to fake being an adult. The Kid is pretty sure from what she’s told him about her childhood and what she left out his mother is that type of woman. A fake woman. Same as he’s a fake man. It may be the only thing he has in common with his mother. He never had to deal with being beaten black and blue by his father the way she did. And he was never sexually abused or raped by anyone male or female the way his mother has hinted happened to her when she was a little girl. And he was never abandoned by his mother to the state foster-care system like her mother did to her and shuttled from one temporary family to another.

The way he sees it his mother was always there for him. That’s her phrase, that she was always there for him, and it means two things to him: that he was a burden to her and that he never took full advantage of that fact. He never accepted her love and loyalty. The phrase makes him feel ashamed twice over. She’s a better person overall than he. She has a good excuse for refusing to grow up and he doesn’t. Her being a fake woman makes sense; his being a fake man doesn’t.

He thinks all this has something to do with his no-go zone reaction to Larry Somerset. He wonders why he let the Rabbit talk him into taking the man’s money and letting him sleep in his tent. It isn’t like he needs the money especially. He has a job and almost no expenses. And it’s not like he’s fond of playing the Good Samaritan. He knows who the guy Larry Somerset is or rather was and what he got busted for and while the Kid’s in no position to judge Larry Somerset or anyone else living beneath the Causeway he still has a fearful attitude toward the guy and it’s not just because Larry Somerset is a cheese ball and was once a big-time state senator with all the power and prestige and money of that office and might still have some of it left over.

The Kid has glimpsed kiddie porn by accident lots of times back in the day cruising the Internet looking for company late at night but he always quickly clicked off — scared but not sure why. Nothing he’s seen on the Internet has scared him like that and he’s seen a lot. And it isn’t fear of being caught and punished for doing something illegal or weird or breaking a taboo like incest or sex with animals. That’s a whole different kind of fear than what scares him about Larry Somerset.

It’s what he felt in the not-too-distant past spending his nights maxing out his mother’s credit card and then his own debit card on porn sites and role-playing and swapping endless sex-talks with strangers in chat rooms when he’d sometimes click his way unintentionally into a website or a chat room where the hinted-at subject was sex with children. Which is immoral. Maybe worse — if there is something worse. Well, baby-banging is worse.

It wasn’t that he was afraid of getting caught unless by his mother and she didn’t bother for years to check on where he went in real life — never mind where he went on his computer. He might not have been raised by wolves exactly but he was a feral child. He was pretty sure that back when he was still living at his mother’s house none of his digital travel was illegal or expressly prohibited as long as he did it on his own time which since he got sent back from Fort Drum became almost all the time.

Fear of being caught and punished for doing something most people disapprove of and some people prohibit or is illegal is only what goes with playing a high-stakes game of chance. If you win you feel lucky and if you lose you feel unlucky and you just take your punishment like a man. Either way you don’t feel ashamed or guilty. It’s almost never colored by shame or guilt like it would if it was immoral.

The Kid hears a car overhead or maybe it’s a truck because it’s moving too slowly to be a commuter’s car and while he waits for it to thump off the bridge onto the highway to the Barriers he hears a second vehicle also moving slowly but on the opposite side coming from the Barriers toward the mainland and then he hears both vehicles crunch to a stop somewhere up there on the Causeway. For a long moment, silence. Until several more cars or vans — he can’t be sure which except he knows they’re not trucks or buses — arrive from both directions and stop overhead. More silence. The Kid sits up and listens. Nothing. The man lying next to him turns fitfully in his sleep, rolls onto his left side facing away from the Kid and yanks the top of his sleeping bag over his head against the chill and goes back to dreaming whatever a guy like that dreams. The Kid doesn’t want to know.

Iggy’s chain clanks and the Kid knows that the iguana is awake and alert. The chain is locked onto a cinder block and Iggy can drag the block a fair distance but not easily and is lazy enough not to bother unless someone accidentally drops trash that he thinks is food just out of his reach. It’s one of the reasons the Kid keeps his campsite clean and gets pissed off at anyone who tosses his garbage and wrappers from McDonald’s or an empty pizza box anywhere close to his tent.

The Kid’s heart rate has picked up. He’s spooked but doesn’t know why. He’s almost never spooked down here. The other residents might be weird and even squalid because of the difficult living conditions and some of them are drunks like the Rabbit or high on drugs and a few of them are potential if not actual thieves but so far none of them has been violent. At least not against him. It’s violence from outsiders that you worry about. Besides, all of the residents except for the Rabbit are afraid of Iggy the best guard dog a man can have and even the Rabbit is cautious around Iggy. Not that the iguana would ever actually attack a human other than to defend himself and probably not even then but nobody except the Kid knows that for sure. The only person in danger of being attacked by a male iguana is another male iguana. And that’s in breeding season when there’s a female iguana in the neighborhood.

He reaches forward and partially unzips the front tent flap and looks out. The predawn light in the east hasn’t reached the camp yet and it’s like being in a cave out there. He grabs his headlamp and switches on its narrow beam. The light is dim. Nearly out. Batteries need replacing. Always happens when you need it. The Kid drops the pale beam of light onto Iggy, who has run his chain out to the end. The iguana’s sawtooth crest is rigid and on high alert. He follows Iggy’s stare and casts his headlamp’s useless fading yellow light in the direction of the off-ramp but it falls short. A narrow bare-dirt path starts at its base and switchbacks up the steep incline from the encampment to the guardrail and highway. It’s the only entrance and exit. Unless you arrive or leave by boat or jump into the Bay and swim from the mainland against the tidal current — where to keep from drowning you’d have to be an Olympic-level swimmer — there’s no other way in or out.

Maybe Iggy hears one of the residents sneaking home after curfew and because of his electronic anklet already caught without knowing it and scheduled for trouble or maybe jail time. Why bother to sneak in when you know they’ve already nailed you? Why not just stroll home openly?

Old habits, the Kid guesses.

He snaps off the useless light and glances back toward the path one last time and against a gray swatch of the eastern sky spots the moving silhouette of a man. The man carries what looks like a baseball bat or possibly a rifle. A weapon anyhow. He’s wearing some kind of helmet with a visor. Behind him comes a second man who also wears a helmet and carries a club or a gun. They’re big guys and they’re walking carefully in the darkness as if they aren’t familiar with the pathway down and don’t have any flashlights or don’t want to reveal their presence by using them. The Kid remembers training in the dark at Fort Drum wearing helmets fitted out with night vision and how useless they were for walking on rough unfamiliar ground and wonders if these two are using night vision.

Behind the first two come a whole bunch more big guys wearing helmets and carrying weapons. It’s some kind of raid or a military-style takedown by a platoon of cops or soldiers or a SWAT team. But why the hell would they be making a raid down here? Nobody down here deals drugs in any quantity larger than the occasional nickel bag or a few tabs of Ecstasy. No illegal aliens. No terrorists plotting the overthrow of the state. There’s nobody here but people like the Kid and the Rabbit and Larry Somerset and Paco and the Greek. Practically everyone in Calusa has known for years what kind of people live here and why and has never given a damn as long as they stay put. The newspapers write about it like it’s a leper colony. Even the TV news has covered it a few times. The only authorities who ever visit the camp are plainclothes cops and parole officers or caseworkers looking for their clients gone missing or the occasional bored state trooper dropping by to waste time looking for drugs or following up on a possible lead to some real criminal he’s investigating elsewhere. And they don’t come at night. They come during daylight hours as if even though the doctors say the disease the residents carry isn’t contagious people think it is — cops included. They’re afraid they’ll catch it if they come at night. The Kid watches the strangers in helmets gather together in a clot at the bottom of the steep incline. There are twenty to twenty-five of them. Maybe more. And here come five or six more guys but without helmets or uniforms — civilians in regular sports clothes.

As if at a signal he somehow missed the entire SWAT team or cops or soldiers or whatever charge full speed into the encampment. Their boots slap heavily against the concrete and their clubs are raised — the Kid sees now they’re uniformed cops carrying batons not guns — ready to bust somebody’s bones while the half-dozen civilians stand back and watch from the sidelines like they’re embedded reporters. When the raiders reach the tents and shanties they break into teams of two and three and go to work kicking over the flimsy huts and yanking down the tarps and as the residents stumble befuddled and terrified out from under the wreckage of their collapsed shelters the cops bellow at them—Get the fuck outa here! Move move move! Get your shit, get the fuck out outa here! — and call them names—Motherfucking pervs! Faggots! Kid-fuckers! The frightened residents cover their heads with their arms and try vainly to dodge the riot sticks but it’s no good and the cops club their shoulders and backs and skulls and whack them across the face. Blood spurts from noses and mouths and ears. People howl in pain.

