by Mal Peet
Bone came into the room like a brown leather bear trailing cold. He had a fat bundle, a parcel tied with string, under one arm and a smaller one in his hand. Irma kissed him, standing up on her toes. Beck had never seen such a thing happen. Two people looking at each other like it could help, somehow.
“How you doing, kid?”
“His name’s Beck.”
“Yeah? How you doing, Beck?”
“Okay. Thank you, mister.”
“Call me Bone.”
“Mr. Bone.”
Bone laughed. “Just plain Bone.” He dropped his packages on the floor, reached into a pocket, produced Beck’s knife, and cut the strings. He put the knife on the arm of the couch where Irma had sat earlier. “Now,” he said, “me and Irma gonna sit in the kitchen and talk awhile. You might wanna get dressed. Not all these clothes here are new, but they’re all clean.” He looked at Beck. “Do you remember last night? How you got here and all?”
“Some.”
“Some is good enough. Maybe we’ll have us a conversation about that later. Now get yourself dressed and come on through when you’re ready. Bathroom’s down the hall.”
Irma said, “Coffee?” She held a cup of coffee in one hand, a bottle of whiskey in the other.
Bone slung his heavy jacket onto the back of a chair and said, “You gotta ask?”
She sighed. “That boy has better manners than you.”
“True.”
She handed him his coffee.
“So, hon.”
“So?”
“What we gonna do?”
“Jeez, Bone, the way you use we. You come back with a half-dead icicle of a boy and say what we gonna do? What next? A grizzly bear you bring in and say what we gonna do with this, Irma honey?”
There was probably a word for finding laughter in all kinds of trouble but Bone didn’t know what it was. The word didn’t matter. She had the level measure of him.
She said, “He’s a nice kid. We can’t exactly send him out on the ice again.”
“No. That’s what I thought.”
She put her drinks on the table and sat down across from him. “Where’d you buy the clothes?”
He shrugged. “Mostly from the Chinese place. The underwear from Hardy’s.”
“Uh-huh. Bone. How much is this boy gonna end up costing us?”
Bone looked away. Shrugged. “Honey,” he began, but stopped there, unsure how to continue.
Irma sipped coffee, set the cup down deliberately. “So the plan is, we dress him up and feed him up and he sleeps the night on the couch and then we send him on his way. That it?”
Bone shrugged again. “Except I doubt he’s got a way to get sent on.”
They heard the boy walk down the hall.
Bone said, as casually as he could, “I was thinking there’s that room, the little one along from Lonnie’s.”
Irma raised her perfect eyebrows.
“Like,” Bone said, “I can’t see no one renting it before spring.”
Irma frowned. “Well, the main word there is renting. How you reckon some skinny-assed runaway boy gonna pay rent?”
“I was figuring maybe he could work the rent.”
“Work? Who for? Me? You?”
“Maybe a bit of both.”
“You by any chance notice that he ain’t hardly strong enough to walk, let alone work?”
“He’s just starved. He’ll build up.”
They heard the toilet flush.
“I dunno,” Irma said. “I don’t see Lew going for it.”
“I already talked to Lew,” Bone admitted.
Irma leaned back in her chair. “You sneaky son of a bitch,” she said with half a smile. “And what did Mr. Weinstock say?”
“He said to take the matter up with the house manager. Which is what I’m doing.”
Irma folded her arms. “You got the wrong name, Bone. You’re soft as warmed-up snow.”
He grinned. “You’re mixing me up with a man who ain’t a ruthless criminal.”
The boy appeared in the doorway and Irma looked him over.
She said, “Beck, get in here and sit down. I’m gonna cut your hair. You’re living among decent criminals now.”
SO BECK BECAME a part-time bootlegger and slept in his own room for the first time in his life, although not at conventional hours. Most of the work was hard and tiresome and conducted in cold and darkness — hefting cases of beer and spirits into a truck, out of a truck, into a storage place, up into a different truck. He was happy. Outside the law and inside Bone and Irma’s life seemed to him the safest place he’d ever been. He learned quickly to service the moody furnace that heated the boardinghouse (a skill Bone had never mastered), to run errands for Irma and run rum for Bone. It was a miracle to him that when he was hungry, there was food, and when he was lonely, there was company.
