Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

  All that’d been true for a long time but somehow it hadn’t upset me before as much as it did now. All at once it felt like everything was way too complicated for me to control and nobody else was in control either so I didn’t have anyone to turn to for help. Except Grandma and with her the second I walked through the door and she didn’t recognize me I realized she wasn’t going to be any help either. It was like I really was invisible or something and no one could see me. No, actually it was more like I was this human mirror walking down the road and all people could see when they looked in my direction was some reflection of themselves looking back because the main effect was nobody saw me myself, the kid, Chappie, Bone even, no one saw me except as a way to satisfy their desires or meet their needs, the nature of which sometimes they didn’t even know about until I showed up on the scene, like my stepdad’s needs for instance.

  I guess I shouldn’t’ve been so pissed off at my grandmother for being unable to deal straight with me though. She was old and poor and uptight and probably scared of things I hadn’t even imagined yet, monsters and demons that only visit old people whose lives are completely behind them now and from that angle look wasted and stupid and unhappy and there’s no chance left of them ever changing things for the better. It’s like the party’s over and it was a bummer of a party and there ain’t gonna be any more. No wonder so many old people act like animals that were mistreated in their youth. I should’ve been helping Grandma to mellow out in these last years of her dumb life and maybe help her see how it hadn’t been all that bad after all but instead I was only making it worse by reminding her of what a poor imitation of a regular family we were, her and my mom and me. It was like she was the seed and my mom was the plant and I was the rotten fruit and what I should’ve done if I couldn’t be the good grandson to her was just leave her alone, stay hidden and let the old lady go around telling people that she’s the grandmother of the poor boy who was burned beyond recognition in the Video Den fire last spring. Then they’d feel sorry for her and make a fuss and she’d be happy as a clam.

  She had cable so I watched MTV for a while but she kept trying to butt in and get me talking to her by asking me if I’d seen my mom yet or Ken and I’d just nod or say yeah and go on watching TV, flicking up and down the channels when the ads came on and back to MTV for the music videos which didn’t seem any different from the last time I watched about a year ago before I got kicked out of my mom’s. Mostly music videos’re visual headtrips with a sound track and a good one is a quick low-grade contact high requiring no effort on the part of the user to get high which is cool and if you’re already bummed it’s actually enough.

  Beck this singer with only one name like me and I-Man was standing in this orange and purple haze with the silhouettes of the leafless trees of death against a pink sky and singing about how nobody understood him either when Grandma finally lost it and she goes, Chappie, please at least have the decency to turn that down! And pay attention to me when I talk to you, young man! You’re not in your own home, you know, you’re in mine!

  I flicked off the TV and stood up and said, Yeah, I’m not in my own home. You sure got that one right. I went over to the fridge and opened it and poked through like I was looking for something in particular but I wasn’t even curious, I just didn’t know what else to do at that moment. I think I was only trying not to cause any more damage than necessary but it probably didn’t look that way to Grandma.

  You got anything good in here? I said but I wasn’t hungry, I was just filling the air between us with words.

  Do you like egg salad? You used to love my egg salad, she said.

  Yeah. I was wondering, I said and closed the refrigerator door pretty hard I guess because she jumped. I was wondering if you could loan me fifty bucks.

  Me? Her eyes started darting from side to side like she expected me to rob her and was looking for an escape route. I. . . I don’t have any money, Chappie. I can’t. . . you’ll have to ask your mother, she said. Or Ken. Ask your stepfather. What do you want it for?

  I don’t want it, Grandma. I need it. There’s a difference. Oh.

  Forget it, Grandma. Forget the fifty bucks. I was only kidding.

  She was silent for a minute, we both were, then she said, Are you in some kind of trouble, Chappie? You can tell me, honey. You can trust me, you really can. She was like trying to think her way onto a TV show, one of her afternoon soaps because that’s where her lines were coming from now. I’m your grandmother, honey, and if you can’t trust me who can you trust?

  I grinned into her face up close and that snapped her back and I said, Yumsters! Yumsters, Grandma! Me want yumsters! Can Grandma give Chappie some yumsters? ‘Cause if she can he’ll be one happy Chappie, all his problems over at last.

  Stop that! You. . . you’re just like your father! She goes, You do the same things to me that he did!

  What d’you mean, man! I’m nothin’ like him! That’s why my mom and him tossed me out, isn’t it? Get a clue, Grandma.

  I don’t mean Ken. I know you’re nothing like him. Although if you really want to know, it might help if you were a little more like him. Except for the drinking maybe. She puffed herself up a little and after a few seconds remembered what she’d been saying. No, I mean your real father. Paul. He used to talk to me exactly the way you’re doing now. He used to make me feel afraid that he was going to get all crazy on me, although he never actually did. But still that man could make me very very nervous. He wasn’t normal.

  My real father used to make you nervous? How’d he do that? Why?

  Oh, you know, just by talking in a funny way, real fast and about things that didn’t make sense like you were doing just now, and he didn’t seem to care one way or the other. I used to think he was on drugs or something, the way he talked, and your mother told me after the divorce that she thought he took cocaine and was possibly an addict because of how he went through so much money. He made very good money.

