Susan Hinton - Rumble Fish

I waited for her at the bus stop, smoking a cigarette and fooling around, smarting off to people passing by. You’d be surprised at how many people are afraid of a fourteen-year-old kid.

Patty hopped off the bus and went swinging on by me like she didn’t even see me.

“Hey,” I said, dropping my cigarette and running a couple of steps after her, “what’s up?”

She stopped sharply, glared at me, and really told me what I could do.

“What’s with you?” I asked her. I was getting mad, myself.

“I heard all about your little party,” she said. I must have looked as blank as I felt. She went on: “Up at the lake. Marsha Kirk was there. She told me all about it.”

“So what? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Do you really think you can treat me like that?” She started off swearing at me again. I wondered where she’d learned to swear so good, then remembered she’d been going with me for five months.

“What does a dumb party have to do with anything?”

“I heard all about you and that girl, that black-haired tramp.” She was so mad she couldn’t even speak for a second.

“Just get lost,” she said finally. Her eyes were shooting sparks. “I don’t want to ever see your face again.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t have to,” I told her, and added a few comments of my own. I almost slapped her. Then, when she went stalking on down the street, her hair bouncing on her shoulders, her head up, a tough, sweet little chick, I thought how I wouldn’t be going over to her house to watch TV anymore. We wouldn’t hug close, trying to make out without her little brothers catching us. I wouldn’t have her to hold anymore, soft but strong in my arms.

I couldn’t see what messing around with a chick at the lake had to do with me and Patty. It didn’t have anything to do with me and Patty. Why would she let something stupid like that louse us up?

I felt funny. My throat was tight, and I couldn’t breathe real good. I wondered if I was going to cry. I couldn’t remember how crying felt, so I couldn’t tell. I was all right in a little bit, though.

I just walked around for a while. I couldn’t think of anything to do, or anyplace to go. I spotted the Motorcycle Boy in the drugstore reading a magazine, so I went in.

“You got a cigarette?” I asked. He handed me one.

“Let’s do somethin’ tonight, okay?” I said. “Let’s go over to the strip, across the bridge, okay?”

“All right,” he said.

“Maybe I can get Steve to go, too.” I wanted Steve to go in case the Motorcycle Boy forgot I was with him and took off on a cycle, or went in some bar where I couldn’t go.

“All right.”

I stood there and looked at the magazines for a little bit.

“Hey,” I said, “what you reading?”

“There’s a picture of me in this magazine.” He showed it to me. It was a picture of him, all right. He was leaning back against a beat-up cycle, kind of propped up on his hands. He was wearing blue jeans and blue jean jacket and no shirt. He and the motorcycle were against a bunch of trees and vines and grass. It made him look like a wild animal out of the woods. It was a good picture. A photograph that looked like a painting. He wasn’t smiling, but he looked happy.

“Hey,” I said, “what magazine is this?”

I looked at the cover. It was one of those big national magazines, one that went all over the country.

“Is there anything about you in here?” I looked through the magazine again.

“No. The photograph is one of a collection by a famous photographer. She took my picture out in California. I’d forgotten it. Actually, it was one hell of a shock to open a magazine and find my picture in it.”

I looked at the other photographs. They were mostly of people. They all looked like paintings. The magazine said that the person who took them was famous for her photos looking like paintings.

“Wow,” I said. “Wait till I tell everybody.”

“Don’t, Rusty-James. I’d rather you didn’t tell anybody. God knows it’s gonna get around soon enough.”

He had been acting a little weird ever since he got back. He had a funny look on his face now, so I said, “Sure.”

“It’s a bit of a burden to be Robin Hood, Jesse James and the Pied Piper. I’d just as soon stay a neighborhood novelty, if it’s all the same to you. It’s not that I couldn’t handle a larger scale, I just plain don’t want to.”

“All right,” I said. I knew what he meant about being Jesse James to some people. The Motorcycle Boy was very famous around our part of the city. Even the people who hated him would admit that.

“Hey, I get it,” I said. “The Pied Piper. Man, those guys would have followed you anywhere. Hell, most of them still would.”

“It would be great,” he said, “if I could think of somewhere to go.”

As we were leaving the drugstore, I saw the cop, Patterson, across the street, watching us. I stared back at him. The Motorcycle Boy, as usual, didn’t even see him.

“That is really a good picture of you,” I said.

“Yes, it is.” He was smiling, but not happy. He never smiled much. It scared me when he did.

We went downtown that night, across the bridge, to where the lights were. It wasn’t as hard to talk Steve into going along as I’d thought it’d be. Usually I had to hound him and stop just short of threatening him to get him to do anything his parents wouldn’t like. This time, though, he just said, “Okay, I’ll tell my father I’m going to the movies.” Which was the easiest time I ever had talking him into something. Steve had been acting peculiar lately. Ever since his mother went into the hospital he’d had a funny kind of empty recklessness to him. He looked like a sincere rabbit about to take on a pack of wolves.

He met us at our place. I never went to his house. His parents didn’t even know he knew me. I poured half a bottle of cherry vodka into a bottle of sneaky pete to take with us.

“Here, take a swig of this,” I said to Steve as we went across the bridge. There wasn’t much space for walking. You were supposed to drive across. We stopped in the middle so the Motorcycle Boy could look at the river awhile. He’d been doing that ever since I could remember. He really liked that old river.

I handed Steve the bottle, and to my surprise he took a drink. He never drank. I’d been trying to get him to for years, and had just about given up on it. He gagged, looked at me for a second, then swallowed it. He wiped his eyes.

“That stuff tastes awful,” he told me.

“Don’t worry about the taste,” I said. “It’ll get you there.”

“Remind me to chew gum before I go home, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. The Motorcycle Boy was ready to move on again and we trotted along behind him. He covered a lot of ground with one stride.

It was going to be a good night. I could tell. The Motorcycle Boy was basically a night person. He’d come home in the morning and sleep past one or two, and really just be getting awake good around four. He was hearing pretty good, too, and didn’t seem to mind us going with him. He didn’t use to like me following him around. Now it seemed like he barely noticed we were there.

“Why do you drink so much?” Steve asked me. Something was bugging him. He always was kind of nervous and bothered, but I couldn’t believe he’d ever try to pick a fight with me.

“You can’t stand your father drinking all the time,” he went on doggedly. “So why do you? Do you want to end up like that?”

“Aw, I don’t drink that much,” I said. I was over into the city, on the strip, where there were lots of people and noise and lights and you could feel energy coming off things, even buildings. I was damned if Steve was going to mess it up for me.