Irma had to teach him how to eat.
“It ain’t a race, Beck. Ain’t no one gonna come and grab the plate off you if you don’t finish inside of two minutes. So slow down. Cut a piece off with your knife. Now chew it. Get the flavor out of it. Good, ain’t it? All these years you been bolting your food down like some kind of animal. It ain’t good for your insides. Now, count to three before you scoop up some beans. And that’s a fork, not a shovel. Table manners’ll get you a long way in life. That’s right, ain’t it, Bone?”
Bone nodded sagely and looked from Irma to Beck. “It sure is. It was Irma’s table manners won my heart. Until then I hadn’ noticed nothin’ special ’bout her at all.”
Irma laughed and cuffed him on the back of his head.
On good food, proper occupation, and friendship, Beck put on two inches of height and plenty of muscle. His face began to lose the sullen haunted habit of a decade or more. In the springtime, when they ate supper out in the yard in the shade of a big old maple, Irma teased him and he laughed, and she looked from him to Bone, solemn and shocked, and said, “Well, Bone, there’s a sound I was about to give up ever hearing from the boy.” And then she put her arms around Beck and kissed him on the cheek and whispered in his ear that she was glad Bone hadn’t thrown him back onto the lake on that frozen night all those months ago.
Beck had never spoken to people with the same color skin as his, much less lived with them as a family. There’d been dark men among the crew of the Duke of Argyll, but they’d spoken to each other in a language he didn’t understand. No one called Irma or Bone nigger. Not in his hearing, anyway.
Then there was the bothersome fact that Irma was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and that other people, white and black, obviously shared his opinion. The way they looked at her. The men, especially. And it didn’t trouble her. She was at ease with herself in a way that he couldn’t begin to imagine. They both were, her and Bone.
Beck considered that they were better at being alive than anyone he’d ever met. And as time went on, the tiniest inkling of the faintest possibility of a life that wasn’t simply one hell followed by another burrowed its way deep inside his brain.
Gradually, casually, they teased Beck’s story out of him. Liverpool, the orphanage, the ship, the Brethren’s house in Montreal. He told them how he’d got the scar on his calf. (Caught sleeping in a barn and hadn’t outrun its owner’s dog.) He told them about picking beans for a dollar a day and how the burlap sacks took the skin off the backs of your fingers when they got heavy and wet. He told them about sleeping in sheds and tents with itinerant field workers who didn’t speak English and stole his wages. He told them about the bearded German house painter in Toronto who’d knocked him unconscious with a Bible. He told them about the alcoholic blacksmith in Waterloo. He told them about riding trains. He confessed to his life of crime: to stealing clothes off washing lines, to sneaking into a church early one morning and pinching food piled on the altar for the harvest festival. But despite the fact that they could see for themselves, he told them nothing about the scars on his back or the events leading up to them and they d
idn’t ask.
He also didn’t tell Irma and Bone, because he had no way of telling them or recognizing the emotion, that he loved them. Instead, just as he had become used to protecting the wintering heat within himself, he now misered the cold coin of disappointment close to his heart. Because you never knew when you might need it.
He’d been in Windsor just under a year when he crossed the ice again. Lonnie had gone down with bronchitis, barking in his room like a distempered seal. Lew’s other guys were busy, so on a late afternoon when the sky above the Detroit River was a huge red ripple, Bone took him down to the warehouse and set him up at shotgun as he eased the truck across the ice.
They followed the yellow smears of the headlights onto the dock on the American side of the river below Grosse Pointe. Bone gentled the brake on and got out of the cab.
“Jeezus, Bone, what keptcha? We’re like halfway to being ice ourselfs, waiting here.”
“Real sorry about that, Gus. Freddie’s guys just dumped the load. We had to get it on the truck ourselves. Took a while.”
Beck opened his door, stepped out, and found himself illuminated.
“Who’s that you got with ya, Bone?”
“New boy. He’s all right.”
The lights came down the steps.
“I recognize that kid.” Cole’s voice. “The one we found in ya truck! What the hell’s he doing here?”
“Lonnie’s sick.”
