Rule of the Bone (9 page)

That is so fucking
smart
! Richard said. Isn't it, James? Isn't it smart?

Yeah, James said. But what's it gonna cost us?

Five hundred bucks, Russ said. And I'll throw in the plates free. You'll definitely need the plates. It's a four-by-four Ranger, man, almost new.

They said no way and Russ dickered with them for a while until finally he agreed to come down to a hundred bucks, five twenties which Richard peeled off a roll and Russ accepted with a sad face like they'd really screwed him. He told them exactly where to find the truck and they naturally threatened to kill us both if it wasn't there. They seemed to have a lot of money for crackheads or even for college guys for that matter but Russ said they had these old college loans that they were still spending even though they'd gotten kicked out of State last fall.

Then Russ put on my shearling jacket and made me wear his hoodie and put the hood up so my mohawk wouldn't show and we took off for this well-known tattoo place downtown. First though we cut down to the town park and this little public beach where kids hang out by the picnic tables and cop weed which we did in a minute from this big redheaded dude I knew slightly from the mall and me and Russ split a blunt and just chilled for a while. We hadn't chilled in a long time.

The sun was out and when the redheaded kid left there was nobody but us there and it was warm and peaceful. We sat on a picnic table and didn't even talk. Just thought our thoughts. Lake Champlain is huge and you can see all the way across to the Green Mountains in Vermont twenty-five miles in the distance and the water was glittering like it was covered with brand-new silver coins and the sky overhead was bright blue with these towers of puffy white clouds on the Vermont side. Seagulls screeched and swooped past the beach like tiny paper kites and the breeze blew off the lake and you could hear it behind us swishing through the trees which were hazy red and light green because of all the new buds. It was a true spring day and although I wasn't all that anxious to think about what was coming next for the first time I felt like the worst winter of my life was over at last.

Finally we realized we were hungry so we got a couple of slices and Cokes at the pizza joint on the corner of Bay and Woodridge Streets and headed for the tattoo place which was only a few blocks away. A couple of times I noticed the
Press-Republican
for sale in street boxes and stopped to check out the picture and read the front page again.

Wanna buy one for a souvenir? Russ said since he had the money. Maybe we should take a bunch, you know? For our grandkids.

Zombies don't have grandkids, I reminded him. And neither do Bucks, I said although I was thinking they can if they want and knowing Russ he probably would.

Suit yourself, man, he said and he put a quarter and a dime into the machine and cleaned it out, nine or ten copies and stuck them all under his arm like he was a paperboy in those old movies. Extra, extra, read all about it. Homeless boy disappears in fire. Local biker burned to death. Parents in shock. I can't believe he's gone! Mother cries. He was basically a good kid, stepfather says. Whole town mourns.

The tattoo place was called Art-O-Rama due to the tattoo guy's name being Art. It was in this funky old storefront on an alley off of a side street which didn't look like much but it was famous in the area for doing air force guys from the base as well as kids who were more or less of the punk type so long as they had IDs that said they were eighteen or over which me and Russ did, of course. Neither of us'd met the guy before but we'd seen his work on miscellaneous kids we knew at the mall and liked it. Besides, Russ's original Adirondack Iron tattoo he'd gotten from a softtail specialist down in Glens Falls who was a guy who only did Harleyheads and was a biker himself and knew all the other bikers in the northcountry so no way we could've gone to him.

Art was this old guy way up in his forties or fifties and his whole body at least what you could see of it was covered with these incredible tattoos, mostly fire-breathing dragons and colorful Oriental symbols with nothing cheesy like stars 'n' stripes or Betty Boops or valentines with arrows the way some old guys do. When he moved even a little all the tattoos moved with him like his skin was alive and had a mind of its own and his body inside was following orders from the skin the way a snake's does.

Russ told him what he wanted which is called a cover-up and Art showed him a bunch of panther pictures and after a lot of back and forth Russ finally settled on the one that I thought was the best too because of the eyes which were emerald green and the fangs. Art said it would cost fifty bucks for the one or seventy-five bucks for the coverup plus another the same size and Russ couldn't resist negotiating with the guy, except he was negotiating for me not himself I suddenly realized when Art says to me, Okay, kid, what the hell it's a slow day, pick what you want from here, and he hands me this beat-up old book of drawings.

