Lost Memory of Skin

CHAPTER ONE

IT’S A NEW WORLD THE KID IS LIVING IN. Literally as well as figuratively. In geological time the entire state, and especially its waterlogged southwestern corner, have only recently been delivered from the ocean. Toward the end of the Pleistocene period barely twenty thousand years ago the planet entered a last great ice age, and glaciers expanded south and north from the Poles. As the air cooled, evaporation of seawater into the atmosphere slowed, and for millennia sea levels dropped six and ten feet a century, until at last, in the shallow waters of the Caribbean off the blunt southern edge of North America, waves from the Gulf of Mexico and waves from the Atlantic begin to crash against one another and then to part and fall upon newly risen banks of coral and sand, and the long narrow subtropical peninsula gradually surfaces dripping and puddled from beneath the blue-green Caribbean.

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

The Kid knows nothing of this five-millennia-long sequence. He only knows what has happened to him in his personal twenty-two-year-long narrative. And of that he’s aware of mostly unconnected bits and thus has no comprehensive sense of his lifetime’s arc. But while he sleeps in paradise beneath the stars and the moon aboard his houseboat deep in the Great Panzacola Swamp with his old yellow dog sprawled on the deck beside him and his companion parrot in a cloth-covered cage next to the dog, he dreams the pictures and sounds of the slow making of his paradise.

A dream can compress eons into minutes, and that way the Kid lives through thousands of years of silence broken only by the sound of the waves lapping the shore and the clatter of palms in the warm winds off the sea, centuries of birdsong and the mating calls of frogs, the hoot of owls in the night, the splash of a gar snagging a mullet and an alligator’s scrambling rush from shore into the water in pursuit of the gar, a sudden thrash in the saw grass as a panther brings down an unwary deer: everything heard and seen in his dream signifying merely the constant presence of the wind, the sea, and the slow-flowing waters over the land, the search by all the creatures living on the land and in the waters for mates for procreation and the necessary death of one creature strictly to feed another: the natural world in its evolutionary passage through time.

Centuries pass quickly into millennia, and while the Kid sleeps aboard his boat, continental and global weather patterns shift again. Rainfall, especially in summer and autumn in the north and central parts of the peninsula, is heavy now, creating large shallow inland lakes that seasonally flood and spill over their southern banks onto the drought-dried flatlands beyond, the floodwaters flowing slowly in sheets and wide meandering streams toward the Caribbean and the Gulf where gradually in the lower southwestern corner of the peninsula a vast wetland grows, the beginnings of the Great Panzacola Swamp. Old temperate flora and fauna from the late Pleistocene and the Ice Age get gradually displaced by tropical and subtropical wetland plants, insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Large stands of cypress trees appear along the coasts, and mangroves proliferate and spread from the estuaries into the inland waterways, clogging the streams and regularly rerouting them. Tidal ridges laid down at the birth of the peninsula by the action of ancient waves and midden heaps built by the first humans become low-lying tree islands and densely forested hammocks surrounded by sloughs and threaded by slow-flowing rivers and streams.

It’s on these tree-covered ridges and hammocks and the wet grasslands beyond that the new natives, the domesticated descendants of those early hunters, settle. Calling themselves the Calusas and the Tequestas, they begin to fire and decorate clay pots and manufacture elaborately carved shell and bone ornaments; they develop societies divided into classes of ruling priests, administrators, and workers and build communal longhouses and places of worship with cypress, slash pine, and thatch.

This is the moment when the serpent enters Paradise. At least in the Kid’s dream that’s how it happens. From the underbrush near the mouth of the Appalachee a half-dozen Calusa men step forward to greet the bearded pale-faced strangers and admire up close their shiny helmets and breastplate armor, their brightly colored pantaloons and their, to the Indians, colossal triple-decker canoe. It should be a simple matter to exchange food and other locally processed and manufactured goods with these humans for some of their steel and woven possessions. For decades they have been hearing about white-skinned people from a faraway land, heard tales of their several gods and their marvelous inventions and weaponry from fellow tribesmen and — women who have traveled overland along the canals and rivers to the peninsula’s eastern coast where the white people are rumored to have made a permanent settlement at the mouth of a river flowing to the sea from the mountains of the north. The Europeans who have settled over there are said to be for the most part peaceful and mainly interested in trade with the natives and fighting off other Europeans at sea.

It’s hard for the six Calusa men to know which of the two types of Europeans has come ashore here — the traders or the slavers. These fellows seem friendly enough however and are not carrying manacles or chains. In fact they have rowed from their great canoe to the mouth of the river and have spread out on the grassy shore large bundles of beautiful cloth and steel axes and knives apparently for trade.

The six native men emerge from the palmetto bushes and holding their bows down and their arrows stashed walk gingerly but with a basic trust in their shared humanity toward the Europeans — who draw their steel weapons and quickly surround them and clamp manacles on their ankles and wrists and chain them together.

The Kid wakes from his dream that has turned into a nightmare. He is swiftly relieved for he realizes that all along he has been asleep and dreaming. Everything’s going to be okay. But then, seconds later, years have passed. Centuries. The last of the twenty thousand Calusas and Tequestas, fewer than three hundred of them now, mostly children and old women and men who have not been enslaved or killed by the Europeans, in a final raid are rounded up by Spanish soldiers and shipped to Cuba.

There are now no human inhabitants of the swamp and the marshlands surrounding it, no one living on the tree islands and hammocks and in the saw grass plains north and east of the wetlands. From the thousand estuarine islands along the coast to the large central lakes inland the entire region has returned to its paradisal state. The mounds and midden heaps and the cultivated gardens and cornfields are covered over with trees and palmettos, and the longhouses and thatched huts of the villages have fallen to the ground and rotted and disappeared into the soil. The banks of the canals and irrigation ditches have been washed away by flood and hurricane and invaded by mangroves, coco plum, and strangler pine. The man-made grid of canals and ditches has been integrated into the swamp’s vast constantly shifting natural system of waterways, marshes, and sloughs.

Once again the only sounds and sights in the Kid’s dream are those of a semitropical world in which there are no humans. He believes that he is lying half-awake aboard his houseboat on a mattress beneath a cheesecloth mosquito net with his dog and parrot asleep beside him. He thinks he is awake. He is still trembling but is relieved to have escaped from the Spanish slave catchers and the British soldiers and now from agents sent down from Georgia and the Carolina plantations to sail along the coast hunting escaped African slaves.

For nearly a century the Kid is the only human being residing in the Great Panzacola Swamp — until he learns that there are many people besides him scattered throughout the wilderness. He’s been joined by people driven south from their ancient Appalachian homeland by the American army, Creek and Miccosukee Indians. He smells the smoke from their fires, hears them chopping trees on the hammocks to build huts, sees them pass along the streams in their canoes, fishing in the sloughs, gathering oysters from the bays. They hunt with rifles and weave beautiful multicolored fabric for their clothing. They call themselves Seminoles and this entire corner of the peninsula has become their homeland, their Seminole nation.

Gradually in the last few moments the Kid has begun to realize once again that he has not wakened. He only thought he woke: he is still asleep and dreaming. He feels an unease, a serious discomfort with that information. He fears that if he cannot wake from his sleep and break off this dream, something really bad will happen to him. He is afraid that whatever will happen to the Seminoles at the hands of the white people in the century and a half yet to come will also happen to him. It’s as if his personal history has been locked down in a cell alongside their tribal history, as if their fate and the fate of the Panzacola wilderness are now his as well.

He tries to concentrate and will himself awake. He grunts and groans, trying to make animal noises that he can hear in his sleep and that ought to wake him. But he stays asleep. He says to himself, It’s only a dream, a fucking dream. If I can wake up, everything will be okay, and I’ll be in Paradise again. Really bad things won’t happen to me. I won’t be a loser with no place to live and no friends or family to turn to for comfort and help and company, I won’t be a pathetic convicted sex offender on more or less permanent parole with a tracker clamped to my ankle, I won’t be an ex-whackoff addict and an ex-porn freak kicked out of the army and without a job, paying my way with probably dirty money taken from a superfat weirdo professor of sex-offensiveness studies who for reasons unknown is paying me to help make people think he’s on a secret spy agency’s hit list. If I can just wake myself up, I won’t be a total limp dick in every way possible. If I can only wake myself up and stop myself from dreaming, I won’t be me anymore!

CHAPTER TWO

ALARMED BY THE KID’S GROANS IT’S Annie’s single frightened bark and a squawk from Einstein that wake him from his multilayered dream. And while it would be truly a paradise for the Kid if when he awoke he was not himself anymore he is in fact still the same person he was yesterday when he took his rented houseboat up the Appalachee and anchored it at Turner Slough. The sole consequence of his dream is that he knows today that he’s not living in Paradise like he thought he was last night but in a fallen world and if he had a computer he’d probably be watching porn and jacking off right now.

But he remembers that he has to feed his companion animals and though his lascivious desires dwindle they don’t quite go away. He learned from the group therapist in prison that there’s a difference between a desire to get high and a craving for it and that the same is true for any addiction, even for an addiction to porn and jacking off. The main difference — according to the therapist who was explaining all this to the inmates in the group which except for the Kid was made up of drug addicts and alcoholics — is that a desire doesn’t go away until it’s satisfied but if you think about something else like feeding your companion animal, a craving unlike a desire will disappear. She told them addicts have cravings, not desires. And although the Kid mostly believed her at the time lately he’s begun to wonder why the cravings keep coming back if they’re not desires. Maybe the psychologists distinguish between the two even though they know there’s really no difference between them so you’ll use a few mental tricks and be able to go for a long time without satisfying either and they figure you’ll lose the desire eventually along with the craving and it won’t matter that there’s no difference between them.

Until today it was working pretty well for the Kid — since the night he got busted by Brandi and her father he’s had no desires to watch porn or whack off and no cravings either that he couldn’t make dissipate by thinking deliberately of something else. But finding himself in the middle of the Panzacola wilderness alone on a houseboat with Annie and Einstein and feeling first like he was in Paradise and then having to fight his way out of a densely tangled dream of slaves and dead Indians and alligators and other wild animals and reptiles have left him feeling the old cravings for porn again and desire for what has passed for sex since he was ten or eleven years old.

Glumly he anchors away and steers the Dolores Driscoll out into the slough on a northwest heading in the direction of the Turner River which flows into the slough from what appears on the map to be a chain of small lakes linked by streams wide and deep enough to accommodate a houseboat. By noon he’s already bored with this adventure. It sounded exciting back when he and the Rabbit were discussing it under the Causeway and when he told the Professor of his plan and later when he rented the boat and bought all his supplies from Cat Turnbull. But now it just feels weird and lonely to him in spite of having Annie and Einstein aboard. It’s just water and mangroves and the occasional stand of trees and some jungle flowers and birds he doesn’t know the names of. It’s thickets of mosquitoes and heavy wet heat. Sometimes it’s open water and sometimes it’s dark tunnels winding under overhanging mangroves on streams that curl through the jungle to another stretch of open water. There are plenty of alligators to look at as he passes along the muddy shores of islands and now and then water moccasins and turtles and twice he sees a large silver long-nosed fish with a mouth full of saw-teeth that reminds him of his dream. But the landscape and waterways and the animals, birds, and reptiles and the abundance of tropical and semitropical vegetation and the blood-sucking mosquitoes don’t distract him from his cravings or desires much because even though he’s only been doing it for one night and two days, being on a houseboat in the Great Panzacola Swamp is basically boring to him.

Maybe what the psychologists and the shrink in prison were trying to get the addicts to overcome was boredom instead of desires and cravings and in reality the main cause for addiction is being bored and his desire for porn and his cravings for a good chub-a-dub are only ways to make his life seem interesting to himself.

By late afternoon he’s made his way up the Turner River into the second of the chain of three Mullet Lakes, the one called Little Mullet. He decides to put in there for the night and instead of fishing for his supper he’ll heat up a can of Dinty Moore beef stew. He’s already sick of fish even though since he shipped out on the houseboat he’s only eaten it once. Fishing in Little Mullet is boring. Eating fish caught in Little Mullet is boring. He’s thinking that maybe after supper he’ll flop a while in his cot and try running a porn flick in his head and go for a blanket bop and afterward smoke his ninth and tenth cigarettes of the day.

Then he remembers that he should give Annie a land-walk so she can do her daily business, an idea that partially distracts him for a while. He draws the boat up to an island campsite close enough to step ashore without getting his sneakers wet with the dog in his arms and Einstein perched on his shoulder like a pirate’s parrot and stands at water’s edge watching Annie circle the open sandy space where people who are obviously not scared of alligators or snakes pitch their tents and sniff at the blackened fire pit until she finally squats near a clump of palmettos and does her business. The Kid uses a stick and buries the turd in the sand.

When he gets back aboard the houseboat with Annie and Einstein he realizes that for about five minutes he didn’t once think about watching porn or jerking off, confirming his theory about boredom being the main cause of addiction because during those five minutes he was wholly and solely interested in watching his dog take a shit and for part of it pretending he was a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder looking for a good place to bury his ill-gotten gains although all he had to bury was a fresh dog turd, and that was all he thought about until he got back to the boat.

While he cooks and then eats his supper of canned beef stew and drinks two warm beers he wonders what the Professor would think of his theory. One good thing about being with the Professor is that the Kid was never bored. He was sometimes pissed, once in a while suspicious, occasionally admiring, and most of the time confused. Which causes him to remember the crank-powered portable radio that the Professor gave him when he first visited him at Benbow’s and he realizes that he can kick back and be distracted by listening to the radio as long as he’s not too far from so-called civilization to get any reception and if he is then he can always wave off his cravings by doing a little reading in the Shyster’s Bible instead or maybe he’ll check out the Shyster’s briefcase full of papers that’s still in his duffel and which he only glanced at quickly the night the cops raided the Causeway and busted Rabbit’s leg and killed Iggy.

Okay, so his situation isn’t perfect here and he’s spending a lot of time and energy just fighting off boredom and addiction and still going through porn and masturbation withdrawal but he’s glad all that’s behind him now — living under the Causeway and getting fired from his job at the hotel and camping at Benbow’s and the deaths of Iggy and Rabbit bound together forever beneath the dark waters of Calusa Bay and the hurricane that wrecked the Professor’s planned community for homeless sex offenders. Maybe he was never bored back then like he is now and therefore wasn’t tempted by mental porn flicks and a real-life woodie waiting for his wet hand but he was definitely in a lot of continuous ever-complicating mental pain.

