Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

  The husband was supposed to be this famous singer from the sixties who’d kicked drugs and booze and got married and had kids et cetera and become like a regular citizen but I wasn’t even born until 1979 so I’d never heard of him. Captain Ave thought that was weird but he was a sixties guy. The beers I’d been lugging below were for Captain Ave and his crew, he said because the cruise was supposed to be drug and alcohol free. He was pretty disgusted by the whole thing. Plus he’d just found out the whole family were vegetarians which he said he didn’t know from Unitarians. Can you handle that? he asked me and I said sure, I’ll cook Ital. He said fine so long as he didn’t have to eat that shit. Then we agreed I’d get two hundred bucks when we got to Dominica and we shook hands.

  We each drank a beer over it and afterwards he showed me where the crew bunked. It was way up in the bow of the boat and tiny like a pointed coffin with no window and two foot-wide benches with sponge rubber mattresses for sleeping on. I was glad then that I was the only member of the crew and decided that unless it rained I’d be sleeping up on the topdeck anyhow and proceeded to haul one of the chunks of sponge rubber up there and lay down on it and probably due to the excitement of the last few days plus relief for having found a way out of Jamaica I didn’t have any thoughts left and almost instantly fell asleep.

  There’s only one other thing that happened to me in Jamaica worth telling about. Not because it’s so interesting but it’s kind of sad. In the morning Captain Ave who had to go meet the singer and his family at the airport gave me a bunch of money and dropped me off at the Mobay market to buy enough veggies to get us to Dominica. Get about a week’s worth, he said, and bring me the change plus receipts. No problema, I said although I wasn’t too happy about making any public appearances so to speak especially at the marketplace where I’d stand out and certain people I knew did their food shopping. Still, Captain Ave didn’t know about my various adventures and I couldn’t tell him so I did what he asked and went around to the different stands buying breadfruits and akee and calalu and coconuts and various fruits, the usual components of an Ital menu which was basically all I knew how to cook anyhow. Him and me he said could eat the fish we caught and there’d be several islands we’d stop at along the way where we could get regular American food which was fine by me since I hadn’t had any in a long time.

  I was pretty close to finished and was buying this huge bag of oranges from a lady when I looked up and spotted a white person in the crowd on the other side of the market and even though I hadn’t seen him since the Ridgeways’ I recognized him at once. It was Russ. He looked the same at first except I could tell he was really confused and scared especially by all the black people whose native language he probably couldn’t understand a word of. For a minute there I had to fight off a desire to rush over and help him but I quickly overcame it and ducked down behind the fat lady selling the oranges and peeked out under her table at him. Russ’s eyes were darting around and he was licking his lips a lot and kept pushing his hair off his forehead. He was trying to seem cool. He had on a sleeveless shirt and cutoffs and black high-top Doc Martens and no socks and he’d cut his hair with a buzz on the sides and a rattail in back. I noticed then that he had a bunch more tattoos, all over his arms and legs even, all kinds of snakes and different-colored dragons and various slogans. They were pretty much everywhere. He looked really pathetic and I wished we could still be friends but it was definitely too late.

  His eyes were like cruising the marketplace crowd, for me no doubt since I hadn’t been at the clock tower where I’d promised but then I saw he’d locked onto something and I followed his gaze across the crowd to a group of three whites, females they were, Evening Star and her campers Rita and Dickie. Evening Star being the experienced Jamaican shopper and all was pointing to this and that and explaining everything to the other two who were like nodding and being politely amazed. Russ though was already zeroing in on them like a teenaged heat-seeking missile. I really had to fight with myself to keep from standing up and waving my arms and hollering, Russ! Don’t, Russ! Come with me to Dominica, Russ!

  But it was too late even for that. Evening Star’d picked him out of the crowd and was already smiling in his direction and he was smiling back and I knew was rehearsing in his mind the line he’d use. He’d say like, You guys come here often? and she’d say, Every Saturday, darlin’, and he’d say, Wow, you must live here, I’m new in town, just arrived from the States and looking for my homey named Chappie who was s’posed to meet me blah blah blah, and the rest would be as predictable as the first part.

  I watched for a few minutes more while Russ and Evening Star yakked it up. Then she introduced him to her friends from Boston and turned aside and said something private to Russ which was probably that her friends were lesbians and which knowing Russ would turn him on and knowing Evening Star that was the point of telling him. Anyhow a second later he was carrying their groceries for them and talking like they were all old friends and I figured it wouldn’t take more than another few minutes for Evening Star to realize that Chappie, Russ’s homey from upstate New York was the very boy she’d known as Bone. And in an hour Russ’d have a blunt-sized spliff in his mouth and be doing the backstroke in the pool at Starport.

