Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Russ liked the panther idea the best. It’ll be my new identity, he said. My trademark. I’m going underground, man. I might even change my name.

What to?

I dunno. Buck maybe. Whaddaya think?

Your last name is Rodgers, asshole. You wanna be Buck Rodgers? A fucking astronaut?

I’ll change my last name too.

How about Zombie, that’s cool. You can be Buck Zombie, the living dead boy.

Maybe I will, he said but I knew he wouldn’t because in spite of everything Russ isn’t radical enough to be a true criminal. Basically he is an astronaut.

You oughta get a new identity too in case the bikers ever come looking for you again, he said. They’ll be pissed you got away.

It’s you they’re really pissed at, Buck. For stealing their stuff. I’m the one they think is dead, man. Me and Bruce.

People will tell them they seen a mall rat named Chappie. Homeless kid with a mohawk. You got high visibility, man. Myself though, I’m gonna be fucking underground. New name, new tattoo, papa’s got a brand-new bag. You know what I’m sayin’?

Yeah, well, I guess I will let my hair grow out. I was thinking of doing it anyhow, I said. I ran my hand over the shaved part of my head and it was already surprisingly nubbled.

You oughta change your name too. Don’t get me wrong, man, but I always thought Chappie was sort of a cheesy name.

It’s better than fucking Chapman, I said. But Zombie sounds pretty good.

He laughed and said, Yeah, Zombie! Fucking Zombie. Buck ‘n’ Zombie. No last names either. Road warriors, man. American gladiators! Like in Mortal Kombat! he said and he gave me these karate chops and kicks and I did it back— high kick, low kick, high punch, low punch, block, flip, jump, and duck, and pretty soon we’re cackling uncontrollably and falling down on the mattress almost like we’re stoned although the truth is we were really scared and were laughing and falling down to keep from thinking about what had scared us.

* * *

Russ figured we needed about a hundred bucks to get his tattoo changed although I wouldn’t have minded saving some of it for the future for basics like weed and food, but the number plates were mainly his since he took them off the fireguy’s truck and he was the one who’d done all the driving which meant that the truck was mainly his too, so I guess it was okay for him to say what we did with the money. I actually never would’ve thought of trying to sell the plates and the truck to Richard and James in the first place who I didn’t think had any money anyhow except for buying crack with but Russ has this instinct for selling things. He knows when people want stuff and he knows they can come up with the money for it even before they do themselves.

It helped I guess that Richard and James were pretty lifted when they made the deal but I had to admit Russ made it sound very attractive especially after he gave them his idea of stashing the truck in a used-truck lot when they weren’t using it. Just keep moving it around to different dealers, he said, and put it in with the trucks for sale and take the plates home with you and they’ll never figure it out. If somebody wants to test-drive it they won’t be able to find the keys, they’ll just think it’s a fuck-up, and the next night you put the truck somewhere else. The rest of the time it’s yours. Like right now it’s ours.

That is so fucking smart! Richard said. Isn’t it, James? Isn’t it smart?

Yeah, James said. But what’s it gonna cost us?

Five hundred bucks, Russ said. And I’ll throw in the plates free. You’ll definitely need the plates. It’s a four-by-four Ranger, man, almost new.

They said no way and Russ dickered with them for a while until finally he agreed to come down to a hundred bucks, five twenties which Richard peeled off a roll and Russ accepted with a sad face like they’d really screwed him. He told them exactly where to find the truck and they naturally threatened to kill us both if it wasn’t there. They seemed to have a lot of money for crackheads or even for college guys for that matter but Russ said they had these old college loans that they were still spending even though they’d gotten kicked out of State last fall.

Then Russ put on my shearling jacket and made me wear his hoodie and put the hood up so my mohawk wouldn’t show and we took off for this well-known tattoo place downtown. First though we cut down to the town park and this little public beach where kids hang out by the picnic tables and cop weed which we did in a minute from this big redheaded dude I knew slightly from the mall and me and Russ split a blunt and just chilled for a while. We hadn’t chilled in a long time.

The sun was out and when the redheaded kid left there was nobody but us there and it was warm and peaceful. We sat on a picnic table and didn’t even talk. Just thought our thoughts. Lake Champlain is huge and you can see all the way across to the Green Mountains in Vermont twenty-five miles in the distance and the water was glittering like it was covered with brand-new silver coins and the sky overhead was bright blue with these towers of puffy white clouds on the Vermont side. Seagulls screeched and swooped past the beach like tiny paper kites and the breeze blew off the lake and you could hear it behind us swishing through the trees which were hazy red and light green because of all the new buds. It was a true spring day and although I wasn’t all that anxious to think about what was coming next for the first time I felt like the worst winter of my life was over at last.

Finally we realized we were hungry so we got a couple of slices and Cokes at the pizza joint on the corner of Bay and Woodridge Streets and headed for the tattoo place which was only a few blocks away. A couple of times I noticed the Press-Republican for sale in street boxes and stopped to check out the picture and read the front page again.

Wanna buy one for a souvenir? Russ said since he had the money. Maybe we should take a bunch, you know? For our grandkids.

Zombies don’t have grandkids, I reminded him. And neither do Bucks, I said although I was thinking they can if they want and knowing Russ he probably would.

Suit yourself, man, he said and he put a quarter and a dime into the machine and cleaned it out, nine or ten copies and stuck them all under his arm like he was a paperboy in those old movies. Extra, extra, read all about it. Homeless boy disappears in fire. Local biker burned to death. Parents in shock. I can’t believe he’s gone! Mother cries. He was basically a good kid, stepfather says. Whole town mourns.

The tattoo place was called Art-O-Rama due to the tattoo guy’s name being Art. It was in this funky old storefront on an alley off of a side street which didn’t look like much but it was famous in the area for doing air force guys from the base as well as kids who were more or less of the punk type so long as they had IDs that said they were eighteen or over which me and Russ did, of course.

Neither of us’d met the guy before but we’d seen his work on miscellaneous kids we knew at the mall and liked it. Besides, Russ’s original Adirondack Iron tattoo he’d gotten from a softtail specialist down in Glens Falls who was a guy who only did Harleyheads and was a biker himself and knew all the other bikers in the northcountry so no way we could’ve gone to him.

Art was this old guy way up in his forties or fifties and his whole body at least what you could see of it was covered with these incredible tattoos, mostly fire-breathing dragons and colorful Oriental symbols with nothing cheesy like stars ‘n’ stripes or Betty Boops or valentines with arrows the way some old guys do. When he moved even a little all the tattoos moved with him like his skin was alive and had a mind of its own and his body inside was following orders from the skin the way a snake’s does.