He digs through his duffel and comes up with the little red plastic radio with the crank. He turns the crank for five minutes or so until he’s generated enough juice for the power indicator to register green. Switching the radio on he runs the dial up and down without locating a station anywhere except for one signal that’s reasonably free of static and turns out to be the National Public Radio affiliate broadcasting from the town of Belvedere where there’s an air force base and not much else about forty-five miles north of Little Mullet Lake. NPR — the Kid hates that network and all its affiliates that you can’t get away from no matter where in America you go and has never been able to stand listening to it for more than twenty or thirty seconds before flipping the dial on to something else, anything else, even soft rock like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell or college baseball, anything other than National Public Radio with the puzzle-master Will Shortz setting little language-and-number mousetraps designed to make you feel stupid and that weird deep-throated guy who sings folk songs his grandparents liked and tells definitely not-funny stories about pie-eating Lutherans from Minnesota and some breathless woman interviewing writers and politicians you never heard of and of course constant news, national and local news and weather told by people trying to sound like they’re English.

But it’s the only signal he can get way out here in the Panzacola so he leans back on his cot with the one pillow propped behind his head and smokes his ninth cigarette and listens to news about the stock market and the Federal Reserve Board that makes no sense to him since he has no idea of what they sell at a stock market or what’s reserved at a reserve board. As the newscasters drone on and on from national to regional to local news the Kid starts to nod and his eyes close. His cigarette drops from his hand onto his belly and burns through his T-shirt and abruptly wakes him. He slaps at the hole in his shirt and rubs the still-burning cigarette out in the empty Dinty Moore can and says aloud, Dude, whoa! Fucking bad idea, smoking in bed!

The Kid checks his belly and decides that he needn’t break out the first aid kit. Besides the T-shirt with the burn hole looks cool to him, as if he took a bullet and somehow survived, when he realizes that the NPR local newscaster is talking about the mysterious disappearance of a well-known Calusa University professor of sociology once described as a genius and the smartest man in Calusa County.

CHAPTER THREE

THE KID WANTS TO WEIGH ANCHOR AND start back right now but it’s already dark and he knows he’ll get lost even with a nearly full moon and clear sky so he waits all night half awake — not dreaming this time, no way he’s going back there — and restless until the sun finally comes up and he can see the markers and follow his map back through the swamp the way he came. It’s downstream all the way and only takes him half the day to get from Little Mullet back to Turner’s Slough and down the Appalachee to the Bay where as soon as he ties up the Dolores Driscoll he hurries down the pier, enters Cat Turnbull’s store and without even a hello as if he’s just stepped out for a minute instead of most of three days he asks Cat for a copy of today’s Calusa Times-Union.

In a flat expressionless voice Cat says, Over there on the rack by the door, and turns his attention back to a man standing at the counter in front of him, a heavyset fellow in his mid- to late sixties. He has short white hair and a close-cropped white beard and sunburnt face. He wears a Boston Red Sox cap pulled low over aviator sunglasses, a white short-sleeved guayabera shirt, cargo shorts, and running shoes with no socks. Now that the Kid notices him he thinks the guy looks like the famous writer Ernest Hemingway whose books the Kid has never read of course but he’s seen his picture in magazines and on TV even though he’s pretty sure the writer’s been dead for a long time. He must be really famous though if the Kid’s heard of him.

The Kid quickly opens the newspaper and leafs through it, taking special care to scan the Metropolitan section carefully. Nothing. He refolds the paper and lays it down on the counter and says to Cat, You hear anything about that professor who disappeared?

Cat shakes his head no — he’s been to the National Sex Offender Registry online and doesn’t really want to talk to the Kid if he can avoid it — but the man who looks like the famous writer says, I saw a bit about it on TV in my hotel over in Calusa last night. It was on the late-night local news.

They show a picture of him or anything? The guy who disappeared?

Yeah. Big fat bearded guy. Sort of a mug shot, actually. I didn’t catch his name though.

Dolores has come out of the back room and has been listening. Unlike Cat she’s actually glad to see the Kid and relieved that he’s apparently no worse for wear for having been in the swamp for most of three days and two nights. He’s more resourceful than he seems. It’s none of her business, but she does want to ask the Kid about his appearance on the sex offender registry and find out what he did to get himself on that list, because to her he doesn’t seem in the least dangerous or creepy and not especially weird, either — at least not in the way she’d expect a sex offender to look and act. A little eccentric maybe, and there’s a lot about him that’s not easily explained without having a good long personal conversation with him, which is what she’s interested in initiating somehow. She asks the Kid, Do you think it might be your friend? The man who drove you out here?

It’s possible. I heard about it last night on the radio and didn’t hear all of it. They might have said his name but I didn’t listen to the whole story until it was almost over. And there wasn’t anything about it when I checked this morning. I could only get NPR out there.

Dolores says, We don’t even get that here. No cable TV either. And all we’ve got for Internet is dial-up. Slow as molasses. Makes you not even want to use it. I keep telling Cat we need a satellite dish, but he isn’t much interested in TV or the Internet. He likes things slow. Don’t you, honey? Cat’s a real nineteenth-century man. A swamp fox.

Cat casts a hard look at the Kid. I don’t watch TV maybe, but I do use the Internet from time to time. To look stuff up. Research. He turns to the other man and asks him if he ever uses the Internet for research in his line of work.

Dolores says to the Kid, He’s a travel writer. He’s writing an article about the Panzacola for a big fancy magazine in New York. He promised we’re gonna be in it.

That explains the Hemingway look, the Kid thinks.

She asks the Writer to remind her what the magazine is called.

Outsider. It’s not really that fancy. The Writer has a crooked smile and speaks partially from the left side of his mouth as if he may have suffered a minor stroke long ago and did not fully recover his speech. He turns to Cat and says that he does indeed use the Internet for research. It was how he learned about Cat and Dolores’s store and their houseboat and canoe rental service.

Cat notes that you can also learn about individual people on the Internet. He tells the Writer, as if it were news to him, that if you know an individual’s name all you have to do is type it in and everything about the individual that’s posted on the Internet will pop up on the screen immediately.

Not immediately, honey. Not if you’re stuck using dial-up. Now let’s change the subject, shall we? Do you think we could learn from the Internet if the professor who disappeared is this young man’s friend? I really hope not. I mean I hope we don’t learn that it was his friend.

Cat ignores her. He says to the Writer, Say I happened to know a young fellow’s name because he rented a boat from me and showed an ID to do it. Paid cash in hundred-dollar bills. Claimed to be U.S. Army just back from Afghanistan. Said he was home on dwell-time. Say for the hell of it I typed his name into the computer. You know, just to check, since he’s got my five-thousand-dollar houseboat out there in the swamp. You might do that yourself in your line of work, right?

Let it go, Cat. He’s worried about his friend who’s disappeared, Dolores says.

The Writer shrugs and says yes, he might do that. To check a source’s background.

What if your source turned out to be a convicted sex offender? Listed in the national registry of sex offenders? And he wasn’t in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army like he said.

Could be meaningless. Or it could be a negative. Could even be a plus. Depends on what I’m using him as a source for.

Cat wonders what the Writer means, especially what he means by saying it could be a plus. How could secrets and lying be a plus?

Say I’m writing about the swamp, not sex offenders, and my source simply withholds the fact that he happens to be on the national registry. A meaningless omission, right? Or he mentions in passing that he saw combat in Afghanistan. A meaningless lie. No one has to tell you everything about himself, and no one has to tell you the truth about himself. But let’s say I’m interviewing a guy here for a piece about sex offenders and he lies and says he’s not a convicted sex offender. That would be a negative. Same thing if I’m writing about the war in Afghanistan and later it turns out my source lied about having served there. Definitely a negative.

Cat says, Okay, but how’s keeping secrets and lying a plus? A positive.

Well, let’s say I’m writing an article about sex offenders and for some reason neglect to ask the guy if he’s one himself and he doesn’t volunteer the information, and later it turns out he is one. That would be a plus. Because his secrecy would become part of the piece, maybe the key to it. Same thing with the war. Say I’m writing about why so many American men falsely claim to have seen combat, and I never bother to ask my military source if he’s one of those liars himself, but then discover on the Internet that actually he never served in the military. That’s a plus, too. He’d be my Exhibit A.

Dolores asks the Writer what he’d do then.

I’d go back and interview them both again. And one of my main questions would be to ask the first guy why he withheld the fact that he was a sex offender. I’d ask the second why he lied about having seen combat.

And what if it was the meaningless case? Dolores wants to know. She has caught the Writer’s drift. The case where you weren’t writing about the subject in the first place. What would you do with the new information that you took off the Internet?

Nothing, I guess. Like I said, no one has to tell you everything about himself. And no one’s obliged to tell you the truth about himself either. We all have our little secrets, no? And we all tell little lies, sometimes for innocent reasons. To make friends, for instance, or to avoid embarrassment. Or just to keep things simple. Sometimes the truth is too complicated to pass along in a short conversation or interview. And sometimes it’s just irrelevant.

Dolores says, There you go, Cat. Irrelevant. Meaningless. Got that? You’ve kept a few secrets yourself, you know. We both have. And told a few lies over the years, even to each other. And I’m here to tell you that it’s not always useful to know all of someone’s secrets or every truth behind every lie. You know that as well as I do.

The Writer agrees. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Cat feigns a large sigh of capitulation and smiles at his woman. She’s a better person than he is, and he loves her for that. He believes that a person’s weaknesses are also his strengths: Cat’s weaknesses are skepticism and suspiciousness; Dolores’s are trust and open-mindedness; and if her weaknesses are morally superior to his, and Cat believes they are, then so are her strengths. Ergo, she’s a better person than he is. He’s a lucky man and he knows it. And when he forgets it she’s there to remind him. He says to Dolores, You’re right. Compared to you I’m a total pain-in-the-ass estupido.

Throughout the conversation the Kid has remained silent. At first he was freshly ashamed for not having told the man that he was a convicted sex offender and felt once again like a chomo like the Shyster and then when he saw that Cat also knew that he had lied about having been in combat in Afghanistan he felt like he was O. J. Simpson again. But listening to Dolores and the Writer lay out what kinds of secrets and lies were meaningful and what kinds were meaningless he began to feel a little better about himself and when even Cat came around to essentially forgiving the Kid for his secrets and lies he was able to see himself briefly through Cat’s eyes — although not through Dolores’s which were a little too wet with sympathy for him and not through the Writer’s either who for all he knew might now be thinking about writing an article for a fancy magazine about sex offenders or about American males who lie about having fought in a war instead of writing an article about the Great Panzacola Swamp and will next be wanting to interview the Kid on one or both of those subjects.

The Kid has been interviewed enough for a lifetime thanks to the Professor and shrinks in prison and judges and public defender lawyers and cops and parole officers going all the way back to Brandi’s father and before that at his army discharge hearing. Except for Iggy the best thing about his life before he joined the army is that back then no one ever wanted to interview him which meant that he never had to lie and didn’t have to keep any secrets. He was no more or less than what he seemed to be — a fatherless white kid who graduated high school without ever passing a single test or turning in a single paper, a kid who could barely read and write or do math beyond the simplest level of arithmetic, who was hooked for years and maybe still was hooked on porn and jacking off and never had a girlfriend or a best friend and belonged to no one’s posse — but that was okay to the Kid back then. He might not be the kind of kid he wanted to be but at least back then he didn’t have anything to hide.

The Writer asks the Kid if the missing person, the fat bearded professor, might really be a friend of his, and the Kid says, Yeah. I’m sure of it, in fact. He’s not exactly a friend, though. More of an acquaintance.

You got any idea of where he is?

Yeah. Sort of.

The Writer is intrigued. So are Dolores and Cat. All three turn their full attention on the Kid and wait for him to say more. He stays silent for a long minute until finally the Writer asks if the missing professor has been having marital problems. The Kid shrugs as if he doesn’t really know. Maybe, he says. Although he knows of course that the Professor’s wife Gloria has recently taken their two children and gone to live with her mother.

Financial problems?

The Kid shrugs again.

But you do have an idea of where he might be found. Correct?

It’s only a guess. It’s probably not him anyhow. I’d hafta see a picture. Most professors are fat and wear a beard anyway, aren’t they?

Dolores suggests they go over to the trailer and check out today’s Calusa Times-Union on the Internet. They print the paper a day early but the Internet’s up to the minute. There’ll likely be a photograph of the missing professor to accompany the article. And if it is your friend, and you have an idea of where he might be, then naturally you’ll want to help find him.

The Writer thinks that’s a great idea, and Cat says, Yeah, sure, why not? He’s still a little embarrassed for having used the computer to check on the Kid. Maybe he’ll feel better if he apologizes to the Kid. Which is a little tricky for Cat to pull off, since he’ll be apologizing to someone who’s a convicted sex offender and has committed a sin that’s cardinal to a Marine vet by falsely claiming to have served his country in wartime. He tries anyhow, for Dolores’s sake and says to the Kid, No hard feelings, I hope. About me not believing you and all. And looking you up on the computer and such. I probably shouldn’t have done that. I mean, it isn’t like we was gonna hire you for a babysitter or something.

My late husband Abbott, Dolores chimes in, used to say that a person’s private life ought to be kept private. That’s why it’s called private life. ’Course, that was before the Internet and all.

Thank you, Dolores, for your late husband’s words of wisdom. Anyhow, sonny, I guess I just got a suspicious nature. Must come from dealing with tourists all the time out here.

That’s okay, man. I’m actually kinda relieved. When people know the truth about me there’s not so much for me to keep track of.

Ha! You’re starting to sound like Dolores’s late husband.

The Writer is impatient to check out today’s online edition of the Calusa newspaper. He says so, and Dolores leads the group from the store along the pier and up the grassy slope to the double-wide trailer where she and Cat make their home.

THAT’S HIM ALL RIGHT!

How come it’s a whachacallit, a mug shot? Like he’s been arrested for something. What’s the article say? Is he a fugitive from justice?

Says he’s a “person of interest” in an ongoing investigation but has not been arrested. Doesn’t say what kind of investigation, though.

So how come they took his mug shot?

Maybe it’s off his ID. Or from some previous arrest. Does it say anything about that?

No. Just says he was last seen leaving his home in his car Sunday morning in the company of an unidentified teenage boy and when he didn’t show up for his Monday classes university officials called his home. His wife and two children were visiting her mother and have no idea of his whereabouts. I’m summarizing here.

So he hasn’t been gone very long. Maybe he had a family emergency.

He has two children? And a wife? Wouldn’t have figured that.

Why not?

Well, I guess on account of he’s so fat.

Gimme a break, Cat. That’s a prejudice. Plenty of fat people get married and have kids.

Mentions he’s well known in the city for his civic work and in academic circles. A popular teacher. That sort of stuff.

Maybe he just wants to be alone. Or is on a bender. Is he a drinker?

The wife’s gone ahead and filed a missing person report. She obviously doesn’t think he just wants to be alone.

