Lost Memory of Skin (42 page)

CHAPTER NINE

I
F
YOU
’
VE
NEVER
PADDLED
A
CANOE
BEFORE
it can at first be surprisingly difficult—you have constantly to correct the tendency of the bow of the canoe to swing in the direction opposite your paddle. At first you may try correcting the tendency by alternately dipping your paddle into the water on one side of the canoe, then switching to the other, but all this does is drive the bow from right to left and back again, and you waste a great deal of energy and time making corrections instead of moving straight ahead on your desired course. Eventually to keep the canoe from wagging its bow from side to side you learn to lean forward from your seat in the stern, dip, pull, and curl the paddle away from the canoe in what’s called the J-stroke. A beginning canoeist who is physically intuitive can figure all this out on his own fairly quickly, and if there is no strong current to fight or the water is still, in a matter of minutes he will be on course, slipping smoothly upriver through overhanging foliage, past mangroves and dense palmettos, the only sound the soft plash of each stroke of the paddle as it breaks the surface of the dark water. Overhead, bands of sunlight streak the bright greenery of swamp willows, gumbo-limbo trees, and strangler figs, drift downward past epiphytes and flowering red mangroves and end up lying across the water in flattened stripes.

The canoe rounds a long slow S-bend in the narrow stream startling a snowy egret into awkward flight. A pair of small chartreuse parrots stares down at the slender craft from high in the branches of a cottonwood tree. As the canoe comes out of the S-bend the streambed straightens for twenty or thirty yards and the canoeist sees the first houseboat tied to the trunks of three stout cypress trees. The houseboat is nearly as wide as the stream, a raftlike platform carried on tubular aluminum pontoons with a small box of a cabin set in the center, a short deck aft and another at the squared bow. As he approaches the houseboat he makes out two more beyond it, also tied to cypress trees. He brings the canoe alongside the first, steps aboard, and ties the canoe to the stern. Five minutes later he has the outboard motor started and has untied the moorings and is ready to bring the houseboat back downstream to the settlement at the estuary, where he will by then be feeling utterly competent at this, and with a certain pride he will bring the rectangular boat out to the end of the pier and pull it into a slip, shut down the motor, and tie the boat to a pair of stanchions there.

He will do this twice again—paddle his canoe upstream to the houseboat, bring the houseboat down to the dock and tie it there. The convicts cleaning up the campground and the area surrounding the store will stop in their work and watch him come and go, and on his final trip downstream to the settlement as he passes the convicts he will impulsively smile and wave to them. Look at me, guys! They will look at him, but with expressions approaching disgust and irritation, and the guard will toss him a hard angry look and with a push of the flat of his hand will tell him to keep moving, unless you want to end up alongside these poor souls yourself.

T
HE
THINGS
HE
CARRIES
FROM
T
URNBULL
’
S
Store and stashes aboard the houseboat named
Dolores Driscoll:

waterproof charts of the channels, sloughs, and streams of the Great Panzacola Swamp

topographical map of the Great Panzacola National Park

compass

fishing license

filet knife

fishing rod and reel with hooks and lures

plastic container of earthworms

mosquito netting

mosquito repellent

water purification tablets

5 one-gallon jugs of drinking water

first aid kit

sunscreen

10 cans Alpo dog food

2 pounds mixed nuts

1 pound sunflower seeds

rice

3 loaves Sunbeam bread

peanut butter

Rice Krispies

powdered milk

instant coffee

sugar

tub of coleslaw

3 large bags Cheez-Its

Tang

6 cans Dinty Moore beef stew

1 dozen eggs

1 dozen oranges

1 case Budweiser Light

6 flashlight batteries

6 candles

20 pounds of ice

10-gallon plastic cooler

white gas for Coleman lantern

1 rented one-man dome tent

1 carton Newport 100 mentholated cigarettes

When he’s paid Cat Turnbull for everything on his list he asks the old man if he can charge his cell phone battery from a wall plug he noticed when he used the restroom at the rear of the store, and Cat says yes indeed, adding that it’s probably a good idea to have a cell phone out there in case he needs to be rescued by the rangers.
People wake up lost in the swamp all the time ’cause they forget how they got to where they anchored the night before. Some of ’em are just drunk, of course, or on drugs, but some of ’em are purely stupid. Good idea to mark on the topo each night exactly where you anchor. You ain’t stupid, sonny, I can see that, but you might decide to drink that whole case of Budweiser the same night or smoke too much pot sitting out there all alone in the swamp listening to the tree frogs.

I don’t touch no drugs,
the Kid says.
No, sir. And I never drink more’n three cans a day. I keep count of everything. Same as with cigarettes. I’m down to eleven a day, and next week it’ll be ten. Ten weeks from now it’ll be one. And then none. Quit.

That’s the military in you, sonny. Better than being a goddam Boy Scout Christian. Can’t trust those types. It’s always the damned Boy Scout Christians who get drunk or stoned ’cause they think they’re on vacation from the wife and nobody’s watching so they can do whatever the hell they can’t or won’t do the rest of the year, and either they get lost or they fuck up the boat somehow and don’t want to pay for it afterward.

I ain’t no Boy Scout Christian. Though I’ve known a few,
the Kid says, remembering the Shyster and his Bible in particular.

He heads for the back of the store and locks himself into the restroom with a copy of the
Calusa Times-Union
and plugs the charge-cord for his anklet into the wall socket. He sits down next to it on the closed toilet seat with his ankle extended and reads the newspaper for a half hour until the battery is topped off with enough juice to report his whereabouts for the next seventy-two hours. He switches over to his cell phone charger’s cord, sets the phone on the back of the toilet and returns to the store and commences loading his large pile of purchases, his duffel and backpack, Annie and Einstein onto the
Dolores Driscoll.

