Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

  I was going to have Froggy hold the money, he told me. But she’s a little slow on the uptake let us say. And then when I saw you standing there by the side of the road. . . Well, my boy, my boy, talk about heaven-sent! Halleloo-yah. And praise the Lord.

  Yeah. The Lord works in mysterious ways, I said which is something my grandmother used to say for explaining weird things.

  We were all the way out to the Northway now and Buster turned the van left onto the ramp heading north, not the direction I’d originally planned on going but there really wasn’t much I could do about it now. Besides my criminal mind was already kicking in and telling me that if Buster was stupid or high enough to trust me with holding the Hooliganz’s money there was the distinct possibility of me getting some of it off of him before I split. And then there was the matter of Froggy which frankly I was now into viewing as a total green-light rescue operation, a definite Go.

  Around five which was when Buster’d arranged to meet these guys the Hooliganz we pulled into the parking lot of Chi-Boom’s but Buster looked over the cars and said they weren’t there yet. There was a McDonald’s two stores down on Bridge Street so Buster went off to get everyone some Big Macs and fries and left me and Froggy in the van. I asked her, You wanna book, man? You wanna get away from Buster?

  She looked at me from her corner in the back like she was a suspicious beaten old dog instead of a regular little kid and didn’t say anything, just glanced up at me and then looked at her bare feet and picked at the bottom hem of her dress. I could see she didn’t know anymore what she wanted which was of course how Buster preferred it and why he kept her stoned so I decided then and there that if I was going to help her I’d have to take Buster’s place so to speak and tell her myself what she really wanted and then go ahead and get it for her. That wasn’t my style, I usually let people do what they want to do or even do nothing if that’s what they want but this time I was fully prepared to take over her decision-making powers and rule her myself at least temporarily.

  We’ll get the fuck outa here together, I told her. You just be cool and leave everything to me, man. I know a place we can hide till I find out where your real home is. Maybe you got parents.

  Then Buster was back with the Big Macs and all, yackety-yakking about this and that like we were great lifelong buddies, me and him and Froggy, and these rapsters the Hooliganz from Albany or Troy or wherever were out to rip all three of us off and not just him and not him being out to rip them off either. Buster took this thumb-sized roll of bills, mostly fifties it looked like and tucked it into my hand and said to stash it deep inside my pack where no one would think to look.

  There wasn’t anyplace like that in my pack, I told him because there actually wasn’t and plus I didn’t want him or anyone else to see my gun which is how I now regarded the niner I’d taken from the Ridgeways’, my gun. But hey, I got this stuffed bird, I said and pulled the ol’ woodcock out of the garbage bag. And it’s all hollow inside. I can stick the money inside the bird, I said to Buster and did it, just shoved the roll of bills up what would have been its asshole if it hadn’t been turned into this neat little pouch-like interior that I had already examined long ago to no avail for drugs. See, I said to him and then I put the CDs and the ol’ woodcock into the backpack but on top of everything else right out there in plain sight.

  Genius, pure genius! he said and he leaned back in his seat and took a nap for a while as it slowly got dark and cars started pulling into the lot and after a while the place was rocking pretty good and there were pickups and motorcycles and all kinds of cars coming and going. Buster was wide awake now and watching every car that pulled in but still no black rapsters from Troy, just white people, locals it looked like, big guys with mustaches and shaggy hair and thick necks and some females in tight jeans and cowboy boots and the occasional biker when speak of the devil there they were, the men of Adirondack Iron, at least a few of them, Joker and Roundhouse and Raoul and Packer, all four riding their own Harleys this time.

  Naturally I didn’t say anything to Buster about them, I just slid down low in my seat so they couldn’t see me even by accident as they walked right past the van and went inside Chi-Boom’s. It wasn’t bad enough I had to deal with Buster Brown the psycho porn king, now I had to worry about the men of Adirondack Iron too. Those guys I definitely did not want to see me even from a distance.