  No way! Coke? My father? Wow, I said. Cool. I was suddenly for the first time since I was a little kid very eager to hear about my real father. Usually I just shut down whenever his name came into the conversation and it was like they were talking about somebody I never met and who didn’t have any impact on my life anyhow so why should I care et cetera. But I was like five years old when my father left and I had memories of him and I knew things, although my memories were fuzzy and I couldn’t really see him in my mind except for the picture I once found in one of my grandmother’s albums. It’s this snapshot of him and my mom standing in front of his ’81 Blazer in the driveway of my mom’s same house which they had just bought then and she got in the divorce later. He’s a lot taller than my mom, taller than Ken too and skinny and he looks kind of good-humored like he knows there’s a joke going on but no one else has caught it yet, and I can see from this long leather coat he’s wearing that he’s on the flashy side, he’s cooler than my mom, he’s a guy who likes new 4x4s and wouldn’t be caught dead in one of Ken’s turquoise nylon jogging suits. Anyhow I never wanted to know much about him, on account of his leaving me to Ken, I guess although he didn’t actually leave me to Ken, I’m pretty sure he never even met Ken, that was after. The point is I just sort of numbed out on the subject of my real father for years and didn’t even want to hear his name. Paul. Paul Dorset.

  Now though suddenly I was asking Grandma all these questions, like what kind of work did he do back then and where did he go after the divorce and so on. I think she was relieved to have a normal conversation with me no matter what the subject because she started rattling away and pretty soon didn’t need any questions from me to grease her wheels.

  She said that my father’d worked as a medical technician which was cool. An x-ray expert she called him and he made big bucks but she didn’t think he was much of an expert on anything except lying to people since she knew for a fact that he never went to medical technician school or even to x-ray school and he had lied about his so-called military record wh
ere he was supposedly an EMS ambulance driver. My mom who worked in personnel at the clinic then knew the truth because she was supposed to check that sort of thing out when they hired anybody and she’d told Grandma all about his lies after the divorce when she was no longer protecting him. Although she had to swear Grandma to secrecy because of Mom being the one to cover for him. He was smart, he’d known to ask my mom out on a date the same day he applied for the job and she fell for him and when it came back that he’d never gone to the schools and that he’d been dishonorably discharged from the air force and all she didn’t tell anyone because by then she was head over heels in love with him.

  My father was a fast talker, a smoothie was Grandma’s word which struck me as funny, the idea of my old man being a smoothie and wasting it on Grandma and Mom who were both unusually gullible let’s say especially when it came to men which they pretty much worshiped. But I liked picturing my father’s talents being wasted on them and on the whole town of Au Sable actually, a place that smoothies may come from but if they’re any good at smoothing they never stay. Was he from Au Sable? I asked her. Did he grow up here and have like a family? I’d be related to them if he did. I’d have cousins.

  No, he was from away, she said. He was from someplace downstate although you couldn’t believe him about that either and in fact he had a funny accent like he was originally from Massachusetts or Maine where they talk like President Kennedy, all nasal and without any r’s which was attractive and made him sound smarter and better educated than he really was.

  I thought that was cool and remembering the picture of him decided that he actually looked like JFK too. The same haircut anyhow. Sort of a young Jack Kennedy, that was my real dad.

  So tell me the truth, Grandma, why’d they get divorced? I asked her. I’d been told stuff over the years but mostly it’d come down to him having this girlfriend Rosalie on the side which from letters I found once and read he didn’t really care about, not the way he cared about my mom anyhow. At least that’s what he said in the letters. But usually people don’t go to all the trouble of a divorce especially when they have a little five-year-old kid who loves and needs both his parents equally unless there’s something more wrong than the fact that somebody hooked up with somebody else a few times or even a bunch of times. So I wondered what the real story was.

  Well, it didn’t disappoint me they got divorced, she said. The man was no good, he was a drug addict probably which I didn’t know at the time and he drank too much although that’s no sin. But I told your mother that she should be strong and she was.

  What?

  Strong.

  About what?

  About getting divorced from him. After she found out he was seeing other women. It was all over town, she said.

  You wanted her to divorce him?

  She said, Oh sure, of course. She was much better off without him.

  According to Grandma my father’d claimed to be sorry and all and cried and begged and told my mom he didn’t want the divorce but Grandma made sure my mom got a good lawyer and the judge gave her the house plus a hundred dollars a week child support which she never saw a penny of, and he gave my father liberal visitation rights which he never used since he would’ve had to pay a little child support if he wanted to see me.

  So she didn’t let him have any visitations with me? I was wondering if things would’ve been different if I’d’ve had my real father to go to when I was seven and Ken first started in. I think I would’ve gone to him and told and my real father would’ve taken me away with him and for a second I flashed on that, it was like a picture of me and him riding in his Blazer 4x4, he’s like JFK and I’m his little son. With my real father to help me I wouldn’t have been scared to tell like I was with my mom who I couldn’t go to or didn’t think I could because Ken was her husband and she loved him supposedly and never let me complain about him even a little without telling me how lucky I was to have him for a stepfather.