I don’t think he’s a drinker. But I don’t really know him that way. Like for drinking.

What’s with the teenage boy? Is that a reference to you, sonny?

Probably. Only I ain’t teenage.

You look like it, sweetie. Especially to a stranger and from a distance.

So maybe you were the last person to see him alive.

Assuming he’s no longer alive. He might be living it up in Rio, for all we know.

Actually, Cat and I were the last people to see him alive too.

Where was he headed, sonny? After he left you off here?

Didn’t say.

But you think you know where he might be? Like you said earlier?

Yeah. Actually, no. I don’t.

C’mon. We all heard you.

Okay, he maybe was doing some research. For his work as a professor. He’s interested in those old Army Corps of Engineers canals back toward Calusa. He was telling me all about how they get used by criminals and such for hiding the evidence of their crimes.

Any particular canal?

Yeah.

You know how to find it?

Yeah.

Maybe we oughta take a ride over there for a look-see. What do you think? I’m driving back to Calusa later today. My work here’s about done, only got to interview one of the rangers for my piece, and this disappeared- professor story is a lot more interesting.

I don’t think he’d want you writing about it in some big New York magazine.

It’s not that interesting. I’m just curious is all. I’ll even bring you back here afterward if you want. I can interview a ranger later.

You should do it, hon. Go with him. Or at least tell the police about the canal. Especially since the last person he was seen with is you. Clear your name, so to speak. We’ll watch your pets and your stuff.

Clear his fat friend’s name is more like it.

There you go! Exactly, clear the professor’s name. Who knows, out there in the sun investigating a canal, the guy might’ve had a heart attack or something. He looks like a heart attack waiting to happen anyhow. I’ll drive you there and we’ll check around for him. If we see his car, we call the police. If not, not. And since they’re probably also looking for you, you being the last person seen with him, I’ll do the calling. You can stay out of it completely if you want.

Dude, I’m not that hard to find. See? Check this out. Speaking of which, I got to charge this thing before I turn into a pumpkin. It’s a good thing I came outa the swamp when I did. I didn’t know there wasn’t any electricity in the houseboat or at the so-called campsites.

Wow. I’ve never seen one of those before. They make you wear that?

Yeah.

For how long?

Like ten years.

You poor thing! That’s horrible! Look, Cat, it’s like he’s a prisoner or a slave in shackles.

No comment, Dolores. No damned comment. He’s paying his debt to society, that’s all. Same as those guys the corrections department sends over. We don’t know what he done. Frankly, I don’t want to know. And I don’t want to hear what your late husband Abbott would say.

He’d be horrified.

So what about it, friend? Shall we take a little ride in my rental? It’s a Lincoln Town Car. Great air. How far is the canal? About an hour?

Hour and a half, maybe.

Is that a yes?

I dunno. I gotta charge my shackle.

I rented a GPS when I picked up the car. Maybe the outlet jack’s the same size as your thingie there and you can charge it while we drive. Let me take a look. Yeah, it’s the same. No problema.

Okay. But if we see his van, you be the one to call the cops. I don’t want nothin’ to do with finding his body.

How do you know he’s dead?

I don’t. It’s just… like you said, he’s a heart attack waiting to happen.

Well, if he is dead we can prove you had nothing to do with it. He was certainly alive when he left here, and we can testify that you’ve been in the Panzacola the whole time since.

You still have three days’ rental on that houseboat, sonny. You gonna want a refund on that?

No. I’ll be back. Maybe I’ll just not take it into the swamp again. It’s kinda primitive out there. Maybe I’ll just keep it tied up here at the dock this time.

Suit yourself.

First I gotta get something from my backpack.

Terrific. Meet you at the parking lot up by the ranger station.

CHAPTER FOUR

CANE FIELDS STRETCH FROM THE CANAL nearly to the horizon where a rough line of citrus trees divides the green earth from the cloudless blue sky. Half- a-dozen police cars — Calusa County Sheriff’s Department, local police, state troopers — and a white Sheriff’s Department tow truck and at least three vans from local TV stations are lined up on the shoulder between the two-lane road and the canal. Uniformed and plainclothes officers in twos and threes mill around the edge of the canal talking and smoking. Occasionally one of them breaks off and peers down into the dark still waters of the canal as if he dropped a coin in for luck. Wearing oxygen tanks and weight belts, a pair of divers in dripping black wet suits lean against a fire engine red EMT rescue truck.

Highway traffic is backed up for a quarter of a mile in both directions. Waving impatiently, a single state trooper tries to keep the rubbernecked drivers moving their vehicles in a single lane past the site, and as the Writer’s Town Car approaches the trooper, the Kid slumps in his seat and turns away. The Writer does the opposite: he stops the car, lowers his window, and hands the trooper his business card. He says he’s covering the story for his magazine and asks where the officer would like him to park.

The trooper glances at the card and shakes his head with irritation. Boy, you guys’re all over this one, aren’t you? Park down there beyond the TV guys and stay the hell there till we get this done.

You find the body yet?

It’s still down there. We got to get his van out first. Get moving now. You’re holding up traffic.

How’d you know to look here, officer?

Sir, I said to keep moving! There’ll be a press briefing later. Save your questions for that.

The Writer takes back his card and salutes the trooper and drives on, parking the car a short ways past the TV vans and several nondescript civilian sedans on the shoulder of the highway. Reporters and cameramen and sound technicians drink coffee and smoke and wait. The Writer swings open his door and tells the Kid he’s going to try to speak with one of the divers. Always talk to the guys you won’t see later at the press conference. You coming? he asks the Kid.

No way, man.

Why not? You could identify the body for them. Assuming it’s your friend they bring up.

They probably got his wife here for that. Besides, I barely knew the guy. Plus I’m a convicted felon, remember? They’ll be all over me like white on rice. I don’t need no added scrutiny. The Kid likes saying that, “white on rice.” It’s an expression the Rabbit used to slip his way now and then and for some reason for the last few moments the Rabbit has been flashing across the Kid’s thoughts. He’s been replaying the instant out there on the Causeway in the hurricane-force wind and rain when the Rabbit stopped trying to stand on crutches and just gave it all up, when he ceased to fight gravity and pain and let his tired broken old body tumble down the hill into the rising floodwaters. For the first time the Kid thinks he knows how the Rabbit must have felt in the last months of his life when his only counter to the loneliness and shame of banishment and harassment official and otherwise was his sometimes sly wit and his guarded friendship with the Kid. Then the city officials sent the cops to bust up the camp and scatter the residents like cockroaches and when that didn’t work and they all sneaked back because they had no other place to live and under the guidance of the Professor rebuilt their camp, the hurricane came along and did what the cops couldn’t. By then the Rabbit’s life despite having almost no options had gotten too complicated to bear or even to understand. So he let gravity take over. Which is what the Kid feels like doing now.

Why? You don’t have anything to hide, do you?

Dude, I got a lot to hide. Everyone does.

The Kid imagines being frisked by a cop and the cop coming up with the DVD of the Professor’s final interview which will implicate him in the Professor’s death even if after watching it they actually buy the super-spy story which is highly unlikely. Either way, to nail down the Kid’s exact relation to the death of the famous college professor they’ll go out to Turnbull’s Store to check out his alibi with Cat and Dolores. They’ll have a warrant to rummage through his duffel and backpack where they’ll discover over nine thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills which the Kid will have a very hard time explaining to anyone. It’s money beyond money. It’s like winning the lottery only not. He has a hard time explaining it even to himself. All it’s done for him so far is complicate his life. He almost wishes he’d refused to let the Professor pay him for his services so he could simply drop the DVD into the canal and let the Professor’s wife think whatever she wants.

The Writer has disappeared. All the reporters and cameramen have seen what the Kid sees now and have scrambled down the line of vehicles where they’re bellying up to the yellow crime scene tape watching and already filming the tow truck that’s been backed up to the edge of the canal. The operator locks the brake and steps down from the cab and walks toward the rear of the truck. He’s a professional and moves slowly and methodically so everyone can know it. He takes his position at a panel fixed to the bed of the truck and checks the gauges and levers that control the tension of the steel towing cable.

Cautiously the Kid makes his way to the tape and stands among the reporters and TV cameramen. The police officers and EMT technicians crowd forward and peer into the canal. The black steel cable curls loosely over the concrete edge of the canal and drops into the water and disappears. The operator shifts his hands from one lever to another, the engine digs in and the winch at the rear of the flatbed truck slowly starts spooling the cable, gradually straightening and tightening it until it’s taut as a steel bar that when reaching the turning drum seems magically to soften into coiled black rope. Then the dark waters of the canal rise into a green bubble that bursts apart, and the front bumper and chrome grill of the Professor’s Chrysler van appear, dented and dangling, headlights smashed. The waters part and the vehicle keeps coming like a whale emerging from the depths of the ocean, until it’s half in and half out of the water, held tight to the truck by the cable as if harpooned. The operator locks his levers and walks forward to the cab and climbs up into the driver’s seat. Very carefully he puts the truck in gear and edges it ahead a few inches at a time, bringing the van slowly up and out of the canal onto the embankment where it ends shuddering on all four wheels, sheets of water slithering off its roof and sides and pouring out from under the doors and hood. A police officer steps to the rear of the van and swings open the wide door and a wave of water spills onto the ground. Another officer pulls on the driver’s side door. It suddenly opens and another, smaller wave breaks onto the ground. Slumped forward in the driver’s seat, his forehead resting on the steering wheel, as if he fell asleep while parked, there he is: the man known to the Kid as the Professor.

CHAPTER FIVE

ON THE DRIVE BACK TO APPALACHEE BOTH the Writer and the Kid for most of the first half hour are stuck deep in separate and distinct thoughts and stay silent until finally the Writer tells the Kid he doesn’t get it. Why would the cops immediately say to the press that the Professor’s death is an apparent suicide, no foul play, et cetera, when they don’t even have a coroner’s report yet and can’t produce a suicide note?

The Kid shrugs and notes that they only called it an “apparent” suicide. And maybe there is a suicide note except it’s at the Professor’s house. Or he sent it to his wife in the mail. Or maybe the police know something about the Professor’s past that could cause him to commit suicide but to protect other people’s privacy they can’t reveal it to the public. Also it is possible they’re only saying it was a suicide just in case he actually was murdered and they want whoever did it to think he got away with it until they gather enough evidence to make an arrest. Cops do that sometimes,the Kid adds. I’ve seen it on TV.

Sounds like you buy the official version, though. But then you knew the guy personally.

Sort of.

The car has left the main road and turns onto the narrow lane leading into the Panzacola National Park. They pass clusters of green-uniformed work crews, chain gangs made up of young black convicts still clearing away debris and fallen trees, the aftermath of Hurricane George. The Writer glances over at the manacles and chains linking the men and asks the Kid about the fact that the Professor’s hands were chained to the steering wheel and his foot to the gas pedal. Before they could remove his body from the van they had to use bolt cutters to cut his hands free of the steering wheel and his foot from the accelerator, remember? That’s a far-fetched and fanciful way for a hugely obese man to kill himself. Especially one who’s supposed to be a genius. There have to be a hundred better ways for a man that smart and that fat to make his death look like a simple accident.

The Kid says he must have wanted to make sure he couldn’t change his mind at the last second. Besides, they weren’t really chains, he points out. They were combination bicycle locks made from steel cables and the cops didn’t know the combinations to unlock them. Which is why they used the bolt cutters. It’s the same type of eight-millimeter cable the Kid used for locking his own bike back when he had one and is probably where the Professor got the idea. That could be why he opened the driver’s side window too — so the van would fill with water immediately and he wouldn’t have enough air inside to give him time to escape. It must be wicked hard to kill yourself while you still have time to change your mind, the Kid says.

The Writer agrees. But something about the way the man did the deed suggests that it wasn’t a garden-variety suicide. If he wanted to make some kind of point or issue a statement to the survivors or to the general public — a not uncommon desire among people who kill themselves — there are ways to do it without making it so strange and ugly.

Unless that was the point. Unless that was the statement. The Writer reminds the Kid of the damage done to the Professor’s face by the crabs and who knows what other underwater creatures that got into the van through the open driver’s side window and ate at his eyes and ears. There are eels in those canals, and alligators.

True, it was very ugly. And strange. The Kid doesn’t want to remember how the Professor looked when the EMT guys finally succeeded in getting him out of the van.

Hemingway blowing off his head with a shotgun in the kitchen while his wife is asleep upstairs. There’s a statement for you.

Yeah? What was he stating?

He spent his life killing animals with guns. Big dangerous animals like lions and water buffalo and rhinos. He wasn’t about to kill himself in bed with a bottle of vodka and a jar of sleeping pills or by taking a flying leap off the Golden Gate. Not a big dangerous animal like Ernest Hemingway.

Who was he stating it to? That he was a big dangerous animal.

History, naturally. Literary history.

That seems dumb to the Kid but he doesn’t say it. He can’t imagine wanting to make a statement about who you really are to history. Especially “literary history”—whatever that is. Unless you’re a Hitler or a George W. Bush talking to history is a waste of time. You’d have to believe that people hundreds of years from now would give a shit about knowing who you really were. Still, the Writer is showing him something he never thought of before: that when you decide to kill yourself you also get to choose the method and therefore how you kill yourself in a sense can reveal who you really are. You don’t get to find that out for yourself of course because you’re dead by then but it is like a form of self-expression, your true last words after you’ve already said what were supposedly your last words. For the Kid this casts a slightly different light on many things: the Professor’s telling his super-spy assassination story and recording it onto a DVD; making the Kid agree to be the story’s delivery boy; then there’s the one hundred Benjamins nicely wrapped and waiting in the safe, the van in the canal, the bicycle locks — all the details that lead up to the Professor’s death and come shortly after it. With only one carefully planned detail yet to play out: the Kid’s actual delivery of the videotaped interview with the Professor to the Professor’s widow.

But what kind of man would think up and then arrange all that? If he did kill himself — and the Kid is now pretty sure that he did — then what does the way he went about it say to those who are still alive, to his wife and children, to the Kid himself, to the Professor’s students and fellow professors, to everyone who ever knew the man? Even to history like the big dangerous animal Ernest Hemingway?

It says the Professor was somebody with lots of secrets, the Kid reasons. With maybe a whole secret life. And that he was somebody who wanted people to believe that he was smarter than everyone else. Also a man who got off from observing people from a safe distance. A man who didn’t want to be known for what he was but at the same time did want to be known for what he was. A man who loved hiding the truth but also loved revealing it.

The Kid asks the Writer if at the press briefing he found out how the cops knew to search for the Professor’s body at that particular spot in that particular canal. There are hundreds of miles of canals in Calusa County that they could have searched just as easily and logically as this one only they would have come up empty-handed. It might’ve taken a year before they happened onto the right spot at the right canal. Somebody must’ve dropped a dime on where the van went in, he says.