The Kid sees a pair of cops lurching toward his tent. He grabs his backpack and unzips the rear flap of the tent from inside and ducks out and escapes into the darkness just beyond when he flashes on Iggy and turns back. The cops have already grabbed onto the front end of his tent and are yanking it down when one of them sees Iggy on his chain stalking steadily toward him fearless and on the attack with his mouth open and his long forked tongue flicking the air.

Holy shit! What the fuck’s that? the first cop says.

The second cop pauses in the destruction of the Kid’s tent. He takes a look at the iguana and his eyes widen. It’s a goddam lizard! Shoot it! Shoot the fucking thing!

We got orders to keep our guns holstered.

Unless physically threatened, man!

While the cops argue the Kid’s roommate wearing only his baggy boxer shorts and T-shirt and black socks like an old-time European porn actor escapes from under the collapsed tent through the open flap at the back the same way the Kid got out. He scrambles on his hands and knees into the relative safety of darkness and comes up on the Kid.

Good God, what’s happening? What are they doing?

The first cop has his revolver out and aims it down at Iggy who keeps on coming toward the second cop.

I call that threatening. That’s physically threatening, man! Shoot the goddam thing! Shoot it!

Too much fucking paperwork. It’s on a chain anyhow.

The Kid hears the sickening crack of a club against bone and he glances in that direction and sees the Rabbit go down, then slowly get back up and stagger off, dragging his right leg as if the thigh bone is fractured. Most of the rest flee into the darkness running and stumbling past the embedded reporters or whatever they are gathered at the bottom of the incline. Those who can do it scramble up the pathway to the Causeway and hop over the guardrail and run down the highway. The few residents who refuse to run or like the Rabbit are unable to run are herded together and shoved into a group off to the side close to the civilians where they’re guarded by a pair of cops with flashlights and guns while the Kid and Larry Somerset watch unseen from the edge of darkness.

I said shoot it! For Christ’s sake, he’s gonna bite me!

The Kid suddenly stands, Don’t shoot! he cries. He’s friendly! He won’t hurt you!

The cop swings his helmeted head around and peers through night-vision glasses at the Kid and Larry Somerset. He looks like a giant bug standing on its hind legs. He brings his gun up and aims it at the Kid.

You got ten seconds to get the fuck outa here. You and the other guy. Otherwise you’re busted back to prison.

For what? We haven’t done nothing!

Obstructing a police officer. Now get the fuck outa here you disgusting little creep before I change my mind and bust both of you and your fucking lizard for resisting arrest.

The Kid turns and runs. He’s got no alternative. Larry tries to follow him but he doesn’t know the camp in the dark the way the Kid does and after a few steps he stumbles and falls. The Kid hears his face smack against the concrete—Kid, help me! I’m hurt! I’m bleeding! — but keeps on running anyhow. The hell with him. It’s every man for himself. As he races past the civilians at the bottom of the pathway he sees that they actually are reporters — they’re holding skinny notebooks and are writing furiously in them and a couple of them are talking into digital recorders. They have strange little smirks on their faces like they’re customers at a sex show who don’t want you to know it’s turning them on.

The Kid keeps running. He sees bright red and yellow and white lights flashing up on the Causeway and hears sirens wailing as ambulances and paddy wagons and more cruisers arrive. TV crews too. He keeps running. He makes it up the path to the guardrail, jumps over the rail onto the Causeway, then races panting down the ramp onto the highway that leads to the Barriers. He’s still running. His heart is pounding. His lungs feel like they’re on fire. Turning back he sees a pair of patrol boats cutting full speed across the Bay toward the encampment. Coming to pick up the guys who couldn’t make it up to the ambulances and paddy wagons parked on the Causeway — probably including the Rabbit, oh Jesus, the poor fucking Rabbit who looked like his leg got broken and Larry Somerset who looked too scared and bloody to get up and run after he fell. The hell with them. Nothing he could do for them anyhow. He slows to a jog. Then he walks.

The Kid wishes he had taken his bike but there was no way that cop would have let him. He’s lucky he thought to grab his backpack. He’s lucky he slept with his clothes on because he was creeped out by Larry Somerset even though he’s not gay. He’s worried about Iggy but figures once he and Larry took off there was no reason for the cop to shoot Iggy anymore. If they do anything they’ll turn him over to the SPCA or Animal Rescue and he’ll end up in Reptile Village. As soon as the Kid has a new home set up he’ll check in with the SPCA and Animal Rescue people and try to retrieve him. If he’s not with the SPCA or Animal Rescue he’ll be at Reptile Village, which is probably where he ought to be anyhow. Living with other reptiles instead of with humans.

The Kid is rationalizing, he knows. He is going to miss Iggy. But the iguana was getting harder and harder to feed and care for properly especially down under the Causeway and he knows that Iggy will be better off living a more natural life with his own kind than chained to a cinder block down where there isn’t much sunlight and there are no other snakes or lizards for company. Just rats and homeless sex offenders. And no trees to climb.

The sun has broken the horizon and the rumpled silver gray clouds overhead are pushed halfway back by the emerging blue sky. The Bay on either side glistens in the clean new light. Palm trees clatter in the offshore breeze. Traffic has started to build as commuters from the mainland head for work on the islands and the residents of the islands start the daily drive from their homes to their jobs on the mainland. The Kid still has a couple hours to kill before he has to show up for work at the Mirador. The eastbound cars flash past him and to get safely out of their way he steps over the guardrail onto the grass and walks there.

Things could be worse, he thinks. He escaped. And no one’s chasing him. He could be locked in a paddy wagon like Larry Somerset probably is: on his way to court and hauled back to jail for breaking parole by resisting arrest or refusing to disperse or whatever phony charge they come up with. He could be injured or worse like the Rabbit and a couple others he saw getting clubbed by the cops. But he’s not, he’s a free man. More or less. And it’s morning in Calusa.

CHAPTER SIX

IT TAKES THE KID OVER AN HOUR TO WALK from the Causeway over to the Barriers and south onto Clifton Road and then the half-mile residential curl alongside the Bayshore Golf Club. From the sidewalk at Clifton and West Twenty-third he watches with a willed curiosity the retirees out for their first eighteen holes. His legs are still wobbly weak and his lungs burn from the long run to safety and ten years of smoking cigarettes, a habit he caught back when he was twelve and hoped that dangling a ciggie from his lips might make him seem older because people kept mistaking him for nine or ten due to his being short and skinny and big-eared. He was eager to be noticed back then but not for that.

Now he’s eager not to be noticed for anything.

He tries distracting himself with the sight of elderly pink people in pastel shorts and shirts whacking with sticks at little white balls, the kind of people he’s never known personally or even spoken to except to say, May I clear, sir? at the restaurant, people whose thoughts he cannot imagine, whose past, present, and future lives are incomprehensible to him. As if they were members of a different species. He wants to understand what it must feel like to be them. To wake in the morning and shower and shave and read the Wall Street Journal or whatever at breakfast — freshly squeezed orange juice and bacon and eggs cooked just the way you like them by a Jamaican lady who is employed by you — and then you take your bag of golf clubs from the trunk of your S-Class Benz and walk from your walled-in rancho de luxe across Clifton Road to the Bayshore Golf Club where you meet two or three fellow retirees from New York or Philadelphia and stroll out to the first tee chatting knowledgeably about yesterday’s Dow Jones average and the gross national product.

Whatever they are.

Who are those fucking people? the Kid wonders and beneath his wondering hopes that the question will keep him from thinking about what he just went through back at the encampment beneath the Causeway. He can keep the shock of the police and press raid pretty well out of his mind almost as if it never happened but it’s harder for him to ignore the fact that now he’s scared of being picked up by the cops and charged with resisting arrest or unlawful flight or any of the other dozen charges they could easily stick on him if they wanted to because no one will believe that he’s innocent of anything. Even of just being alive. He’s guilty of that too. Being alive. Besides that he’s lost his squat, his safe haven, his home. And he’s worried about Otis the Rabbit and Iggy and feels sorry and a little ashamed that he abandoned Larry Somerset in spite of finding the guy creepy. Guilty and ashamed. Like he did something immoral by running for his life.