  No, Grandma said, I didn’t want that man in the same house with you two. Of course not. Not unless he was willing to pay up the child support he owed your mother. Grandma said she’d offered to move in with me and my mom but by then Mom was seeing Ken and he moved in instead. I could tell that had given Grandma a crossed hair but she couldn’t say it of course or people might think the reason she’d pushed so hard for the divorce was so she could have a nicer place to live for herself. Grandma’s a person with permanent ulterior motives.

  I asked her if she knew where my father took off for after the divorce because so far as I knew he hadn’t stayed in Au Sable or even Plattsburgh. No one in town’d ever once mentioned him to me. It was like he was this mysterious stranger named Paul Dorset who looked and talked like JFK and he rode into Au Sable one day and married the prettiest gal in town and then he knocked her up and married her and one day after a little nastiness the stranger rode out of town again and except for the gal and her immediate family no one remembered him as having even been there. They were like, Who was that masked man? And he was like, Hi yo, Silver, awa-a-ay!

  Grandma said after the divorce he went to the Caribbean, one of those foreign countries down there like Jamaica or Cuba or at least that’s what she’d heard from someone at the bank, a friend of hers who was a teller who a year or so after the divorce was told in a letter to close out my dad’s account and send the balance to a bank in Jamaica or someplace like that which she happened to remember because right after she did that a whole bunch of checks came in that bounced like rubber balls but there wasn’t anything the bank could do since my dad was out of the country now. They had a warrant for his arrest, Grandma said, for bouncing checks and for nonpayment of child support which she had encouraged my mother to file for since it was criminal for a man not to help pay for his own son’s food, clothes and housing, didn’t I agree?

  I guess so, I said. But maybe if he’d been able to get to know me a little he’d’ve been more willing to kick in and help pay for things. The way it is now he’d be busted if he tried to even see me, I said.

  You better believe it, mister! Grandma said. She could get fierce when she wanted to, a regular wolf in grandmother’s clothing. And you should be more appreciative of everything your mother’s done for you, she said. And Ken, him too. He’s been more of a father to you than your real father ever was.

  Oh yeah, wow, fucking A, man! Dear old Daddy Ken, I almost forgot about what a great guy he’s been all my life. Thanks for reminding me, man, I said and I was up and stomping around now wanting to knock something over, wanting to trash the place or start tossing all the furniture out the window and see it break down on the sidewalk so I figured I’d better get the hell out of there before I did something that I’d really regret afterwards because I didn’t want to hurt my grandmother or harsh on her too much or wreck any of her stuff. She didn’t know any better than to be the way she was.

  Look, I gotta get outa here, Grandma, I said to her and grabbed up my backpack and tied my doo-rag back on which had dried out on the radiator while we were talking.

  She was wringing her hands and all, saying how she hoped she hadn’t upset me with all this talk about my father and I said no way and if it was up to me I’d go to Jamaica or wherever tomorrow and find him if I could because I had a few things he might be interested in hearing. Stuff about my stepfather, I said to her.

  That lit up her screen. Really? she said. About Ken? Like what?

  I smiled at her and said, Wouldn’t you like to know. Hang in there, Granny, I said. If things work out you may end up living in Mom’s house with her after all.

  She smiled in that innocent way of hers and she goes, Well, I did point out how they had an extra bedroom now. With you gone, I mean.

  Yeah, well, don’t worry, I’ll stay gone. The place needs a little bit of a clean-up though, I said. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and went down the ratty old smelly hallway to the stairs and down the stairs to the street. I couldn’t much blame her for wanting to get out of t
hat place and my mom was an incredible wuss to be staying there with her. The whole scene gave me the creeps.

  Out on the street it was almost dark and the rain was still coming down. I didn’t put out my thumb or look for a ride or anything though, I just walked straight out of town and along the side of Route 9N toward Plattsburgh. With my luck if I hitched I’d get picked up by Russ or the Bong Brothers, or maybe the Ridgeways in their Saab or why not ol’ Buster Brown in his church van? Better to walk all night long in the rain if that’s the only way to get back to the bus and I-Man. Besides I had plenty of new stuff to think about now, especially about me and my real father.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MISTER YESTERDAY

  I’d say the night that I walked out of Au Sable forever in the rain was one of the weirdest nights of my life except that nothing happened. Plus later I went through some even weirder nights and of course I’d already experienced quite a few by then that not many normal people go through, due to drugs and the bikers and some of the stuff maybe that me and Russ’d done together like at the Ridgeways’ summerhouse in Keene. But even though nothing was happening it was only on the outside because inside I was like tripping only I wasn’t high or anything.

  After a while I didn’t think about my real father and me anymore because there wasn’t enough real information to feed my thoughts so to speak. It was like my brain ran out of things to say to me. I was walking along 9N on the shoulder of the road in the darkness with the rain pouring down on me stepping steadily straight ahead like I was marching to the edge of the planet so I could drop right off it into cold black empty space. My mind was empty and my body was this machine that walked. Every once in a while a car or a truck would go by and catch me in the lights and slow down to check me out and a couple of times drivers stopped and rolled down the window and said did I want a ride but I kept on moving so they probably figured I was just a stoned freaked-out kid or a mass murderer or something and went on their way.