Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Then one night when they were lugging another load of boxes into the apartment Russ ran down to help them and grabbed onto a box and Bruce said, Get the fuck outa here, kid! Don’t you ever touch this shit! You understand me? Ever!

I was standing at the top of the stairs holding the door open for Raoul and Joker to carry this huge 27 inch Zenith inside and I’m thinking Russ should not push this, Bruce is the one guy not to cross. But Russ keeps it up. He goes, Hey, c’mon, Bruce, I’m cool, and besides, I’ve Already been incriminated. You might as well make me a partner and put me to work like the other guys. Adirondack Iron, man! he says with a grin and gives Bruce a power salute with his tattoo showing.

I start down the stairs to see if maybe I can distract Russ or something before he gets in too deep but Bruce has already gently set the box he was carrying on the tailgate of Raoul’s pickup as if to free his hands to beat the living shit out of Russ and he says, Just what the fuck do you mean incriminated?

Well, you know what I mean, like I’m in the presence of stolen goods, man. So I’m an accomplice to a crime. I mean, I could always say I didn’t know what was in the boxes or where you got them, but who knows, they might not believe that.

Are you threatening me, you little asshole? Are you?

Moi? Mais no, man! All I want is the same as the other guys’re getting, since I’m running the same risk as them. You can use the help anyhow. Like, whaddaya say to only a half a share? Since I’m a minor and all and can’t be charged with a felony.

Bruce sees me on the stairs a few steps behind Russ and he says, What about you, Chappie? You in on this shit too? Are you threatening me like this asshole?

I didn’t want to abandon Russ so I tried to answer in a way that might help him without necessarily hurting me. He’s just high, man, I say which was true anyhow, Russ had been gobbling inhalers all afternoon and was speeding pretty good. C’mon, Russ, let’s go cool out, I say and grab his arm but he yanks it away.

Nobody’s threatening nobody, he says. I’m negotiating, that’s all.

Bruce goes, I don’t fucking negotiate with assholes. I fuck ‘em. I fuck ‘em with my fist. He leans in real close to Russ then, Do you know what that is, kid? Fist-fucking?

I don’t know if he did, I sure didn’t but it sounded real undesirable so I said, He knows, man, don’t worry, he knows. He’s only high, I said and grabbed Russ by both shoulders hard now and practically dragged him away from Bruce although Russ didn’t resist this time and was secretly glad probably that I was there to save him without him having to back down on his own.

Although he didn’t admit it of course. He acted like I had saved Bruce’s ass instead of his. I got him into the drivers seat of his car and pretty soon we were driving down 9N along the Au Sable River toward Jay and Keene, country villages where everyone had long since gone to bed. Russ’s Camaro was the only car on the road, a good thing because he was wired and pissed and the combination made him a good talker but a lousy driver. But he didn’t object or even seem to notice whenever I reached across and adjusted the steering wheel and got us back onto the road which was pretty narrow and windy and had the river on our left.

Russ wanted to get even but he also wanted to make a profit at it and he had this new idea how we could get both, although I definitely did not like his use of we. What we gotta do, he said, is take one or two VCRs at a time and sell them ourselves. Just the VCRs, man. They’ll never miss them, those assholes don’t even have an inventory. The VCRs don’t take up much room, we can stash them in my trunk until we unload them. We specialize in VCRs, see, and sell them one by one at half price. New they go for what, three hundred, four hundred bucks apiece. We’ll sell ‘em for one fifty, or less, even. No matter how much, it’ll still be one hundred percent profit. We can split two ways, seventy-five twenty-five, since I’ve got the car and I’ll be doing most of the negotiating with the buyers.

Who’re you gonna sell ‘em to? I asked swerving the car back onto the road with my left hand and just missing a parked van and a whole row of maple trees.

Well, lemme think. For about ten seconds he thought. Rudy LaGrande for starters, he said. Ol’ Rudy used to tell me how he wanted to rent out VCRs from the store only he couldn’t afford to buy new ones and used weren’t any good because you hadda keep paying to have ‘em fixed. Yeah, Ol’ Rudy’ll probably want five or six at least.

Bruce’ll notice five or six gone.

Not if we take them outa the squat one at a time and from different stacks. We just walk out with ‘em early in the morning when whoever’s there is sleeping and the next day we take another and so on. Simple.

I don’t know, man. It’s risky with those guys. They all got guns, man.

Chapstick, he said, we’re already risking being busted so we might as well profit from it. Fuck those guys, man.

Yeah, but it’s stealing.

Stealing from thieves is not the same as stealing from straights. Remember, thieves are not victims, man. Besides, he explained, this is kind of a step up. Morally speaking.

What d’you mean, a step up? I said and grabbed the wheel again and pulled the car back to the right and avoided hitting a railroad crossing sign by maybe a foot.

From dealing to stealing, man. I mean, which is better? Think about it. They’re both fucking illegal so which is better? Didn’t your parents teach you anything?

Not about the difference between dealing drugs to asshole bikers and stealing already stolen VCRs from them, I said. But that don’t mean there isn’t one.

One what?

A difference, man. I was thinking like Russ’d said there was a lot about right and wrong that my parents hadn’t taught me and now due to my situation I was having to work out most of it myself. Everybody, Russ and the bikers, Black Bart and Rudy LaGrande and probably Wanda too and that creep Buster Brown at the mall who tried to get me to act in his porn movie and my stepfather and Maybe even my mom, everybody but me seemed to think the difference between right and wrong was obvious. For them I guess what was right was what you could get away with and what was wrong was what you couldn’t, but it made me feel stupid that I didn’t know it too. It was like the difference between dealing small-load weed and dealing crank— there was one, I knew but I didn’t know what it was. The whole thing was scary. It made you feel like once you stepped across the line you could never get back and were doomed from then on to a life of crime. Since everybody stepped across the line and did a wrong thing at least once in his life then everybody was doomed. Everybody was a criminal. Even my mom. You had to be a cat like Willie or a little kid like I once was not to be a criminal and for a human being like I was now that was impossible.

I decided that for the time being I didn’t want to be any worse a criminal than I already was so I told Russ I wouldn’t help him steal the VCRs from the bikers. He thought I was being stupid and a wuss but basically he was relieved I think because now he could keep all the profits for himself although I had to convince him first that my lips were sealed so to speak. And they were. No way I’d fuck over my best friend, my only friend actually if you didn’t count Bruce and the bikers and some kids I knew a little up at the mall.

We drove along for a while and then he said he was worried about me because of how I wasn’t taking advantage of opportunities to advance in the world.

I said, like stealing stolen VCRs from psychos with guns.

It’s freight forwarding, man. That’s all. I’m into freight forwarding, and it don’t matter to me what I ship or where it comes from or where it’s going. That’s someone else’s problem.