CHAPTER SEVEN

HE’S SITTING ALONE AT A CAFÉ TABLE outside a small bookstore on the fifteen-block-long section of Rampart Road that’s given over to pedestrians — a chic sprawl of sidewalk cafés, restaurants, bars, brasseries, and upscale shops for people who want to be seen by each other alongside souvenir stores for short-term sunburnt tourists and sunglass and sneaker stores for young people who like to think of themselves as raging against the machine. A fine mingling spot for people-watching if you’re into that but the Kid is here because it’s still early in the day and there aren’t many customers and no one wants his table so he’s free to idle away a few hours over a cup of coffee and not get nudged off it by the waiter. It’s a bookstore café with a newsstand and a sprinkling of people are sitting nearby reading newspapers just as he is although he’s not reading his newspaper exactly. He’s cashed one of Larry Somerset’s hundred-dollar bills at the bank on the corner of Clifton and Rampart and has bought a city map at the newsstand and a cup of coffee and an apricot muffin at the café. He’s opened the paper to the real estate section and is working his way down the listings for studio apartment rentals.

Parc Bay Plaza Apartments

2341 North Bayshore Drive

$750–$1378. Live up to ONE MONTH FREE in selected apartments when move-in by the end of September. Prices listed reflect the one month free. Enjoy breathtaking views of Calusa Bay and downtown Calusa. Our lovely studio and 1- and 2-bedroom apartments for rent are beautifully appointed with spacious living areas. Many of our homes have large patios and balconies. Our controlled access community includes a swimming pool and a 24-hour fitness center. Catch a flick in our big screen surround sound movie room or play pool, table tennis and air hockey in our game room. Call today to schedule a personal tour: 866-510-1424.

A tall very thin guy in his forties with long lemon yellow hair carrying a purple velvet clutch purse and wearing nothing but a gold lamé Speedo, flip-flops, and an all-body leathery tan swings past and catches the Kid’s eye. He’s anorectic thin with a lace mesh of wrinkles for a face and is weighed down with gold rings dangling from his ears, nostrils, nipples, and navel. He flashes a toothy smile and waves at the Kid, flips his hair and cruises in a half-circle up to the Kid’s table and stops.

Hello, Kid. A little early to be working the street, isn’t it?

The Kid gives him a cold stare and looks down at his map. It’s a very detailed map of the entire city with the Calusa Isles segment scaled at five hundred yards to the inch.

Oh, I forgot, you’re holding down a regular job now. Like a real quote family man unquote.

Fuck off, Molly.

Molly spins in a feigned huff and walks away. The Kid retrieves his cell phone from his backpack and punches in a number.

Parc Bay Realty. How may I help you?

He says he’s calling about a furnished studio with kitchenette and bath. Always he asks first for the price and then the square footage. It’s the drill — the same old Q’s, the same old A’s. Regarding price he’s looking strictly at the low end. Location is irrelevant as long as it’s within biking distance of his job but he knows it’s reassuring to the rental agent so he politely inquires into the related questions of neighborhood safety and building security. While the woman at the other end goes on about how it’s perfectly safe even after dark and the building has excellent twenty-four-hour security he dots the street address on the map with his ballpoint and draws a circle with a diameter of two inches — one thousand yards, three thousand feet — around it.

There are a half-dozen kindergartens, day care centers, public and private schools, and three or four public playgrounds inside the circle. There are kids’ ballet studios, martial arts studios, art classes, music classes, and SAT preparation classes located inside the circle. Inside the circle everywhere you look the children are already gathering.

He makes an appointment anyhow to come by and check out the room as soon as he gets off work at the Mirador and she says fine. He takes a box of Marlboro Gold from his backpack, knocks a cigarette loose, and lights it. He asks about pets and she says no dogs or cats.

He says, Oh, followed by a longish pause. How about a pet iguana?

She knows what an iguana is. She asks how big is it.

Not big, he lies. It sleeps all day and can live in a box under the bed. It doesn’t make any noise and won’t damage anything.

She says she’ll have to see it first and then decide.

He’s okay with that. He says he was thinking of giving him away anyhow. To a friend, he lies again.

Then she asks his name. As usual he wants to tell her Kid. But no way he can get away with it. End of interview. He knows what she’ll do with the information as soon as he gets off the phone. He says his real name anyhow. He has to.

They say good-bye and he clicks off. He imagines her going straight to the Internet to run his name. He’s been through all this before — how many times? Fifty? A hundred? It’s a total waste of time, energy, and hope and he knows he won’t bother to show up at the appointed time and place. Even so he’ll make a call to a second agent. And a third. And probably a fourth. Before finally once again he’ll give up the search for a home.

It’s an hour before the Kid has to be a busboy again and pedestrian traffic has thickened somewhat with tourists, brunchers, and dog walkers strolling past the café and grabbing seats nearby in increasing numbers until all the tables are taken and the Kid has noticed a clutch of people gathered by the headwaiter’s stand staring pointedly in his direction. He folds up his map and is about to leave the café and does not see the two bottle-blond girls in bikinis Rollerblading his way until they circle his table eyeing him like a pair of hawks riding a rising thermal high above a distracted mouse. As their shadows cross him he looks up and instinctively ducks. He wishes he had a hole to dive into. One bikini is pink polka-dotted, the other is tiger striped. Both girls wear carefully tousled honey-colored manes, black fingernail polish, lovingly applied makeup, and the usual navel rings. Polka-dot snaps one of his ears with her thumb and forefinger and keeps circling. Rolling along behind her Tiger-stripe does the same to his other ear.

Ow-w! Cut that shit out, man!

They flash their gleaming teeth and make a second loop. They are both genetic wonders, their smooth tight bodies evenly toasted a golden brown, flesh firm as an unripe Bosc pear, symmetrical faces with pertly sculpted noses and chins. They’re not quite twins, probably not even sisters — Polka’s cheekbones are a little higher than Tiger’s and she’s maybe two inches taller — but have been manufactured from the same prototype by a bored God for no better reason than to satisfy His private eyes.

But for the Kid as the girls skate arabesques around his table everything mingles and blurs. Gold bracelets and earrings glint in the late-morning sun. Flocks of screeching green parrots watch like an aroused audience from the palms and tamarind trees that crowd the center of the mall.

The Kid wants the girls to go away, please go away, and he wants them to stay and stay, please stay. He glances at each girl’s plum-shaped breasts as she passes, her taut belly, the sweet little pouch between her legs and he looks quickly off and up to her mischievously smiling face and as she swirls past and disappears in back of him he switches to the other girl’s face and down to breasts, belly, and pouch and then off her body at once bang and when she disappears behind him his gaze swings back to the face of the first girl again. He mustn’t linger on her body anywhere he mustn’t and tries fixing on her face but can’t keep himself located there for more than a second. His head nods up and down like a stringed puppet’s saying yes yes yes and flops side to side from one girl to the other saying no no no until finally they stop circling over him and Polka dives for the chair next to his and plants her elbows on the table and cups her head in her hands and gazes through half-lidded jade green contacts into his blinking eyes. All her moves very exact, very studied, very likely practiced in front of a mirror. Tiger comes to a stop too but stands next to him and watches as if holding a tray waiting her turn at a cafeteria counter. He feels his throat start to close and his blood thickens all through his body and he swallows hard but then suddenly realizes that seen up close like this the girls are not what they seem, they’re not grown women, eighteen- or twenty-year-old women. They’re girls. Teenage girls. A glistening pearl of sweat slips from Polka’s throat across her chest and slides between her breasts. Thirteen- or at best fourteen-year-old girls.

You guys… you guys oughta get the fuck outa here.

Aw, c’mon, little dude, we’re only trying to turn you on.

Yeah? Well, I ain’t turned on so forget about it, man. I got places to go, things to do.

You look so sad and cute sitting here all by yourself we figured you wanted company. We’re like cheerleaders. You know, like for cheering people up. Doncha wanna get cheered up?

The Kid sits back in his chair, folds his arms over his chest, and crosses one leg over the other trying to look gruff and casual at the same time. A grown man. Ex-military.

