Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

C’mon, man, let’s get the fuck outa here! I said and grabbed her by the hand and yanked. But she pulled her hand out of mine and didn’t seem to want to leave. What’s the matter, Froggy, don’t you want to get rid of this guy? He’s a creep, for chrissake.

He’s gonna be mad, she says in this tiny voice, practically the first time I’ve heard it and I think maybe she’s only about six or seven, even younger than I thought. I’m s’posed to stay here an’ wait for him to come back, she says.

C’mon, man. This is our only chance, the rapsters’ve got him scared, I said and reached for her hand again but she pulled away and shrank back against the side of the van. I climbed around the seat and got in back with her and she scrunched herself up like she was afraid of me. Aw c’mon, Froggy, I ain’t gonna hurt you. All I wanna do is help you out a little, help you get away from this creep and maybe find a regular family to live with. Maybe even find your own mom and dad. You got a regular mom and dad someplace? I asked her. Actually I was starting to wonder if anyone had a regular mother and father anymore except on television.

She said yes.

Whereabouts are they?

I don’t know. At home, I guess.

Where’s home then?

I don’t know. Far. Milwaukee, she said.

Jeez, that’s far. How the hell’d you get mixed up with Buster Brown? He your uncle or something?

No, she said. He was somebody her mom knew and her mom had given her to him.

Gave you to him?

I guess. Yeah. She couldn’t take care of me anymore, and my daddy was gone someplace. In jail.

Jeez. Didn’t she even maybe sell you to him? I mean, it ain’t like Buster is fucking Doctor Spock or some kind of child care expert. If you give your kid over to a guy like him you want to get paid for it, you know?

She said yeah he must’ve paid her mom something which to me made more sense especially if her mom was cracked out and maybe had AIDS or something and really needed the cash and couldn’t take care of her kid anymore. I’d heard a few stories of mothers doing that and while it didn’t exactly cheer me up about family life it at least made sense. But it also meant I was going to have a hard time getting Froggy situated with a regular family and all, assuming I could even convince her to run out on Buster in the first place. Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you don’t expect it and the people who deserve loyalty the least seem to get it the most especially when it’s coming from little kids.

Look, we gotta get the fuck outa here before Buster makes peace with the rapsters and comes back and wants his money. This is our one chance. I know this great place where we can chill for a while, it’s an actual schoolbus only it’s been turned into like a housetrailer where you can live in it. I told her then that if she didn’t like it better there with me than here being Buster’s prisoner she could come back to him or she could even go home to Milwaukee if she wanted, I’d buy her a bus ticket with some of Buster’s money. You know it’s illegal to buy and sell little kids, I told her. So it’s okay for you to cut out on him and go wherever the hell you want. This’s America and America’s a free country, Froggy. Even for kids.

I think I pretty nearly had her convinced when all of a sudden I heard this crash and a few feet in front of the van the window of the bar comes down like when I shot lip the Ridgeways’ picture window and a bottle comes flying out and then a couple of people come flying out too, one white and one black and the white guy is Joker and the black guy is a rapster, not the huge guy but one of the smaller ones, and then there’s Buster in the middle of it trying to pull Joker off of the rapster when Packer comes out and coldcocks Buster on the head with a beer bottle and then there’s Roundhouse and Raoul hollering racist stuff like kill the fucking nigger which of course brings on the rest of the Hooliganz who whale into the bikers like this is the most fun they’ve had all month, beating the shit out of a bunch of white asshole bikers from the northcountry. Buster is down on the ground all bloody and getting tromped on by both sides and the lead Hooligan is smacking Joker around like he’s a carpet and the other Hooliganz’re fending for themselves pretty good against a rapidly growing gang of white guys from inside the bar who normally wouldn’t take the side of bikers except when the white race gets into it.

Now suddenly it’s like we’ve got a full-scale race riot going on in the parking lot of Chi-Boom’s and I figure the cops’ll be next to join the fray and are probably already on their way over from Dunkin’ Donuts or wherever. C’mon, girl, let’s us be invisible, I said to Froggy and I opened the side door of the van and grabbed her by her wrist and with my other hand hefted my backpack which actually weighed more than Froggy and dragged her out of the van and around behind it. Then we were running side by side, she was really into it with me now, the two us scuttling along between the cars until we were out there on Bridge Street and ducking down Margaret Street toward an alley I knew and there came the cops only they didn’t see us.

Half an hour later we’re at the secret hole Russ’d shown me in the chain link fence by the field out behind the warehouses. I held the fence back while Froggy slipped under and then I followed and took her hand and led her across that creepy windblown dark field toward the old wrecked schoolbus in the high grass in the middle. When we got there it looked the same, no signs of life but it didn’t stink so bad all around as before. I knocked on the door a couple times and waited and did it again but no answer.

I guess the ol’ Bong Brothers got busted or else they split, I said and pulled the door open and looked inside. Nothing. No one. Looks like we’re home, I said and went inside and set my pack down. Froggy followed and stood there by the driver’s seat examining the place which wasn’t all that bad although it probably helped that it was dark and all we could see were the outlines of the few bus seats that had been left and the mattresses and the old boards on cinderblocks.

What d’ya think? I said.

It’s dark.

I remembered the flashlight in my pack then and when I had it turned on we checked the place out carefully and saw that the Bong Brothers seemed to’ve cleaned all their stuff out and left just the furniture so to speak and from the smell nobody’d been here for a month or more. It smelled clean and dry like it had been aired out and I noticed that some of the cardboard that’d covered the windows’d been taken down and a few of the windows were open. I walked down the length of the bus toward the rear shining my flashlight into the corners and behind the seats and so on until I got to the end where I shined it across the back seat and I saw a body lying there.

I didn’t say anything because of not wanting to scare Froggy who was behind me a ways and I let the light go slowly up the guy’s legs— it was a guy, I could see that much, wearing Wal-Mart sneaks and jeans— on to his hands which were on his belly and I saw then that he was’ a black guy with a plaid flannel shirt on but no wounds or sign of blood so far and then I came to his face and there he was, lying on his back and smiling up at me like he’d just overheard me telling Froggy this funny joke, gray eyes crinkly and open in the middle of a broad coffee-colored face with a humongous flat nose and deep lines almost like trenches around his wide mouth and over his eyebrows and a huge mass of dreadlocks wrapped all around his head like a pillow of blacksnakes.

He puckered his lips and said, Would y’ mine shinin down de torch, mon. I-Man cyan see nuttin wid de light shinin in him eyes so.