Thirty bucks for the panther and thirty for the second, so long as you pick it from these here, he said and he lit a cigarette and went right to work on Russ's forearm while I leafed through the tattoo book.

The buzz of the needle was like a hummingbird's wings and didn't sound dangerous at all and whenever I glanced up at Russ he wasn't wincing in pain or anything. Does it hurt? I asked him.

Naw, he said. It feels like you got a ice cube on your arm except at first when it feels hot and sort of stings.

I was attracted to some of the drawings more than others, like palm trees with a sunset and a howling wolf on a mountain but I figured they were more for ecology freaks, vegetarians and suchlike than kids like me. The severed heads with snakes coming out of the eye sockets and the knives dripping blood and jokers with huge red tongues were okay too but obviously for metalheads and I might be into heavy metal a little now but you never know about the future. A tattoo is forever even if you get a cover-up like Russ so you want to pick a design you can grow with.

Then I saw what I wanted. It was like a pirate's flag only without the flag, just the skull and the crossed bones behind it which reminded me of Peter Pan from this book I had when I was a little kid that my grandmother used to read to me anytime I wanted. I loved that book. I remember studying the pictures up close like you do when you're real small and asking Grandma about the flag because it kind of scared me but she said it was just something Captain Hook and the pirates did to make people think they were evil when all they were really interested in was finding buried treasure. It's a good story. Peter Pan goes to this big city looking for his lost shadow and he meets these rich kids whose parents don't like them so he teaches them to fly and takes them back to his island hideout where they have all kinds of adventures against Captain Hook and the pirates. There's an Indian princess and an invisible fairy named Tinker Bell and they help Peter Pan and the rich kids defeat the pirates and it's like a very cool place for them, this island which is called Never-Never-Land because there's no adults and you get to stay a kid forever. But eventually the children start to miss their parents and want to go home and grow up like regular people so they have to leave Peter Pan behind on his island alone. The ending is actually sad. Although he does have his shadow.

Anyhow I figured a tattoo is like a flag for a single individual so I decided on the skull and bones flag like Captain Hook's only without the skull in it. Just the crossed bones. The skull kind of grossed me out and I was pretty sure after a few years of looking at it I'd get bored by it, so I was thinking X marks the spot and Malcolm X like in the movie and Treasure Buried Here and RR Crossing and suchlike. Plus when they saw it people'd still think I was evil even without the skull part which was cool. And whenever I looked at it myself I'd remember Peter Pan and my grandmother reading to me when I was a little kid. Russ thought it was an excellent decision too but he only picked up on the evil part. I didn't see any point in telling him about the rest.

I had Art put it on the inside of my left forearm like Russ's so I could show it to other people by making a power salute or a high five and could show it to myself just by turning my arm and looking down at it. The tattooing part actually stung a lot more than Russ said and stayed hot the whole time while Art made it and was sore afterwards but it really looked wicked excellent when he was done except my skin all around it was red and inflamed-looking. But it was a real work of art. The crossed bones had big joints at the ends like thighbones or something and were very detailed. The guy could draw.

Fucking A, man! Russ said and we both high-fived with our left hands. You got the
bones
! he said to me. I could tell Russ was wishing he hadn't gotten a panther now but it was too late.

That's
what your name oughta be, he says. Bone. On account of your tattoo. Forget Zombie, man, it sounds like you're into voodoo or some weird occult shit like that. Bone is
hard,
man. Hard. It's fucking universal, man.

Yeah. Forget Zombie. Bone is cool, I said and I meant it and was already viewing myself as the Bone. You still gonna use Buck for a handle? I asked him. I was thinking Buck 'n' Bone didn't sound so good. Country and western. How about Panther? I suggested so he'd maybe feel better about his tattoo but I didn't really think Panther was such a cool name for a talkative dude like Russ, I just said it.

Naw. I'll stick with Buck for now, he said. Like the Buck knife company. Or like one of those big twelve-point deer, man. You know, in that insurance ad.

