Rule of the Bone

RULE OF THE BONE

A NOVEL

RUSSELL BANKS

Dedication

To Ellen Levine
and always to Chase

Contents

 

 

You'll probably think I'm making a lot of this up just to make me sound better than I really am or smarter or even luckier but I'm not. Besides, a lot of the things that've happened to me in my life so far which I'll get to pretty soon'll make me sound evil or just plain dumb or the tragic victim of circumstances. Which I know doesn't exactly prove I'm telling the truth but if I wanted to make myself look better than I am or smarter or the master of my own fate so to speak I could. The fact is the truth is more interesting than anything I could make up and that's why I'm telling it in the first place.

Anyhow my life got interesting you might say the summer I turned fourteen and was heavy into weed but I didn't have any money to buy it with so I started looking around the house all the time for things I could sell but there wasn't much. My mother who was still like my best friend then and my stepfather Ken had this decent house that my mother'd got in the divorce from my real father about ten years ago and about that she just says she got a mortgage not a house and about him she doesn't say much at all although my grandmother does. My mom and Ken both had these cheesy jobs and didn't own anything you could rob at least not without
them
noticing right away it was gone. Ken worked as a maintenance man out at the airbase which is like being a janitor only he said he was a building services technician and my mom was a bookkeeper at
the
clinic which is also a nothing job looking at a computer screen all day and punching numbers into it.

It actually started with me roaming around the house after school looking for something that wasn't boring, porn books or videos maybe, or condoms. Anything. Plus who knows, they might have their own little stash of weed. My mom and especially Ken were seriously into alcohol then but maybe they aren't as uptight as they seem, I'm thinking. Anything is possible. The house was small, four rooms and a bathroom, a mobile home on cinderblocks like a regular house only without a basement or garage and no attic and I'd lived there with my mom and my real dad from the time I was three until he left which happened when I was five and after that with my mom and Ken who legally adopted me and became my stepfather up until now, so I knew the place like I knew the inside of my mouth.

I thought I'd poked through every drawer and looked into every closet and searched under every bed and piece of furniture in the place. I'd even pulled out all these old Reader's Digest novels that Ken had found out at the base and brought home to read someday but mainly just to look good in the livingroom and flipped them open one by one looking for one of those secret compartments that you can cut into the pages with a razor and hide things. Nothing. Nothing new, I mean. Except for some old photograph albums of my grandmother's that my mom had that I found in a box on the top shelf of the linen closet. My mom'd showed them to me a few years ago and I'd forgotten probably because they were mostly pictures of people I didn't know like my mom's cousins and aunts and uncles but when I saw them again this time I remembered once looking for pictures of my father from when he was still alive and well and living here in Au Sable and finding only one of him. It was of him and my mom and his car and I'd studied it like it was a secret message because it was the only picture of him I'd ever seen. You'd've thought Grandma at least would've kept a few other snaps but no.

There was though this stack of letters tied with a ribbon in the same box as the albums that my father'd written to my mom for a few months after he left us. I'd never read them before and they turned out pretty interesting. The way it sounded my father was defending himself against my mom's accusations that he'd left us for this female named Rosalie who my mom said had been his girlfriend for years but he was claiming that Rosalie'd only been a normal friend of his at work and so on. He had good handwriting, neat and all the letters slanted the same way. Rosalie didn't matter to him anymore, he said. She never had. He said he wanted to come back. I almost felt sorry for him. Except I didn't believe him.

Plus I didn't need the letters my mom'd written to him in order to know her side of the story because even though I was only a little kid when this all happened I've got memories. If he was such a great guy and all how come he split on us and never sent any money or even tried to be in touch with his own son. My grandmother said just don't think about him anymore, he's probably living it up in some foreign country in the Caribbean or in jail for drugs. She goes, You don't
have
a father, Chappie. Forget him. She was tough, my grandmother, and I used to try and be like her when it came to thinking about my real father. I don't think she knew my mom'd saved my dad's letters. I bet my stepfather didn't know either.