  They strolled toward the parking lot and I finally stood up and watched them get into Evening Star’s Range Rover and drive off. Poor ol’ Russ, I thought. I wished I could’ve saved him. But I knew that even if I’d tried he wouldn’t’ve let me. That could’ve been me, I thought, that poor bewildered kid in the Doc Martens and the rat-tail haircut with the painful-looking red and blue and black newly drilled tattoos all over his pink skin climbing into the fancy car and riding up the hill to the greathouse, a stoner boy amazed at his incredible luck and looking forward already to getting coked with some weird dude named Doc on the patio before the sun goes down and laid by this buff older chick named Evening Star in the laundryroom before it comes up again.

  It would’ve been me, if it hadn’t been for Sister Rose and I-Man and everything I’d learned about myself and life from coming to love them out there at the schoolbus in Plattsburgh and being with I-Man afterwards at the ant farm and up on the groundation in Accompong. I’d even loved big bad Bruce because he’d died trying to save me from the fire in Au Sable and that’d taught me a lot too. They were the only three people I’d chosen on my own to love, and they were gone. But still, that morning in Mobay when I saw Russ for the last time, I saw clearly for the first time that loving Sister Rose and I-Man and even Bruce had left me with riches that I could draw on for the rest of my life, and I was totally grateful to them.

  We cast off from the marina at around four that afternoon and headed in bright sunshine and a light breeze for open water. From the galley I could look out onto the foredeck while I was working and watch the kids Josh and Rachel who were supposed to be twins but they didn’t look anything alike and I wondered if they were adopted because neither of them resembled the parents either. Josh was moon-faced and blond and freckled and Rachel was dark and curly-haired and wore glasses and was taller than her brother. They were maybe eight or nine, spoiled rich kids I suppose but basically decent and surprisingly considerate to each other, considering they didn’t get much out of their parents one way or the other.

  I remember the singer and his wife lying in their perfect bodies on the foredeck on these plastic chaise longues getting tanned and zoned and not saying anything which was their style even to each other. They were like in the middle of a ten-year fight and they didn’t know if you were going to come in on his side or hers so they weren’t talking till you declared yourself. No smiles, no jokes, no questions, except like where’s the bathroom and so on. They weren’t unpolite, just into themselves a lot and each of them into blaming the other whenever something went wrong. Like already their whole vacation’d gone wrong on account of the Belinda Blue not being a clipper ship but instead of just making the best of it they seemed to prefer giving each other dirty looks and
ignoring the rest of us, including their own kids.

  I don’t mean to go wandering off on the subject of the singer and his family but there was something about the kids, Rachel and Josh that really got to me as we pulled out of Mobay late that afternoon and headed southeast along the coast of Jamaica. Probably instead I should’ve been paying attention to my departure from this place where so much good and bad had happened to me in less than one short year. I was sure I’d never get back again unless someday I came searching for I-Man’s grave up in the churchyard cemetery in Accompong to put flowers on it. My natural father lived in Jamaica but that didn’t exactly provide a draw, not anymore and I’d had my first total-immersion sex experience with a woman there but that’s something you can only do once. And I’d come to know I in Jamaica, I’d seen the lights of I at the heights and at the depths, but you can’t do that more than once either. Either the lights of I kick in or they don’t, and if they don’t you keep going back to the heights and depths until they do. But when they do kick in like they had with me that night in the cave you’re supposed after that to look out from I and forward, not in to I and back. You’re supposed to use those bright new lights strictly for seeing into the darkness.

  Which is what I was doing I guess by not looking back over my shoulder at the quickly shrinking green hills of Jamaica and peering instead through the small square window of the galley at the children up on the foredeck. The parents were stretched out on their chaises in the middle, their pale skin glistening with lotion and their eyes shut behind sunglasses. Josh was sitting on the starboard side and Rachel was on the port. With his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms wrapped around his shins the boy stared solemnly out to sea, and just as serious as him the girl was pointing her toes out in front of her like a ballet dancer and gazing at the opposite sea.

  They were totally alone, those kids, like each had been accidentally sent to earth from a distant planet to live among adult humans and be dependent on them for everything because compared to the adult humans they were extremely fragile creatures and didn’t know the language or how anything here worked and hadn’t arrived with any money. And because they were like forbidden by the humans to use their old language they’d forgotten it so they couldn’t be much company or help to each other either. They couldn’t even talk about the old days and so pretty soon they forgot there even were any old days and all there was now was life on earth with adult humans who called them children and acted toward them like they owned them and like they were objects not living creatures with souls.

  I could see from their expressions and gestures that those two little kids, Josh and Rachel were probably going to grow up to be just like their parents. They were already practicing. But who could blame them? No one in his right mind would want to stay a kid forever. Certainly not me.

  We put in late that night at Navy Island which is just off Port Antonio at the eastern end of Jamaica and real late after everybody’d gone to bed I dragged my mattress up on the topdeck. It was actually just the roof of the main cabin but that’s what Captain Ave called it, the topdeck. The night was totally clear and the stars were awesome, like zillions of tiny lights bobbing on a wide black ocean. I was still thinking about the kids Josh and Rachel and wondering which star up there they’d originally come from and if they knew it, or say I found out somehow and pointed it out to them would they want to go back there and be among their own kind again?

