Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Either way I didn’t want to be connected to what had happened to Bruce. I didn’t even want to think about it. He was my friend and he’d tried to save me. It was just had luck that I’d already been saved by Russ.

What we got to do now, man, I told him, is disappear off the face of the earth. If anybody sees us they’ll have more questions than we’ve got answers for.

Boy, is my mom going to be pissed, he said.

Forget that, man. Your mom is like my mom, I said. They’ll both think we died in the fire with Bruce and will be real sad or else as usual they won’t know where we are and won’t really give a shit. Russ’s mom wasn’t married with a regular job like mine, she was sort of a hooker who worked in a bar near the air force base and lied about her age and told the guys she brought home that Russ was her nephew which is why he left home when he was fifteen in the first place. She was a babe but I actually preferred my mom to his although he was better off than I was having no stepdad like mine to deal with.

We stayed there under the bridge in the dark for about an hour listening to the cars and trucks rumbling overhead and the steady roar of the river which was only a few inches below the walkway and the occasional siren as fire trucks from the towns around came in to help. A fire is one of the few things that gets people together nowadays. The bridge was a big stone arch and when we looked out from under it we could see a piece of the sky which was all lit up like there was a night baseball game over where we used to live with the bikers and it did make me want to go and join the crowd so I tried not to look.

What I really wanted was to get high but neither of us had any weed so Russ and I talked for a while about Bruce and what a cool dude he was and what bastards the other bikers were to leave him like that. He had soul, man, Russ said. White soul. You know what I’m saying?

I said, Yeah, but actually I didn’t want to talk about him anymore because of how my feelings were all mixed up. Then one time I peeked out and noticed that the sky was getting dark again so I figured we should book while people were still somewhat distracted by the fire and thinking maybe we had burned up in it. Russ had about ten bucks and an almost full pack of cigarettes and I had nothing but the clothes on my back but Russ said he knew these excellent guys in Plattsburgh who lived in a bus where we could crash as long as we wanted and no one would know because there were always different kids who stayed there between squats, nobody permanent except the dudes who owned the bus.

We couldn’t get out of Au Sable though and hitch over to Plattsburgh without being spotted and we didn’t have Russ’s Camaro anymore so we decided to sneak up by Stewart’s which is like this late-night convenience store where people drive in for last-minute items like cigarettes or beer and sometimes leave their car running outside. By keeping to the alleys and backyards we got to Stewart’s without anyone noticing us and then hid behind a dumpster next to the store and waited. It was pretty cold but I had my shearling jacket and Russ had his Islanders hoodie so we were okay.

Quite a few cars and pickups came in and a lot of them were people we actually knew but they were locals and knew not to leave the motor running. After a while the out-of-town fire engines and some of the volunteer firemen with their blue bubble lights on the dashboards started passing by and two or three of them stopped for gas or went in for supplies and the such but even though they were from away they shut off the motor and took their keys with them.

Then this one pickup, a red practically new Ford Ranger pulled in. It was a volunteer fireguy probably heading home to Keene or some other small town where nothing was open this late. After a few minutes he came out with a bag of groceries and got into his truck and started to back out but then he suddenly stopped and jumped down from the cab and with the motor still running walked slowly back inside the store like he’d forgotten something he was supposed to bring home for the wife and was pissed.

Russ ran around to the front of the store, took a quick look through the window and came back to the dumpster and said it was cool, the guy had his head in the ice cream freezer. We scooted across the lot and Russ jumped in on the driver’s side and I climbed in beside him and we were outa there.

At first I thought Russ was going the wrong way but it was only a deceptive maneuver to make the guy or anyone who saw his truck leaving the lot think we were headed west in the direction of Lake Placid instead of east to Plattsburgh. As soon as we’d gone a few blocks he cut left and zipped back on River Street which turns into River Road and then crosses the river on this old wooden bridge outside of town a ways where it connects a few miles further on to the main road to Plattsburgh.

A few minutes later we were doing eighty headed east on Route 9N smoking the fireguy’s cigarettes from the carton of Camel Lights I’d found in his grocery bag and laughing like crazy. There was other good stuff in there too— a twelve-pack of Bud kings, Fritos, some chips, and some Kotexes probably for the guy’s wife which naturally caused Russ to make a couple of his cruder jokes but I didn’t mind because for the moment at least we were like free, free to just be ourselves, driving fast with the windows down and the heater blasting, smoking cigarettes and eating junk food and drinking beer and crankin’ with Nirvana’s Serve the Servants on WIZN screaming from the speakers. It was definitely cool. We even switched on the blue bubble light so if anyone saw us they’d think we were heading for a fire.

Russ said, Yesss! and pumped his fist and I said, Yesss! and did the same although it felt a little stupid because of everything that’d happened. But life is short I guess and you have to celebrate it when you can so that’s basically what we did.

* * *

We stayed off the Northway and shut off the bubble light because there was likely to be staties cruising and took the back roads into Plattsburgh and parked the pickup in a used-car lot out on Mechanic Street where there were fifty or sixty used trucks for sale. It was around midnight by then and not much traffic and only a few local cops who were probably drinking coffee over at Dunkin’ Donuts so there was very little danger of us getting caught.

After Russ took the number plates off the truck with this screwdriver he found in the glove compartment the fireguy’s Ranger looked like all the other pickups on the lot. Russ figured it wouldn’t be discovered there until somebody tried to buy it or else they did an inventory and when they did no way it could be tied to us. Russ was good at criminal activities and even when he was doing something for the first time it seemed like he’d already done it twice last week.

The number plates he put in the bag with the beer and stuff because he figured maybe we could sell them if we met somebody who was into stealing cars and then we booked on foot for the dudes who lived in the bus, which wasn’t very far, Russ said.

It was out past these old warehouses and junkyards where there weren’t any regular homes or stores and you had to go through a break in a chain-link fence and cross a huge field where people had dumped old tires and refrigerators and such. It was kind of spooky out there in the dark lugging the grocery bag over the rough crumbly ground with the wind blowing and everything smelling wet and rusty like it was a hazardous waste site or something. Russ said he’d only been out here once when he took home this girl he’d picked up at the mall and it turned out she was crashing at the bus with these crack-heads from Glens Falls who were going to Montreal for a Grateful Dead concert but never made it.