  And then pretty soon after that Buster’s rapsters finally arrived, four black dudes in a rusted-out ’79 Galaxie, big guys wearing doo-rags on their heads and Chicago Bulls sweats and hoodies and Filo sneaks looking straight out of the projects only there aren’t any projects within a hundred miles of here so they really looked like they were men from another planet like Pod Boy except Pod Boy was traveling incognito tonight and the Hooliganz definitely weren’t.

  Buster jumped out and ran around and greeted them with all these high fives and get-down street talk which is almost embarrassing for a fellow white person to have to witness with his own eyes and ears and the first thing they do is ask him for the money.

  They talked for a few minutes out there and I could pick up most of it. The rapsters wanted Buster to hand over the expense money up front or they wouldn’t sign and he was saying he couldn’t get it from the promoters until after they signed the contract blah blah but he does have a couple of motel rooms for them, he says and he’ll spring for food until they all get paid after the concert and so on.

  The rapsters know Buster is lying and why, but they don’t know exactly where he’s lying which is his forte so to speak. The biggest Hooligan was wearing sunglasses and looked bad enough to rip Buster’s brains right down through the roof of his mouth. He draped one of his arms the size of a tire around Buster’s slopy shoulders and very pissed he says, Man, we be needin a drink and you be buyin cause they ain’t no other fuckin way for us to get a muthafuckin drink, you know what I’m sayin. Let’s us go inside an talk this whole muthafuckin mess over, he says and as requested Buster like a good boy scoots along into Chi-Boom’s with them leaving me and Froggy alone in the van with various things but most important with the money.

  C’mon, man, let’s get the fuck outa here! I said and grabbed her by the hand and yanked. But she pulled her hand out of mine and didn’t seem to want to leave. What’s the matter, Froggy, don’t you want to get rid of this guy? He’s a creep, for chrissake.

  He’s gonna be mad, she says in this tiny voice, practically the first time I’ve heard it and I think maybe she’s only about six or seven, even younger than I thought. I’m s’posed to stay here an’ wait for him to come back, she says.

  C’mon, man. This is our only chance, the rapsters’ve got him scared, I said and reached for her hand again but she pulled away and shrank back against the side of the van. I climbed around the seat and got in back with her and she scrunched herself up like she was afraid of me. Aw c’mon, Froggy, I ain’t gonna hurt you. All I wanna do is help you out a little, help you get away from this creep and maybe find a regular family to live with. Maybe even find your own mom and dad. You got a regular mom and dad someplace? I asked her. Actually I was starting to wonder if anyone had a regular mother and father anymore except on television.

  She said yes.

  Whereabouts are they?

  I don’t know. At home, I guess.

  Where’s home then?

  I don’t know. Far. Milwaukee, she said.

  Jeez, that’s far. How the hell’d you get mixed up with Buster Brown? He your uncle or something?

  No, she said. He was somebody her mom knew and her mom had given her to him.

  Gave you to him?

  I guess. Yeah. She couldn’t take care of me anymore, and my daddy was gone someplace. In jail.

  Jeez. Didn’t she even maybe sell you to him? I mean, it ain’t like Buster is fucking Doctor Spock or some kind of child care expert. If you give your kid over to a guy like him you want to get paid for it, you know?

  She said yeah he must’ve paid her mom
something which to me made more sense especially if her mom was cracked out and maybe had AIDS or something and really needed the cash and couldn’t take care of her kid anymore. I’d heard a few stories of mothers doing that and while it didn’t exactly cheer me up about family life it at least made sense. But it also meant I was going to have a hard time getting Froggy situated with a regular family and all, assuming I could even convince her to run out on Buster in the first place. Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you don’t expect it and the people who deserve loyalty the least seem to get it the most especially when it’s coming from little kids.

  Look, we gotta get the fuck outa here before Buster makes peace with the rapsters and comes back and wants his money. This is our one chance. I know this great place where we can chill for a while, it’s an actual schoolbus only it’s been turned into like a housetrailer where you can live in it. I told her then that if she didn’t like it better there with me than here being Buster’s prisoner she could come back to him or she could even go home to Milwaukee if she wanted, I’d buy her a bus ticket with some of Buster’s money. You know it’s illegal to buy and sell little kids, I told her. So it’s okay for you to cut out on him and go wherever the hell you want. This’s America and America’s a free country, Froggy. Even for kids.