Tiger reaches down, pats his ankle through his jeans, and tugs his cuff back a few inches. What’s that thing?

Whaddaya mean? Nothin’.

No, what is it? It’s cool-looking.

Polka leans across the table for a look-see and the Kid quickly yanks his cuff back to his sneaker but can’t help peering down Polka’s bikini top. He can see between her breasts all the way to her dangling navel ring. Her glistening tanned skin is wet with sweat down there. And guaranteed warm to the touch.

Polka says, Show me. What is it?

Tiger says, Is it some kind of camera? Or a secret recorder? Are you a spy, little dude? You must be a secret spy working for the government, like in the CIA.

It’s nothin’.

I bet you’re spying on people. I can tell. Okay? You’re like sitting here pretending to read the paper and stuff only you’re really like a private detective checking on somebody’s wife meeting her boyfriend for sex.

Polka says, Cool! and yanks his cuff halfway up his calf. The Kid uncrosses his legs and plants both feet on the pavement under the table and shakes his cuff down.

No! It’s only… it’s like a kind of monitor. I got a heart condition and it monitors my heartbeat.

Awesome! Let’s see it work then. Let’s check your heartbeat. See if we can get it racing. See if we can give you a heart attack. That’d be really cool. Get you excited enough to have a heart attack. What’s your name?

Kid.

Awesome! I’m Stephanie and she’s Latisha. You want to play with us, Kid?

What do you mean, play with you?

Whatever you like. You got any money?

No.

Okay. You got a ATM card? I see you got a map there. We can show you some fun places if you want. You got a car? Where’s your hotel?

I’m not a tourist. I live here.

Where’s your place? We can go to your place if you want.

Why aren’t you two in school where you should be?

We graduated!

Yeah, sure. Babes on blades.

Slowly the Kid pushes back his chair and stands. He looks down and sees with relief that his pants are loose enough that his woodie doesn’t show. He takes a last lingering look at the two and almost choking says I’m outa here. Stuffs his map, newspaper, cigarettes, and cell phone into his backpack. Turns and walks away.

The girls watch him go, shrug and giggle and skate off in the opposite direction. Halfway down the block the Kid glances back as they roll past Victoria’s Secret. He sees them lifted quickly off the pavement by warm updrafts and over the heads of the pedestrians into the air. They soar above the trees and the flocks of squawking green parrots into the blue sky where they make slow interlocked circles and renew their search for unwary prey below. On the corner of Mantle and Rampart Road the man called Molly who carries a clutch bag and wears only a gold lamé Speedo and flip-flops gazes up at them mildly amused by their audacity and deftly rolls a joint without having to look at his hands. He looks down the block at the Kid and flashes him a wink and a pinkie-wave.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE KID LIKES HIS JOB AT THE MIRADOR. He’s a noon-to-ten-at-night busboy in a beachfront hotel restaurant the size of a major airport terminal which is pleasant enough — no previous experience required, no hierarchy among the busboys, no Babes on Blades — but beyond all that the job appeals to his innate affection for order and cleanliness. He gets to clear away dirty dishes, silverware, glassware, and crumpled napkins and strip the tablecloths off the tables. He gets to cart everything back to the kitchen and separate out the plates, cups, and saucers from the silverware and glassware and rack them in separate dishwashers and drop the used tablecloths into one basket and the stained napkins into another. Then he gets to go back to the dining room and shake out a fresh clean tablecloth and lay down four or six or eight shiny new place settings for the next batch of diners. He likes all this. He enjoys squaring the circle of the plate with the knives, spoons, and forks and folding the napkins into little cloth pyramids and placing them just so in the exact center of the plate. He takes pleasure in delivering the basket of bread and plate of little shell-shaped butter pats and filling the glasses with ice water and then disappearing until the meal is finished. And he likes wearing the starched white jacket with the mandarin collar. It makes him feel like he’s a scientist.

Most of all he likes the anonymity of a busboy. No one checks him out. No one asks his name. No one remembers him. It’s almost like being invisible. He’d make better money if he were a waiter but then he’d have to interact with the diners, describe the daily specials to them, reassure them about portion size, degree of spiciness, ask and answer dumb questions about hotness, coldness, well done, medium or rare, whether or not it really is kosher, endure the diners’ complaints and make small talk and smile all the while. He’d have to say, My name is Kid and I’ll be your server today. He’d have to come regularly to the table and ask, How is everything? He’d have to bring them their food and say, Bon appétit or Enjoy. Some of the waiters, usually the gay guys, just say, Enjoy. That is definitely not the Kid’s style. But neither is Bon appétit.

Actually the Kid doesn’t have a style. He can’t be pegged as one kind of person or another except by age, race, and gender. He’s a white guy in his early twenties. Otherwise he’s almost invisible. Which is the way he likes it. When he was a teenager in high school or working at the light store and later in the army at Fort Drum in upstate New York it bothered him that no one could seem to see him or remember having met him before or simply forgot he was present even when he was trying to draw attention to himself. It puzzled and irritated him and made him even more insecure than when he was alone and every now and then he tried to effect a personal style — he tried gangsta for a few months, then preppie. He tried techno-geek, goth, surfer dude, urban cowboy. Once at Fort Drum he tried sex machine and told the guys in his outfit that he’d auditioned for a porn flick but they needed nine and a half inches and he only had nine. The part about auditioning for a porn flick was a total lie but the part about nine inches was close enough. He had the biggest dick in the outfit but when his fellow soldiers dragged him into the showers and stripped him they just laughed at it and acted like it was wasted on him. Which it was.

Nowadays though he’s happy to be invisible. Sometimes when he’s clearing a table even though the waiters and waitresses wear black tuxedo-style jackets and the busboys are in white a diner mistakes him for a waiter and asks him to bring another menu or more bread or the check but he just pretends he doesn’t speak English and turns his back.

Table seven is a large round VIP table over by a floor-to-ceiling window with a view of the beach and crashing waves and the turquoise ocean beyond. It’s usually bused by the pretty little Mexican girl who wants to be promoted to waitress so she does a lot of smiling and leaves the top two buttons of her jacket unbuttoned. But she called in sick today so as soon as the Kid comes into the kitchen ready for work Dario the manager assigns it to him.

Hurry the fuck up and clear seven, they’ve already ordered dessert.

Dario is Italian from Philly in his late thirties, dainty as a dancer with little hands and tiny wedge-shaped feet but hard-bodied, a man who works out regularly and dresses the same way every day like a prosperous gangster or an actor playing one in a black silk T-shirt, black Armani suit, sockless black Bally loafers, and a large faux-diamond pinkie ring. He has straight black hair in a ponytail and keeps a fresh carnation in his lapel and likes to be seen sniffing it. He reminds the Kid of Al Pacino in Scarface only without the scar.

Dude, it’s only noon. What is it, a late breakfast? Brunch? We haven’t started serving brunch, have we?

Don’t fuck with me, Kid. I let ’em in early. They got a golf game or something and needed to eat now.

Must be big cheeses.

Never mind that. Just get out there and clear the fucking table.

There are four large beefy men at table seven, a thick-necked black guy with his back to the Kid facing the window and three white guys with barrel-bellies, all of them in pastel-colored golf clothes. Mob friends of Dario down from Philly, the Kid decides although he’s pretty sure Dario isn’t a real mobster, only a guy who likes to be regarded as one. He goes all smarmy and overhospitable whenever the real thing shows up at the restaurant. One of the white guys at the table looks Spanish and has a bad dye job on his black pencil-thin mustache and comb-over. The big black guy wears a baseball cap and even from behind looks familiar to the Kid. Usually he avoids looking at the diners’ faces when he clears the table but this time as he goes for the black guy’s plate and silverware he glances up and recognizes him.

His legs go all watery and his breathing turns shallow and fast. O. J. Simpson is in the house! How weird is that? the Kid says to himself. More than weird, it’s a little scary because to his knowledge at least the Kid has never been this close to a real cold-blooded killer before. He somehow hadn’t realized O. J. Simpson was a real person and not just a famous killer who existed only on TV since nothing you know only from TV is real. Not even the news. Not even the president. He wonders what O. J. would do if the Kid accidentally knocked over his half-filled glass of red wine and it splashed into his large lap or dropped his plate of half-eaten ketchup-covered fries onto the floor and got ketchup all over O. J.’s spotless pale green slacks and white shoes.

