Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

  I actually kind of was a mass murderer. Boy slays family and self. I’d started having these incredibly realistic visions of firing my niner at my stepfather, shooting him in the right temple from about six inches away while I stood with my foot on his neck and him lying on the floor begging me not to. It was pretty vivid, with blood and brains splashing over my foot and all.

  And then my mom comes into the room, it’s my old bedroom at home and she sees what’s happened to Ken and me with the gun and blood spattered all over my pantsleg and sandal from where I had placed it on his neck and my hands from holding the gun so close to his head when I fired, and she takes off down the hall and I go after her and catch her as she gets to the door only it’s locked and she can’t get it open in time so she goes, No, Chappie, don’t!

  I do though. I give her one straight in the heart. It was like in a video game only real.

  I looked out the livingroom window and there was Grandma coming up the walk so I opened the door for her and she came inside and saw my mom lying there with blood all over her chest and her eyes rolled back and her mouth open with blood bubbling out and Grandma says, What’s going on? and that’s when I blast her too. In the heart, same as my mom.

  Afterwards I walked around the house for a while calling Willie and finally I remembered that he was dead too and it was Ken who ran over him and then I realized that if ol’ Willie was still alive maybe none of this would’ve happened. It’s amazing but all I needed was that little black and white cat who really liked me and I probably wouldn’t have slain my family. He only weighed nine or ten pounds, about like a bag of sugar and he couldn’t talk or anything but it was like there was the concentration of a person inside his furry head who truly liked me and was always sincerely glad to see me when I came home and slept on my lap whenever I stayed up late alone watching MTV and purred with contentment like I made him feel safe in a dangerous world.

  I remembered the time I got Ken’s .22 rifle with the scope out of the case that was stashed in his and my mom’s bedroom closet and aimed it at Willie and pulled the trigger but the safety was on and it didn’t fire so I used the gun to shoot up Ken’s and my mom’s bed instead. I felt incredibly guilty then for almost killing Willie. Sometimes I guess you do a bad thing in order not to do a worse thing that you can’t stop yourself from doing. Boy slays cat and self they would’ve said if that day Ken’s .22 hadn’t had the safety on. Ken and Mom and Grandma would’ve been okay and even would’ve gone to the funeral and after that normal life would’ve resumed for them.

  Lucky for Willie I guess, even though he bought it later. But unlucky for them because now I’d ended up doing the worst thing instead of only the bad thing. It was like being inside a snuff video on the VCR and watching it at the same time with a remote in my hand and I could play the same three scenes over and over, noticing new details each time, pressing Rewind after I whacked Grandma—she gets up and goes backwards out the door and down the steps to the street and Mom stands up and yanks on the locked door and then comes toward me down the hall with her back facing me like we’re playing blindman’s buff when suddenly she turns and sees Ken on the floor his head all bloody and I stand up and put the gun into my backpack and by this time Ken is slipping back out the bedroom door—and then pressing Play and now I notice when he comes sneaking into my bedroom that Ken’s wearing only his bikini underpants and he’s got a boner and that glazed boozy look in his eyes that makes me feel like bread dough, and my mom’s first reaction actually is to be pissed off at me for making such a mess and firing off a gun inside the house instead of for what in reality I’ve gone and done with it, killed her husband, and my grandma’s first thought I can tell from her face when she sees that my mom’s lying dead on the floor is that maybe she’ll get something out of it for herself, the house even.

  Hours passed, it was probably like three in the morning and there weren’t any more cars on the road but it kept raining and my body kept walking while the rest of me was trapped inside the family massacre video examining and thinking about every gross detail. Over by Keeseville where the road crosses the Ausable River I got halfway out on the bridge when I noticed the wind was blowing and suddenly it was like the VCR had jammed with everybody but me dead in the house and it wouldn’t rewind or go forward. It’s stuck on the scene at the end where I go around the house looking for ol’ Willie. Here, Willie, c’mon out, Willie.

  For the first time since leaving my grandma’s apartment I stopped walking. I looked over the railing and down about three hundred feet into the chasm and the rocks and the rushing water below which I could hear in spite of the rain beating down and the wind. It was too dark to see the river or the rocks down there and I thought now was the time and place if he was going to do it right for the boy to slay self. No muss, no fuss. Behind him nothing but waste and scenes of carnage. Ahead more of the same.

  I took off my backpack and set it down on the walkway and climbed up onto the flat top of a concrete post that the iron railing was attached to and with my hands out at my sides stood there for a while listening to the water way below churning over the rocks and felt the cold wind push against my soaked tee shirt and cutoffs and looked up into the black sky and let the rain fall straight onto my face. I was shivering from the cold and the wet and except for that I couldn’t tell anymore what was real from what was only in my head.

  The concrete post was slippery under my feet though. And when I noticed that I realized I didn’t want to fall off the bridge into the chasm and bust myself up on the rocks by accident. I figured I’d better get down and think about this some more. I don’t know why but it seemed that the worst thing I could do now was accidentally kill myself. I wanted to do it strictly on purpose. Not some dumb slipup.