  I think I pretty nearly had her convinced when all of a sudden I heard this crash and a few feet in front of the van the window of the bar comes down like when I shot up the Ridgeways’ picture window and a bottle comes flying out and then a couple of people come flying out too, one white and one black and the white guy is Joker and the black guy is a rapster, not the huge guy but one of the smaller ones, and then there’s Buster in the middle of it trying to pull Joker off of the rapster when Packer comes out and coldconks Buster on the head with a beer bottle and then there’s Roundhouse and Raoul hollering racist stuff like kill the fucking nigger which of course brings on the rest of the Hooliganz who whale into the bikers like this is the most fun they’ve had all month, beating the shit out of a bunch of white asshole bikers from the northcountry. Buster is down on the ground all bloody and getting tromped on by both sides and the lead Hooligan is smacking Joker around like he’s a carpet and the other Hooliganz’re fending for themselves pretty good against a rapidly growing gang of white guys from inside the bar who normally wouldn’t take the side of bikers except when the white race gets into it.

  Now suddenly it’s like we’ve got a full-scale race riot going on in the parking lot of Chi-Boom’s and I figure the cops’1l be next to join the fray and are probably already on their way over from Dunkin’ Donuts or wherever. C’mon, girl, let’s us be invisible, I said to Froggy and I opened the side door of the van and grabbed her by her wrist and with my other hand hefted my backpack which actually weighed more than Froggy and dragged her out of the van and around behind it. Then we were running side by side, she was really into it with me now, the two of us scuttling along between the cars until we were out there on Bridge Street and ducking down Margaret Street toward an alley I knew and there came the cops only they didn’t see us.

  Half an hour later we’re at the secret hole Russ’d shown me in the chain link fence by the field out behind the warehouses. I held the fence back while Froggy slipped under and then I followed and took her hand and led her across that creepy windblown dark field toward the old wrecked schoolbus in the high grass in the middle. When we got there it looked the same, no signs of life but it didn’t stink so bad all around as before. I knocked on the door a couple times and waited and did it again but no answer.

  I guess the ol’ Bong Brothers got busted or else they split, I said and pulled the door open and looked inside. Nothing. No one. Looks like we’re home, I said and went inside and set my pack down. Froggy followed and stood there by the driver’s seat examining the place which wasn’t all that bad although it probably helped that it was dark and all we could see were the outlines of the few bus seats that had been left and the mattresses and the old boards on cinderblocks.

  What d’ya think? I said.

  It’s dark.

  I remembered the flashlight in my pack then and when I had it turned on we checked the place out carefully and saw that the Bong Brothers seemed to’ve cleaned all their stuff out and left just the furniture so to speak and from the smell nobody’d been here for a month or more. It smelled clean and dry like it had been aired out and I noticed that some of the cardboard that’d covered the windows’d been taken down and a few of the windows were open. I walked down the length of the bus toward the rear shining my flashlight into the corners and behind the seats and so on until I got to the end where I shined it across the back seat and I saw a body lying there.

  I didn’t say anything because of not wanting to scare Froggy who was behind me a ways and I let the light go slowly up the guy’s legs—it was a guy, I could see that much, wearing Wal-Mart sneaks and jeans—on to his hands which were on his belly and I saw then that he was a black guy with a plaid flannel shirt on but no wounds or sign of blood so far and then I came to his face and there he was, lying on his back and smiling up at me like he’d just overheard me telling Froggy this funny joke, gray eyes crinkly and open in the middle of a broad coffee-colored face with a humongous flat nose and deep lines almost like trenches around his wide mouth and over his eyebrows and a huge mass of dreadlocks wrapped all around his head like a pillow of blacksnakes.

  He puckered his lips and said, Would y’ mine shinin down de torch, mon. I-Man cyan see nuttin wid de light shinin in him eyes so.

  Cool, I said and dropped the beam of my light.

  Mon got to shine de light from out him eyes fe seein good, he said and he laughed from way down deep in his chest.