Yeah. Or like in Bambi.

Fuck you, asshole, he says. I could see he was pissed and I'd hurt his feelings about his name and his tattoo.

C'mon, man, I'm only kidding you. The Bone's a great kidder, y'know.

He said sure and paid the guy for the tattoos and we walked out. Except for Russ being bummed I was feeling truly excellent, like I was a way new person with a new name and a new body even and my old identity as Chappie wasn't dead, it was only a secret. A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it's this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want, and a new name if it's cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It's the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.

After we paid Art for the tattoos Russ only had thirty-some bucks left which limited our options so to speak and we had nothing to sell except maybe my shearling jacket. That and the nine or ten copies of the
Press-Republican
Russ tried to unload for spare change as we walked along but it was afternoon already and the citizens weren't interested. Plus we didn't have any safe place we could crash except the schoolbus and Russ wisely thought better of that when I reminded him that the Bong Brothers were definitely going to fuck up and get themselves busted driving around in our stolen pickup.

Crackheads, man, they do dumb things, I reminded him.

Yeah but these're college guys, he said.

Fucking duh, man. It doesn't matter they're college guys. Nobody but a pipe sucker'd give you a hundred bucks for the license plates and keys to a pickup stolen from a Stewart's only twenty miles away, I told him. And the minute those assholes get busted they'll try to blame us and will reveal our secret identities to the cops who if we go back to the bus will instantly try to entrap us.

Russ said yeah but like Richard and James didn't know our secret identities, they only knew our old ones which I had to point out were the same thing, it was Chappie and Russ that were our secret identities now, not Bone and Buck. I don't know why but I really hated referring to him as Buck. He did look a little like a buck, a young one, a four-pointer maybe, gawky and long-faced with big brown eyes and straight brown hair and ears that stuck out, but whenever I had to call him by his new name I could only say it in a somewhat sarcastic tone or else I stumbled over it and almost said Duck or Fuck or Suck. You'd've thought a guy who talked as good as Russ would've picked a name easier to say and more inspiring to think about.

Anyhow he agreed it was too dangerous now to go back to the schoolbus and he had to admit that even if nobody believed the Bong Brothers when they spilled their guts trying to squirm out of a stolen vehicle charge by blaming it on two poor missing and presumed dead kids that they read about in the newspapers, the cops would definitely be watching the schoolbus for a while anyhow.

But we had to go someplace. We couldn't hang out up at the mall or on the city streets where Joker or one of the bikers might see us never mind the cops although I figured the bikers by now had split for Buffalo or Albany. And with or without our new identities we still couldn't hitch out of town to someplace like Florida or California, someplace far away where we could start our young lives over again. At least not until they decided to remove us from the missing and just left the presumed dead part and people stopped watching for us at the side of the southbound lane of the Northway with our thumbs out. That could take months.

I wondered if they'd put our pictures on milk cartons with the other missing kids. I kind of hoped so although the most recent picture my mom had of me was my sixth grade school picture when I was eleven and had long hair and looked really dumb and even younger than I was then. I used to think all those missing kids were living together in some squat like in Arizona and they were all close friends now getting a big laugh every morning over breakfast when one of them went to the fridge and brought out the milk carton for cereal.

Russ did some thinking and said he knew of this summerhouse over in Keene that was down the road from his aunt's whose kid his mom used to say he was when she brought guys home from the bar. He liked his aunt, she was his mom's cool older sister and was married to this guy and had some kids of her own although not Russ of course. Sometimes before he officially left his mom's Russ used to crash at his aunt's house and him and his cousins used to break into the summerhouses in the neighborhood when the people who owned them were away. There was this one house he said was way in the woods a half mile in from the same road his aunt lived on and it didn't have any alarm system or anything and was real easy to break into and the people only came up from Connecticut or someplace in the summers. It's like a fucking hotel, man. They even keep food stashed there for emergencies and a TV and everything.

Since we had enough money left for the bus to Keene which dropped you off only a couple of miles from the house that's what we decided to do. Russ finally gave up trying to peddle his newspapers for spare change and dumped them in the trash except for the front page that he tore off of one copy, For the scrapbook, man, he said. Then we went over to the Trailways station to check out the schedule.