Couldn’t have been the wife. The police told us she and their two kids were living with her mother temporarily and she hadn’t seen or spoken to him for days. That leaves only one person who could have done it.

Who?

You.

Very funny.

Well, when we left Appalachee you seemed to know precisely where they’d find him.

C’mon, I just remembered he was kind of interested in that one canal. Besides, I was way deep in the swamp since before he went off the radar. I couldn’t’ve called the cops.

Cell phones, Kid.

For a minute or two the Kid wonders if maybe he did call the cops from way deep in the swamp. He remembers being surprised by the NPR news coming as it did from what seemed like another planet than the one the Kid was on with Annie and Einstein in his houseboat out there in the sloughs among the mangroves like the crew of the starship Enterprise. And he remembers being frightened at first because he wasn’t sure how he was connected to the Professor’s disappearance but knew that somehow he was connected and it could turn out to be dangerous to him. He was backsliding right then, bored and generating head-porn and jerk-off fantasies which has always had a dulling effect on his awareness of what else was going on at the time and not much memory of it afterward so that often the next day if he was no longer bored he would remember his thoughts and actions of the previous day as if he had only dreamed them. Did he call the cops and tell them where they were likely to find the missing professor? Or did he only dream it? Or wish it?

He could have made the call. You just dial 911 and say, Look for the missing college professor at the Route Eighty-three Canal at Lock one-oh-seven. Then hang up. And the Writer’s not wrong, the Kid did have his cell phone with him out there and if he was in NPR range he was possibly in cell phone range too. He pulls his clamshell from his pants pocket and checks the recent-calls list. His next-to-last call, he notes with relief, was placed the morning after the cops busted up the encampment under the Causeway and before he got fired from his busboy job at the Mirador when for a few moments that morning he thought of renting an apartment for him and Iggy to live in and called a few Realtors before he was interrupted by the two Babes on Blades. His last call was to his parole officer from Benbow’s.

I never dropped no dime on the Professor, man. Not unless they got pay phones out there in the middle of the Panzacola. Which they don’t, believe me. But you already know that since you’re writing about it for your magazine and all.

I didn’t know that. Never thought of it, actually. No pay phones in the Panzacola? Nice detail. Mind if I use it?

Be my guest.

Wonder if you’re out of cell phone range there. Did you happen to check your reception out there?

Not that I remember. How come you hafta ask about stuff like this? Don’t you hafta be like some kinda expert on the Great Panzacola Swamp in order to write about it for a big fancy New York magazine?

Not really.

You ever actually been inside the swamp? Like in a canoe or a houseboat? Or even take a walk on one of those hiking trails they got for bird-watchers?

Not really.

But you’re okay with writing about it anyhow?

Sure. Jesus Christ, what’s that!

The Writer hits the brakes and brings the car to a sudden stop ten feet short of a gigantic mocha-colored serpent as long as the one-lane road is wide crossing the road slowly from left to right as if sleep-crawling over the hot pavement, sucking the heat through its scales into its cold blood as it undulates its way from greenery over concrete to more greenery and seems to be trying to make it last but is obliged nonetheless to keep moving in order not to get cooked by the sun-baked pavement or hit by a car or truck before succeeding in making it all the way across and into the safety of the jungle. Its head is as large as a Doberman’s and its swirling muscular body is as thick as the Kid’s body so that if its mouth could open wide enough it could swallow the Kid whole. This snake is evil. Its eyes are open but cold and not afraid or angry or curious and they’re nothing like Iggy’s, the only other eyes the Kid can think of comparing them to, eyes that always seemed friendly toward the Kid at least if not toward other people.

Though he’s never seen a snake like this before — never seen a snake that’s so big and scary it blocks everything else out of his field of vision — he knows that it’s a full-grown Burmese python, one of those three- or four-foot-long pet snakes somebody got tired of feeding live mice to and dropped off one night in the Panzacola where it grew to maximal size and gradually moved its diet up the food chain to the top, so forget about mice and rats, now it’s eating deer and feral cats and dogs and the occasional pig that wanders off the farm into the swamp and if it got hungry enough it could grab and crush and devour without dismembering a human being.

Despite the air-conditioning inside the car the Kid is sweating. His thumping heart rushes blood to his face making his ears ping like high-pitched alarms. His palms are wet and for a few seconds he’s afraid he’ll pee his pants. If he starts talking he’ll block out enough of his fear with his own voice and be able to control his body better so he says to the Writer, It’s a fucking giant python, man! Don’t get outa the car or do anything to piss it off ’cause even though they’re not poisonous like water moccasins they can move really fast on the ground and they can break every fucking bone in your body and eat you, man. They’re pure evil and they know no fear. In fact you better put the fucking car in reverse and back it the fuck up in case it decides to attack the car.

The Writer laughs. He pulls out his iPhone and reaches for the door handle. I want to get a picture of it.

Dude! Are you fucking nuts?

The Writer ignores him and gets out of the Town Car and steps to the front fender a few feet away from the middle of the slow-motion body of the snake. He props his elbows on the hood and holds up his iPhone and snaps off half-a-dozen pictures of the serpent as it slithers past the car and slides into the gully at the far side of the road and disappears into the high grass and palmettos.

Grinning in triumph the Writer returns to the car and gets in and clicks through his iPhone photos. Wow! Amazing! My editor’s going to love this. Perfect ending to the story, a twenty-foot Burmese python living in America’s Great Panzacola National Park. And I’ve got photographic proof.

Crossing his arms over his chest the Kid slumps down in his seat. You’re just lucky he wasn’t hungry right now. That snake is evil, man. Pure evil.

Where do you think you are, Kid, the goddam Garden of Eden? Snakes aren’t evil any more than they’re good. They’re just following their nature. Which as long as we don’t screw them up by putting them in cages and zoos is snake-nature. Good and evil, Kid, that’s strictly for us humans. It’s only human nature that’s divided into good and evil.

No way, man. Everything in the universe especially human nature is good and evil mixed. But that fucking snake is pure evil, man. Which is why God put him in the Garden of Eden. Don’t you read the Bible?

The Writer smiles, drops the car into gear and drives. A few miles farther on as they approach the Appalachee ranger station the Writer says to the Kid, I’m going to assume there’s no cell phone service out there in the swamp. For my article. But also with respect to the question of whether you called the cops and told them where to look for the Professor’s body.

Thanks. A lot.

But if you didn’t do it, who did?

Whoever put him there, I guess. Or else the Professor himself called it in.

Right. But judging from the condition of his body, the Professor must have been in the canal since he first disappeared, which was right after he dropped you off out here. Hard to phone in your location when you’ve been underwater for four days and half-devoured by crabs and eels. So it must’ve been whoever put him there.

I guess.

But why would the person or persons who chained him to his van and drove it into the canal want the body discovered?

Beats the shit outa me. Anyhow, they were bicycle locks, not chains.

And why would the police decide so quickly that it was suicide?

Like I said, beats the shit outa me. Is this what writers do all the time, sit around asking themselves questions that can’t be answered?

Yeah. And when they can’t answer them they write about them.

Why?

To give somebody else a chance to answer them.

Does it work?

Sometimes.

The Kid lightly taps the DVD in his cargo pants pocket. He brought it with him from Appalachee because he thought he might see the Professor’s widow at the canal and if so he planned to give it to her then and there without comment and just walk away whistling. But she wasn’t there. Now he’s almost glad she wasn’t because he’s thinking of telling the Writer about his interview with the Professor, get the Writer’s take on the Professor’s story and maybe even let him watch the DVD even though he promised he’d not give or show it to anyone but the Professor’s wife Gloria.

Then he changes his mind. He can’t let the Writer play the DVD on his computer. That would rip up his deal with the Professor and it would be like he stole the ten K from him instead of being paid legitimately for a job yet to be completed.

Maybe he could get away with telling him about it though. Don’t tell him everything. Long-story-short kind of thing. See if he thinks it’s one of those unanswerable questions the Writer likes so much.

CHAPTER SIX

WHEN THE KID AND THE WRITER ARRIVE at Turnbull’s Store Cat and especially Dolores are eager to hear all about the recovery of the disappeared professor’s body from the canal which the Writer gladly reports in detail, even including his speculation as to how the police knew to search for it at that exact spot. The Writer is the excitable talkative type and seems to want to upgrade Cat’s and Dolores’s level of excitement as if to compensate for their generally low-key personalities. The Kid tries fading from the scene inside the store and hangs back by the door at the edge of earshot with Einstein and Annie. Something about hearing the Writer’s version of events makes him uncomfortable: in his telling the story gets simplified and crude even though everything the Writer says either is factual or if the facts aren’t known is rational.

The Writer checks his watch and announces that he’s off to interview the ranger for his magazine article before the man leaves the park. As he passes the Kid at the door he asks him if he plans to spend the night in the houseboat and the Kid says why the hell not, he’s got no place else to stay and he’s already paid for it, so yeah.

Will you be taking the boat into the swamp tonight?

Not after seeing that fucking snake, man. I’m gonna keep it tied tight to the dock. I got a dog and a parrot to protect.

The Writer laughs at that. How about I drop by later for a visit? Check out what it’s like to cruise the Panzacola in a rented houseboat.

Whyn’t you just rent one and take it for a ride yourself? Maybe you’ll run into one of those giant snakes and snag some more pictures.

No time. And not necessary, Kid, since you’ve already done the boating for me. Anyhow I’ve got to get back to Calusa tonight. Early flight to New York tomorrow, he says and hurries off to interview the ranger.

The Kid shrugs and reaches down and scratches Annie’s boney forehead. The dog lies down and closes her eyes with pleasure and flops her tail twice against the tile floor. From his cage Einstein watches the Kid and Annie with what looks like empathy for both. The Kid is surprised by how relieved and glad he is to see Annie and Einstein after being away from them for only a few hours and they seem relieved and glad to see him too. He thinks all three of them must be scared of being abandoned and their shared fear is drawing them closer together. Of course they don’t know about his past habits and longings and his many failed attempts to be a normal person but then they’re animals — or rather an animal and a bird — and are therefore innocent and if the Writer is right they are beyond good and evil and cannot judge him. And will not abandon him. And he will not abandon them.

Dolores has walked up behind the Kid and touches him on the shoulder startling him. I spoke with Cat, hon, and he says it’s okay for you to stay on the boat and keep it tied up in the slip, if that’s what you want and can afford to keep renting it. It’s off-season anyhow. Not much call for houseboats this time of year.

Cat watches from the far end of the counter, his expression halfway between a scowl and a look of defeat.

In a voice that’s practically a whisper the Kid says to Dolores, You don’t mind having a convicted sex offender in the neighborhood? It’s gonna be on the Internet watch list, y’know. Where I’m living.

Whatever you did, hon, I don’t believe you’re a danger to me or Cat. Are you?

I’m not a danger to anyone. What I did was I guess just stupid and confused. And I’m not as stupid and confused now as I used to be.

That’s what I figured. C’mon, I’ll help you take your pets and your bags to the boat, Dolores says and she lifts his duffel and Einstein’s cage and walks from the store. Einstein hollers, Man overboard! Man overboard! and Dolores laughs and tells him to shut the hell up and he obeys. The parrot seems to like Dolores.

The Kid takes Annie’s leash in hand and grabs his backpack. As he leaves he stops and turns to Cat for a second. Thanks for letting me stay on awhile, Cat.

Thank Dolores. She’s the one with the soft heart.

Hey, I’m really sorry I lied to you, man. About the army and all that. It was very disrespectful.

Beats me, though, why everybody wants to say they been in combat when they weren’t anywhere near it. It’s like wanting to say you worked in a meat processing plant when you never got closer to meat than eating a Big Mac. Consider yourself lucky, Kid, that you didn’t get sent over there. And don’t be ashamed to admit it next time somebody asks. You got enough stuff you should be lying about. You don’t hafta lie about your military service too.

Yeah. Thanks for the advice.

So what got you kicked out of the army anyhow? “Don’t ask don’t tell”? You’re not a gay guy, are you?

No. I got caught distributing porn films to my outfit in basic.

Jesus! G’wan, getthefuckoutahere. Next time lie about that too. Say you’re a gay guy or something.

The Kid can’t tell if Cat is serious or not. But he’s right, the next time someone asks him about his military service he’ll admit it right up front, he’ll say he got shit-canned by the U.S. Army before completing basic training. If they ask him why he was discharged he’ll say it was because of “don’t ask don’t tell” and they found out he’s gay. It’s what he should have told brandi18. It would have saved him a world of trouble.

IT’S NEARLY NIGHTFALL WHEN THE WRITER strolls aboard the Dolores Driscoll. He finds the Kid in the gloom of the cabin seated cross-legged on his cot among a batch of loose sheets of paper, some of the pages on his lap, others fallen to the deck, several held in his hands. With small surprise the Writer notes a Bible lying among the papers on the cot. The Kid’s normally suntanned face is chalk white and his hands are shaking. The Writer pulls up a folding chair, sits down, and asks the Kid what he’s reading.

Some weird shit, man.

The Bible yours? I didn’t take you for a Christian particularly.

I’m not particularly. The Bible’s not what’s weird. It belonged to a guy I knew. I ended up with it and started reading in it by accident, you might say. Same as these papers. They’re like printed-out e-mails that I guess the guy was saving for a case. Or in case of a case. Something like that. He’s a lawyer. Or used to be a lawyer.

The Writer can see that the Kid is upset by what he’s been reading, upset and perhaps frightened. Do you mind if I take a look?

Be my guest, the Kid says and he gathers the sheets of paper, takes a moment to put them carefully in sequence, and hands the packet to the Writer.

As the Writer reads his eyebrows lift and he purses his lips as if to whistle. Then he does whistle. Who is this guy, Big Daddy?

I’m pretty sure he’s the guy I know, the lawyer, since they were in his stuff. I sort of got them without his knowledge, I guess, and forgot to give them back. His name is Shyster. Actually his real name is Lawrence Somerset. Used to be some kind of big-time state politician named Larry Somerset who was on TV a lot until he got caught for being into kiddie porn and arranging over the Internet to set up a love nest for a couple of little girls supposedly being pimped by their mother. Only it was a sting and there wasn’t any mother or any little girls either. You maybe read about him in the papers or heard it on the news. It was a big deal for a while when he first got caught. Mainly because he was this big state legislator with a wife and grown kids and all, and when he opened the motel room door for what he thought was a couple of little girls but instead turned out to be the cops, he was naked or almost naked with a dildo in his hand and a kiddie porn DVD playing on the TV. Asshole probably had a hard-on too. And I thought I was stupid.

