Just gimme a holler the guy gives you any trouble.
I don’t think he’s into guys. Paco thinks he’s a baby-banger, I’m betting he’s into little girls. Tweeners.
You sure he ain’t into iguanas?
CHAPTER FIVE
IT’S AN HOUR BEFORE DAWN. THE TIDE HAS turned and the sulfur stink of the mudflat beyond the Causeway and the nearby mangrove marshes laces the cool night air. In the east where the sea meets the sky a gray velvet blanket of clouds leaches darkness from the night and dims the stars overhead one by one. It’s still too early for the traffic to commence its daily rumble over the Causeway. There are the steady slaps of low waves against the edge of the concrete peninsula below the Causeway and the sporadic cries of solitary seagulls cruising low over the Bay. There are the occasional coughs of sleepers in their huts and the low drawn-out groan of a man curled in a thin blanket sheltered from the salty dew by a plastic tarp. There are the snores of the deepest sleepers like the Kid’s new and decidedly temporary tent-mate whose raucous adenoidal snoring has kept the Kid awake most of the night.
The encampment is otherwise silent and still and lies in darkness invisible to the world. The fires have all burned to cold ash. Fully clothed the Kid lies awake in his sleeping bag and for a few seconds he imagines the dream of the man snoring in the sleeping bag next to his and shudders and stops himself cold. Children have come onto his radar and entered his no-go zone. Little pink-skinned girls barely older than toddlers. How do you even talk to kids that young? he wonders. He’s never been able to figure out what to say to children anyhow. Or at least children under the age of twelve or thirteen. They always make him self-conscious and insecure. Especially girls.
Little girls. Just thinking about them — never mind talking to them — makes him self-conscious and insecure. And oddly scared. With little boys he can at least pretend they’re as old as he is himself no matter how young they are in reality and he can talk to them the same as he would a grown man. Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men — at least he always did when he was a kid — because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives. Even old men playing golf or pinochle or watching TV in their retirement homes or sitting half-asleep in a Jacuzzi tub are only pretending to be adult men. But little girls are more complicated and mysterious than little boys. At least to the Kid they are. They don’t want you to talk to them like they’re grown-up women. Maybe it’s because grown-up women aren’t like men. Maybe women really are adults and not little kids in disguise.
But what about the women who when they were little girls got hurt somehow? Hurt so bad they got stuck there scared of having to grow up and as a result they never grow up and like men have to fake being an adult. The Kid is pretty sure from what she’s told him about her childhood and what she left out his mother is that type of woman. A fake woman. Same as he’s a fake man. It may be the only thing he has in common with his mother. He never had to deal with being beaten black and blue by his father the way she did. And he was never sexually abused or raped by anyone male or female the way his mother has hinted happened to her when she was a little girl. And he was never abandoned by his mother to the state foster-care system like her mother did to her and shuttled from one temporary family to another.
The way he sees it his mother was always there for him. That’s her phrase, that she was always there for him, and it means two things to him: that he was a burden to her and that he never took full advantage of that fact. He never accepted her love and loyalty. The phrase makes him feel ashamed twice over. She’s a better person overall than he. She has a good excuse for refusing to grow up and he doesn’t. Her being a fake woman makes sense; his being a fake man doesn’t.
He thinks all this has something to do with his no-go zone reaction to Larry Somerset. He wonders why he let the Rabbit talk him into taking the man’s money and letting him sleep in his tent. It isn’t like he needs the money especially. He has a job and almost no expenses. And it’s not like he’s fond of playing the Good Samaritan. He knows who the guy Larry Somerset is or rather was and what he got busted for and while the Kid’s in no position to judge Larry Somerset or anyone else living beneath the Causeway he still has a fearful attitude toward the guy and it’s not just because Larry Somerset is a cheese ball and was once a big-time state senator with all the power and prestige and money of that office and might still have some of it left over.
The Kid has glimpsed kiddie porn by accident lots of times back in the day cruising the Internet looking for company late at night but he always quickly clicked off — scared but not sure why. Nothing he’s seen on the Internet has scared him like that and he’s seen a lot. And it isn’t fear of being caught and punished for doing something illegal or weird or breaking a taboo like incest or sex with animals. That’s a whole different kind of fear than what scares him about Larry Somerset.
It’s what he felt in the not-too-distant past spending his nights maxing out his mother’s credit card and then his own debit card on porn sites and role-playing and swapping endless sex-talks with strangers in chat rooms when he’d sometimes click his way unintentionally into a website or a chat room where the hinted-at subject was sex with children. Which is immoral. Maybe worse — if there is something worse. Well, baby-banging is worse.
It wasn’t that he was afraid of getting caught unless by his mother and she didn’t bother for years to check on where he went in real life — never mind where he went on his computer. He might not have been raised by wolves exactly but he was a feral child. He was pretty sure that back when he was still living at his mother’s house none of his digital travel was illegal or expressly prohibited as long as he did it on his own time which since he got sent back from Fort Drum became almost all the time.
Fear of being caught and punished for doing something most people disapprove of and some people prohibit or is illegal is only what goes with playing a high-stakes game of chance. If you win you feel lucky and if you lose you feel unlucky and you just take your punishment like a man. Either way you don’t feel ashamed or guilty. It’s almost never colored by shame or guilt like it would if it was immoral.
The Kid hears a car overhead or maybe it’s a truck because it’s moving too slowly to be a commuter’s car and while he waits for it to thump off the bridge onto the highway to the Barriers he hears a second vehicle also moving slowly but on the opposite side coming from the Barriers toward the mainland and then he hears both vehicles crunch to a stop somewhere up there on the Causeway. For a long moment, silence. Until several more cars or vans — he can’t be sure which except he knows they’re not trucks or buses — arrive from both directions and stop overhead. More silence. The Kid sits up and listens. Nothing. The man lying next to him turns fitfully in his sleep, rolls onto his left side facing away from the Kid and yanks the top of his sleeping bag over his head against the chill and goes back to dreaming whatever a guy like that dreams. The Kid doesn’t want to know.
Iggy’s chain clanks and the Kid knows that the iguana is awake and alert. The chain is locked onto a cinder block and Iggy can drag the block a fair distance but not easily and is lazy enough not to bother unless someone accidentally drops trash that he thinks is food just out of his reach. It’s one of the reasons the Kid keeps his campsite clean and gets pissed off at anyone who tosses his garbage and wrappers from McDonald’s or an empty pizza box anywhere close to his tent.