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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to my assistant, Nancy Wilson, and to Liz Moore for their help with research. Thanks also, as always, to my agent, Ellen Levine, for her ongoing support, and to my irreplaceable friend and editor, Dan Halpern.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RUSSELL BANKS is one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He lives in upstate New York and Miami, Florida.
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