He sets the tray onto the folding stand beside the table and very carefully removes first O. J.’s knife, then the dishes and the rest of the silverware and the empty glasses. When he nervously reaches for O. J.’s wineglass the man places his brown football-size hand over it and shakes his head no and the Kid quickly backs off.

Sorry sorry. Very sorry.

I’ll have another glass of the Rhône.

Yessir. I’ll tell your waiter.

The man the Kid thinks is Spanish says, Bring me half a pear.

O. J. laughs and says, Fucking half a pear! Why do you want only half a fucking pear? Get a whole one, for chrissakes, and eat half if you only want half a fucking pear.

I only want half a pear. I wanted a whole fucking pear I’d order a whole fucking pear.

O. J. says to the Kid, Bring my fastidious friend here half a fucking pear.

Yessir.

Dario is standing at the headwaiter’s desk by the door going over lunch reservations. As the Kid passes with his tray of dishes and silver and glassware from table seven he stops for a second and says, O. J. wants another glass of wine. Rhône. Want me to bring him his wine?

I’ll take care of it. Fucking guy never buys a decent fucking bottle himself unless somebody else’s paying. Like he expects to get comped his whole fucking life.

And there’s an asshole over there who wants half a fucking pear.

At that moment the asshole — the Spanish-looking guy with the bad hair — passes behind the Kid on his way to the men’s room. The Kid realizes he’s been overheard.

Oh yeah and this gentleman wants the other half!

The gentleman nods, smiles, and moves on to the men’s room.

Dario places a hand on the Kid’s shoulder. That “gentleman” is the Nicaraguan consul.

No shit? The guy with O. J.?

No shit.

I thought in Nicaragua everyone was a soccer player or a hooker.

Dario gives the Kid a cold look. Then he turns his attention back to the lunch reservations. In a low voice he says, You some kinda wiseguy? My wife’s from Nicaragua. You know that. Everybody works here knows that.

Jeez, Dario, I didn’t even know you were married. What team’d she play for?

Dario takes a step back and squints at the Kid. Is he serious? Is he putting me on? Is he insulting my wife? Or me? The Kid confuses Dario. He’s confused him since the day he walked in and asked for a job that almost always went to a Honduran or a dry-footed Cuban off the boat or a wet-footed Haitian with phony papers. A normal-looking little white American guy in his twenties with a high school diploma, a type that almost never wants to bus dishes except temporarily as a way to become a waiter. He took the Kid’s application anyhow and ran the usual background check. It turned out the Kid was a listed sex offender on parole and was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet. Dario got the picture. But the Kid didn’t seem mentally retarded and he spoke decent English and a little Spanish so he went ahead and hired him anyhow. He figured because of his record and the risk of being sent back to jail he wasn’t likely to cause trouble or steal anything.

He called the Kid in and told him he knew about his past. The Kid said it was all a stupid mistake, he was innocent of everything, he was set up. It looked like he was going to break into tears right there in Dario’s office and Dario felt sorry for him which he rarely felt for anyone especially someone he was interviewing for a job. In the past he’d hired ex-cons, recovering alcoholics, and addicts just out of rehab, men and women he knew were illegals with doctored documents and they usually made good dishwashers, pot scrubbers, and busboys at least for a few months or a season until they fell off the wagon or reverted to their old petty criminal habits or got busted by the INS or Homeland Security and deported or locked up. He figured the shadow hanging over the Kid would keep him in line. Which it has.

But that was ten months ago and the Kid is starting to get on Dario’s nerves. Not for anything he does as much as for what comes out of his mouth. The Kid is a good worker but he’s also a wiseguy. A smart-ass. You never know what he’s going to say or not say. He makes Dario nervous as if the Kid doesn’t give a damn about his job and is periodically tempting Dario to fire him. This is one of those times, Dario decides. Enough already.

Kid, put your tray in the kitchen and take off your jacket and go home.

What?

You heard me. You’re through. Come by the end of the week for what you’re owed.

Why are you firing me?

You got a fucking big mouth. You don’t show respect.

Dario sniffs his carnation, turns away from the Kid, and walks toward the bar. I gotta get the wife-killer his fucking cheap glass of bar wine. Don’t be here when I get back.

Okay. I won’t.

The Kid slowly hefts the loaded tray to his shoulder and heads for the kitchen. To himself since no one’s listening anymore he says, I don’t know where I will be though. I got nowhere left to go.

CHAPTER NINE

NOWHERE, EXCEPT BACK TO THE CAMP beneath the Causeway. So he goes there. By the time he steps over the guardrail and cuts down the sharp slope to the concrete island below it’s late afternoon and the camp is shrouded in semidarkness. A few of the rousted residents have returned and are struggling to prop their shanties back up and hanging plastic sheeting over jerry-built frames of PVC tubing and cast-off lumber but otherwise the place is mostly deserted. They too have nowhere else to go. They ignore the Kid and he ignores them. Nothing new — that’s how they usually act. Like they’re covered with shame and are ashamed of each other as well. Him included.

The camp looks like a small tornado blasted through — clothing and papers and blankets lie scattered in no discernible pattern, shacks and shanties have been turned into piles of rubble, tents have been pulled down and tossed into rumpled heaps of canvas and torn pieces of plastic. The Greek’s generator lies on its side half in the water and half out. A strong shove would dump it permanently into the Bay. The few returning survivors of the raid move slowly and silently in the gloom as if merely trying to make the best temporary use of the wreckage they can but with no evident ambition to restore what they built before the raid when it was practically a village down here, a settlement of men, grim and minimal and squalid but an extension of the city nonetheless as if the city had deliberately colonized this dark corner of itself with its outcasts.

A couple of residents are fishing for their supper from the edge of the island. Someone in the cavern beneath the far on-ramp has set a grill on bricks and built a driftwood fire and is boiling water in a pan probably for spaghetti or a one-pot meal from a box. These are the only signs of domestic intent.

From a short distance the Kid spots his bike still chained to the pier where he left it and his tent collapsed in a pile next to it. No sign of Iggy — which he’s desperate enough to take as a good sign. This is not the same as optimism. The Kid is definitely not an optimist. Even so he thinks maybe Iggy somehow escaped and is hiding in the shadows or under a pile of wreckage waiting for the Kid to come back for him. It’s possible but not very likely that the cops called the SPCA or some kindly animal rescue organization and they unhooked his chain from the cinder block and hauled him off to Reptile Village where he’s already found himself a cave to sleep in and a tree to climb and a friendly female iguana to warm his cold reptilian blood.

The Kid knows what he’s going to find but just can’t face it yet.

No sign of Larry Somerset either and none of Otis the Rabbit Washington which doesn’t surprise him. The Rabbit is probably in the hospital and bound for jail as soon as he’s discharged while Larry Somerset has his pin-striped lawyer arguing that in no way did his client violate the terms of his parole and Senator Somerset should therefore be released on his own recognizance immediately which will very likely happen although the Kid doubts he’ll come back to the encampment after this. He’s got options the rest of the men don’t have. He could live in a rented trailer out on the Keys or beyond the suburbs someplace close to the Great Panzacola Swamp where no children live. The Kid figures Somerset’s lawyers if they can’t get him off parole will cut him a deal with the city. He’ll probably end up living down on one of the Keys and teaching a class on good governance and homelessness at the Keys branch of Calusa Community College. It might have to be via the Internet though — there’s lots of college students under the age of eighteen who have to be kept 2,500 feet from sexual offenders.

For months the Kid knew the raid was in the political opportunism pipeline but he didn’t really expect it to happen. Newspaper and TV editorials have been calling incessantly for a “solution” to the “problem” posed by the underground colony of homeless men living beneath the Causeway. State and local tourist boards and hotel and restaurant associations have been lobbying city government to ship the settlers out of the city to someplace where tourists never go — someplace that’s isolated and feels far away, like a homegrown version of Tasmania or Devil’s Island. Church groups and religious leaders and talk radio commentators and their call-in listeners for months have been demanding permanent punishment of sex offenders and even potential sex offenders by means of chemical castration or better yet life sentences without parole or even better execution to be followed if possible by eternal damnation.

