Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks

  I was wondering if Buster was high, coke I figured because of how he talked and could I get a little taste, when he asked me did I want to do a screen test?

  Sure, I said. When?

  Oh, anytime. Tonight if you want.

  Sure, I said and got up from the table and dumped the trash in the barrel like Froggy’d done and Buster and me went back into the mall and headed toward the exit down past Sears and J. C. Penney’s, opposite the way Froggy had gone. I was feeling lucky now because of how things were turning out after such a lousy start—me and Russ being kicked out of our crib by the bikers and Russ going back to his mom’s which was not an option for me and the cold and the snow and no money and no drugs. Now as I walked past Sears with this cool dude Buster Brown it looked like all my problems were solved, at least temporarily.

  If I’m going to your place, I said to him, you oughta give me some money. For the screen test and all, I say.

  That depends.

  On what? I say and I stop right there so he’ll know I’m serious.

  He’s like, Well, various things, Chappie. It depends on how much the camera loves you, for instance. You may not be in the slightest photogenic, despite your beauty to the naked eye. That’s why it’s called a screen test, Chappie. You have to pass it.

  I’m like, Gimme twenty bucks up front or find yourself another protege. Plus I don’t do no sex with you. No fucking or sucking. Just the screen test.

  Just the screen test, he says smiling and he pulls a twenty from his wallet and hands it to me. You drive a hard bargain, Chappie, he says.

  Yeah, well, I had a good teacher, you might say. I’m thinking at that moment of my stepfather, I’m like flashing on his face, the outline of his head in the dark really so not quite his face and his smell of booze and Brut and the sandpaper scratch of his chin on my shoulder and neck. I almost never think about that stuff anymore, except when my mom tells me how lucky I am that he’s my stepfather which she doesn’t do since they kicked me out of the house for stealing and me being into drugs and all.

  So how come you bought those pantyhoses? I ask Buster as we pass out the door by Sears into the parking lot. It was snowing fairly hard by now and there weren’t many cars in the lot. A couple of plows were scraping away at the far end.

  Pantyhose! What makes you think that’s what I’ve got? he asked and he held up the Victoria’s Secret bag and wagged it.

  I seen you buy them, man.

  Ah, you were tracking me, were you? Playing detective, eh? And now you’re thinking you’ve caught me, he said. Only maybe instead I’ve caught you. He laughed at that like it was a big joke.

  Whaddaya got, a girlfriend or something? I was starting to think he was a Canadian again because of the pantyhose. You see a lot of Canadians down here buying stuff they can’t get at home.

  You’d look pretty terrific in pantyhose, he tells me.

  Yeah, sure, I say. You can forget that. Forget all about it, man. I asked him where his car was and he said back alongside the J. C. Penney’s building. Then I asked him where’s his crib and he just said not far. Good, I said, because I ain’t going to no Canada tonight.

  He said, Hey, no problema, Chappie. No problema.

  Yeah, sure, I say. We’re walking side by side close to the building to stay out of the wind and snow and as we’re passing the big J. C. Penney’s windows I notice up ahead that there’s a guy working inside on one of the window displays and he’s got all these naked mannequins that he’s moving around. When we get closer I see that the mannequins are like in pieces with their arms and hands lying on the floor and some of them don’t even have any heads and the ones that do are bald. They have breasts and all but no nipples or pubic hair. It’s like they’re adults but they’re really little kids. Then the guy who’s setting them up disappears through a door into the store to get some clothes for them or something and I stop by the glass and look in at all the body parts.

  C’mon, Chappie, Buster said. We’ve done our window-shopping for tonight.

  Yeah, wait a minute, I said. I’d never seen mannequins like that before, all naked with their arms and heads looking like they were sliced off. There were these bright overhead lights inside the window that made it look like a dissecting room in a morgue or something. Definitely it was the grossest thing I’d ever seen, at least at that moment it was which is strange I guess because I’d seen lots of really gross things by then.

  C’mon, let’s get out of here, Buster says like suddenly he’s afraid someone’ll see us.

  I say, I don’t think I want to do that screen test, man.

  Cut the shit, Chappie. We have a deal.

  No, I say and I back off a few steps. I still couldn’t take my eyes off the mannequins. It was like I was in a dream and I didn’t want to wake up and this guy Buster Brown was standing by my bed shaking me by the shoulder.

  He goes like, There’s the matter of my twenty bucks, kid.

  That’s when I turned and started running. I ran back the way we’d come, past the Sears toward the entrance to the mall and I hear Buster’s feet slamming along behind me and him hollering, You little bastard! Give me back my money!

  Buster was definitely pissed and he ran pretty good for an old guy so when I go through the door he’s only a few steps behind me. Inside there was no one in sight except way in the distance by the fountain but I spotted a fire exit sign a little ways down the mall and a door I could maybe lock behind me once I got through. I raced over to it and yanked it open and went in and slammed it shut just as Buster got there. There was no way to lock it from the inside though so I clamped onto the handle while Buster pulled on the other side until finally I couldn’t hold it closed anymore and when I let go Buster went flying.

