after all. It’s possible the guy can help the Kid find a job at the university on the grounds crew or something and a more or less permanent place to live. You never know. The Kid has never met a real professor before but they’re supposed to be smart and people respect them and they don’t work for the cops or the state. Besides they’re like priests and shrinks, right? Everything you tell them is strictly confidential.
You know where Benbow’s is?
Benbow’s? Is it a restaurant? A homeless shelter?
I can’t go to a homeless shelter. Not where there’s likely to be kids. It’s supposedly an old shrimpers’ camp on Anaconda Key. Out beyond the sewage treatment plant. That’s where I’m going tomorrow. Look for me in a day or two at Benbow’s, okay?
I know how to get to Anaconda Key. And I’ve smelled the sewage treatment plant numerous times when the wind blows out of the south. Now tell me your name, young man.
Kid. Just ask for the Kid.
I have classes all day tomorrow. And meetings at night. I’ll have to get together with you late the following day, if that’s all right.
Not this late.
The Professor rumbles a laugh and says, No, son, not this late. He lowers his lamp and closes the tent flap and walks away. The Kid listens to his slick shoes crunching against the concrete. It must have been hard for a guy that fat to make his way down the path from the Causeway. And a lot harder getting back up. A guy his size could have a heart attack just getting out of his chair.
The Kid lights his stub of a candle and opens Larry Somerset’s Holy Bible again and picks up reading where he left off. But after the story of Cain and Abel he comes to a whole lot of begat s which except for the fact that everybody back then was living for hundreds of years at a time is really boring to the Kid.
He closes the Bible and blows out his candle and lies back in the darkness with his eyes wide open and as he has done nearly every night of his life even when he was a little boy he plans his day tomorrow step by step. Break camp. Pack tent sleeping bag clothes cooking utensils containers toilet kit and other gear into backpack and duffel. Include some of Larry Somerset’s stuff. Tie duffel to bike rack, wear backpack, and ride or if it’s too much stuff walk bike to South Bay Causeway four miles south and cross to Anaconda Key. Find Benbow’s. Find Benbow himself if P.C. didn’t lie and he’s a real person and talk him into letting him pitch his tent temporarily and maybe ask for a job there as a busboy if it’s a restaurant and try to cadge a meal or two. Meanwhile make a quick late-night Dumpster dive and replenish home food supply. And hope things change for the better soon. He’s pretty sure they can’t get worse.
CHAPTER ONE
T HE P ROFESSOR DIGS CLASSICAL JAZZ AND swing, music made in the 1930s, the decade before he was born in Clinton, Alabama, and in the 1940s, the decade of his early childhood. He was an only child, his mother the town librarian and his father an accountant for U. S. Steel. They were northerners, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Both his parents were college educated, Episcopalians, suspected locally of being supporters of Franklin Roosevelt, and despite his father’s white-collar job at U. S. Steel, pro-union.
The Professor’s father’s name was Jason. He kept the books that monitored the costs of inmates hired and often purchased outright from the state and county prisons and local jails. They were, with few exceptions, black men, de facto slaves housed in the company labor camps, serving out their sentences in the dark airless mine shafts deep beneath the red hills. His mother, a high-spirited, easily bored post-debutante from an old Pittsburgh banking family, was named Cynthia.
Classical jazz and swing was music made mostly by black people—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, and Lester Young—and raffish whites like Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman. It was
You know where Benbow’s is?
Benbow’s? Is it a restaurant? A homeless shelter?
I can’t go to a homeless shelter. Not where there’s likely to be kids. It’s supposedly an old shrimpers’ camp on Anaconda Key. Out beyond the sewage treatment plant. That’s where I’m going tomorrow. Look for me in a day or two at Benbow’s, okay?
I know how to get to Anaconda Key. And I’ve smelled the sewage treatment plant numerous times when the wind blows out of the south. Now tell me your name, young man.
Kid. Just ask for the Kid.
I have classes all day tomorrow. And meetings at night. I’ll have to get together with you late the following day, if that’s all right.
Not this late.
The Professor rumbles a laugh and says, No, son, not this late. He lowers his lamp and closes the tent flap and walks away. The Kid listens to his slick shoes crunching against the concrete. It must have been hard for a guy that fat to make his way down the path from the Causeway. And a lot harder getting back up. A guy his size could have a heart attack just getting out of his chair.
The Kid lights his stub of a candle and opens Larry Somerset’s Holy Bible again and picks up reading where he left off. But after the story of Cain and Abel he comes to a whole lot of begat s which except for the fact that everybody back then was living for hundreds of years at a time is really boring to the Kid.
He closes the Bible and blows out his candle and lies back in the darkness with his eyes wide open and as he has done nearly every night of his life even when he was a little boy he plans his day tomorrow step by step. Break camp. Pack tent sleeping bag clothes cooking utensils containers toilet kit and other gear into backpack and duffel. Include some of Larry Somerset’s stuff. Tie duffel to bike rack, wear backpack, and ride or if it’s too much stuff walk bike to South Bay Causeway four miles south and cross to Anaconda Key. Find Benbow’s. Find Benbow himself if P.C. didn’t lie and he’s a real person and talk him into letting him pitch his tent temporarily and maybe ask for a job there as a busboy if it’s a restaurant and try to cadge a meal or two. Meanwhile make a quick late-night Dumpster dive and replenish home food supply. And hope things change for the better soon. He’s pretty sure they can’t get worse.
CHAPTER ONE
T HE P ROFESSOR DIGS CLASSICAL JAZZ AND swing, music made in the 1930s, the decade before he was born in Clinton, Alabama, and in the 1940s, the decade of his early childhood. He was an only child, his mother the town librarian and his father an accountant for U. S. Steel. They were northerners, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Both his parents were college educated, Episcopalians, suspected locally of being supporters of Franklin Roosevelt, and despite his father’s white-collar job at U. S. Steel, pro-union.
The Professor’s father’s name was Jason. He kept the books that monitored the costs of inmates hired and often purchased outright from the state and county prisons and local jails. They were, with few exceptions, black men, de facto slaves housed in the company labor camps, serving out their sentences in the dark airless mine shafts deep beneath the red hills. His mother, a high-spirited, easily bored post-debutante from an old Pittsburgh banking family, was named Cynthia.
Classical jazz and swing was music made mostly by black people—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, and Lester Young—and raffish whites like Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman. It was