The county commission and mayoral elections are only six weeks off and candidates from all political persuasions have been working to outdo each other in the effort to protect American children and defend the American family from the dark desires and intentions of perverts. First they scream for laws that prohibit anyone convicted as a sexual offender from living within 2,500 feet which is almost half a mile from a school or day care center or playground or wherever children are known to gather together or from living in a home where anyone under the age of eighteen happens to reside. Which means pretty much the entire city and its suburbs are off-limits. Except under the Causeway and one or two other locations in Calusa County like the airport and the Great Panzacola Swamp. Then they turn around and call for an immediate solution to the problem of the growing number of convicted sex offenders living under the Causeway.

The Kid’s no psychologist and he hasn’t much insight into what makes a sex offender offend but he has more sympathy for the men he’s been living with lately than with the people who put them there even though he knows that most of the men living here himself included have done very bad things. The papers have taken to calling them the Bridge People which he thinks makes sense in another way because they are a bridge between what passes for normal human beings and animals. They’re like chimpanzees or Neanderthals who eventually would have evolved into normal human beings if it weren’t for their DNA having got scrambled somehow making them forget how they’re supposed to act when it comes to sex so that what seems natural to them seems unnatural to everyone else even though everyone else has the same DNA except it isn’t scrambled the same way theirs is. The Kid wonders if all across America there is some kind of strange invisible radioactive leakage like from high-tension wires or cell phones or road and mall parking lot asphalt that is turning thousands of American men young and old of all races into sex offenders so that instead of being attracted to grown women their own age they’re attracted to young girls and little children. He worries that it’s an environmentally caused degenerative disease. He’s heard about Twinkies having chemicals that can change a normal person into a murderer. Maybe junk food like Big Macs and Whoppers can damage the immune system of certain susceptible men and convert them into sexual offenders. He wonders if his still being attracted to girls like the Babes on Blades earlier today on Rampart Road is a sign that he will someday be attracted to female children. He wonders if when he’s middle-aged he’ll end up like Larry Somerset and rent a motel room and over the phone arrange for a clucker mother to bring her two little daughters to the room where he’ll plan to greet them with porn videos and sex toys and the crackhead mother will turn out to be an undercover cop.

Finally he sees Iggy. Poor Iggy! He walked past him twice and didn’t notice him because the iguana had turned the same shade of gray as the concrete and in the shadows was almost invisible. He’s dead. Shot in the top of his head where his third eye was located. Shot at close range it looks like. The hole is large — the size of one of Dario’s carnations without much blood showing due to his being a reptile and cold-blooded. The eyes on the sides of his head are open but dry and glassy like marbles. With his dewlaps deflated and his dorsal crest and spikes folded back he seems shrunken and old. His feet are hidden beneath him as if he was holding on to his belly when he was shot or maybe he was shot first in the belly and was holding his guts in when the cop finished him off with a shot to the head.

He is still attached to the chain and the chain is hooked to the cinder block but he dragged it about twenty feet away from the tent and the Kid wonders if he did that after he was shot and his final effort in life was either to get away from the cops or to attack them.

Knowing Iggy he was on the attack. Iggy was always braver than the Kid. Iggy would never run from a fight. Not that he’d had many opportunities — in all the years he lived with the Kid Iggy never met another male iguana. And the Kid always protected him from dogs except when he was in basic training at Fort Drum when he made his mother swear not to let him out of his cage except when she cleaned the cage and then to make sure the door to his bedroom was closed tight and the windows down so he couldn’t escape into the dangerous outside world. Down here under the Causeway no one bothered Iggy. He was sort of a mascot anyhow as if he somehow represented not just the Kid but all the men living under the Causeway to the world at large. To the residents under the Causeway Iggy was more than a pet and less. To the Kid however he was more than a human being and less. He was his best friend. He never should have abandoned him during the raid. He never should have trusted the cops to ignore him especially when that one cop drew his gun and the other cop yelled for him to shoot Iggy.

Tears are running down his cheeks and he feels like a big baby. He’s ashamed of himself not for crying but for having been such a coward and though he feels rightly punished by having his best friend taken away forever Iggy did not deserve to die. Iggy never once did anything to be ashamed of. All he did all his life was be his natural self. Unlike the Kid. Who doesn’t even know what his natural self is.

There’s no way he can bury Iggy down here so the Kid drags Larry Somerset’s sleeping bag out from under the collapsed tent and unzips it and rolls Iggy’s body and the chain and cinder block into the sleeping bag and zips it back up. Then he lifts the bundle in his arms and cradling it walks down the sloping concrete island to the water. With Iggy’s body which weighs twenty-seven pounds plus the cinder block and chain the sleeping bag is too heavy for him to toss so he drops it straight into the Bay and then takes a nearby two-by-four and pushes it out into the deeper water where it slowly sinks to the bottom.

The Kid loved Iggy — maybe the only creature he has ever loved except his mother and he’s not really sure he loves her because sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between lifelong dependency and love especially for someone you can’t be sure loves you back. But he knows that from the day Iggy clamped onto his hand with his little beak and the doctor wanted to cut off his head to make him let go the Kid has loved Iggy. And now that Iggy is dead and his body is at the bottom of the Bay the Kid wants to be dead and at the bottom of the Bay too.

Slowly he turns away from Iggy’s watery grave site and walks back to his ravaged campsite. Larry Somerset’s duffel is still there alongside his own supplies and sleeping bag and clothing and his cook-kit and stove. There’s even a can of Corona beer and a bag of Cheetos left over from last night’s supper. The tent poles and lines are intact and the tent itself wasn’t torn. He’s able to reset it quickly and in an hour he has restored his camp to its original neat four-square condition. While he drinks the beer and eats the Cheetos he pokes through Larry Somerset’s bag: corduroy trousers, a Brooks Brothers V-neck sweater and two folded dress shirts, some underwear and socks, a shaving kit and miscellaneous toiletries, a pair of flip-flops and a bath towel. Also a Bible which doesn’t surprise him since guys like Larry Somerset are usually Bible thumpers and a thin leather briefcase stuffed with legal-looking papers that the Kid intends to read in the morning light as it’s nearly dark and he remembers that his headlamp batteries are weak.

On the north side of the Causeway a couple of the survivors of the raid have put the shower pail back up on its stand and have repaired the latrine which is basically a large plastic bucket half-hidden behind a floral shower curtain stretched over a tripod of bamboo poles. One of the men — a guy named P.C. who is around fifty and says in his previous life he was a high school track coach — passes by his camp and the Kid asks him what happened to Rabbit.

P.C. is a fleshy white man with a steel gray buzz cut. He wears baggy bermuda shorts and white basketball sneakers, a faded green Calusa Tarpons T-shirt and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap and is lugging a second plastic bucket to the latrine for when the first bucket is full. He looks like a suburban dad off to wash his station wagon in the driveway. You’d never think he was a sex offender but what’s a sex offender look like anyhow? The Kid doesn’t know what P.C. stands for but he’s pretty sure it isn’t “politically correct.” More likely it’s “partly correct” because he’s one of those guys who speaks with total authority about things he knows almost nothing about. Also there is something sly about him that the Kid can’t quite name. Something compulsively deceitful — like he would say it’s raining, it’s definitely raining, when you can see for yourself that the sun is shining. He doesn’t trust the guy. Not the way he trusts the Rabbit. Or even Paco and most of the other residents.

Rabbit? Oh yeah, he got his leg busted up pretty bad. They took him and some others in the ambulances. Paco just took off on his motorcycle and no one followed him on account of being so busy busting everybody else.

Anybody killed?

A heart attack or two and one guy who tried swimming to the mainland but got caught in the rip and drowned.

P.C., that’s gotta be bullshit. It woulda been in the paper and I read the paper today. I woulda seen it.

They’re keeping it quiet on account of politics. A lot of us just ran like hell. Once people heard the cop’s gun from when he shot your lizard everybody who hadn’t already gotten the hell out of here like you and me froze and behaved themselves and got hauled off in the paddy wagons. Hey, too bad about your lizard, Kid.

You think they’ll be back? I mean the cops and all?

Not tonight. This whole thing was staged for the press. The media. An election year photo op. A few days though an’ there’ll be reporters back to write their follow-ups and if they find us still here and write about it the cops’ll be all over this place again.

I thought you said they were keeping it quiet on account of the politics.

Trust me. Better pack your stuff and find a new place to live, Kid. At least till after the election.

Why do I think you’re trying to keep people from coming back, P.C.? You got your eye on one of those empty shacks?

