Free Second Skin by John Hawkes Page A

across our wandering island—it
is
a wandering island, of course, unlocated in space and quite out of time—and seems to heap the shoulders with an armlike weight, to coil about my naked legs and pulse and cool and caress the flesh with an unpredictable weight and consistency, tension, of its own. These snakes that fly in the wind are as large around as tree trunks; but pliant, as everlastingly pliant, as the serpents that crowd my dreams. So the wind nests itself and bundles itself across this island, buffets the body with wedges of invisible but still sensual configurations. It drives, drives, and even when it drops down, fades, dies, it continues its gentle rubbing against the skin. Here the wind is both hotter and colder than that wind Cassandra and I experienced on our ill-fated trip across the southwestern wartime desert of the United States, hotter and colder and more persistent, more soft or more strong and indecent, in its touch. Cassandra is gone but I am wrapped in wind, walk always—from the hips, from the hips— through the thick entangled currents of this serpentine wind.
    Now I have Catalina Kate instead. And this—Sonny and I both agree—this is love. Here I have only to drop my trousers-no shirt, no undershirt, no shorts—to awaken paradise itself, awaken it with the sympathetic sound of Catalina Kate’s soft laughter. And it makes no difference at all. Because I am seven years awayfrom Miranda, seven years from that first island—black, wet, snow-swept in a deep relentless sea—and seven years from Cassandra’s death and, thanks to the wind, the gold, the women and Sonny and my new profession, am more in love than ever. Until now the cemetery has been my battleground. But no more. Perhaps even my father, the dead mortician, would be proud of me.
    No shirt, no undershirt, no shorts. And from my uniform only the cap remains, and it is crushed and frayed and the eagle is tarnished and the white cloth of the crown has faded away to yellow like the timeworn silk of a bridal gown. But it is still my naval cap, despite the cracks and mildew in the visor and the cockroaches that I find hiding in the sweatband. Still my cap. And I am still in possession of my tennis shoes, my old white sneakers with the rubber soles worn thin and without laces. Some days I walk very far in them. In the wind and on the business of my new profession.
    And the work itself? Artificial insemination. Cows. In my flapping tennis shoes and naval cap and long puffy sun-bleached trousers, and accompanied by my assistant. Sonny, I am much esteemed as the man who inseminates the cows and causes these enormous soft animals to bring forth calves. Children and old people crowd around to see Sonny and me in action. And I am brown from walking to the cows in the sun, so brown that the green name tattooed on my breast has all but disappeared in a tangle of hair and in my darkening skin. An appealing sort of work, a happy life. The mere lowing of a herd, you see, has become my triumph.
    Yes, my triumph now. And how different from my morbid father’s. And haven’t I redeemed his profession, his occupation, with my own? I think so. But here, now, this morning, with the broad white window sill full in my view—it is old, thickly painted, cool, something like the bleached bulwark of a ransacked sailing ship—and with the lime tree gleaming beyond the window frame and dangling under every leaf a small ripe lime, here with the hammock a swaying garden in the darkness behind me and the wind stirring my papers, stirring my old naval cap where it hangs from an upright of a nearby black mahoganychair, here I mention my triumph, here reveal myself and choose to Step from behind the scenes of my naked history, resorting to this strategy from need but also with a certain obvious pride, self-satisfaction, since now I anticipate prolonged consideration of Miranda. I would be unable to think of her for very long unless I made it clear that my triumph is