  Before he could get up I pulled the door shut again and took off down this long narrow hallway. There were doors and other hallways running off the main hall like in a video game maze and with all these fluorescent lights it was very bright, but no people anywhere. At one point I stopped and peeked back around a corner and listened for Buster. I could hear footsteps in the distance, somebody running but I couldn’t tell if it was water dripping or him or if he was going in the other direction away from me or about to pounce on me from behind. I didn’t even know how to get back to the mall where the people were.

  This time when I start to run it’s like I’m a little kid lost in some kind of carnival funhouse and I’m panicking. I go down one hall and hang a left and come to a dead-end and make a U-turn back the same way I came. A second later I’m running along another hall and when I fly through a door with an exit sign on it I’m in a hall just like the one I left. I’m totally confused by now. It’s like I’ve been taken off the planet earth and set down on this new planet where there’s no people. I think I was almost crying by then.

  Suddenly I smelled food cooking. There was a door ahead of me and when I pushed through it I almost knocked over a huge stainless steel counter with all kinds of steaming food in these big pans. I’m back in the mall but I’ve come out in the middle of the food court behind the counter of Wang’s Pavilion the Chinese take-out place and these three Chinese guys and a tiny Chinese woman are staring at me very shocked. They all start jabbering in Chinese at once and waving their hands at me in this very pissed-off way.

  I go, C’mon, man, chill out, willya fucking chill, for chrissake! But it’s like they don’t understand English. It was late and there were no customers in the place anyhow but these people were acting like I’m some kind of freako terrorist. I pull out Buster’s twenty and go, Hey, man, I just want to buy some chopped suey, and they shut up for a second and stare suspiciously at the money like it’s not American. But then I glance over their heads into the food court and here comes Buster.

  I freeze and the Chinese guys follow my eyes and slowly turn around and then they see him too and they must be figuring out that he’s the bad guy I’m running from because they don’t say anything, they just go back to work cleaning out their pans
and stacking trays and so on. Then I noticed that Buster had Froggy the Gremlin with him. He was holding her by the hand like she was a rag doll. She looked really tired now, like she was in a nod.

  They walked slowly past Wang’s and out of the food court on down the mall toward the exit to the parking lot and I watched them the whole time until they disappeared from sight. I felt incredibly sad then. I felt guilty too because of losing my courage and deciding not to take her place when I saw those mannequins in the window.

  What you want? the head Chinese guy said to me.

  I pointed to a couple of green and brown things in the pans and he dished the stuff into a Styrofoam box and I paid and got my change. I was ready to book through the front when I spotted Black Bart cruising the food court looking spaced like he’d managed to score some weed. It was late, there was almost nobody left in the mall except the workers and Bart making his nightly roundup of the last couple of kids still hanging out and the bums sleeping on the benches and so on, driving them with his stoned smile into the cold snowy night.

  Not me though. I slipped through the door behind Wang’s Pavilion with my box of food and returned to the maze of hallways out back where I wandered around until finally I found this janitor’s closet I could sleep in and Bart didn’t find out about me crashing back there every night until about two weeks later. By then everything was cool with the bikers again and Russ’s mom had kicked him out for drinking all her booze one night and busting the place up so we went back to our old crib over the Video Den in Au Sable. Russ had his same room as before and I had to sleep on the couch in the livingroom but I didn’t mind, I knew then that as long as my stepfather was still living at my mom’s I was never going back there.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ADIRONDACK IRON

  In the beginning and all winter I was only dealing small-load weed to the bikers which was cool because A, lots of kids in Au Sable were dealing then mostly in school where I never went near anyhow but everywhere around town too so we were like a swarm of flies and it was low-risk to be one of them what with so few swatters. And B, it didn’t feel like a wrong thing to be doing even though it was illegal. Especially given the way I looked at booze in those days from what I saw of its effect on the bikers for one and my stepdad for another and even my mom, which is not something I want to go into right now. Plus it was the only way I could keep my crib in the apartment over the Video Den with my friend Russ and his biker roommates.

  I was pretty heavy into skunk then myself but I could’ve dumped it off easy if I’d had a good reason to, which I didn’t because like always high was better than low as those were my only two alternatives. It was cool though, so long as I had a warm squat and adequate food to eat and friends.

  Russ was my friend. And the bikers were my friends too, even though they were older and kind of unpredictable. Russ had hooked up with them because of his job at the Video Den, which he’d had since before he quit school and got kicked out of his house by his mom for doing drugs. But the job was only part-time days and he couldn’t afford the apartment over the store on his own so he offered to share it with this one guy he knew, Bruce Walther who was more or less a friendly biker in spite of how he looked.

  But then Bruce’d started bringing his friends into the place because they were sort of a gang although he called them family. He like underlined it when he said it. These dudes’re fam-i-ly, man. You don’t fucking deny your family.