  Just then I saw the lights of a car approaching from the direction of Willsboro still a long ways off and I started to turn and get down so I could get off of the bridge before the car got close enough to see me because at this hour it was probably a state cop. But when I turned, my right foot slid off the edge of the post and my left followed and for a second I was floating in the air and then I flung out both hands and grabbed at the darkness and found the iron bars of the bridge railing. I clamped on and hung there with my whole body dangling below the bridge while the steady gush of the rain above and the overflowing river far below filled my brain like that classical music from the Burlington station I heard once on a car radio when I was hitching home to Au Sable from the mall. The music was real mellow and relaxing and all, with violins and clarinets and hundreds of other instruments playing this smooth powerful song that rose like in spirals and fell and swirled around and rose again like it could do that forever or at least for a very long time.

  I was starting to think the music was strong enough to lift me up and carry me off like on a beautiful soft cloud if I let go of the iron railings which I clung to like they were the bars of a jail cell and my hands were pretty cold by then and I probably couldn’t hold on for more than a few seconds longer anyhow, when the car I’d seen before got to the bridge and splashed across and cast its lights over everything and made me see clearly where I was, dangling a hundred yards above a killer river in a wicked rainstorm. After the car passed on it was like it’d left its lights behind because I could still see exactly what I’d seen in that split second and it freaked me so I pulled myself up and got one foot onto the bridge and then the other and managed to clamber back over the rail to safety.

  I was breathing real hard. My teeth were chattering and I was soaked through and my heart and liver felt like they were frozen solid. I went over to my backpack which was all I owned in the world, my rain-soaked worldly effects it would have been if they’d found it there in the morning and my body all smashed up on the rocks below. Opening it I reached in and pulled out the pistol I’d used or thought I’d used and still kneeling flipped it over my shoulder. I watched it sail into the air turning like a tiny dead animal and then disappear into the darkness and down into the
chasm. Then I stood up and put the backpack on again and started walking toward Plattsburgh. That was the closest I ever came to committing mass murder and suicide and until now I’ve never told anyone.

  By the time I got to the field behind the warehouses and spotted the schoolbus out there in the middle it was dawn and the rain had finally stopped. The sky was a shiny gray color like it had wet paint on it with these wispy white cloud-tails floating underneath here and there. I crossed through the chain-link fence and the tall wet grasses and ragweed and goldenrod in the field slapped against my bare legs and pasted their seeds to my skin as I made my way toward what I guess I now thought of as home. Although the truth is I wasn’t thinking much of anything then, I was dizzy and shivering and probably had a hundred and ten fever and a couple of times during my nightlong hike I’d been really sorry I’d given the sweater I’d taken from Mr. Ridgeway to Sister Rose at the bus station. It was only yesterday morning but back then I’d figured she was going to places unknown and I was going home to where I had parents who’d buy me clothes of my own so I could afford to be generous.

  I don’t really remember arriving at the schoolbus, only crossing the field and the weeds and the seeds and hundreds of daisies and black-eyed susans and the bus getting bigger and bigger until it was the only thing I could see, this big banged-up yellow schoolbus with huge green leafy plants instead of kids looking out of the mostly broken windows, and then I was knocking at the door like I was a kid who wanted to be picked up for school and that’s all I remember. It was like once I’d gotten there I could finally let go the way I’d wanted to let go when I was hanging off the bridge because the next thing I remember is waking up inside the bus on a mattress with a blanket around me and a dry tee shirt on that’s too big like a nightshirt.

  I felt like a newborn baby. Sunlight was splashing through the windows and I was warm and dry and there was music playing, reggae music, this light bouncy sweet tune with the words, Hey, Mister Yesterday, what are you doing from today? It was so different from the music that I’d heard on the bridge which I now realized was evil and weird and probably sent from Satan like you’re supposed to hear when you play heavy metal backwards that I became at that moment like a complete convert to reggae. It filled my head with light and for the first time I could remember I was happy to be alive.

  I ached all over though, like my body was a box of rocks and I could barely turn my head to see where the music was coming from, somewhere above and behind me when suddenly there was I-Man dancing barefoot and wearing his floppy shorts and flipping his head and switching his dreads to the beat with this big spliff in his mouth which smelled like freshly turned earth and sunbeams. He kept on shuffling in this excellent reggae dance around my bed smiling down and nodding his head like he was glad to see me awake but didn’t want to say anything to interrupt the music, just bopping by to check on Mister Yesterday and then moving on down toward the rear of the bus and returning a few seconds later with a steaming bowl in his hand, still dancing and puffing on his spliff until finally the song ended and he said how I was coming forward now and mus’ drink dis herb fe return to de structure of life an’ de fullness dereof.

  Which I did. It took a while and sometimes I got the chills again and then I’d sweat for hours especially at night and I was so weak I could barely sit up and had to piss in a jar and so on. But I-Man knew all these old African and Rastafarian cures from herbs and other plants he could find in the field and out among the shady woods behind Sun Foods and downtown in the park by the lake that he’d go out for at night and bring back and mash up and boil into like a tea that he actually spoonfed to me for quite a few days, and every morning I woke up feeling a little bit better until pretty soon we were having regular conversations like before. I-Man still had a lot of Rasta wisdom to impart and I still had a lot to learn about life in general and about the spirit of truth and goodness, as I’d discovered from trying to go back home again so I just tried to relax and listen and watch.