Come morning I’m outa here myself.

Where can we go?

There’s no “we,” Kid. My advice is go alone. The same way you came here in the first place. Being homeless ain’t a team sport. And keep moving is my advice. And never sleep in the same place twice. Hey, good luck out there, my little friend.

Yeah, thanks.

You might try Benbow’s over on Anaconda Key for a few nights. It doesn’t look like it but it’s a business so he won’t let you camp there permanently. You know Benbow’s?

You’re just making it up, P.C., like everything else. Benbow’s is probably some kind of beach resort where they’ll run me off as soon as they see me start to pitch my tent. Or they’ll bust me. You’re trying to get me busted, aren’t you? You want my spot here beneath the Causeway with the great view of the Bay and beautiful downtown Calusa.

Naw, Benbow’s an old squatters’ shrimper camp. Trust me. They sell beer and smoked fish and shrimp. But guys down on their luck hang out sometimes for a week or two and nobody bugs ’em for it unless they want to make it permanent. Benbow and a bunch of old Vietnam vets run the place. Crazy guys but harmless. Him included. Other side of the South Bay Causeway. On Anaconda Key out by the sewage treatment plant. Can’t miss it. They make movies there sometimes.

What kinda movies?

I heard skin flicks, porn. Cheap shit that goes straight to the Internet. Trust me.

Yeah, right. The Kid says he’ll think about it. Tomorrow. Tonight he’s too fucked up by the death of Iggy to think about anything that might be considered his future or his past. Tonight all he wants to think about is the immediate present.

P.C. says, Suit yourself, Kid. But you’re going to need a power source to charge your anklet battery. The Greek’s generator is permanently out of business. This place is totally over, Kid.

CHAPTER TEN

THE KID FLICKS HIS BIC AND LIGHTS A candle and crawls into his sleeping bag. Above him shadows flutter like restless crows across the pale green skin of the nylon tent. He forgot to buy batteries for his headlamp. Dumb. Lying back, elbow bent, head on his upper arm, he lights up a cigarette. His thirteenth smoke of the day. He’ll be down to twelve next week. But who’s counting, right? At least he’s not thinking about Iggy or about being fired from his job or about having to find a new place to live. The Kid is good at keeping in cages the things that trouble his mind.

He opens Larry Somerset’s Holy Bible. It’s the only book in the tent. The Kid’s never been much of a reader and he has hoped for a long time, ever since he first heard of it, that he suffers from attention deficit disorder because in school and in the army most people regarded him as borderline retarded. He’s pretty sure that he’s not but he’s had a hard time coming up with a better explanation for what’s gone wrong with his life so maybe he is borderline retarded.

He’s not actually read the Bible before. All or even in part. His mother never made him go to Sunday school or church but he’s known about the Bible all his life of course and he respects it — just as he knows about and respects the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence which he’s also never read and Shakespeare and a few other famous writings that weren’t required reading in school and some that were but which he never got around to reading. Supposedly those are the chief books and documents where people set down in print the basic rules that you have to obey in order to live a good productive legal life. A moral life. Everyone in authority when you got down to basics concerning right versus wrong quotes from them or at least refers to them but the Kid always figured that since every rule and regulation in the world was based on them you didn’t have to read the originals.

But lately he’s started to wonder if the authorities have been misrepresenting the originals here and there or at least interpreting them in a way that is more to their own advantage than to the good use of people like the Kid who are both ignorant and pretty much powerless and therefore usually have to depend on the authorities to tell them what’s right and what’s wrong.

For instance he wonders where in the Holy Bible or the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or Shakespeare it says you aren’t supposed to try and have sex with anyone under the age of eighteen. He’s pretty sure that somewhere in the Bible it says God doesn’t want you to have sex with animals or with your mother or your sister or daughter. Shakespeare was probably against all that too. Who wouldn’t be? But what about sex with hard-bodied flirtatious fourteen-year-old girls with navel rings and tattoos and you’re not related to them? What does the Bible have to say about going online and trying to have sex with them? Shakespeare might even be for it.

Some things have been viewed as obviously wrong for thousands of years which is the main reason they’re illegal. At first they’re regarded as immoral pure and simple — God’s law whether you believe in Him or not — and then when people keep doing those immoral things anyhow which is the same as breaking God’s law the majority of human beings gets together and votes to make them illegal as well. Man’s law. That’s okay, the Kid can live with laws like that. It’s democracy in action and everybody including the Kid is in favor of democracy.

Then there are man-laws that are more like rules you agree to obey only they aren’t backed up by the Bible or any of those other ancient writings and if you break them you’re punished which is to be expected but it’s not because you’ve done something morally wrong. You’ve not broken God’s law, you’ve just broken a rule. Like when you join the U.S. Army which has a rule against distributing porn and you go ahead and do it anyhow because you want all your buddies to have a DVD starring your favorite porn actress and you want them to like and respect you but you aren’t aware of the rule against distributing porn so you get kicked out of the army. That’s like breaking a contract because you didn’t read the fine print. Or you didn’t realize that the lease said no pets. Too bad for you is all. It’s not necessarily wrong. Just stupid. Nobody pretends it’s immoral or against the Holy Bible or Shakespeare the way they do if you try to have sex with someone who says she’s fourteen years old and tells you to come on over.

The Kid needs to check out God’s law. So he opens Larry Somerset’s Holy Bible to the book of Genesis and starts reading. It’s the King James Version and he can tell right away that even though it’s supposed to be in English it’s in more like a foreign language than any English he’s ever read before. Still with a little work and concentration he can figure out most of what’s being said there. It reminds him of the dialogue in certain video games and movies about Vikings that are set in medieval times.

Right from the start God seems to be the president or the king of the universe and in charge of everything in it including the sea that surrounds it and the skies above. The various firmaments. Seven days go by in which He sets everything up so He can rule without any opposition and if He wants can even kick back and rest every seventh day. By then He’s got people living there, a man anyhow that He made from blowing into a pile of dust. God’s first real citizen. God’s homey. His name is Adam.

The Kid sort of knows where this story is going but he keeps on reading anyhow. For the details. He likes the details. He can visualize the story and what you can visualize you can imagine. He’s imagining Calusa thousands of years before the white people arrived. Calusa and the Bay and the Barrier Isles and Keys and the Great Panzacola Swamp back when there weren’t any people living here, not even the Panzacola Indians. Only Adam and Eve. And no skyscrapers or hotels or malls or interstate highways and the whole of this part of the continent was covered with jungle and mangroves and the waters were filled with manatees and porpoises and crocodiles and endless schools of fish and whenever vast flocks of birds crossed overhead the skies darkened as if the sun were blocked by passing clouds.

He can’t quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man’s deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work. God’s got one big rule — no eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This is the first real basic right-versus-wrong rule that he’s seen in the Bible so far.

No eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, okay?

He likes that distinction: there’s good and there’s evil. Evil is worse than bad. And it’s a lot worse than merely dumb or unlucky or illegal. That’s what makes God’s rules superior to all other rules: if you break one you’re not just dumb or even bad, you’re fucking evil ! You have knowingly disobeyed God. To be evil is to be bad in an extreme way — sentenced to life without parole and locked up in hell for eternity after you die. If you believe in hell, that is. Which the Kid does although he does not believe in heaven. When you’ve had a life like the Kid’s so far it’s a lot easier to believe in hell than in heaven. Same as with God whom the Kid believes in when things go right but not when things go wrong. Which doesn’t make him an atheist exactly or an agnostic. Just inconsistent.

Finally the talking snake comes into the story and it gets seriously interesting to the Kid especially because the Snake which in the Bible is called a serpent reminds him of Iggy somehow. He wonders if Iggy who is definitely a reptile could properly be called a serpent as well. Don’t go there, Kid. He doesn’t want to think about Iggy wrapped in a sleeping bag at the bottom of the Bay. But he doesn’t want to fall asleep either because he’s afraid the cops might come back in spite of what P.C. told him. And he’s afraid of his dreams. Don’t go there either. So he keeps reading.