“He’s workin’ for ya?”
“Yeah.”
“Ya kidding me.” Cole crunched across the ice and shone his flashlight up and down Beck. He grunted a laugh. “So this is Lew’s big idea, huh? Get himself a whole bunch of runners ya can’t see in the dark. Yeah. I can see the sense in that.”
Twenty minutes later, when Beck was lugging yet another case up onto the dock, Cole took Bone aside.
“A word, my man.”
“What’s up?”
Cole lit a cigarette, hunching away from the wind. “Things are getting rough downriver. Lew say anything to ya?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. Well, the word is that Capone and the Purple Gang have done a deal. Capone has all the muscle, but them Jew boys are crazy. They don’t give a shit ’bout nothin’. No respect at all. Kill anyone soon as look at ’em. So Big Al has said, ‘Okay, boys, Michigan is yours east of US 31. West of it’s mine. Do what you like, just don’t cross the road.’ Like, anything for a easy life, you know? So Al’s got Chicago; the Purples got Detroit. Brought extra guys in. And they’re not interested in honest export business, Bone. The sonsabitches just cruise the waterfront and heist stuff off anybody, no matter who they’re connected to. Last week, they hijacked a consignment on its way to Bugs Moran and shot the shit out of the driver, a nice guy I happen to know. No need for it. And no comeback from Bugs. He just paid the Jews for the load and said thank you very much. What does that tell ya?”
“That we get careful,” Bone said. “I’ll talk to Lew. You guys are okay, though?”
“I dunno.”
“C’mon, Cole. You’re connected, aintcha? Capone’s gonna look after you.”
“I dunno,” Cole said, again.
“So what’re you sayin’ ? I go to Lew and say no more shipments till things settle? You wanna cancel Wednesday?”
“No. It’s not like I got some regular job to go to, Bone. But listen. Be ready when you come across, okay? You know what I mean.” Cole flipped the stub of his cigarette into the blue night and jerked a thumb toward Beck. “You wanna use that kid, it’s up to you. All I’m saying is I wouldn’t, myself. I’d rather have someone with me knew how to use a gun. That’s all I’m saying.”
Bone was silent on the way back across over the ice to Windsor. Beck glanced sideways at him several times.
TWO DAYS LATER, over breakfast, Bone said to Irma, “Reckon you can spare Beck this morning for a coupla hours or so?”
They walked to the dock. It was a Sunday; church bells broke the thin air like glass. Bone wore a red beanie cap and carried a satchel slung over his shoulder.
Beck cranked the truck with his hands flat on the handle, like Bone had shown him — “’cause the kickback’ll break your thumbs.”
They drove south and east out of Windsor, the tire chains clanking on the cleared roads between the heaped-up dirty old snow.
“How old are you, Beck? No bullshit, now.”
“I ain’t sure. Seventeen, I think.”
“Uh-huh,” Bone said, mostly to himself. “Plenty old enough, I’d say.” Though he didn’t say for what.
Later, Bone took a left and the clanking became a slow rhythmic crunch. Most of the tracks on the surface of this road were ghosted over. After ten minutes, he pulled into an opened-out space alongside a closed-up building with a sign across its front: M PLE LEAF HUNTI G LODGE. He turned the engine off. The silence was absolute.
Bone lifted the satchel off the seat between himself and Beck. “C’mon.”
They waded into the bare trees behind the building. Now and again the rigid surface of the snow gave way and they sank into it up to their knees. They came to an open space that was firm underfoot.
“This’ll do,” Bone said, the words a small cloud. He put the satchel down and opened it and took out two handguns.
“Smith ’n’ Wesson thirty-eights,” he said, holding one out to Beck. “Take it, kid.”
Beck took it. He was wearing woolen gloves with the fingertips cut off but the gun felt colder and heavier than he’d expected.
“Okay,” Bone said. “Don’t be scared. It ain’t loaded. Hold it down against your leg like I’m doing. Now lift your arm out straight in front of you.”
The gun wavered in Beck’s hand.