Good lord! How on earth do you know a man like that? the Writer asks and the Kid briefly describes life beneath the Causeway, its unintended necessity and nature. He adds that he doesn’t know where the Shyster has been living since the hurricane and points out that he never liked the guy anyhow and especially doesn’t like him now after reading these e-mails which the Shyster must’ve been saving in case he needed to keep the other guy from blowing his whistle on even worse things than kiddie-dipping. The Kid calls the other guy “the recipient.”

The one who calls himself Doctor Hoo?

Yeah.

Let me take a wild guess. Is that our professor?

’Fraid so. Read the rest.

The Writer asks if there’s a reading lamp and the Kid places a kerosene lantern on the table next to his chair and lights it. A splash of orange covers the wall behind him and shadows dart around the cabin like bats. The Writer resumes reading. The two of them remain silent. When he reaches the end of the stack of e-mails, the Writer exhales loudly, passes the e-mails back to the Kid and simply says, Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

Did you know your professor friend and this guy Shyster or whatever he’s called were coconspiring pen pals?

No. But they didn’t either. Check the dates on their e-mails. They’re all from a couple years ago, back before the Shyster got busted and did time. They’re from when he could still legally use a computer for e-mailing and cruising the Internet for kids. I didn’t know the Professor back then. Or Shyster either. And since it sounds like Big Daddy and Doctor Hoo never actually met in person in real life, despite being heavy into swapping kiddie porn websites and exchanging kiddies-for-hire contact info, when they did meet in real life under the Causeway a few weeks ago it was a kind of coincidence and they didn’t know who they were meeting so they didn’t recognize each other.

Why on earth would this Shyster want to keep these e-mails? They’re disgusting.

Maybe he thought he could make a deal with the cops. Like if he turned in his pen pal they’d let him get rid of his anklet and get off parole and maybe get his old law license back. I dunno. Everybody makes deals if they can.

The Writer goes back to the e-mails and quickly scans three or four in particular, wincing as he reads. He asks the Kid what makes him think this Doctor Hoo is in fact his professor friend.

The Kid hesitates before answering, as if afraid of the answer. Finally he says, I just know it’s him. I mean, I believe it’s him. Because of all that stuff in there about little buried treasures, which you can tell are in reality little kids for sex, and secret maps, which are Internet kiddie-porn sites, and the mentions of Captain Kydd, who is himself. It’s like a code. It’s not really about pirates. It’s about sex with little kids and how to find them on the Internet. And it’s like all a big joke to those two. Anyhow, the Professor sort of talked like that. Nobody else talked that way. Nobody I ever met anyway. Especially that stuff about Captain Kydd. He used the same words when he was telling me about him and the map and so on. Only I thought at first he was talking about a real secret treasure map and an actual pirate’s treasure and that there was a real island where it was buried. I even got into trying to find the treasure using this old map that he gave me that was supposedly Captain Kydd’s secret map. I thought maybe it was buried under the Causeway, which was originally an island before they paved it with concrete and built the Causeway over it. That’s how dumb I was. I even thought because his name is spelled the same as mine maybe he was related to me.

The Writer scratches his bristly beard and continues to peruse the e-mails, as if looking for something to argue against the Kid’s conclusions. He doesn’t want to find himself trapped in dark self-designed delusions: he’s all too familiar with his affection for bad news and conspiracies. It’s had a negative effect on his career. After a moment he asks the Kid if he thinks the person who told the police where to find the Professor’s body was Big Daddy. The Shyster.

The Kid says no, the Shyster wouldn’t have known where to send the cops unless the Professor tipped him off in advance where he was going to drown himself. Which he wouldn’t have been able to do via e-mail since the Shyster can’t go online anymore due to being a convicted sex offender. Plus the Kid is pretty sure that when the Professor met the Shyster in person down under the Causeway he had no way of knowing he was actually meeting Big Daddy. Any more than the Shyster knew he was meeting Doctor Hoo. No, it had to be somebody else who called the cops.

Who?

Yeah, Hoo. Could’ve been Doctor Hoo himself, assuming he was definitely gonna kill himself then and there. So maybe he made a last-minute 911 call or mailed a tape to the cops or a letter scheduled to arrive a few days after he did the deed.

The Kid goes silent for a moment. The Writer asks if he has anything to drink and the Kid says sure and gets up and digs two cans of beer out of the cooler, apologizing for their not being very cold. He forgot to buy more ice from Cat earlier. The Kid sits on the edge of his cot again and goes back to stroking Annie’s forehead. Without looking up he says, Or else it was somebody else. Somebody not Big Daddy or Doctor Hoo. Somebody who bike-locked him to his van and then drove the van into the canal. Somebody who wanted the Professor’s body discovered and ID’d and declared a suicide.

The Writer looks him over carefully. You know something I don’t know?

Sort of. I shouldn’t be telling you all this. You’re probably gonna write about it.

The Writer shakes his head. No way I’ll write about it.

Yeah? Why not?

Who’d want to read it? Kiddie porn and child molesters, pedophiles and suicidal college professors? Jesus! Besides, I’m just a freelance travel writer, not some kind of investigative journalist or a novelist trying to depress people. I have to make a living. The stuff I write is designed strictly to make people want to spend money on hotels and airlines that advertise in my employers’ magazines. Believe me, this is not a story likely to be welcomed by the Calusa County Chamber of Commerce or the local tourist board. They’d probably pay me not to write it.

Throughout this conversation, throughout the entire afternoon, the Kid has felt himself warming to the Writer, feeling less and less suspicious of his motives and intentions, enjoying the man’s company, not because the Writer is amusing or especially friendly like Dolores or even interesting in a challenging way like Cat but because the Writer’s jumpy ongoing attention makes him feel less alone in the world. Even before the Professor disappeared, from the moment that he turned over the DVD of their interview and paid him to deliver it to his wife Gloria the Kid has felt unaccountably lonely. Up to this point the Kid has rarely felt loneliness — he had been merely one of those people who later, after it comes out that he’s an assassin or a terrorist, is described in puzzlement by people who knew him as a “loner,” a quiet solitary boring person who seemed to have no family or friends going all the way back to childhood, someone who was incapable of committing the act that made him however briefly the center of the known universe. And with the Professor’s DVD in hand and ten thousand dollars in his duffel the Kid has unexpectedly gone from being a mere loner to someone desperately lonely, as if for the first time in his life he’s potentially the center of the known universe only nobody knows it yet.

It’s because the Kid possesses information that no one else has. And he’s starting to believe that if he shares it with the Writer it will give him the feeling of actually being at the center of the universe which will in turn end his loneliness, at least until everyone else has the same information. Maybe then he’ll have to come up with something else that only he possesses and find someone else like the Writer to share it with. But for now he decides to tell the Writer about the DVD in which the Professor aka Doctor Hoo predicts his own assassination by secret government agents who will stage his death as a suicide caused by the threat of imminent public exposure of a shocking sexual scandal.

He begins with the dark and stormy night of Hurricane George after the Professor picked him and Annie and Einstein up at the flooded encampment under the Causeway and brought them to his house. He adds in passing that the Professor’s wife had just left him and had gone to her mother’s with their two kids. He doesn’t mention her note taped to the refrigerator door.

So you were alone with him. Did he try anything? Anything… sexual, I mean.

The Kid laughs at that and says that the Professor’s only interest in him was for testing out some dumb theory he had about making homeless convicted sex offenders into sexually normal people. It had something to do with organizing them into little committees and voting on how to run the camp under the Causeway and various aspects of personal hygiene and the Kid and the other men living there had more or less gone along with it for a while until the hurricane hit.

It takes the Kid fewer than five minutes to summarize the content of his interview with the Professor, partly because he neglects to include in his account anything about the ten thousand dollars. Though from the beginning it must have been a part of the Professor’s plan, taking the money is more about the Kid than the Professor and it still slightly embarrasses him. He merely says that he was charged with the responsibility of getting the DVD of the interview into the hands of the Professor’s estranged wife so that she will believe that he did not kill himself and the sexual scandal was bullshit.

To the Kid’s surprise the Writer who he thought was the skeptical type, being a writer and all, easily believes his brief description of what the Professor said in the interview. He buys into the Professor’s account of why he will be murdered and who will do the murdering. He believes that it will be made to look like a suicide and that information about the Professor’s involvement in a sexual scandal probably involving pedophilia, child pornography, and child prostitution, though false, is about to be made public. The Writer believes all this because he believes in conspiracies and that in fact there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of secret government operatives with supernatural competence, double and triple agents, spies and moles working outside the law. And apparently for many years the Professor was one of these operatives — he was a certified genius after all — and must have been about to go off the reservation as they say in the movies and perhaps write a tell-all book or turn a stash of secret documents over to a blogger or testify to a congressional committee and reveal all the heinous deeds committed for decades by agencies that we don’t even know exist. The Professor had become a threat to national security and was therefore dispensable.

The Writer says, So it wasn’t a suicide after all! Wow! That explains a lot.

Like what?

Like how the cops knew where to look for his body. The quick official designation of his death as a suicide. The way he was chained to the steering wheel and accelerator. Et cetera.

Suddenly, having revealed to the Writer the Professor’s account of his approaching death and seeing how easily the Writer accepts it as the truth, the Kid no longer believes it himself. There’s a big difference between knowing something is true and believing it’s true and the Kid doesn’t want to be a believer. They were bike locks, he points out again. Not chains. Bike locks are cool. Chains are definitely uncool.

The Writer cocks an eyebrow and stares at the Kid. You think he was trying to tell us something?

Maybe. Yeah. That the suicide is a phony. Maybe he was trying to tell us he didn’t really kill himself, someone else did it. So his wife and anybody with a suspicious nature wouldn’t buy the Big Daddy and Doctor Hoo kiddie-porn and suicide story, which he figured was gonna come out and is why the Shyster was saving those e-mails. The Professor must’ve known it was coming. Like he says on the DVD. But when you think about it, it’s like he went to too much trouble to make his so-called suicide look phony.

What do you mean, too much trouble?

If these super-spies and all are so good at killing people who they don’t trust anymore, they oughta be able to fake a suicide without clamping the guy to his car with bike locks and driving it into a canal, right? I mean, he’s such a fat guy they could’ve made him run on a treadmill or up and down a beach dune until he had a heart attack and died and they could just leave him there. They coulda pushed him off a bridge if they wanted to fake his suicide. Drop him off a boat in the Gulf. There’s a hundred different ways to make it look like a suicide without also making it look like a murder. If that’s what you want. The only one who wanted it to look like a murder was the Professor. But he also wanted to make it look like a suicide. He needed it both ways, or nobody’d believe his story. The murdered ex-spy cancels out the child-molester professor. And vice versa. They both disappear. Like that snake slithering into the swamp.

And we end up not knowing which one he really was.

Maybe he was both, the Kid says. Maybe neither. He was supposedly a genius, remember. And he liked playing games with people.

What’re you going to do with that DVD?

Take it to the wife. Like I said I would.

Tomorrow?

Yeah, I guess so.

I’ll drive you there. I’ll cancel my flight back and take you to the Professor’s wife.

You’re not gonna write about this, are you?

God, no!

Where you gonna stay the night?

I’ll rent myself a houseboat so I can write about sleeping in a houseboat deep in the Great Panzacola Swamp instead.

Research.

Yep.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WHEN THE PROFESSOR’S WIFE ANSWERS the Kid’s light knock on the door she opens it only a crack at first, as if expecting someone she doesn’t want to speak to: another reporter or a nosy neighbor faking concern and offering condolences and a casserole; or a police officer with more of her husband’s “effects” as they call his clothing and the contents of his pockets and car. Her skin is chalky white and dry and she has large dark circles under her green eyes. She doesn’t appear to have been crying, but she looks haggard and exhausted as if she hasn’t slept for days. Her shoulders are slumped and her hands, even though both are clamped to the edge of the door, tremble visibly.

She pushes the door open a few more inches and peers out at the Kid and the big bearded white-haired man in the Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts standing behind him and asks them what they want. Something about the small young man with the military buzz cut is familiar to her. Did he do some yard work for them? He looks like the kind of young unskilled white man who does yard work for people in neighborhoods like this. Or maybe he’s selling magazine subscriptions and the older man behind him is his supervisor who’s training him.

The Kid asks if she’s the wife. He can’t remember her actual name — the only time he saw it was on her typed good-bye note that she taped to the refrigerator and the Professor barely mentioned her by name, just referred to her as my wife. To the Kid therefore she’s the Wife so that’s what he calls her.

She says yes and asks them again what they want, a little less confrontational now than the first time. She opens the door farther. She’s starting to remember that she met the young man briefly at the library once, but is unsure of the circumstances or when — recently no doubt. Possibly she interviewed him for an afterschool job but did not hire him. But if she met him at the library and it was about a job she never gave him, why would he seek her out at home?

Oddly — at least it strikes her as odd — she likes his looks, especially compared to the looks of everyone else she’s had to talk to lately: she likes the angle of his cocked head and the way he stands at an opposing angle with all his weight on one foot like a watchful bird. He seems slightly bored and a little annoyed with having to stand here at the door. He doesn’t appear to want anything from her. She likes that too. Everyone else has wanted something from her — information about her husband mainly, his disappearance and death — and has tried to conceal that fact with false expressions of sympathy and insincere offers of comfort and help: neighbors, friends and colleagues from the library and from her husband’s university, the several reporters who called on her, the police. Even her mother. If there’s anything I can do…, Don’t be afraid to call on us…, I know how hard this must be for you, ma’am, but. ..

She knows what people thought of her husband when he was alive — he was not a popular or particularly admired man to anyone except his wife and his children — and she knows what they think of him now that he’s committed suicide and abandoned that loving wife and those well-behaved pretty children, the only people who knew him and did not think he was odd and ugly and arrogant. But he is or rather was a very intelligent man, people always note that. A genius.

But nobody likes a genius. Especially one who is obese and eccentric. And she knows — because of the way he killed himself and because he was a fat weird opinionated genius — that everyone thinks the Professor had secrets, dark secrets, probably secrets of a sexual nature. People who are neither fat nor geniuses always think fat people who are geniuses have strange secret sex lives. And because she was married to him and bore him two children, people probably believe that she too has, or rather had, a strange secret sex life. She senses the presence of that belief especially now in friends and colleagues as much as in strangers. Even in her mother. It’s one of the reasons she was hesitant about leaving the children with her mother while she dealt with the aftermath of her husband’s disappearance and death. But her mother had said, Please, dear, please let me help by taking care of the children for a few days. You have enough to handle, Lord knows, and with me they’ll be more protected from the… from the facts of the situation.

As if the facts were somehow sexual. And peculiar. But they weren’t. Were they?