The Snake complicates the story which makes it suspenseful for the first time. The Kid tries to warn Adam and Eve: Don’t fall for it! The Snake’s only trying to make trouble between us humans and God! But he’s too late. The woman — probably because women are more trusting than men or at least they were back then in the beginning — believes the Snake. And of course once she’s taken a taste and likes it she talks Adam into eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil too. And suddenly they go from feeling innocent and like babies not even aware that they don’t have any clothes on to feeling guilty and also ashamed which is worse than just feeling guilty and when God shows up again to check on how His garden’s doing they hide in the bushes. When God calls Adam out at first Adam says I didn’t do it. Then he claims that actually the woman made him do it. And the woman turns around and says the Snake made her do it.

The Kid knows how they feel. He’s felt that way since he was about eight or nine. Maybe even younger. First you deny that you did it and then when it’s obvious you’re lying you blame somebody else. It’s what people do when they’re ashamed. It’s always about sex too. First it was from watching his mother making it with some guy and then it was from jerking off all the time since he was ten and then skin magazines and Internet porn and when he got older it was porn DVDs and shows at sex clubs and sex chat room conversations on the Internet with teenage girls until finally he got caught in the act so to speak and busted by the cops and it’s all on YouTube for the whole world to watch and judge.

The Kid wonders if it’s possible that this whole tree of knowledge of good and evil thing was set up by God as a kind of prehistoric sex-sting with the Snake as the decoy. Maybe from the beginning the Snake was secretly working for God who was mainly interested in testing Adam and Eve because in spite of being all-seeing and all-knowing He couldn’t be there in the Garden of Eden 24/7 to watch over them and protect their innocence. If God was going to trust them to behave themselves and follow His rules when He was elsewhere in the universe they would have to be capable of protecting their innocence from temptation on their own. They would have to be like angels. God probably wasn’t sure they could do that. Maybe God didn’t know what sort of creature He’d actually created when He blew into that handful of dust and came up with Adam and then later took out one of Adam’s ribs and made Eve.

Without knowing it the Kid is drifting toward sleep and his theological and philosophical speculations are starting to shape and misshape his reading. According to the Kid the punishment that God lays on the Snake for beguiling the woman into eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is to wrap the Snake in a sex offender’s sleeping bag and sink it to the bottom of the Bay, there to lie forgotten and despised by all mankind and mourned by none except for Adam who in a cowardly moment exposed himself to the fear of men with guns and abandoned the serpent to suffer their wrath. God punishes the woman by making her bear a son who will be dependent upon her for many years and will restrict her in her enjoyment of the company of men until she reaches the age when she no longer attracts them and then the son will disappoint the woman and publicly humiliate and shame her all the remaining days of her life. And because Adam listened to the woman and ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil he is condemned to homelessness living in a tent somewhere east of Eden until he turns back into the dust from whence he came. Then there is something about Adam becoming a farmer and fathering two sons with Eve and naming them Cain and Abel but by now the Kid’s candle has burned down nearly to a stub and he is asleep and dreaming freely.

All of a sudden the flap is pulled back and a bright white light floods the inside of the tent. The Kid wakes and sits up and rubs his eyes with his fists like a child. He hitches himself away from the light toward the rear of the tent. His first thought is to say What the fuck? but it might be God so he doesn’t say anything. The white light splashes against the sides and roof of the tent and bathes the Kid all over. It probably is God. And He’s finally found him although He must’ve known all along where on the planet the Kid was hiding because He’s all-seeing and all-knowing. He must’ve decided that because the Kid has been reading the Bible now is the right moment to confront him with the cold irrefutable fact that the Kid is evil and He’s come down from heaven to the Causeway to tell him in person and reveal the nature of his punishment.

A low voice speaks from the source of the light which is located at the open tent flap — a man’s voice dark and old and thickly layered like the bass register on a church organ. It has a noticeable southern accent cleanly spoken but a little drawled and homey like some of those TV evangelists.

I realize, my friend, that it’s late. But I would enjoy talking with you.

Now?

I will take only a few moments of your time, as it’s late for me as much as for you. To tell the truth, I did not expect to find anyone still here.

The source of the bright tent-filling light drops and the Kid sees that it’s a high-intensity emergency lamp held by an enormous white man with a gray beard and a tangled mass of gray hair. His long shaggy beard and messy nest of hair look like He got buffeted by hurricane-force winds when He flew down from the sky or wherever He came from. He has red puffy lips and a face as broad as a shovel. His body is as wide as the tent and He’s very tall. He’s the largest man the Kid has ever seen. Assuming he is a man and not God — the Kid’s still not sure. He’s never seen a portrait of God before. No one has. Besides God can probably take any form He chooses depending on the circumstance and who He’s talking to. Right now He’s a gigantic bearded fat man in his early sixties dressed like a lawyer or a banker in a chocolate brown suit and white dress shirt and brown-and-yellow-striped tie and a vest buttoned tightly over his enormous belly.

What… what do you want to talk to me about?

Maybe this isn’t a good time. I didn’t think there’d be anyone still here. I just stopped on my way home to see the site of last night’s raid.

On your way home.

Yes.

From?

From the university.

What do you want from me?

A chat.

This ain’t a chat room.

Would you agree to talk in the morning? I don’t have a recorder with me tonight anyhow. It’s a bit of a surprise to find someone still here.

Who the fuck are you anyhow?

It doesn’t matter. I’m a professor at Calusa State. Chair of the sociology department.

Why are you here?

I moderated a panel discussion this evening at the university and was driving myself home. Listening to the local news on the car radio I heard what happened here last night. So I parked up there on the Causeway and made my way down to see where people like you have been living.

People like me.

It’s sort of my area. My academic specialization. Homelessness. Its causes.

Okay. Whatever.

Would you meet with me tomorrow morning? I’d like to interview you.

I won’t be here in the morning. I’m moving.

Where are you moving to?

Why should I tell you, Professor?

I can meet you there. We can do the interview wherever you like.

The Kid thinks it over. The Professor is clearly not God and he’s not likely a cop or someone working for the state either so the Kid has nothing to lose in talking to him in the form of an interview. He can always lie or refuse to answer questions that might incriminate him: Did you or did you not eat of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil? On advice of counsel I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.

It sounds like the Professor will do most of the talking anyhow. He’s a professor, after all. It’s possible the guy can help the Kid find a job at the university on the grounds crew or something and a more or less permanent place to live. You never know. The Kid has never met a real professor before but they’re supposed to be smart and people respect them and they don’t work for the cops or the state. Besides they’re like priests and shrinks, right? Everything you tell them is strictly confidential.

You know where Benbow’s is?

Benbow’s? Is it a restaurant? A homeless shelter?

I can’t go to a homeless shelter. Not where there’s likely to be kids. It’s supposedly an old shrimpers’ camp on Anaconda Key. Out beyond the sewage treatment plant. That’s where I’m going tomorrow. Look for me in a day or two at Benbow’s, okay?

I know how to get to Anaconda Key. And I’ve smelled the sewage treatment plant numerous times when the wind blows out of the south. Now tell me your name, young man.

Kid. Just ask for the Kid.

I have classes all day tomorrow. And meetings at night. I’ll have to get together with you late the following day, if that’s all right.

Not this late.

The Professor rumbles a laugh and says, No, son, not this late. He lowers his lamp and closes the tent flap and walks away. The Kid listens to his slick shoes crunching against the concrete. It must have been hard for a guy that fat to make his way down the path from the Causeway. And a lot harder getting back up. A guy his size could have a heart attack just getting out of his chair.

The Kid lights his stub of a candle and opens Larry Somerset’s Holy Bible again and picks up reading where he left off. But after the story of Cain and Abel he comes to a whole lot of begats which except for the fact that everybody back then was living for hundreds of years at a time is really boring to the Kid.

He closes the Bible and blows out his candle and lies back in the darkness with his eyes wide open and as he has done nearly every night of his life even when he was a little boy he plans his day tomorrow step by step. Break camp. Pack tent sleeping bag clothes cooking utensils containers toilet kit and other gear into backpack and duffel. Include some of Larry Somerset’s stuff. Tie duffel to bike rack, wear backpack, and ride or if it’s too much stuff walk bike to South Bay Causeway four miles south and cross to Anaconda Key. Find Benbow’s. Find Benbow himself if P.C. didn’t lie and he’s a real person and talk him into letting him pitch his tent temporarily and maybe ask for a job there as a busboy if it’s a restaurant and try to cadge a meal or two. Meanwhile make a quick late-night Dumpster dive and replenish home food supply. And hope things change for the better soon. He’s pretty sure they can’t get worse.