Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Anyhow he agreed it was too dangerous now to go back to the schoolbus and he had to admit that even if nobody believed the Bong Brothers when they spilled their guts trying to squirm out of a stolen vehicle charge by blaming it on two poor missing and presumed dead kids that they read about in the newspapers, the cops would definitely be watching the schoolbus for a while anyhow.

But we had to go someplace. We couldn’t hang out up at the mall or on the city streets where Joker or one of the bikers might see us never mind the cops although I figured the bikers by now had split for Buffalo or Albany. And with or without our new identities we still couldn’t hitch out of town to someplace like Florida or California, someplace far away where we could start our young lives over again. At least not until they decided to remove us from the missing and just left the presumed dead part and people stopped watching for us at the side of the southbound lane of the Northway with our thumbs out. That could take months.

I wondered if they’d put our pictures on milk cartons with the other missing kids. I kind of hoped so although the most recent picture my mom had of me was my sixth grade school picture when I was eleven and had long hair and looked really dumb and even younger than I was then. I used to think all those missing kids were living together in some squat like in Arizona and they were all close friends now getting a big laugh every morning over breakfast when one of them went to the fridge and brought out the milk carton for cereal.

Russ did some thinking and said he knew of this summer house over in Keene that was down the road from his aunt’s whose kid his mom used to say he was when she brought guys home from the bar. He liked his aunt, she was his mom’s cool older sister and was married to this guy and had some kids of her own although not Russ of course. Sometimes before he officially left his mom’s Russ used to crash at his aunt’s house and him and his cousins used to break into summerhouses in the neighborhood when the people who owned them were away. There was this one house he said was way in the woods a half mile in from the same road his aunt lived on and it didn’t have any alarm system or anything and was real easy to break into and the people only came up from Connecticut or someplace in the summers. It’s like a fucking hotel, man. They even keep food stashed there for emergencies and a TV and everything.

Since we had enough money left for the bus to Keene which dropped you off only a couple of miles from the house that’s what we decided to do. Russ finally gave up trying to peddle his newspapers for spare change and dumped them in the trash except for the front page that he tore off of one copy, For the scrapbook, man, he said. Then we went over to the Trailways station to check out the schedule.

There was a bus to Glens Fall and points south that stopped in Keene leaving in about an hour so while Russ bought our tickets I hung out in the bathroom. He figured we might be spotted by a cop if the two of us were seen together in public like that. So I waited and while I waited I started remembering how Bruce used to like coming here to get blowjobs from fags and would then beat the shit out of them afterwards which seemed weird to me although nobody else saw anything wrong with it. He’d brag about it later and the guys would get all psyched to do it themselves but I don’t think any of them ever did. Not because it was against their principles, they practically didn’t have any principles but more because they were afraid of getting blowjobs from a guy. They only liked getting blowjobs from females. What they did to fags was just roll them for their money and watches. I never really saw the big difference, a blowjob is a blowjob I figured but I was only a kid.

Pretty soon the bus was ready to roll and Russ came and gave me my ticket and told me to get on separate from him and sit way in the back and watch for when he got off in Keene and we’d join up again there. He went first and after a few minutes I followed and stood in line with about ten people between us. The whole time I was half-expecting to feel a cop’s hand yank me back just as I boarded but I got onto the bus without a glitch and walked past Russ who was in the third seat from the front like I didn’t know him and sat alone in the back.

I wasn’t alone for long though. As soon as the bus pulled out of the station this musclebound red-faced guy around eighteen with a big adam’s apple who I recognized as air force because of his buzzcut in spite of the fact that he didn’t have a uniform on left his seat and came and sat beside me. Right away he pulled out a pint of peach brandy and took a swig from it and offered me one which I silently declined because except for beer booze makes me sleepy and I was afraid of missing my stop.

The guy was a motormouth going home to Edison, New Jersey to see his girlfriend who better not be fucking anybody or he was gonna kick her ass blah blah blah. He’d joined the air force because of Desert Storm and the Gulf War which was big right when he got out of high school but he was pissed because the only thing the American military was doing now was feeding starving niggers in Africa blah blah when what he really wanted to do was fucking kick some fucking Arab ass, did I know what he meant blah?

I didn’t answer which wasn’t smart because he got curious and asked me where I was headed.

Israel, I said which was the first place that popped in my mind.

No shit, he said. Well you got plenty of Arabs to fuck with there, man. All that PLO and shit. You Jewish?

Yes I am. But not your regular Jewish, I told him. I said I was an ancient type of wandering Jew called the Levitites, a name I made up which I said translated into Bark Eaters who’re the descendants of the Lost Tribe that’d settled in Canada and upstate New York back before the Vikings. Although over the years some of us’d married into the Indians and had given up the old Jewish ways a few of us’d stayed faithful right up to modern times and now we were slowly migrating back to our homeland which was Israel where certain skills we’d learned from hundreds of years of living alongside the Indians in Canada were highly desirable.

No shit, he said. In Israel? Like what kinda skills?

Oh, like tracking enemies over rocks and going for days in the desert without water and enduring torture.

But you don’t know that shit, he said. You’re just a kid.

It’s part of our early childhood training. We spend a certain number of years on the reservation learning Indian skills in case there’s ever another Nazi uprising and then during summer vacation and afterwards our fathers pass on to their sons all the rest of the ancient Jewish lore. The mothers teach their daughters different things.

Like what?

They don’t tell us. Jews and Indians keep the boys and girls pretty much separate, you know. The guy was really into it now and I was too so I sat there and spun him my tale all the way to Keene and almost didn’t notice Russ get up from his seat when the bus pulled in next to a restaurant there and stopped. I gotta get off, I said to the guy.

I thought you were going to Israel.

Yeah but my aged father lives near here and I gotta say goodbye to him and stop by my mother’s grave. He’s one of the Jews who married an Indian, I said and pulled my hood back and showed him my mohawk which even though it wasn’t spiked anymore from no hairspray and the hood and I had all these nubbles of hair growing back it still made me look like a half Indian at least to this guy from New Jersey.

Hey, good luck, man, he said and shook my hand with a power grip. What’s your name?

Bone.

Cool, he said and waved as I hurried down the bus and joined Russ who was standing in the restaurant parking lot waiting impatiently for me.