There was a bus to Glens Falls and points south that stopped in Keene leaving in about an hour so while Russ bought our tickets I hung out in the bathroom. He figured we might be spotted by a cop if the two of us were seen together in public like that. So I waited and while I waited I started remembering how Bruce used to like coming here to get blowjobs from fags and would then beat the shit out of them afterwards which seemed weird to me although nobody else saw anything wrong with it. He'd brag about it later and the guys would get all psyched to do it themselves but I don't think any of them ever did. Not because it was against their principles, they practically didn't have any principles but more because they were afraid of getting blowjobs from a guy. They only liked getting blowjobs from females. What they did to fags was just roll them for their money and watches. I never really saw the big difference, a blowjob is a blowjob I figured but I was only a kid.

Pretty soon the bus was ready to roll and Russ came and gave me my ticket and told me to get on separate from him and sit way in the back and watch for when he got off in Keene and we'd join up again there. He went first and after a few minutes I followed and stood in line with about ten people between us. The whole time I was half-expecting to feel a cop's hand yank me back just as I boarded but I got onto the bus without a glitch and walked past Russ who was in the third seat from the front like I didn't know him and sat alone in the back.

I wasn't alone for long though. As soon as the bus pulled out of the station this musclebound red-faced guy around eighteen with a big adam's apple who I recognized as air force because of his buzzcut in spite of the fact that he didn't have a uniform on left his seat and came and sat beside me. Right away he pulled out a pint of peach brandy and took a swig from it and offered me one which I silently declined because except for beer booze makes me sleepy and I was afraid of missing my stop.

The guy was a motormouth going home to Edison, New Jersey to see his girlfriend who better not be fucking anybody or he was gonna kick her ass blah blah blah. He'd joined the air force because of Desert Storm and the Gulf War which was big right when he got out of high school but he was pissed because the only thing the American military was doing now was feeding starving niggers in Africa blah blah when what he really wanted to do was fucking kick some fucking Arab ass, did I know what he meant blah?

I didn't answer which wasn't smart because he got curious and asked me where I was headed.

Israel, I said which was the first place that popped in my mind.

No shit, he said. Well you got plenty of Arabs to fuck with there, man. All that PLO and shit. You Jewish?

Yes I am. But not your regular Jewish, I told him. I said I was an ancient type of wandering Jew called the Levitites, a name I made up which I said translated into Bark Eaters who're the descendants of the Lost Tribe that'd settled in Canada and upstate New York back before the Vikings. Although over the years some of us'd married into the Indians and had given up the old Jewish ways a few of us'd stayed faithful right up to modern times and now we were slowly migrating back to our homeland which was Israel where certain skills we'd learned from hundreds of years of living alongside the Indians in Canada were highly desirable.

No shit, he said. In Israel? Like what kinda skills?

Oh, like tracking enemies over rock and going for days in the desert without water and enduring torture.

But you don't know that shit, he said. You're just a kid.

It's part of our early childhood training. We spend a certain number of years on the reservation learning Indian skills in case there's ever another Nazi uprising and then during summer vacation and afterwards our fathers pass on to their sons all the rest of the ancient Jewish lore. The mothers teach their daughters different things.

Like what?

They don't tell us. Jews and Indians keep the boys and girls pretty much separate, you know. The guy was really into it now and I was too so I sat there and spun him my tale all the way to Keene and almost didn't notice Russ get up from his seat when the bus pulled in next to a restaurant there and stopped. I gotta get off, I said to the guy.

I thought you were going to Israel.

Yeah but my aged father lives near here and I gotta say goodbye to him and stop by my mother's grave. He's one of the Jews who married an Indian, I said and pulled my hood back and showed him my mohawk which even though it wasn't spiked anymore from no hairspray and the hood and I had all these nubbles of hair growing back it still made me look like a half Indian at least to this guy from New Jersey.

Hey, good luck, man, he said and shook my hand with a power grip. What's your name?

Bone.

Cool, he said and waved as I hurried down the bus and joined Russ who was standing in the restaurant parking lot waiting impatiently for me.