  Racially this was getting to be quite an unusual night for me. I hadn’t seen this many black people on the same night in my whole life practically and these weren’t your usual black people either like Bart the security guard at the mall and the occasional Air Force dude you saw around town. These guys were seriously black, like Africans almost.

  What’re you doing here, man? I said keeping my light pointed down like he’d asked.

  Same as you, mon.

  What’s that?

  Tryin to get home, mon. Me jus’ tryin to get home.

  Yeah, well, I guess us too, I said. Then I introduced myself and Froggy and he said his name was I-Man and shook my hand like a regular white person so as to make me feel normal which it did. Afterwards me and Froggy settled on one of the mattresses and I covered her with my jacket and she fell straight to sleep. I was lying there thinking about all that’d happened when suddenly I smelled the sweet familiar aroma of burning marijuana and I-Man calls down from his seat in the back, You wan’ smoke some spliff, mon?

  I said sure and went back there and we smoked and talked a while and before the night was gone I knew that I had met the man who would become my best friend.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SCHOOL DAYS

  It’s hard to think back to those days of living in the bus with I-Man and Froggy and not get all gummed up with feelings of like thankfulness although I don’t know who to thank and didn’t know then either since I-Man himself never took any credit and everything that seemed unusual to me was only normal to him.

  Maybe it was normal and maybe what was unusual or weird was basically my life up to then. Because up to then for me living was the same as running through hell with a gasoline suit on.

  You got to give thanks and praise, mon, he used to tell me whenever I’d say how cool things were now with me and Froggy and him living together in the schoolbus out there in the field behind the warehouses north of Plattsburgh.

  I’d say, Yeah, right, who’m I supposed to give thanks and praise to? and I-Man always smiled that soft smile of his and said Jah which I guessed was his idea of God or maybe Jesus but different on account of I-Man being an old black guy and a Jamaican and all that. I wasn’t sure who Jah was really, the whole thing being still pretty new to me and when he t
old about how Jah was actually this African king of kings named Haile Selassie who drove the whites out of Africa and freed up his people I figured this was something white people probably couldn’t get or else I-Man was working from a different Bible than ours, one I hadn’t heard of yet.

  Actually there were some Rastafarians who were like white Americans that I’d seen at the mall and elsewhere hitching et cetera, kids mainly who were into reefer but wanted a religion to go with it so they grew their hair out and twisted it into locks and put wax and other crap into it so they could make like dreadlocks out of it and these white Rastas when they talked about Jah and said give praise and thanks, mon, stuff they’d picked up mostly from Bob Marley songs they never mentioned the Haile Selassie guy. I knew they were in reality talking about God though and Jesus and suchlike only picturing Him as a way older black guy like Malcolm X with a gray beard so they could picture themselves as black too, like that was the whole point, to not have to be an American white kid worshiping the god of your parents which is why the Haile Selassie stuff got overlooked by them but it was important.

  The thing is, reality, at least that part of reality which includes gods and saviors and so forth was different for I-Man than it was for us American white kids. Probably different even than for American black kids too but I can’t say much about that of course since I’m not one myself. I mean, who knows how black kids from America picture God? I guess if you judge from their parents’ artworks and church songs and suchlike it figures that they picture Him pretty much the same as white kids do only He’s a little less uptight maybe.

  Anyhow whenever I-Man told me to give thanks and praise to Jah because I’d just said how cool everything was it was like he was telling me to thank the monkey god or praise the hundred-armed god with the elephant face or something weird like that. But when I thought about it since for the first time in my life I was actually happy it made more sense for me to be thanking and praising foreign gods like that than the bearded white American Methodist God and His skinny son Jesus that my mom and stepfather and my grandmother’d told me to thank and praise in church when I was a little kid. I would’ve been lying then since I didn’t exactly have a lot to be thankful for unless you count my real father taking off on me and my stepfather’s sicko visits to my room when he was drunk and my mom’s weepy dumb belief that everything was cool and my grandmother’s constant complaining. Giving thanks and praise to God and Jesus back then, that would’ve been the really weird thing and they probably knew it too. Then or now they themselves never went to church regular anyhow, not even one Sunday a month but only often enough so people knew they weren’t Catholic or Jew which I think was the main point.