The Wife’s mind is primed by her darting dark thoughts, so when the Kid says, I have something your husband wanted me to give you, and holds out a clear plastic case with what looks like a CD inside she remembers suddenly and clearly her one and only meeting with the Kid. He’s the same skinny young man who walked stiff with anxiety into the library on Regis Road one afternoon and asked her to help him look up his neighborhood, his own house in fact, on the National Sex Offender Registry. His is the face that came up on the computer screen, the convicted sex offender who said he was sorry and she told him not to be sorry. Although she had no idea what she meant by that. Ever since, she’s wondered what she was thinking then and has wished he had not fled and instead had stayed and told her what he was sorry for. Whatever it was, she was sure, from the horrified expression on his real face when he saw its digitalized version on the computer screen and from the rigid quick-stepping way he steered his body from the library like a mortified comedian in an early silent movie, that he could not have done something that he should be sorry for. She has believed ever since that she was not wrong to tell him that.

At the same instant the Kid recognizes her too. She’s the fizzy red-haired research lady at the library he was dumb enough to ask for help the afternoon he wanted to see for himself what anybody in the world with a computer and an Internet connection could see. He remembers the afternoon with embarrassment and shame. It’s how he remembers most of his life up till then only sharper because that was the afternoon before the night the cops tore up what passed for his home and killed Iggy. It was the afternoon before the next morning when he was humiliated by the bikini babes on Rollerblades and then got fired from his job at the Mirador on account of his joke about the guy at O. J. Simpson’s table who wanted half a pear. His first and only visit to the library was when everything started going from bad to worse, from simple to complicated, obvious to confusing. It was the day before the night the Professor first came knocking at the door of his tent. And now it’s suddenly all come full circle and feels almost like he’s back at the library again looking at his mug shot on the computer screen with the nice research lady except that it’s much worse this time because not only does she know some of his secrets he knows some of hers.

The Wife’s tired eyes get very large and her mouth opens to speak but nothing gets said. She nods and takes the plastic case from the Kid’s extended hand in silence. For a moment the Wife and the Kid stare at each other as if waiting for an answer to a question that neither of them wishes to ask.

Finally it’s the Writer who speaks. The young man knew your late husband, ma’am. We’re very sorry to intrude at such a time, but your husband instructed my friend here to deliver the DVD to you personally. They filmed an interview together. Your husband, in the event of his untimely death, wanted you to have it. We thought it was important enough to risk intruding on you like this. I hope you don’t mind.

Without answering him, the Wife as if brushing away cobwebs passes one hand over her face and gestures with the other for them to come inside.

She asks the Kid if she should watch the DVD now since he knows what’s on it. Can it wait until I’m a little over the… the shock of it all? I don’t need any more bad news.

The three of them stand awkwardly together in the middle of the living room. The blinds and curtains are drawn, filling the room with thickened shadow and gloom, as if no one has ventured into it in months. The Kid says, I dunno, I think maybe you oughta check it out now. Before you do get any more bad news.

She says, Oh! He’s told her more than she wanted to hear.

I mean, I think the Professor wanted you to look at it right away. Like, as soon as they found his body and said it was a suicide.

Well, it was suicide!

The Writer clears his throat and asks, Was there a note or a letter to that effect, ma’am?

No. But he was despondent. There were things you couldn’t know. He and I… we were recently estranged. I’m afraid to watch it, the DVD. He may say things about me or the children that I don’t want to hear.

The Kid says, No way. He only says nice stuff about you and the kids.

The Wife looks pleadingly into the Kid’s eyes: Will you watch it with me? I’m scared to watch it alone. I don’t know who else to ask. You were there, weren’t you?

Yeah. I was sort of like the cameraman.

She asks the Writer if he knows what’s on the DVD, and he says yes, although he hasn’t watched it himself. The Kid summarized it for him.

She says, All right, then if you don’t mind, we’ll watch it together. Come with me, there’s a computer in my husband’s office, she says and leads the Kid and the Writer down the hallway to the Professor’s office.

The Wife sits down at the desk and opens the computer and turns it on. As the Kid and the Writer take positions behind her, the Kid glances over at the big black safe and feels a twinge of guilt. He wonders if he should have told the Wife about the money and decides no, it would only complicate things even further. Maybe someday.

When the computer screen has opened and the screen has filled with icons, the Wife slips the DVD into the slot. A few seconds later the Professor’s bearded plate-shaped face appears on the screen.

You sit there, Kid, off camera. I’ll sit here on the sofa in front of it.

Whaddaya want me to ask? I mean, I never done this before, interviewed somebody.

The Kid interrupts his digital self: I guess I was more than a cameraman. Sorry.

The Professor continues: No, but you’ve been interviewed. You start by asking a question that you want answered, and then I decide if and how I’m willing to answer it. Then you ask a follow-up question that’s generated by my previous answer. Simple. Especially for the one asking the questions.

Okay. How about what’s the fucking reason for making this interview in the first place?

Excellent first question! The simple answer is that in the coming weeks or possibly months my body will be found, and it will look like a suicide. This interview will provide evidence that it was not a suicide. ..

For nearly twenty minutes the Kid, the Writer, and the Wife watch the DVD on the Professor’s desktop computer. Finally the interview comes to an end:

Pretty much everything I wanted Gloria to hear has been said already. Except that I truly love her and the children, and I am not guilty of the heinous acts that I will soon be accused of.

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

Ashamed? Of what?

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

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

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

Fair enough.

The screen blanks out. The Kid backs away from the Wife, who sits stunned in front of the computer. The Writer hunches over beside her, still staring at the screen as if wanting more. The Kid moves slowly toward the door thinking: I never should’ve said that shit about my fee because now they’re going to ask me how much he paid me and the Wife’s going to ask for the money back and I’ll have to give her what’s left of it if she does on account of she’ll need it for her kids and it isn’t like I actually earned the money by working for it but then I’ll be broke again and homeless with no job and I won’t be able to feed Annie and Einstein or even myself except by Dumpster diving so now I’m totally fucked again!

But they don’t ask him about his fee. They don’t ask him about anything. For the Wife and the Writer, the Kid’s interview with the Professor has provided nothing but answers. Instead of asking questions, they make statements.

Her pale face soaked with tears, the Wife turns and looks up at the Kid, who’s never seen a woman cry before: Thank you, she says. Then to the Writer: Thank you both. I know the truth now. I finally know who my husband really was. Finally! And I know what to expect. And when it comes, no matter how awful it is I’ll know how to deal with it and how to protect my children from it. I’ll be able to tell them that whatever people say about their father it isn’t true! And someday when they’re old enough to understand such things I’ll play this for them. So thank you! For their sake as much as mine.

The Writer places a hand on her shoulder. Some people would consider your husband a hero. I’m one of them.

The Kid stops at the door not so much surprised as appalled and stares at the two. They believe the Professor’s stupid story! Both of them! The Writer has leaned down and embraced the Wife. She sobs onto his shoulder wetting the sleeve of his yellow and red Hawaiian shirt.

The Kid slips out the door and waits in the Town Car.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ON THE DRIVE BACK TO APPALACHEE THE Kid slumps in the passenger’s seat in sulky silence with his arms folded across his chest and his feet propped against the dashboard while the Writer natters on — at least from the Kid’s perspective — about the Professor’s courage in accepting the fatal consequences of his past associations and the man’s loving-kindness toward his wife and children by making sure they knew the truth. Arming them against the coming scandal, he says.

The Kid tamps back an impulse to ask the Writer if he’s forgotten about the sick e-mail correspondence between Big Daddy and Doctor Hoo. Buried treasures and secret maps. Captain Kydds and Peter Pans. Disgusting! The Writer believes what he wants to be true, not what he knows to be true. Who does he think told the cops where to find the Professor’s body anyway? Who else had a motive? No one. It had to be the Professor himself. It was the only way he could be sure his cover story would get delivered to his wife, the only way he could defend himself from beyond the grave and also go out feeling smarter than everyone else. He probably holed up in a cheesy by-the-hour motel at a minimall somewhere west of the city for a few nights until his disappearance got on TV, then drove out to the canal and made an anonymous phone call to the cops with the motor of his van already running, lowered the window, and tossed the phone into the water, snapped the bike locks onto his wrists and feet, somehow shifted the van into drive and floored it. It would have given the crabs and eels only an hour or so to do all that damage to the Professor’s face but maybe that’s enough when they’re hungry. Complicated — maybe too complicated — but just complicated enough if you were married to the man like the Wife was or are slightly paranoid and believe in conspiracies like the Writer does to make suicide not quite believable which is exactly what the Professor needed to make his story believable to his wife and no doubt someday to his kids and evidently to the Writer as well.

But not to the Kid.

The Kid’s not buying it. Though he’d like to. It would help him sort out how to deal with the money. His fee. If the Professor’s story is a big fat lie and he was a big fat chomo into kiddie porn and worse then the money the Kid received for filming the story and delivering it to Gloria makes him an accomplice in the Professor’s big fat lie and life. Which makes the money dirty and he ought to hand it over to Gloria and her kids the same as if the Professor stole it from them. But if the Professor’s story is actually true then the money’s clean — it’s payment for the Kid’s services which involved a certain degree of risk for him and maybe still does if those secret agents assuming they exist ever find out about it — and he’s entitled to keep what’s left of the ten K and spend it any way he wants.

It’s in the Kid’s interest then, his financial interest, to believe the Professor’s story is true. It’s the only way he can afford to rent the houseboat and live out there with Annie and Einstein in Appalachee at the edge of Paradise among normal people like Dolores and Cat and the ranger. Otherwise he’ll have to give the money to the Wife and he’ll be penniless and without a job or a home and will have to go back down under the Causeway and live with the ghosts and whoever else among the convicted sex offenders of Calusa County shows up there. And he won’t be able to take proper care of Annie and Einstein or even feed himself except by stealing garbage from behind restaurants and supermarkets after they close.

He says to the Writer, You really believe the Professor’s story, right?

Definitely!

But how do you know it’s true? Instead of just believing it’s true.

You mean, do I have proof? Like scientific proof? No, of course not. Hardly anything about human behavior can be known that way. Even our own behavior. We just have to choose what to believe and act accordingly, Kid.

Yeah, well, I need to know if his story is true or not. Because as far as believing goes, I can come down on either side. And if I come down on one side my “human behavior” will be different than if I come down on the other and vice versa. No matter which side I come down on, I’ll worry it’s the wrong side and my human behavior will be wrong too. This ain’t a novel or a movie, y’ know, where that shit don’t matter as long as you know by the end what really happened.

The Writer laughs and shakes his head. You’re shoveling some heavy shit there, Kid. But I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. Whether he killed himself or someone else known or unknown did it for him, the Professor is dead and gone. You delivered his DVD to his widow and presumably you collected your fee, which I understand from Cat amounted to a rather large supply of hundred-dollar bills, right?

Yeah. Right.

So whether you believe the Professor’s story or not, your life will go on pretty much the same tomorrow as yesterday. You can live out there on your houseboat like Huckleberry Finn on his raft until your money runs out and then probably work for Cat and Dolores at the store until something better comes along. Sounds pretty nice to me, little buddy. I don’t see how your “human behavior” will be affected one way or the other by your not having scientific proof that the Professor’s story is true. You gotta believe, Kid! You just gotta believe.

Not, the Kid says. ’Course, that’s easy for you to say, you’re a writer. For people like me it’s not so easy to believe things. Every time I believed someone or something I totally fucked up my life. So you can let that one go, man.

Sorry, sorry, sorry, Kid.

A FULL MOON ABOVE THE BAY SPLASHES WIDE stripes of cool glimmering light across the dark waters of the Appalachee estuary. There is a weak offshore breeze, and low waves lap the sides of the pier. The boats rise and fall slowly as if the sea were breathing. The Writer has rented the boat next to the Kid’s for one night only. He plans to structure his travel magazine article around a weeklong exploration by houseboat through the practically unmapped constantly shifting mazelike interior waterways of the Great Panzacola Swamp. He figures a single night spent aboard one of Cat’s boats at the pier ought to provide him with enough details to make his account believable. Sort of like African Queen. Only without the leeches, he tells the Kid.

The Kid points out that he’ll be making the whole thing up and asks if that’s the way it is in the magazine article world, if what you read and what you think is true is actually mostly made up.

The Writer explains that in a sense everything we read is mostly made up.

Even the news?

Even the news.

Even on the Internet?

Especially on the Internet.

What about pictures and videos? Pictures don’t lie, man.

Everything lies.

If everything’s a lie, then nothing’s true.

You got it, Kid. Sort of. It means you can never really know the truth of anything.

Where’d you learn this? In college?

Yeah. Brown.

What the fuck’s a Brown?

Where I went to college.

They’re sitting in deck chairs at the stern of their respective houseboats, side by side and only a few feet apart. Einstein is perched atop the Kid’s cabin like a lookout and as if to amuse himself every now and then mumbles, Land ho, and Annie sleeps curled like a comma at the Kid’s feet. When the Kid returned earlier from Calusa both creatures seemed happy and relieved and the Kid’s chest and throat filled with thick emotion and he felt himself almost start to cry but quickly got hold of himself and knocked his feelings back and was okay again.

But then when he went into the store for ice and more beer Dolores too and even Cat seemed oddly happy and relieved to see him — odd to the Kid since they know he’s a convicted sex offender but don’t yet know the exact nature of his crime when it could be anything from child abuse and rape to exposing his dick in public — a thing he wouldn’t be caught dead doing — and everything in between, the kinds of things that he would do and a few that he actually did and that lots of more or less sexually normal people would do too if given the chance. And again his emotions almost welled over.

What’s going on? he wondered. Am I losing it or are they?

Dolores actually hugged him and Cat didn’t charge for the ice. They knew only that he and the Writer had driven into the city so the Kid could deliver a message to the widow from his friend the dead Professor since he was probably the last one to see the Professor while he was still alive — that was all he told them and what he instructed the Writer to say — and they were impressed by his kindness and loyalty to his strange friend. They were closing up the store, planning to barbecue ribs for supper and Dolores asked the Kid if he’d like to join them but he just shook his head no and grabbed the beer and ice and backed out the door, turned and headed quickly for his boat. Their trust and seeming affection for him was scaring him. It was a lot like Annie’s and Einstein’s trust and affection but Annie and Einstein are innocent animals and to make animals and even reptiles respect and like you all you’ve got to do is first do no harm and second make sure they have enough to eat and a safe place out of the rain. It isn’t all that clear on the other hand if you’re a human yourself what makes humans trust and respect you.

The Kid cracks open his second can of beer and says to the Writer, If everything’s a lie and nothing’s true like you said, then it doesn’t matter if the Professor’s story is bullshit, right? Is that what you’re saying?

What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.

Then I got an old philosophical problem, the Kid says.

Tell.