  The reggae tunes were from some tapes and a box, a cool Sony probably stolen that had been given to I-Man by a local kid he called Jah Mood but I knew he was only Randy Moody who was heavy into reggae and dope and had grown these matted white-kid imitation dreadlocks that he thought were cool and they sort of were if you didn’t know about the real thing. Randy though was too dumb to know the difference between black people and white people or too racist to admit there was a difference and he was stuck forever being a white kid from Plattsburgh.

  When I mentioned that one morning to I-Man he smiled and patted my hand and said Jah Mood will come to I-self in Jah’s own time and way and not to worry, Bone, him na gwan displace m’ heart. That’s when I decided I’d better do more listening and less talking.

  Nobody knew we were crashed at the schoolbus, not even Jah Mood. After the Bong Brothers’d been busted the place had bad vibes locally and kids’d stayed away and the cops forgot about it I guess. I-Man’s ganja crop’d started coming in by then so he was even more careful of the cops than before when he was only an illegal alien and he didn’t leave the place during the daytime now except when he absolutely had to which was almost never, not even to Sun Foods now that his vegetables were ripe and he didn’t tell any civilians he knew, mostly mall rats and other homeless kids where he lived or who he lived with or where he had his plantation. His ganja plants were from seeds he’d sneaked in with him from Jamaica, he said and he’d started them in old egg cartons in the bus. Then he’d slipped them in among the weeds around the field and he’d cropped them off when they were young so they grew in low and broad and you wouldn’t even know they were there unless he pointed them out to you. They were genius plants and I-Man was like this mad scientist when it came to growing and processing herb so we ended up blowing pure lamb’s breath, all we wanted and probably the best dope in the whole northcountry that summer. Maybe in America.

  It’s funny, when you have all the quality dope you want and no stress about getting more you find out pretty fast what you need and you never smoke more than that. With I-Man once the crop came in I never went into deep buster-freak mode like I used to. I’d just hit a J in the morning after breakfast and chill around sunset with another so I could talk with I-Man I-to-I so to speak. In the old days me and Russ’d cop some weed from Hector or someplace and scoop up some malt 40s and go bust our brains with bongs and brews until we ran out or passed out whichever came first and we’d never learn anything from the experience about ourselves or the world. Now my head was like permanently located halfway between being bummed from no dope and unconscious from too much, only it was like my true self that I’d locked onto there, the self that hadn’t been fucked up by my childhood and all and the self that wasn’t completely whacked in reaction. I-Man said I was coming up to my lights, de Bone him coming to know I-self an’ placin him on de way to natty. He said I was taking my first baby steps along the path of truth and righteousness which would soon lead me out of Babylon and I said, Excellent, man, that is truly excellent, and he laughed.

  Then this one night late in July after my health had been completely restored and in fact I was stronger than I’d ever been on account of I-Man’s roots and herbs and the Ital vegetarian diet and all and from working on the plantation in the summer sun, I woke up a few hours after I’d fallen asleep and heard this strange slow tune from I-Man’s box being played real low back in the rear of the bus. That was where I-Man slept and kept his personal stuff. My crib was in the front near the driver’s seat and we used the middle space for socializing and making things or just hanging out on rainy days. Anyhow I woke up to the sad slow sound of this old song Many Rivers to Cross which is about life in Jamaica and Jimmy Cliff sings it although it’s not a reggae song, it’s more like a regular black American religious song about slavery and patience and getting over to heaven and suchlike.

  I got up and went back to his crib just because of this strange strong feeling I had that I-Man was sending me a message with the song, and he wa
s because as soon as I sat down on the bus seat next to his mattress his voice came out of the darkness all gloomy and slow and weary. Bone, Bone, Bone, he said. I-and-I got too many rivers to cross.

  He needed to get home to Jamaica, he explained. He needed to return to the forests and the mountain streams and the deep blue Caribbean Sea to live among his brethren again. It was the first time I’d heard him talk about Jamaica as a real place and not Babylon, with real people living there, people he loved and missed and I could fully understand that and felt sorry for him. Which was a whole new feeling for me and scared me a little but I quickly overcame my fear and started asking him questions like where in Jamaica he was from and what was it like there and did he have a wife or kids or anything.

  He was from this village called Accompong way up in the hills, he said which was this independent nation of Ashanti warriors who’d like escaped from slavery and had beaten the British in a war in the olden days, in the 1900s I think. He told me he had a small plantation up there in Accompong and listed everything that grew on it, bread-fruit and afoo yams and coconut and calalu and akee and banana, his groundation he called it, and he had a woman up there and some kids too, four or five, he said which sounded funny due to its vagueness but by now I was used to I-Man being vague about things Americans are real exact about and then turning around and being incredibly exact about stuff that Americans are vague about like history and religion which to him were as personal as his teeth and hair.