“Now clamp your other hand on your wrist, like so. Good. Hold the gun steady. That’s better. The barrel is like your finger, okay? You point at what you wanna hit just like you’re pointing at it with your finger. Aim at that nearest tree. Get your eye and the barrel and the tree all lined up. Hold it, hold it. Okay, relax. Drop your arm. You’re shaking, son. That ’cause you’re cold or nervous?”
“Both, I reckon.”
“Yeah. I’m cold, too, so listen good. I don’t wanna have to repeat everything.” He took the revolver from Beck’s hand. “Now, this here’s the safety catch. On, like this, the piece can’t fire. Off, like this, we’re ready to go. You remember one thing from today — always have the safety on till you’re meaning to use it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Bone showed Beck how to break the gun open. Then he reached into the satchel and took out a box of cartridges. He put a single round into each revolver, closed them, and returned the gun to Beck.
“Safety on or off ?”
Beck looked. “On.”
“Good. Now wait there and don’t do nothin’.”
Bone trudged the twenty yards to the nearest larch, pulled the knitted cap from his head, and hung it on a branch stub some five feet from the ground. He trudged back again and stood behind Beck. The red cap glowed like a lamp in the black and white world.
“That’s our target. Now then. Safety off, aim like I showed you. Arm out straight from the shoulder, other hand steadying your wrist. Good. Ten bucks if you put a hole in my hat.”
Beck fired. The gun bucked, sending a shock through his wrist and arm like a kick from a boot. It jumped from his hand and pushed him backward on his arse in the snow. The sound of the shot was the loudest thing he’d ever heard. It seemed to stay in the air forever like something with three dimensions. Its echoes were outraged and raucous birdcall. Beck felt like someone had thrust a hand into his chest and grabbed onto his heart. He looked up at Bone’s grin.
“You missed the whole tree, son. On the other hand, you just learned a coupla things it would have taken me some time to explain.” He took Beck’s hand and pulled him to his feet, picked up the Smith & Wesson, and wiped the snow off it with his sleeve.
“One: You pull on the trigger nice and easy. Squeeze
it back like this. Not jerk on it like you just did. Jerk on it, it’ll throw your aim to hell. Two: Soon as you pull the trigger, let your arm go loose. Let it soak up the recoil, okay? Gun like this’ll jump up a little, but you just hang on to it. I’ll show you. Watch close now.” Bone raised his own gun and fired. Chips of bark exploded from the tree just above his cap. “See?”
“Yeah,” Beck said. “I think so.”
“Okay.”
Bone filled the magazines of both guns.
On his fifth attempt, Beck hit the tree, ripping a yellow scar into it.
On the way back into Windsor, Bone said, “You done okay, kid.”
There was a long pause and then Beck looked at him sideways. “You didn’t hit the hat neither.”
Bone shoved the truck up a gear and grinned. “You seriously think I’m gonna shoot the shit out of my own hat?”
Three weeks later Bone plucked the red cap off the branch and, whooping, stuck his finger through the hole that Beck’s fourth shot had made in it. He came back to Beck and dug a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket.
“A bet’s a bet. Keep the hat, too. Don’t let Irma see it, though. She knit it for me, but I never liked the color.”
“Thanks, Bone.”
A mile down the road Bone said, “Keep the gun, too. Don’t let Irma see that, neither.”
LEW WEINSTOCK’S BROTHER, Freddie, had never skimped on the headaches he contributed to the bootlegging business, so it was not entirely unexpected that it was he who brought the whole thing down.
That next spring, when the ice had broken up and was drifting downriver in a constellation of white islands, Freddie dressed up in his suit and his sable fur coat and caught the ferry across to Detroit. It had been months since he’d been over. No matter that drivers — legitimate and illegitimate — drove back and forth with casual impunity, Freddie had a mortal fear of crashing through the ice and being swallowed into the dark awfulness beneath. From the newspapers, he kept count of who hadn’t made it, whose stiffened corpses had been fished out by the police. (Twenty-eight that winter, he told his brother, and who knows how many others not yet recovered.) So he’d stayed in Windsor all winter, stoking his peculiar needs, which grew more feverish with each passing week. As soon as the ferry announced its first run, he took a long bath and oiled his hair and dressed up in eager anticipation of the pleasures of his favorite Detroit club, the Blue Cockatoo.