It’s sort of about the money, he begins. My fee. Leaving out the numbers the Kid admits that he received a very large amount of money from the Professor for delivering the DVD to his widow, money he has no trouble keeping on account of the risk he was taking. But that’s only if the Professor’s story is true. If it is he can in good conscience keep the money and stay on the houseboat for a long time, maybe cut a deal with Cat to rent it for a year or more and live like a regular Huckleberry. But if the Professor’s story isn’t true and he drowned himself in the canal because the Shyster or somebody else gave evidence to the cops that the Professor was actually this guy Doctor Hoo and was into kiddie porn and sexually abusing little kids then the Kid has let himself be drawn into a chomo conspiracy of lies. If that is the case he should give the money back — what’s left of it which is almost all of it. Besides with her husband officially a suicide and no insurance and two kids the Wife could probably use the money.

Well, you can take that out of the equation, Kid. Gloria doesn’t need the money. Your late friend was a very successful player on the commodities exchange for years and apparently he got into gold early.

How do you know that?

I asked and she told. You don’t have to worry about Gloria, Kid.

I guess that’s good.

You’re trying to think logically about this, but you’re being way too sloppy. Not that it would help if you were rigorous. Anyhow, let me show you the limits of logic. First, forget good and bad. Forget all about ’em. And forget the money, even. The Writer tells the Kid to remove everything from the equation except considerations of pure logic.

What equation?

Either the Professor’s story, X, is true, or it isn’t, Y.

The fuck you talking about?

They can’t both be true, right? X and Y? So one of them has to be false.

Yeah. I guess so.

So that means either X or Y is the case for P.

What the fuck’s P?

The Professor.

Right. The Professor is P.

Okay. Your problem, if you rely on logic, is that you can’t assert the proposition such that X is the case for P, and you can’t assert the proposition such that Y is the case for P. All you can assert is that either X or Y is the case for P.

Dude, that’s where we started. That’s the fucking problem.

It’s only a problem if you rely on logic. That’s my point. What you’ve got to do, Kid, is forget logic, admit its limitations, suspend your disbelief, and believe! It’s the only way you’ll be free to act. Otherwise you’re stuck, frozen in disbelief. As good as dead.

For a long while the Kid remains silent. He tries to replay in his mind what the Writer has just told him but he can’t untangle enough of the sentences to remember and understand what the man said — except for the last part, that he’s frozen in disbelief and is as good as dead. He thinks it’s true. It is the case that he is as good as dead.

He listens to the waves lap against the sides of the houseboats. He looks up and notices a few raggedy clouds, their edges soldered silver with moonlight, sliding in from the west. The breeze off the water has kept the mosquitoes back in the swamp all evening which he’s glad of. He forms a sentence and says it aloud: It’s actually pretty nice here. He reaches down and scratches Annie’s forehead.

Finally he asks the Writer if he’ll be driving back to Calusa in the morning.

Yeah. I’m about done. I thought I might stick around the city a few days. Type up my notes. Knock out a draft of my article. Get to know Gloria a little better.

Gloria?

The Wife. Yeah, we kind of hit it off back there. She and I. While you were waiting in the car we talked about a lot of things. Gloria’s pretty special.

Right. The Wife. So maybe you wouldn’t mind giving me and my stuff a lift?

Where to?

The Causeway.

Why the hell would you want to go back there?

It’s where I live.

CHAPTER NINE

THE KID RISES EARLY TO FEED HIS ANIMAL friends before he feeds himself and walks Annie along the grassy bank of the Appalachee so she can do her business. While Annie squats and pees he glances back at the pier: no sign of the Writer stirring in the boat next door. He returns to his own boat where he builds himself a quick double-decker peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, packs his belongings, and makes the cabin shipshape.

Before Cat and Dolores arrive at the store the Kid walks the length of the pier to the end. It’s a bright cloudless morning and off to his left metallic plates of sunlight glitter on the Bay. He sits down on the concrete pier beside a rough plywood belt-high table used mainly for cutting bait and cleaning fish. Folding his right leg under him he extends the other, exposing the electronic monitor clamped to his ankle. In the Bay a short ways off the pier a pair of dour pelicans perched atop two channel-marking pylons watches him carefully as if puzzled by the way he’s seated himself on the pier. Usually people stand behind the table and gut and chop the bodies of fish and toss the gooey insides and bits of flesh into the water for the pelicans and gulls to fight over. It’s not clear what this one is up to.

He unravels a stringy black charger cable and jacks one end into a socket on the anklet and plugs the other into an electrical outlet bolted to the table’s two-by-four wood frame. The metal shackle presses against the bare skin of his leg, and the Kid feels the juice flow not from the battery into his body but from his body out to the battery as if instead of being filled with electrical power he were being drained of it. It happens every time he gets the battery charged: he imagines his way from his body out to what he rationally knows is the source of the current but visualizes it instead as the ultimate receptacle for the current — as if he and millions like him were spinning the turbines at the farthest end of the line and not vice versa. He sits on the pier and stares at the dime-size battery linking his skin to the charger cord.

It takes half an hour to fully charge his monitor battery and during that half hour the Kid feels intimately connected to the millions of other convicted sex offenders young and old and in-between, rapists and child abusers and men who exposed their genitals on a bus, public masturbators, voyeurs and escalator gropers, compulsive seducers of teenage boys, coaches who couldn’t keep their hands off their athletes, men who talked dirty in Internet chat rooms to people they thought were teenage girls and then arranged to meet them for sex, fathers and uncles who drunkenly reached out for their teenage daughters as they passed by the sofa, porn addicts and fantasists lost in the misty zone between reality and imagery, no longer able to tell the difference — all of whom at this moment have plugged their electronic shackles into outlets and are sitting in the bedrooms, living rooms, and basements of houses and apartments and mobile homes, in garages, homeless shelters, public parks, in airports and train stations, in waiting rooms, offices, and the back rooms of fast-food restaurants and under causeways and overpasses — as if they were all trembling leaves on the branches large and small of a vast electrical tree that casts its shadow across the entire country.

AN HOUR LATER THE KID DROPS HIS DUFFEL and backpack beside the Writer’s Town Car. Leading Annie on her rope leash, lugging Einstein in his cage, he steps inside the store. Dolores is sweeping the floor behind the deli counter and Cat is in the back room breaking down cardboard boxes. Smiling warmly at the sight of him Dolores puts aside her broom and comes around to the front of the counter and asks what’s he got planned for today, another voyage into the heart of darkness?

She’s never read the book but has caught onto the phrase and knows it’s supposed to refer to the African jungle and be scary. She thinks the Panzacola must resemble Africa and is dangerous in spite of being so close to civilization, which is one of the things that attracted her to Appalachee when she first arrived from upstate New York — that and Cat Turnbull who resembled an old-time expat running a store at the mouth of the river for the natives who come in and trade their crafts and pelts for goods manufactured in Europe and the cities of America. Except that the natives are mostly tourists and fishermen. But she lived all her life in the mountains of the North far inland and has romanticized the South and the sea and the slow-moving meandering dark rivers that empty into it and the people who live there and even the people who visit there.

The Kid says, Actually, I gotta move on.

Listen, it’s okay by us if you keep the houseboat a while. We won’t get much call for houseboat rentals for another month anyhow. Cat’ll want you to pay for it, of course. But he’ll give you a discount.

Naw. I got to get back to where I belong.

Where’s that?

It’s where they put all us convicted sex offenders. Out here I’m the only one. And it’s kind of uncomfortable.

I don’t understand.

That’s okay. You don’t have to.

You don’t look very happy about it. But I guess you know what’s best for you.

Listen, can I ask a favor of you? You and Cat?

Certainly.

It’s about Annie and Einstein, he explains. He tells Dolores that where he’s going will be rough on them. There’s grass here for Annie to walk on and fresh air and normal people coming and going and lots of interesting birds including other parrots for Einstein to relate to. Maybe she and Cat could use a watchdog with a good bark even though she’s old and a little decrepit and a friendly tame talking parrot to amuse the tourists even though he’s kind of eccentric. He’ll leave enough money to pay for their food for a month and if it works out, once a month he’ll send whatever it costs for their upkeep.

I don’t know. They seem awfully attached to you. Why would you give them up?

I can’t provide them with the kind of home they deserve.

Look at you, hon, she says and pats his hand. You’re tearing up. Someone should give you the kind of home you deserve.

They have, he says. He retrieves his hand and turns away from her. He stares manfully out the window and sees the Writer strolling down the pier toward the store. I gotta go now, he says. Here comes my ride.

Dolores nods and reaches out and takes Annie’s leash from his hand and lifts Einstein’s cage and places it on the counter. The Kid digs into his pocket and pulls out a single hundred-dollar bill and passes it to her. Then he turns and quickly walks away.

THE WRITER’S TOWN CAR APPROACHES THE Causeway from Calusa heading toward the Barrier Isles. It crosses over the concrete arch to the far side where the Writer pulls the wide vehicle onto the gravel shoulder and parks it next to the guardrail. Cars and trucks and motorcycles roar past in both directions. He cranes his neck and peers down the steep slope into the shadows beneath the six-lane bridge. He can’t see much down there — flotsam and jetsam, a jumbled mix of building materials, trash, cardboard boxes, torn sheets of polyethylene. A tidal dump.

The Writer says to the Kid, You’re not going down there, are you?

Without answering, the Kid steps from the car and retrieves his backpack and duffel from the backseat. He walks up to the passenger’s side window and the Writer lowers it. The Kid leans in and says, Thanks for the ride, man. For all the rides, I mean. Thanks for everything.

Not a problem, Kid. But I’m a little worried about you going down there. You know, to live. It looks… dangerous.

It’s not. Not for me anyhow. Listen, the Kid says, I gotta ask you not to write about this. About any of it. You know what I’m saying? Like for a magazine or something. Or for the Internet. Definitely not for the Internet. Blogs and shit. Or on Facebook.

Why not?

I dunno. It’s just sort of private. My life, I mean. And the Professor’s and even the fucking Shyster’s. In spite of the fact that we’re on the Internet and anybody who wants to can look us up and think they know all about us, it’s still our life. It’s all we got. Know what I mean?

Don’t worry, Kid, it’s not my kind of material. Besides, as long as you and I and Gloria know what really happened out there at the canal, it doesn’t matter if no one else knows.

Yeah, but we don’t. We don’t know what really happened out there.

We know what we believe, Kid. That’s all anyone gets in this life.

Yeah. Sure. The Kid gives the Writer a small wave and hefts his backpack onto his shoulders. He lifts his duffel off the ground and steps with care over the guardrail as if about to trespass. Slowly he makes his way down the steep slope and disappears from the Writer’s sight into the heavy wet shadows beneath the Causeway.

For a few moments the Writer sits in the car trying to imagine the life the Kid will lead down there. Then he gives up trying — not his kind of material — puts the Town Car in gear, makes a quick U-turn and enters the flow of traffic heading toward Calusa and drives away.

FROM THE HEAPS OF TRASH PILED BY THE water’s edge the Kid like a shipwrecked sailor scavenges a batch of two-by-fours and a sopped sheet of paint-stained polyethylene. In bright sunlight a dozen or so feet above the high-tide line he props the two-by-fours into an upside-down conical frame, ties the poles together at the top with a piece of found wire, and covers the frame with the plastic sheeting. Two hours later he’s built himself an eight-foot-tall rainproof teepee with a wide view of the Bay and the skyscrapers of downtown Calusa. Sweet.

He stashes his belongings inside his teepee, then stands outside it for a moment in the late-afternoon breeze and admires his work. Things could be worse than they are, he notes. A ragged ridge of pink-edged clouds has moved in from the east. The sunset should be awesome. He scans the concrete islet to see if there’s anything else worth salvaging — a plastic cooler or some cooking utensils, maybe a bucket to use for a toilet. Finding nothing useful he glances into the darker recesses of the Causeway for the first time and realizes that he’s being watched. Probably has been watched from the beginning. He’s not as alone on his island as he thought.

It’s Paco. Senor On-Your-Own. Still the bodybuilder, still wearing his muscle shirt and nylon gym shorts, his Harley on its kickstand parked off to one side, his old weight bench on the other, some kind of junk wood and wallboard shanty behind him. Wherever Paco fled when the hurricane hit it must have been deemed illegal once the storm passed out to sea. The dude had nowhere else to go.

By way of greeting him Paco slowly lifts and folds his ham-size arms across his chest and nods his heavy head twice. The Kid nods back. Having adjusted his sight to the darkness back there he can make out now a few more shadowy figures lurking amid what appears to be the beginnings of a resettlement, one that’s modeled on the old settlement but a lesser more dilapidated version — a collection of hovels that he initially thought was just trash and tide- and storm-tossed wreckage heaped up against the inner supports of the Causeway. It’s the squalid remnants of the old colony. And the remnants of the colonists.

Coming forward from the gloom is P.C. wearing a crooked smile of recognition although he’s not exactly welcoming the Kid with open arms and beyond P.C. stands the Greek holding a large adjustable wrench in his hand and behind him are a half-dozen other impassive men — among them red-haired Ginger, the goofball Froot Loop and finally in his navy blue lawyer’s suit and stained white shirt and loosened tie there stands the Shyster. They all regard the Kid with an expression mingling welcome with suspicion that to the Kid signifies a reluctant acceptance of his presence among them. It’s as if thanks to the chaos of the hurricane the men living under the Causeway pulled off a mass jailbreak, but then one by one each man was hunted down in most cases probably by no one other than himself, captured by himself and returned by himself to his cell. They gaze almost mournfully out of the shadows at him, as if his return is the final proof of their collective defeat. As if their last hope after the storm was that he alone of the original settlers, the last of the lost colonists and the first, the youngest and the scrappiest, had somehow permanently escaped. And now by coming back to the Causeway he’s let them down. Of all the settlers the Kid was the one thought most likely to survive above the Causeway among normal people. And if the Kid is back it’s certain that those who haven’t yet returned will soon be caught and brought back too — by the police or their parole officers or caseworkers. Or if not caught and returned by the authorities, they like the Kid will catch and bring themselves back here on their own. There’s no escape from under the Causeway.

No one steps forward to greet him; no one says anything.

Wussup, Paco, the Kid finally says.

You pitch your tent too far out in the light, man. They can see you from the highway.

P.C. says, New rules, Kid. We can’t stay here unless no one can see us. So you better take down your tent and move it and your shit all the way inside like the rest of us.

The Kid squints and looks past the group into the jumbled damp darkness that surrounds them. No way, man. You guys’re like fucking bats scared of the light living inside a wall. I ain’t moving in there.

The Shyster says, We don’t have much of a choice, Kid. And they don’t either.

“They”? Who’re “they”?

The police. The authorities. The upholders of the law. And those who make the law, the frightened citizens of Calusa.

