Susan Hinton - Rumble Fish

Neither one of them said anything. I thought maybe they hadn’t even heard me, but all of a sudden the Motorcycle Boy said, “When you were two years old, and I was six, Mother decided to leave. She took me with her. The old man went on a three-day drunk when he found out. He’s told me that was the first time he ever got drunk. I imagined he liked it. Anyway, he left you alone in the house for those three days. We didn’t live where we do now. It was a very large house. She abandoned me eventually, and they took me back to the old man. He’d sobered up enough to go home. I suppose you developed your fear of being alone then.”

What he was saying didn’t make any sense to me. Trying to understand it was like trying to see through fog. Sometimes, usually on the streets, he talked normal. Then sometimes he’d go on like he was reading out of a book, using words and sentences nobody ever used when they were just talking.

I took a long swallow of wine. “You…” I paused, then started again: “You never told me that.”

“I didn’t think it would do you any good to find out.”

“You told me now.” Something nagged at the back of my mind, like a memory.

“So I have.” He stopped to admire a cycle parked on the street. He looked it over very carefully. I stood there fidgeting on the sidewalk, zipping the zipper of my jacket up and down. That was a habit I had. I had never been afraid of the Motorcycle Boy. Everybody else was, even people who hated him, even people who said they weren’t. But I had never been afraid of him till now. It was an odd feeling, being afraid of him.

“You got anything else to tell me?”

The Motorcycle Boy looked up. “Yeah, I guess I do,” he said thoughtfully. “I saw the old lady when I was out in California.”

I almost lost my balance and fell off the curb. Steve grabbed hold of my jacket to steady me, or maybe himself. He was swaying a little, too.

“Yeah?” I said. “She’s in California? How’d you know that?”

“I saw her on television.”

For a second I looked around, trying to make sure everything was real, that I wasn’t dreaming or flipped out. I looked at the Motorcycle Boy to make sure he hadn’t suddenly gone nuts. Everything was real, I wasn’t dreaming, and the Motorcycle Boy was watching me with the laughter shining dark out of his eyes.

“Yeah, I was sitting in a comfortable bar, having a cold beer, minding my own business, watching one of those award shows. When the camera went over the audience, I saw her. I thought I could find her if I went to California, and I did.”

It was hard for me to understand what he meant. Our mother — I couldn’t remember her. It was like she was dead. I’d always thought of her as being dead. Nobody ever said anything about her. The only thing I knew was the Motorcycle Boy — my father telling the Motorcycle Boy, “You are exactly like your mother.” I thought he meant she had wine-colored hair and midnight eyes and maybe she was tall. Now, all of a sudden I thought maybe he didn’t mean just look like her.

I felt the sweat break out in my armpits and trickle down my back. “Yeah?” I said. I think, maybe, if the street had caved in under me, or the buildings around us had exploded, I would have stood there sweating and saying, “Yeah?”

“She’s living with a movie producer, or was then. She was planning on moving in with an artist who lived in a tree house up in the mountains, so she may be there now.”

“She glad to see you?”

“Oh, yeah. It was one of the funniest things she’d ever heard of. I’d forgotten we both had the same sense of humor. She wanted me to stay out there with her. California was very funny. Even better than here.”

“California’s nice, huh?” I heard myself asking. It didn’t seem like me talking.

“California,” he said, “is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she’s on top of the world, not knowing she’s dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks.”

He smiled again, but when I said, “She say anything about me?” he went deaf again, and didn’t hear.

“He never told me about her,” I was saying to Steve. The Motorcycle Boy was ahead of us, slipping through the crowd easily, nobody touching him. Steve and me pushed and shoved at people, getting sworn at, occasionally punched. “I never bugged him about it. Hell, how was I to know he could remember anything? Six ain’t old enough to remember stuff. I can’t remember anything about being six.”

An old drunk guy was creeping along in front of us. I couldn’t stand for him to be blocking the way like that. It made me mad, and I slammed my fist into his back and shoved him into the wall.

“Hey,” Steve said. “Don’t do that.”

I stared at him, almost blind from being so mad. “Steve,” I said with effort, “don’t bug me now.”

“All right. Just don’t go pounding on people.”

I was afraid if I hit him or something he’d go home, and I didn’t want to be left with the Motorcycle Boy by myself, so I said “Okay.” Then, because I couldn’t get it out of my mind I went on: “You’d think it’d cross his mind to tell me he saw her when he went to California. I woulda told him, if it was me. That is something he shoulda told me.”

The Motorcycle Boy had stopped to talk to somebody. I didn’t know who, and I didn’t care. “What is the matter with you?” I asked him. I didn’t see why he had to go around messing everything up. I felt like the whole world was messed up.

“Nothing,” he said, walking on. “Absolutely nothing.”

Steve laughed, crazy-like. We stopped to pass the bottle back and forth again. Steve leaned on a glass store window.

“I’m dizzy,” he said. “Am I supposed to be dizzy?”

“Yeah,” I told him. I was trying to shake off my bad mood. Here I was, having a good time, having a really good time, and I shouldn’t let people mess things up for me. So what if the Motorcycle Boy saw our mother? Big deal.

“What the hell.” I straightened up. “Come on.”

We ran and caught up with the Motorcycle Boy. I started clowning around, trying to pick up girls, trying to start fights, just giving people trouble in general. It was a lot of fun. I might have had a really good time, except for Steve, who was scared, giggling, or throwing up. And except for the way the Motorcycle Boy was watching me, amused but not interested. After an hour Steve sat down in a doorway and bawled about his mother. I felt bad for him and patted him on the head.

We found a party later. Somebody leaned out of a window and yelled, “Come on up, there’s a party.” There was more booze there, music and girls. I found Steve in a corner making out with a cute little chick about thirteen years old. “Way to go, man,” I said.

Steve looked at me dazedly and said, “Is this real? Is this real?” and seemed terrified when he realized he wasn’t dreaming.

It did seem like a dream, sort of. Even if we hadn’t been drinking so much, I think it would have seemed like a dream.

Later we were back on the streets, and the lights and the noise and the people were more and more and more. Everything was throbbing with noise and music and energy.

“Everything is so bright,” I said, looking at the Motorcycle Boy. “It’s too bad you can’t see what it’s like.”

We were watching the Motorcycle Boy play pool. I didn’t exactly know where we were, or how we got there, but I knew how long we’d been there — forever. The place was smoky and dark and full of black people. This didn’t bother me, and it didn’t seem to bother Steve either. Steve and me were sitting in a booth. The table was scarred and the plastic covering on the seats was ripped and leaking cotton junk. Steve was adding to the carving on the table. He was writing a word I didn’t even know he knew.