It took us about an hour to reach the turnoff to the summerhouse, all uphill on this old winding dirt road where the houses next to the road were mostly small and beat-to-shit with plastic over the windows and rusting old cars in back. Every now and then we passed a driveway disappearing into the woods with stone pillars by the road and fancy carved signs with names like Brookstone and Mountainview. Rich people don't like you to see their summerhouses from the road but I guess they don't want you to forget they're still around either.

The sign where we turned off said Windridge and they had a chain stretched across the driveway to keep cars out which we just stepped over and a big No Trespassing sign and all these No Hunting signs with bullet holes in them from the locals saying fuck you. The driveway was this long narrow lane that led through tall old pine trees with the wind blowing through. It was dark in there and kind of spooky and the ground was soft under our Doc Martens from the pine needles as we walked along not saying anything due to our nervousness, not so much from the Keep Out signs back at the road but the general atmosphere which was like in a kid's scary fairy tale where there's an evil witch waiting in a cabin in the woods at the end of the lane.

But when we came out of the woods instead of a witch's cabin there was this huge dark brown log house with all kinds of porches and decks set up on the side of a hill with acres of lawns and a swimming pool with a cover over it and a tennis court and garages and little houses for guests and the such. They even had their own satellite dish. It was definitely the biggest fanciest house I'd ever seen in person. It was like a plantation.

These people only live here like on their vacations? I said to Russ.

Yeah. My aunt works for them as a housecleaner when they're here, he said. The guy's a big professor or something and the wife's an artist. They're pretty famous, I think.

The windows had wooden shutters over them and the place looked like it might be hard to break into but Russ said he'd scoped out a way one time when he came over to help his aunt haul trash to the dump in his uncle's pickup. You wouldn't believe the excellent shit they throw away, man. Good stuff. My aunt just keeps most of it. Half her house is furnished with the stuff these people toss out with the garbage.

We walked up the hill past the house and around to the back where there was this little screened porch that stuck out from the second floor. Russ climbed up one of the supports and while he was hanging there with one hand he used his pocketknife to cut through the screen with the other and climbed up onto the porch. I followed him and by the time I got up he'd already jimmied open a sliding glass door and gone inside so I pushed the curtains away and strolled in too like we lived there and this was how we always came in.

The house was dark on account of all the windows being shuttered and the curtains so it was hard to see anything but I could smell fresh paint and figured this must be where the wife did her artwork. I started to pull open the curtains on the glass doors but Russ said, Don't do it, man. My uncle's like the caretaker. They pay him to come over here once a week and check it out mainly for signs of a break-in.

For a while we stumbled around in the darkness looking for candles and then moved into this hallway off of the art studio when all of a sudden right next to where I'm standing a phone rings and scares the shit out of me. Then we hear a man's voice. Hi, you've reached Windridge! If you wish to speak with Bib or Maddy Ridgeway, they can be reached at 203-555-5101 and they would be delighted to take your call. This machine, I'm sorry to say, won't take messages. Bye-bye!

Jesus! What the fuck is
that
all about? I said.

It's an answering machine, asshole. But what it means is the electricity must be on, Russ said and started patting the wall by the door until he found a switch and turned on an overhead lamp. Let there be light, man! he said.

After that it was like we were living there. We wandered all over the house looking into closets and drawers and cabinets, checking out everything like our parents'd gone away for the weekend. The one room we closed the door to and didn't go into anymore except when we needed to go outside was the art studio because Russ was afraid his uncle if he came by could see the lights through the curtains. But there were plenty of bedrooms to rummage through that had shuttered windows and a den with all these bookcases and a bunch of stuffed animal heads and birds and a way huge kitchen and a pantry with hundreds of cans of tomato sauce and soups and beans, all kinds of food in cans including some weird stuff I'd never even heard of like smoked oysters and anchovies and water chestnuts. They also had these humongous jars full of funny-colored spaghettis and fancy kinds of rice and oatmeal and instant coffee and instant iced tea and Tang, everything we needed plus a big freezer and two complete refrigerators but unplugged with nothing in them.