The boat is the first that he brought in from the swamp. A floating house trailer, it has an eight-by-ten-foot cabin minimally furnished with a fold-down table and two stools, a pair of collapsible cots, a propane-powered stove and refrigerator and a row of low cabinets with cookware, plastic dishes, and eating utensils stored inside. He has his radio and flashlight, his own sleeping bag, the Shyster’s Bible and packet of purloined papers for reading material, clothes, the telescope given him by the Professor in case he wants to look at distant birds or stars at night, and the rented tent in case he decides to spend a night camping at one of the island campsites over near the Gulf.

The
Dolores Driscoll
is named after Cat’s girlfriend and business partner, the same white-haired lady the Kid caught looking at him with such affectionate regard a while earlier. She watches him now from behind the deli counter as he comes and goes between the store and the boat. Then he disappears from her sightline for a while, gone to the ranger station for a park permit, she figures. She’d like to talk with him, find out where he’s from, who his people are, how old he is and so on, but instead when he returns to the store to pay Cat she hangs back in silence. She can see that he’s extremely shy and averts his eyes from her, and though he speaks forthrightly if a little stiff in an odd loud way when he’s talking with Cat, whenever he appears to know she’s in earshot he mumbles and looks down at the floor. He’s a strange boy with his derelict yellow dog and caged parrot and what looks like all his worldly effects paying for the boat and supplies with hundred-dollar bills like a sudden millionaire. He doesn’t ever smile, even with Cat who has a humorous way of putting things and is the friendliest man she’s ever known.

Cat told her that the kid’s just back from Afghanistan, which explains a lot about his manner and affect and probably all the cash, but it doesn’t explain the dog and the parrot or the fact that he seems so alone in the world now that his fat bearded friend has driven off. They were a mismatched couple, the short skinny young man with the buzz-cut hair in T-shirt and worn jeans and sneakers who looks barely old enough to shave and the enormous hairy middle-aged man wearing a dark three-piece suit like a TV professor or that fat TV detective, Whatzizname, Nero Wolfe. The two seemed intimately connected but formal; attached to one another but determinedly independent: they acted like a father and son who love one another, who are stuck with one another for life, but have no idea of who the other is.

The young man reminds her some of the little schoolboys she knew back when she was driving a country school bus up by the Canadian border years ago, before her invalid husband died and she moved as far south as she could go and still be in America to get away from the memories of all that and try to start her life over in her late fifties, which, thanks to finding Cat Turnbull, she has pretty much succeeded at. She remembers how every year or two a scrawny pale boy several years short for his age and looking almost malnourished would show up on the first day of school at the school bus stop outside a falling-down shingled wreck of a house or one of the rented dented double-wide house trailers on the outskirts of town, a new boy in town who couldn’t make eye contact with anyone, not even with the other children. They were born to lose, those little boys, no other words for it, and the other children recognized it instantly and turned on them the way a flock of hens will single out the weakest member of the flock and start pecking at its head and eyes until it bleeds and tear out its feathers one by one until they’ve made it so ugly and deformed that lying panting on its side in the dust it looks more like a grotesque version of a newborn chick than an adult hen. You couldn’t protect those persecuted boys from the other children, any more than you could protect the poor pecked-to-death hen from its flock, because those boys mistrusted adults, no doubt with good reason, even more than they mistrusted other children, as if the protective adult were merely a larger stronger version of the worst of the other children. If you tried to help them they turned surly and pulled away in sullenness from your extended hand and stumbled back into the eagerly waiting flock.

From her post behind the deli counter she looks out the screened door and along the dock to the slip where the young man is untying the houseboat that Cat so sweetly named after her when she first moved into the trailer with him. Cat stands off a ways watching him with more than usual interest though it’s probably mostly because like Cat he’s ex-military and Cat never got over his time as a Marine in Vietnam and to him anyone who once wore a uniform is a brother or nowadays a sister. The way he does for everyone who sets off in a rental Cat salutes the young man who from the afterdeck of the boat salutes him back. He squats down and starts the motor and slowly steers the craft away from the dock out into the open water of the estuary. He brings it back around and heads it into the quickly narrowing Appalachee River. Seconds later the
Dolores Driscoll
has disappeared up the river and into the jungle.

Cat walks into the store with a worried frown on his face.
I prob’ly shouldn’a done that.

Done what?

Rented him a boat. Took his money.

For God’s sake, why not? A cash customer at this time of year? Five days’ rental. All those supplies.

He ain’t straight, that kid. Paying with cash, all hundreds, even for the deposit. And using a state-issue ID instead of a military one. Not even a driver’s license. You see what he was wearing on his ankle?

On his ankle?

Noticed it when he sat down and started the motor. His pants leg come up a ways and he had one of them electronic whatchamacallits on, like they make people wear who’re under house arrest.

You think he’s some kind of criminal? He did seem a little odd to me. Actually just unusual, not odd. Kind of sweet, I thought. And shy and sad, like he’s trying to get over a busted romance or something. The one I didn’t trust is that big fat guy who brought him in. Maybe that thing on his ankle is just a kid thing. You know, some new kind of cell phone or electronic game machine or one of those gizmos they use for playing their music like the joggers wear on their arms.

Maybe. Still, I think I oughta look him up on the computer. The Internet. Assuming his ID ain’t a fake. See if the cops’re looking for him or something.