Russell Banks: Rule of the Bone

Then I remembered the other briefcase and went back to the closet and sat down and opened it. Inside are all these Baggies, thirty or forty of them filled with coins, mostly old quarters and Indian head nickels and even some weird-looking pennies with dates from way back in the early 1900s. Excellent discovery. I figure the rifle must belong to Ken and he stashes it in this briefcase on account of my mom always saying she’s scared of guns and the coins too, I’m thinking, because if they were my mom’s I would’ve known it since she pretty much told me everything in those days. Besides she wasn’t the hobby type. Ken though was definitely the kind of guy who would have a cool gun and never show it to me or even tell me about it, plus he collected things like exotic beer cans and souvenir coffee mugs from the various theme parks they’d gone to and put them out on shelves where anyone could see although he was always telling me not to touch them because I never left things the way they were which is basically true.

I took the rifle apart and put it back in the briefcase and then I took a couple of coins from each of about six Baggies so he wouldn’t know any were missing if he happened to check. Afterwards I wrapped the briefcases back in the blanket and put the bundle behind my mother’s shoes in the closet where it had come from.

I had maybe twenty coins, small change, nothing bigger than a quarter and I took them to the pawnshop on Water Street near the old tannery where I knew some kids had hocked stuff they’d stolen from their parents, jewels and watches and so on. The old guy in there didn’t say a word or even look at me when I spread the coins out on his counter and asked him how much he’d give me. He was this big fat guy with thick glasses and huge sweat circles under his arms and he scooped up the coins and took them in back where he had an office and a few minutes later he comes out and says eighty dollars which really blew my mind.

Sounds fine to me, man, I told him and he paid me in twenties and I went out already high just thinking about all the skunk I could get for eighty bucks.

I had this very good friend Russ whose mom’d kicked him out in the spring and he and a couple of older guys who were like headbangers and bikers were living in an apartment over the Video Den downtown. Russ was sixteen and had quit school and had this part-time job at the Video Den so that’s where I went when I wanted to hang out and get high or just chill until I had to go home. Russ was okay but most people meaning my parents thought he was a loser because he was into heavy metal and all that and did a lot of drugs. At the time he wanted me to get a tattoo because he had one and thought they were cool which they were but I knew what my mom’d say if I came home with a tattoo. I was already driving her and Ken crazy with my lousy grades in school and having to go to summer school now and getting a mohawk haircut and nose rings and being a general pain in the royal ass around the house as Ken liked to say and not helping out enough and I could tell Ken especially was really getting sick of me. I didn’t need any more trouble than I already had.

It’s amazing how fast good weed goes when you’ve got the money to buy it with especially when you’ve got some friends to smoke it with like I had Russ and these older dudes who lived with him. They were what you’d call bikers not Hell’s Angels and some of them didn’t even have bikes but were the same violent type so they were hard to refuse when they’d come in and see me and Russ rolling joints on the kitchen table. In only a few days my stash was gone and I had to go back to the briefcase in the closet for some more coins. I’d always put the rifle together while I was there and stand at the window hitting imaginary targets coming along the sidewalk or just sit on the floor going Blam! into the darkness of the closet.

It was getting toward the end of summer school and I knew I was going to flunk at least two out of the three courses that I needed to pass just to get out of eighth grade which was going to make my mom crazy and deeply piss off my stepdad who already had his own secret reasons for disliking me but I don’t want to talk about that right now, so I was smoking a lot of skunk, more even than usual and was cutting most of my classes and hanging out at Russ’s place. Russ and the biker guys were my only friends then really. My stepfather’d developed this new habit of referring to me as him and never talking directly to me or even looking at me except when he thought I didn’t notice or when he was drunk. He’d like say to my mother, Ask him where he’s going tonight. Tell him to take out the goddam trash. Ask him how come he goes around with torn clothes and wearing earrings in his ears like a goddam girl and in his nose for chrissake, he’d say with me watching TV right there in front of him.

As far as he was concerned I was her son now not his even though he’d adopted me when I was eight after they got married and he moved in with us. When I was a real little kid he was an okay stepfather with some significant exceptions you might say, but when I got to be a teenager he sort of pulled out of the family unit and did a lot more heavy drinking which now my mom was into blaming me for. I didn’t care if he didn’t like me anymore, fine by me but I didn’t want her making it into all my fault. Some of it was his.

I went back to the coin collection in the closet a lot that summer always taking only a few coins at a time from six or seven different Baggies and I was starting to figure out which ones were worth the most like the dimes with the lady on it and the Indian head nickels and I’d just take those and mostly not bother with the others. Sometimes the guy at the pawnshop would give me fifty bucks, sometimes I’d get over a hundred. One day he says to me, Where’d you get these coins, kid? and I go into this sad story about my grandmother dying and leaving them to me and I could only sell a few of them at a time because it was all I had of hers and didn’t want to let the whole collection go.

I don’t know if he believed me but he never asked me about them again and just kept shelling out the bucks which I kept turning into weed. I was a good customer by now and had moved up from buying it off of the couple of older kids who were dealing at school and out at the mall to this Spanish guy named Hector in Plattsburgh who hung around Chi-Boom’s which was a kind of club down on Water Street. I bought so much skunk Hector thought I was dealing and a couple of times when I had extra I actually did sell a few bags to friends of Russ’s roommates but basically it was me and Russ doing most of it, and the bikers.

Then one night I came home around midnight from Russ’s place. I still rode around then on one of those knobby-tired dirt bikes which my mother’d given me a couple of Christmases ago. It was like my trademark, that bike, the way some kids do with their skateboards and I had this habit of taking it into the house at night and parking it in the front hall. Only this one time when I come up the steps carrying my bike the door like opens in front of me and it’s my stepfather standing there with my mom right behind him with her face all red from crying. I can see he’s deeply pissed and maybe drunk and I naturally think he’s been whaling on her which he’s been known to do so I shove my bike right into his stomach and the handlebars hit him in the face and knock off his glasses and suddenly everybody is screaming, me included. My stepfather yanks the bike out of my hands and throws it back down the steps and this makes me go crazy and I start calling him all the worst names I can think of like faggot and fucking asshole while he’s grabbing me by my arms and pulling me inside the house and telling me to shut the fuck up because of the neighbors and my mother is yelling at me like I’m the one who was whaling on her and tossing kids’ bikes around not her own husband for chrissake.