Anyhow this one afternoon I came home from school early because I'd cut the last two periods which was just as well since I didn't have my homework anyhow and both teachers were the kind who boot you out of the class if you come in empty-handed, like it's a punishment that'll make you do better next time. I rummaged around in the fridge and made a bologna and cheese sandwich and drank one of my stepfather's beers and went into the livingroom and watched MTV for a while and played with the cat Willie who got spooked and took off when I accidentally flipped him on his head.

Then I started making my rounds. I really wanted some weed. It had been a couple of days since I'd been high and whenever I went that long I'd get jumpy and restless and kind of irritated at the world, feeling like everything and everyone was out to get me and I was no good and a failure at life which was basically true. A little smoke though and all that irritation and nervousness and my wicked low self-esteem immediately went away. They say weed makes you paranoid but for me it was the opposite.

I'd about given up on finding something in the house that I could rob—a personal possession that could be hocked like the TV or the VCR or the stereo would be instantly noticed when it was gone and all the rest of their stuff was boring household goods that you couldn't sell anyhow like electric blankets and a waffle iron and a clock radio. My mom didn't have any jewels that were worth anything except her wedding ring from my stepfather which she made a big deal out of but it looked like a Wal-Mart's ring to me and besides she always had it on. They didn't even have any decent CDs, all their music was seventies stuff, disco fever and easy listening and suchlike, on cassettes. The only kind of robbing I thought was possible was big time like stealing my stepfather's van while he was asleep for example and I wasn't ready for that.

I was taking one more look into their bedroom closet, down on my hands and knees and groping past my mother's shoes into the darkness when I came to what I'd thought last time was just some folded blankets. But when I felt into the blankets I realized there was something large and hard inside. I pulled out the whole thing and unwrapped what turned out to be these two black briefcases that I'd never seen before.

I sat cross-legged on the floor and put the first briefcase on my lap thinking it was probably locked until it snapped open which surprised me but then the real surprise came when I lifted the lid and saw a .22 automatic rifle broken down into three parts just lying there with a rod and cleaning kit and a box of shells. It wasn't hard to fit the parts together, it even had a scope like an assassin's rifle and pretty soon I was into a Lee Harvey Oswald trip standing by the bedroom window and brushing the curtain away with the tip of the barrel and aiming through the scope at stuff on the street going Pow! Pow! I blasted a couple of dogs and blew away the mailman and nailed the drivers of cars going by for a while.

Then I remembered the other briefcase and went back to the closet and sat down and opened it. Inside are all these Baggies, thirty or forty of them filled with coins, mostly old quarters and Indian head nickels and even some weird-looking pennies with dates from way back in the early 1900s. Excellent discovery. I figure the rifle must belong to Ken and he stashes it in this briefcase on account of my mom always saying she's scared of guns and the coins too, I'm thinking, because if they were my mom's I would've known it since she pretty much told me everything in those days. Besides she wasn't the hobby type. Ken though was definitely the kind of guy who would have a cool gun and never show it to me or even tell me about it, plus he collected things like exotic beer cans and souvenir coffee mugs from the various theme parks they'd gone to and put them out on shelves where anyone could see although he was always telling me not to touch them because I never left things the way they were which is basically true.

I took the rifle apart and put it back in the briefcase and then I took a couple of coins from each of about six Baggies so he wouldn't know any were missing if he happened to check. Afterwards I wrapped the briefcases back in the blanket and put the bundle behind my mother's shoes in the closet where it had come from.

I had maybe twenty coins, small change, nothing bigger than a quarter and I took them to the pawnshop on Water Street near the old tannery where I knew some kids had hocked stuff they'd stolen from their parents, jewels and watches and so on. The old guy in there didn't say a word or even look at me when I spread the coins out on his counter and asked him how much he'd give me. He was this big fat guy with thick glasses and huge sweat circles under his arms and he scooped up the coins and took them in back where he had an office and a few minutes later he comes out and says eighty dollars which really blew my mind.