Yeah, well, fuck them. And besides, scumbag, I don’t want you living next to me. I don’t even want you talking to me, man. Suddenly the Kid’s heart is pounding and he’s breathing rapidly and hard. He spits on the ground to calm himself, looks straight at the Shyster, focuses his mind and in a voice barely above a whisper he says, Big Daddy.

The Shyster raises his eyebrows as if surprised by hurt feelings. Or in mockery of surprise. Or both. You’re judging me? Really, Kid? You think you’re better than I am? Sorry to break it to you, but no matter what we’re guilty of, we’re all down here for the same reason. That includes you.

The Kid turns away and starts back to his teepee. At the entrance flap he stops, spins on his heels and calls back to the Shyster, I seen your e-mails, man! I know what you did! You and Doctor Hoo!

Ah! So you have my briefcase. I wondered where it ended up. Better you, I suppose, than the police.

You want it back? You can have it. The e-mails make me want to puke, man. They’re so dirty they make everything they touch dirty. I thought I’d seen dirt before but nothing comes close to the e-mails between you and Doctor Hoo. Nothing. Too bad you didn’t fucking drown yourself like he did.

Drown? Again the Shyster raises his eyebrows as if in mock surprise. It’s his default facial expression. Poor old Doctor Hoo is certainly dead, which turned out to be a problem for me. But he didn’t drown.

Yeah? How’d the fucker die, then?

Oh, he shot himself in the head. Right after I was arrested, unfortunately. Nearly two years ago. Before my trial. You might as well burn those papers, Kid. I don’t know why I kept them. They’re of no use to anyone now, not even to me. They were part of my defense, which obviously didn’t work, and ended up in the trial transcript. I would like the briefcase back, however. And my Bible.

What’re you telling me? The Kid has made his way back to the Shyster and stands close enough to him now to see the man’s nearly black pupils — they’re opaque. Nothing visible on the other side. Like the eyes of a snake. What d’you mean, they were part of your defense?

The jury didn’t buy my claim that by posing online as Big Daddy I was merely trying to entrap a child molester who happened to be a well-respected Calusa pediatrician known in certain Internet circles as Doctor Hoo. It’s the old legal strategy of trying to confuse the jury or at least one member of the jury by providing too much information. One holdout and you’ve got a hung jury. Surprised me that the judge admitted the e-mails as evidence, since by then the good doctor was dead and no longer available to testify on his own behalf. Or on mine, as it were. Wasted effort.

Was it true?

Was what true?

That you were trying to entrap this doctor. This fat perv who was all into kiddie porn and sex with little girls. Or was it boys?

In his case, boys. And he was hardly fat. He was one of those Ironmen. A competitive triathlete. Zero body fat. But puh-lease, I was merely trying to avoid going to jail. The same as everyone living down here. It’s the same for everyone everywhere, Kid. It’s what people do. We tell stories that proclaim our innocence. All of us. We tell them to ourselves and to anyone who’ll listen. Even your old friend the late lamented Rabbit with his boxing stories did it. No doubt your professor friend too. Even you. And it’s not just us pervs. Everyone has a story that proclaims his innocence. It’s human nature. I’m a lawyer, Kid. I’ve heard them all.

The Kid lowers his face and looks down at his feet. He turns slowly away from the lawyer and returns slump-shouldered to his teepee. Brushing the plastic door flap aside he steps in and sits down on the cement floor facing out. The view of the Bay and downtown Calusa isn’t as appealing as it was a few minutes ago. Nothing is.

He’s almost back where he started. If the Professor wasn’t Doctor Hoo then the Shyster couldn’t have been the one who told the cops where to look for the Professor’s body. The Kid realizes that he’s disappointed: on some deep level he wanted the Professor to have been Doctor Hoo. Even if repellent and disgusting it would have made him finally known to the Kid. There isn’t much about people that he lets disgust him because there’s always a chance people aren’t what they seem to be or say they are. But if he knew the Professor really was a chomo then he would at least be free to be disgusted.

But if it wasn’t the Shyster who phoned in the location of the Professor’s body, it must have been whoever put him there. The Professor’s story proclaiming his innocence, his story about the spies and counterspies, could still be true, right?

Unless it isn’t. Unless the Professor himself was the one who told the cops where they could find his body and then drowned himself in a slightly suspicious way so Gloria and other people like the Writer would believe his story and think he was assassinated because he knew too much. It’s a plausible story after all. Even the Kid believes it happens sometimes, that secret agents murder other secret agents who they think can’t be trusted anymore. Even in America. So it could be true.

He doesn’t know which story to believe — the one in the Professor’s filmed interview or the report from the Calusa County coroner’s office. His mind is bouncing off competing versions of reality as if he’s living inside a video game and it’s making him feel dizzy and nauseated. He wonders if the Writer’s harsh theory about knowledge — that you can’t ever know the truth about anything — is true after all. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. But the Kid can’t even know that: he’s stuck between believing the Writer’s theory and not believing it.

He does know however that if nothing is true then nothing is real. Logic tells him that. And if nothing is real then nothing matters. Which means you’re free to believe whatever you want — unless you’ve got an innocent soul like Iggy had and Annie and Einstein. Unless you’re an animal, that is. Except for the Snake which is neither a human being nor an animal. Because once you’re born a human being and the Snake talks you into doing something that you have to lie about you’re no longer innocent. That’s when you start making up stories that proclaim your innocence like Adam and Eve did after they ate the forbidden fruit and like the Shyster says is what everyone does. It must happen very early in life when you’re still new at being human, the Kid reasons and he wonders when it happened to him, when he got talked into doing something that he had to lie about and as a result no longer had an innocent soul.

Maybe the Internet is the Snake and pornography is the forbidden fruit because watching porn on the Internet is the first thing the Kid remembers lying about. He was only ten years old that summer and he remembers getting his first real hard-ons from listening to his mother screwing her then boyfriend in her bedroom. The Kid can’t remember which of three boyfriends she was making it with that summer, Dougie or Sal or the retired U.S. Airways pilot. They kind of blend together in his memory. The only thing that helped him ignore her orgasmic shouts and the thumping of the headboard against the wall was sitting in his room in front of the computer screen of her old Dell desktop, clicking onto free porn sites. Later he memorized her credit card number and whenever his mother and her boyfriend of the moment were screwing he got into watching pay-per-view hard core and then a year or so later he was watching it when she was out with her women friends cruising the bars or after he got home from school and she was at work and he was alone. It relaxed him. When he sat down and booted up the computer and mouse-clicked his way straight to the porn sites he favored he could feel and almost hear a corresponding series of clicks in his brain. A warm spot would emerge at the back of his skull and spread up over the top of his head until he felt like he was wearing a heated cap.

He didn’t lie about it to his mother — except about using her credit card which she discovered on her own anyhow when he finally maxed it out prompting her to read the whole statement for once instead of just checking the minimum monthly payment due. But she knew he was deep into porn — maybe not how deep — and although she shook her head and clucked her tongue whenever she caught him at it she didn’t seem to care. She treated his growing addiction to pornography like it was little worse than a waste of time better spent doing his homework or helping out with housework. So it wasn’t his mother he lied to or anyone else either since no one else knew or ever asked him about it. He lied to himself.

And it wasn’t watching porn that he lied about or even his constant jerking off. He lied about the way they made him feel, both the porn and jerking off. He told himself it was normal, everyone did it — especially guys. Well, maybe only guys. And it was no big deal anyhow. In fact it was boring, he told himself. Even the quintuple-X hard-core multiple black-on-white fisting double anals. Porn was boring; beating his meat was boring. The same-old same-old. He just did it because it felt better and less boring than not doing it, he told himself, like chewing gum or wearing sneakers instead of shoes. That’s what he told himself.

But he knew better. He did it because he couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t stop himself because watching pornography and masturbating were the only times he felt real. The rest of the time he felt as if he were his own ghost — not quite dead but not alive either. A dust bunny shaped like a person. So for years whenever he was alone with a computer he watched pornography and masturbated. Until the night he let himself get lured by brandi18 into a house in the suburbs and got busted by her and her father.

He doesn’t know why but everything changed that night. Suddenly for the first time in his life he was visible to himself. The police who took him down in Brandi’s yard when they interrogated him at the station later opened a laptop on the table in front of him and put in a disc and showed him a video of him and Brandi’s father in the kitchen that Brandi’s father had taped with a hidden camera and the second he saw himself on the screen he felt like all his atoms were instantly reconfigured. It was as if he had never seen himself in a mirror before. It was like being touched by an angel. He had an actual body and it was not just his body, something he merely possessed, it was him! And who was he? He was the digitalized body of an about-to-be convicted sexual offender, a grown young man with a six-pack of beer, a porn movie, condoms, and a tube of lubricant trying to hook up in the suburbs with a fourteen-year-old Internet girl — and because now it was on a computer screen for everyone in the world to see, it was reality.

From that moment on he no longer felt even the slightest desire to watch pornography or jerk off because now he was a convicted sex offender, which provided him with the same feelings he used to get from sitting in front of his computer screen with his hand wrapped around his cock watching one or two or more naked men with huge erect penises pushing their penises into the orifices of one or two or more naked young women. Three holes and two hands per woman. He no longer had to lie to himself. He no longer had to endure mind-numbing boredom in order to feel partially alive. He had been made human — as wholly human as he could then imagine anyhow. And those women — those three holes and two hands each — for the first time the women on the screen were almost human too and not just two-dimensional pictures. They were as real as he was!

There’s a difference between shame and guilt. And the Kid has begun to realize that he’s not ashamed of having spent most of his life so far watching pornography and using it to give himself orgasms: he’s not a bad person, he knows that much, and being a bad person is what makes you feel shame. No, he’s guilty instead because that’s what you are if you do a bad thing. And if the women being abused on camera by facial cum shots, gangbangs, and double anals and so forth as if they were just images designed to make his dick hard enough to whack off with were in fact as almost-real as he, then paying money to watch them being abused and degraded was a bad thing. It was like paying money to watch someone beat a dog.

Ever since the night he got arrested and then was convicted and sent to jail and the months he’s spent as a convicted sex offender he’s thought and acted like a man who was ashamed, a bad man who deserved to be cast out of the city. For reasons he will never fully understand — although he knows its origins go back to his childhood way before Iggy came into his life — he got sluiced into being a nearly full-time consumer of Internet pornography and because he didn’t realize it was a bad thing that he was doing and should therefore feel guilty for doing it which would have made him stop doing it, he felt ashamed instead: a bad person doing his typically bad things instead of a good person doing one bad thing. Or maybe two.

Remembering the night he was arrested for soliciting sex from a minor via the Internet and how as a result he went from feeling like a dust bunny to a flattened image of a man seen on a computer screen, the Kid wonders for the first time if there is a way for him to give that two-dimensional image on the screen a third dimension and become wholly alive.

Maybe if he just acts like he has a third dimension whether he’s seen by others or not — whether he’s seen by practically everyone in the world on YouTube and is monitored by his parole officer on a computer screen with beeps from the GPS on his ankle or instead is invisible to the world, living underground in darkness beneath the Causeway and well out of sight from passersby on the highway — if he acts like a three-dimensional man then maybe, just maybe he’ll turn into one. Isn’t that how everyone does it? By acting?

But he’s not sure how to behave as if he were already a man with three dimensions. It has to be done mentally from the inside out, he knows that much: it can’t be just an act put on for the cameras and the Internet as if life were a gigantic reality TV show that you can download onto your computer or your phone. That would only make things worse. No, it has to start way inside you down in the black hole of antimatter that sits at the exact center of who you are. Diddle that spot even a little and the rest will follow and out of nothingness will come heat, light, and a strong wind blowing across the universe, and they will combine and bring into existence fire, earth, and water, and out of fire, earth, and water will emerge flesh, bone, and blood wrapped in his skin.

So the Kid decides to believe the Professor’s story. All of it. That’s the first move. The rest will follow.

He decides to invest some of the Professor’s money in a new generator for the Greek and go into the battery-charging business with him. That’s the second move. If he’s stingy with it he can maybe make the Professor’s money last a year or possibly more, at least long enough for him to luck onto a job as a busboy again at one of the hotels out along the Barriers. The way he lives he could get by just on panhandling plus his cut of the Greek’s battery-charging fees but a real job will help establish him as a man in the world beyond the Causeway.

Third: he decides to give back the Shyster’s briefcase and not to judge him or feel superior to him. He may even apologize for woofing him the way he did.

Fourth: unfinished business; miscellaneous loose ends. In a week or two he’ll hitch out to the Panzacola and visit Dolores and Cat and see how Annie and Einstein are holding up at the edge of the jungle. He won’t bring them back to the Causeway with him though. This is no place for a dog on her last legs and a restless talkative parrot. He’ll buy a bicycle. Maybe he’ll start pumping iron with Paco.

He needs to move fast if he wants to stay synchronized and ready because the pace of change is picking up. He can feel it spreading out from inside his body in the general direction of his skin.

He’ll check in on his mother but will only stay long enough to let her know he’s alive in case she’s worried about him. He may visit Gloria and her kids and encourage them to continue believing the Professor’s account of how he died, although he figures the Writer will be taking care of that. By now he’s probably getting ready to move in with them.

The Kid stands and drags his duffel and backpack — all his worldly possessions — outside the teepee. The other men gaze at him in silence from under the Causeway, a Greek chorus standing in the shadows offstage watching their disillusioned hero accept his fate. He’s not as sad and beaten down as he looks however. Heroes never are. Otherwise they’d be victims and the Kid is not a victim. He rips down the plastic sheeting and unties the frame and lets the structure collapse of its own weight. Grabbing his pack and duffel he lugs his possessions toward the damp darkness beneath the Causeway.

He will make his home here among the other men. He is after all like them: a convicted sex offender. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. He has nine years to wait in darkness out of sight deep beneath the city before he is no longer on parole. No longer guilty. Nine years before he can remove the electronic shackle from his ankle and can emerge from under the Causeway and mingle freely again with people he believes to be mostly normal people with mostly normal sex lives; nine years before he can live among others in a building aboveground that’s less than 2,500 feet from a school or playground and circulate inside the city walls without fear of being rearrested, buy a one-way ticket on a bus bound for a distant city and live there if he wants to and not be breaking the law; nine years before he can stroll into a public library and legally use the public computer to go online and check out the job listings and apartments for rent on craigslist.org — a website that may not even exist by then — and while he’s online and nobody’s nearby he’ll be tempted to linger over a little free Internet porn as long as he keeps his fly zipped and no one reports him to the librarian. He decides to stop quitting cigarettes. He wonders what pornography will look like nine years from now. He wonders if it will get him hard again. He’ll be thirty-one years old by then.