Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

It took us about an hour to reach the turnoff to the summerhouse, all uphill on this winding dirt road where the houses next to the road were mostly small and beat-to-shit with plastic over the windows and rusting old cars in back. Every now and then we passed a driveway disappearing into the woods with stone pillars by the road and fancy carved signs with names like Brookstone and Mountainview. Rich people don’t like you to see their summerhouses from the road but I guess they don’t want you to forget they’re still around either.

The sign where we turned off said Windridge and they had a chain stretched across the driveway to keep cars out which we just stepped over and a big No Trespassing sign and all these No Hunting signs with bullet holes in them from the locals saying fuck you. The driveway was this long narrow lane that led through tall old pine trees with the wind blowing through. It was dark in there and kind of spooky and the ground was soft under our Doc Martens from the pine needles as we walked along not saying anything due to our nervousness, not so much from the Keep Out signs back at the road but the general atmosphere which was like in a kid’s scary fairy tale where there’s an evil witch waiting in a cabin in the woods at the end of the lane.

But when we came out of the woods instead of a witch’s cabin there was this huge dark brown log house with all kinds of porches and decks set up on the side of a hill with acres of lawns and a swimming pool with a cover over it and a tennis court and garages and little houses for guests and the such. They even had their own satellite dish. It was definitely the biggest fanciest house I’d ever seen in person. It was like a plantation.

These people only live here like on their vacations? I said to Russ.

Yeah. My aunt works for them as a housecleaner when they’re here, he said. The guy’s a big professor or something and the wife’s an artist. They’re pretty famous, I think.

The windows had wooden shutters over them and the place looked like it might be hard to break into but Russ said he’d scoped out a way one time when he came over to help his aunt haul trash to the dump in his uncle’s pickup. You wouldn’t believe the excellent shit they throw away, man. Good stuff. My aunt just keeps most of it. Half her house is furnished with the stuff these people toss out with the garbage.

We walked up the hill past the house and around to the back where there was this little screened porch that stuck out from the second floor. Russ climbed up one of the supports and while he was hanging there with one hand he used his pocketknife to cut through the screen with the other and climbed up onto the porch. I followed him and by the time I got up he’d already jimmied open a sliding glass door and gone inside so I pushed the curtains away and strolled in too like we lived there and this was how we always came in.

The house was dark on account of all the windows being shuttered and the curtains so it was hard to see anything but I could smell fresh paint and figured this must be where the wife did her artwork. I started to pull open the curtains on the glass doors but Russ said, Don’t do it, man. My uncle’s like the caretaker. They pay him to come over here once a week and check it out mainly for signs of a break-in.

For a while we stumbled around in the darkness looking for candles and then moved into this hallway off of the art studio when all of a sudden right next to where I’m standing a phone rings and scares the shit out of me. Then we hear a man’s voice. Hi, you’ve reached Windridge! If you wish to speak with Bib or Maddy Ridgeway, they can be reached at 203-555-5101 and they would be delighted to take your call. This machine, I’m sorry to say, won’t take messages. Bye-bye!

Jesus! What the fuck is that all about? I said.

It’s an answering machine, asshole. But what it means is the electricity must be on, Russ said and started patting the wall by the door until he found a switch and turned on an overhead lamp. Let there be light, man! he said.

After that it was like we were living there. We wandered all over the house looking into closets and drawers and cabinets, checking out everything like our parents’d gone away for the weekend. The one room we closed the door to and didn’t go into anymore except when we needed to go outside was the art studio because Russ was afraid his uncle if he came by could see the lights through the curtains. But there were plenty of bedrooms to rummage through that had shuttered windows and a den with all these bookcases and a bunch of stuffed animal heads and birds and a way huge kitchen and a pantry with hundreds of cans of tomato sauce and soups and beans, all kinds of food in cans including some weird stuff I’d never even heard of like smoked oysters and anchovies and water chestnuts. They also had these humongous jars full of funny-colored spaghettis and fancy kinds of rice and oatmeal and instant coffee and instant iced tea and Tang, everything we needed plus a big freezer and two complete refrigerators but unplugged with nothing in them.

The furnace was off naturally and the house was colder inside than out and smelled damp and moldy from being closed up all winter but it was comfortable anyhow and Russ said we could build a fire in the fireplace in the living-room after it got dark when nobody’d see the smoke and he thought there was probably some space heaters around. Not a good idea I thought after our last go-round with a space heater and I kind of hoped he wouldn’t come across any which he didn’t.

When I tried a faucet in the kitchen nothing came out and I said to Russ, Hey, the water’s off. So how’re we gonna piss and shit, man? We can’t even wash up.

Russ said he thought maybe we could figure out how to turn on the water ourselves so we hunted around awhile until we found the door to the cellar and when we went down there we saw all this incredible camping equipment on shelves by the stairs including sleeping bags which we took two of to sleep in because the beds didn’t have any blankets or sheets on them. It took a while but eventually we found the pipe where the water came into the house from the well and Russ just turned the handle on the pipe and flipped the pump switch to On and in a few seconds I could hear the pipes gurgling and banging all over the house. Let there be water! Russ said. Then he turned on the electric water heater and said, Let there be hot water!

Our sleeping bags we laid out on the two beds in the main bedroom on the second floor which had its own bathroom with lights all around the mirror like a movie mar’s and then after we each squeezed some pimples and studied our tattoos because of the good light and took a piss in the toilet we went back down to the kitchen and I cooked up some of this weird green spaghetti they had.

It was pretty good spaghetti but a little on the clumpy side. We made it with tomato sauce and tuna fish from a can mixed in and sat at the long diningroom table and ate it off these great gold-edged plates with instant iced tea in fancy wine goblets but no ice of course. Russ sat at one end of the table and me at the other and we talked like Bib and Maddy Ridgeway’s teenaged sons home on vacation from their fancy prep school while Bib and Maddy’re down in Connecticut making more money to buy us more good stuff.

Pahss the salt down, would you, deah brother?

Why I’d be dee-lighted to, and would you care for another helping of this most exquisite green spaghetti? It’s the color of old money, isn’t that the most charming idea? I’ll have the butler Jerome bring us some.

Why thank you, deah brother, how thoughtful of you.

That first night in the summerhouse was the best I’d felt in a long time even though I knew it was only temporary and we were like burglars more or less. Of course now that I was a fugitive from justice and definitely committed to a life of crime I didn’t worry much about being a small-time burglar. Once you cut your ties to the past like we’d done you’ve gone the whole route. There’s no more near or far, it’s all the same thing— gone.