Sounds fine to me, man, I told him and he paid me in twenties and I went out already high just thinking about all the skunk I could get for eighty bucks.

I had this very good friend Russ whose mom'd kicked him out in the spring and he and a couple of older guys who were like headbangers and bikers were living in an apartment over the Video Den downtown. Russ was sixteen and had quit school and had this part-time job at the Video Den so that's where I went when I wanted to hang out and get high or just chill until I had to go home. Russ was okay but most people meaning my parents thought he was a loser because he was into heavy metal and all that and did a lot of drugs. At the time he wanted me to get a tattoo because he had one and thought they were cool which they were but I knew what my mom'd say if I came home with a tattoo. I was already driving her and Ken crazy with my lousy grades in school and having to go to summer school now and getting a mohawk haircut and nose rings and being a general pain in the royal ass around the house as Ken liked to say and not helping out enough and I could tell Ken especially was really getting sick of me. I didn't need any more trouble than I already had.

It's amazing how fast good weed goes when you've got the money to buy it with especially when you've got some friends to smoke it with like I had Russ and these older dudes who lived with him. They were what you'd call bikers not Hell's Angels and some of them didn't even have bikes but were the same violent type so they were hard to refuse when they'd come in and see me and Russ rolling joints on the kitchen table. In only a few days my stash was gone and I had to go back to the briefcase in the closet for some more coins. I'd always put the rifle together while I was there and stand at the window hitting imaginary targets coming along the sidewalk or just sit on the floor going Blam! into the darkness of the closet.

It was getting toward the end of summer school and I knew I was going to flunk at least two out of the three courses that I needed to pass just to get out of eighth grade which was going to make my mom crazy and deeply piss off my stepdad who already had his own secret reasons for disliking me but I don't want to talk about that right now, so I was smoking a lot of skunk, more even than usual and was cutting most of my classes and hanging out at Russ's place. Russ and the biker guys were my only friends then really. My stepfather'd developed this new habit of referring to me as
him
and never talking directly to me or even looking at me except when he thought I didn't notice or when he was drunk. He'd like say to my mother, Ask
him
where he's going tonight. Tell
him
to take out the goddam trash. Ask
him
how come he goes around with torn clothes and wearing earrings in his ears like a goddam girl and in his nose for chrissake, he'd say with me watching TV right there in front of him.

As far as he was concerned I was her son now not his even though he'd adopted me when I was eight after they got married and he moved in with us. When I was a real little kid he was an okay stepfather with some significant exceptions you might say, but when I got to be a teenager he sort of pulled out of the family unit and did a lot more heavy drinking which now my mom was into blaming me for. I didn't care if he didn't like me anymore, fine by me but I didn't want her making it into all my fault. Some of it was his.

I went back to the coin collection in the closet a lot that summer always taking only a few coins at a time from six or seven different Baggies and I was starting to figure out which ones were worth the most like the dimes with the lady on it and the Indian head nickels and I'd just take those and mostly not bother with the others. Sometimes the guy at the pawnshop would give me fifty bucks, sometimes I'd get over a hundred. One day he says to me, Where'd you get these coins, kid? and I go into this sad story about my grandmother dying and leaving them to me and I could only sell a few of them at a time because it was all I had of hers and didn't want to let the whole collection go.

I don't know if he believed me but he never asked me about them again and just kept shelling out the bucks which I kept turning into weed. I was a good customer by now and had moved up from buying it off of the couple of older kids who were dealing at school and out at the mall to this Spanish guy named Hector in Plattsburgh who hung around Chi-Boom's which was a kind of club down on Water Street. I bought so much skunk Hector thought I was dealing and a couple of times when I had extra I actually did sell a few bags to friends of Russ's roommates but basically it was me and Russ doing most of it, and the bikers.