  Probably not. The experience of being born on earth and living among humans even for only a few years changes you forever. I guess all you can do is make the best of what’s clearly a bad situation. Still, it would be nice to know that on this one particular star or maybe on that one over to the right of it there were people who loved you for yourself.

  I was thinking that and other such thoughts when suddenly I noticed that it was true, the biggest stars or at least the brightest ones were related like in a family and you could connect the dots so to speak and make a picture if you wanted, same as the old shepherds did who watched their flocks by night. I’d tried lots of times to see them before but it’d never worked so I’d figured constellations were just one of those things like atoms and molecules that people tell you exist but you can’t see them so you say yeah, whatever.

  But it was true. There was a bunch of bright stars here and another there and several other bunches that stood out from the zillions of stars in the background. The trouble was, even though finally I could see with my own eyes that there really were such things as constellations up there I couldn’t remember any of the names or pictures anymore. I knew there was supposed to be like some guy with a bow and arrow and a chariot and horses and various Greek gods and goddesses but I couldn’t tell which was which.

  So I tried connecting the dots on my own. There was this one cluster of stars fairly low in the northern part of the sky and when I connected them they made like a perfect barbell. That’s the constellation Bruce, I thought. Only not to have it sound stupid I decided to call it Adirondack Iron, the sign of the bad boy with the brave heart.

  Another batch of stars that floated all by themselves in a really dark part of the sky turned out to be a long-stemmed rose, and I looked at that for a long time and almost cried it was so delicate and exposed out there on its own. It had little thorns on it and beautiful red petals. It was the constellation Sister Rose, the sign of the rejected child.

  A third cluster of stars hovered right above me and I lay there on my back looking straight up until it came forward in the shape of a lion’s head with a crown, the constellation Lion-I, the sign of the open mind, and among those stars, even though I couldn’t see him I knew I-Man sat looking down on me with his lips in that little pursed smile and his eyebrows raised in slight surprise at the way things’d turned out.

  All the rest of the night I passed my gaze from one constellation to the other and watched them float slowly across the sky until finally along toward dawn it began to get a little pink out on the ocean in the east and the stars started sliding into the darkness behind the mountains. First Adirondack Iron passed into the dark, and then Sister Rose, and finally Lion-I. They were gone and I missed them but even so I was very happy. For the rest of my life no matter where on the planet earth I went and no matter how scared or confused I got, I could wait until dark and look up into the night sky and see my three friends again and my heart would swell with love of them and make me strong and clearheaded. And if I didn’t know what to do next I could ask I-Man to instruct me, and across the huge cold silence of the universe I’d hear him say, Up to you, Bone, and that’s all I’d need.

  About the Author

  RUSSELL BANKS is the author of twelve works of fiction including continental Drift Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter. He lives in upstate New York.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  More Acclaim for RULE OF THE BONE

  ‘To read Rule of the Bone is to want everyone you know to read every last word, to hear the story in Bone’s words and see the world through his eyes. . . . One of the great rewards of the classic coming-of-age novel (and Rule of the Bone is surely one) is that the reader is allowed not only to observe but to partake in the protagonist’s growing acumen, to watch the wide-eyed wise up and maybe to smarten up a little ourselves.”

  —Washington Post

  “Ingenious. . . . It takes a very special and hard-to-achieve voice to make a first-person fictional character. And it takes something close to a miracle to achieve a first-person voice for a 14-year-old that will do vital and nuanced justice not only to the boy but to the age-old world he moves through. Bone’s voice performs excellenty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Brutally, often fantastically picaresque . . . captures the mix of defiance and confusion, pride and remorse. . . . The moral underlying Banks’ work up to now asserts itself with a new force. . . . He is at his characteristic best as he explores the combustible mix of fear, frustrat
ion and passionate feelings.”

  —The New Republic

  “Veteran novelist Banks has finally done it: He has written the Great American Novel. Or, to be more precise, he has rewritten it. Rule of the Bone is Huckleberry Finn transposed to Upstate New York in the 1990s. Banks . . . excels at portraying lives on the edge. .. . In Rule of the Bone he gives us a searing wake-up call.”

  —People

  “What Russell Banks has given us in his fiction is the truth— sometimes creepily intimate—about what’s going on in the underpasses of America’s highways. . . . Bone’s scary pilgrimage is a continuation of that journey, and an emotionally authentic one.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Banks has . . . pulled one adolescent from the drably dressed, drifting throng and found in his candor and freshness some-diing like a diamond.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Rule of the Bone works because we are strongly moved by someone who can keep his integrity in a world that barely knows the word.”

  —Seattle Times

  Also by Russell Banks

  THE SWEET HEREAFTER

  AFFLICTION

  SUCCESS STORIES

  CONTINENTAL DRIFT

  THE RELATION OF MY IMPRISONMENT