  So they moved in, different ones, four or five of them at a time and sometimes their girlfriends who they called their old ladies or just split-tails or gash but the same ones never stayed long. The squat was this big funky apartment owned by Rudy LaGrande the guy who ran the Video Den with three bedrooms and a bunch of mostly broken old furniture. The stove partially worked though and the refrigerator but I remember the toilet was stopped up a lot that winter. Russ still paid half the rent but only got the pantry off the kitchen for his room where he had a mattress on the floor and his old stereo from home and his heavy metal tapes and Playboy collection all of which the bikers used whenever they wanted so Russ kept a lock on the door.

  No question my mom and Ken truly did not want to see me anymore so I settled permanently onto this ratty old sofa in the livingroom which was okay except when the bikers were partying which they did a lot of and sometimes passed out on my couch and burned holes in it and barfed in their sleep. Once in a while like when they got whacked on crank they went crazy and Russ and I had to sleep in his car or someplace else but as long as I kept the bikers in skunk the apartment was free for me and usually peaceful so I didn’t complain. I had to unload the weed pretty much at cost to keep the bikers from buying it off of other kids or trying to buy it themselves off of Hector the Spanish guy, who was only into selling sandwich bags wholesale to kids which I think is the safest way to deal in a small town. But I still managed once in a while to pull a few bucks out for myself plus the occasional nick. Besides all I needed money for then was smokes and food which I mostly ate at the mall because if I brought anything back to the squat the bikers ate it. It was smalltime dealing for sure and in spite of it I was usually broke but it wasn’t very dangerous or wrong and my material needs were few.

  Plus for a kid without a home it was an interesting way of life. The bikers for instance kept you pretty alert. Bruce was sort of the head biker because he’d been in the Gulf War and knew a lot about Arabs and desert life and weapons and he had these incredible tattoos all over his chest and back and up and down his arms of Arab guys with swords in their teeth and harem girls and suchlike. He lifted weights all day at Murphy’s Gym where he said he was one of the trainers but he only hung out there and got to use the weights free because he was a good advertisement. He had arms and pecs as big as hams and because of them and his tattoos he almost never wore a shirt except for when he went out in winter when he just wore his leather jacket and kept it unzipped. He had an incredible body for a human being, like he was from the planet of the weightlifters, and he had these awesome nipple rings and shaved the hair off of his chest and stomach several times a week. Straights gave Bruce a lot of room and he took it like it was his in the first place, like he was a cop although he hated cops and called them pigs. Bruce used quite a few of those old hippie terms.

  I think he was the smartest of the bikers who actually as a group were not very intelligent. Russ was intelligent. More than me anyhow and even more than Bruce although I was two years younger than Russ whereas Bruce was probably thirty. Smart or not, Russ was only sixteen then and thus he pretty much had to take shit not just from Bruce but from all the bikers which was often some pretty stupid shit, like when after they’d seen this old biker movie they made him stand in the middle of the Grand Union parking lot one night while they drove their Harleys around him in figure 8s to see who could come closest without hitting him. I sat in Russ’s Camaro and watched and kept hoping they wouldn’t remember I was there which they didn’t because they were so whacked and into tormenting Russ who I think bugged them on account of his intelligence and the Video Den guy had put the lease in his name so Russ had to collect the rent. Also Russ tended to talk too much and too big especially when he was scared, and around the bikers he was scared a lot so they liked to punish him for that too.

  Around big dogs if you’re a kid you either learn to do the little dog or you book. Russ had trouble learning the little dog but he was stuck with the bikers due to his early friendship with Bruce and his job and the apartment, and I was stuck with Russ due to my home situation and being too young to get a job yet, so in a sense like Bruce said we were a family whether we wanted to be or not which is true of real families anyhow.

  Of course like always things could’ve been worse and that’s why me and Russ didn’t complain or go anywhere else. The town of Au Sable was like our home base. It was where our parents lived and where we had once been little kids and had lived with them. Plus it was where the friends were. There and up at the mall in Plattsburgh.


  All the bikers rode strictly Harleys or else were planning to get one soon. Everything else was Jap shit or Kraut shit or Brit shit. What they liked was American shit—softtails, shovelheads. Bruce used to say, Harleys are iron horses, man. Fucking iron horses. He liked to repeat himself, probably because he was used to talking to people who didn’t get it the first time. Due to his obsession with weightifting he had given them the name Adirondack Iron which they had painted on their leathers and had gotten tattooed upside down under their left forearms so you could read it when they did a power salute, like they were an actual serious-minded motorcycle gang or one of those foreign skinhead bands. They looked more organized than they were. They talked like being a piece of Adirondack Iron was the whole point of their lives and maybe it was but some of them had wives and even kids someplace who they occasionally visited when they ran out of money.

  Actually the Adirondack Iron and even to some degree Bruce were all assholes who couldn’t get real jobs so they mostly stayed drunk or high all night and slept off the days or just chilled on the back porch listening to Russ’s tapes or worked on their bikes in the yard. They were like dogs and Bruce was the lead dog, sort of a German shepherd or one of those big Alaskan huskies. He made decisions and gave orders and the other guys usually followed them or else carefully ignored him.