Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

He was very clear on where to dig though and laid it out exactly with string and stakes and all while me and Froggy came along behind with our shovels turning over he soil which was surprisingly free of rocks and dark and crumbly and rich-looking. It was like I-Man was following this vein of good soil, the only good soil in the whole area actually and if he’d gone and cut a regular garden plot in the field twenty or thirty feet square like a normal person nothing would’ve grown there because most of that field like most of the whole county was rocks and gravel and in lots of places was chemical waste. Definitely the field we were working and living on then was pretty much on top of old chemicals from when they stored poison and radioactive stuff out there for the air force years ago in case the Russians attacked but somehow I-Man was able to sniff out the one narrow strip of dirt that wasn’t like contaminated and dangerous or rocky even because I never saw such dark thick dirt in that part of the country and everything he planted came up and grew wicked fast and looked as healthy as food from the olden pioneer days.

It stayed light pretty late then because we were coming up on the end of June and nights after supper the three of us would sit out on the steps of the bus with the door open and me and I-Man would knock back this blunt-sized spliff and we’d talk about stuff, him doing most of the talking actually and me and Froggy just trying to understand because he was like our teacher in life and we were the students, her in the first grade or kindergarten and me maybe in the third and there’d be these long silences in between I-Man’s words of wisdom and we’d all three just sit and listen to the crickets together and the breeze rustling the long grasses and the cornstalks and all the other plants in the garden and we’d watch the sun go down and the sky turn all red like jam and these thin strips of silver clouds would float across and one by one stars would pop out of the dark blue sky overhead like genuine diamonds and then the old moon would drift up over the tops of the trees in the distance and the field in the moonlight would look so incredibly peaceful and beautiful that it was hard to believe that at one time not very long ago I’d seen this place as spooky and kind of nasty and couldn’t hardly wait to get away. Now it was like for the first time in this old wrecked schoolbus on this bulky field I’d found a real home and a real family.

But it wasn’t a real family of course and me and I-Man couldn’t be like Froggy’s parents or even her older brothers because she was such a very young child and I was only a kid myself and an outlaw and I-Man was a Jamaican illegal alien trying to get by and eventually get home without getting busted by the American government. Plus Froggy was somebody’s real daughter and no matter how fucked up that person was we had an obligation to try and return Froggy to her if she wanted to be with her mom, or if not then we had to find her somebody else for a mom.

It was obvious that being a female and such a little kid Froggy needed a mom more than she needed me and I-Man, we understood that and accepted it and tried talking to her about it.

I-Man’d say to her, Somewhere out dere, Froggy, in de cold wild hinterlands of America, dere mus’ a mama be cryin fe you t’ come home now, chile, him cryin it time to come home. Him sorry now, Froggy, dat him sold him baby off into Babylon.

I said maybe we could call Froggy’s mom on the phone and kind of feel her out on the subject and then decide what to do and I-Man thought that was okay if Froggy wanted it but she just said, No, talk about something else.

It took weeks but her mom was named Nancy Riley, we finally got that much out of her and Froggy thought she lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin or she used to anyhow before Buster came and got her but that was a long time ago and she probably wasn’t living there anymore anyhow. Froggy didn’t cry or anything when we talked to her about returning to her mom, she’d say a few words and then just look out in space and bite her lower lip and let her eyes go dead. I knew she hadn’t been away all that long, only six months or a year and it only seemed long to her because she was still a little kid so I kept saying let’s go call information and find out if your mom’s listed, that won’t hurt, until finally she seemed to give in and said, O— kay.

It was a warm night early in July, the Fourth of July actually because I remember the fireworks later down by the lake and it was around seven-thirty that we finally got permission from Froggy to try and call up her mom. Basically I think up to then she’d been too afraid that her mom would tell her don’t come home if she called which was a natural fear I guess or that her mom wouldn’t even talk to her at all but she’d been getting some serious attention from me and I-Man for quite a while by then and a lot of description of what moms really feel for their kids regardless of how they act sometimes so she was starting to trust people a little more. It was like a major breakthrough I guess.

But it’d taken a lot of coaxing mainly by me because I don’t think I-Man was all that into talking people into doing what was good for them even little kids like Froggy who’re supposedly too young to know what’s good for them, but finally this one night when she’d said O-kay she would talk to her mom if I got her on the phone the three of us headed on our usual path across the field which had lots of flowers on it now, daisies and goldenrod and suchlike and slipped under the old chain-link fence and walked to the Officemax and around to the front of Sun Foods where there was a pay phone and not many people on account of it being Fourth of July and pretty late. I led and Froggy followed and I-Man was last.

I-Man did have a point although he didn’t make it in words, just by example instead which was typical plus it kept you on your toes and thinking on your own. But getting kids to do stuff for their own good when they don’t want to can be dangerous and only works out for the best once in a while. Actually I don’t know if it ever works out unless you’re standing in the middle of the street and don’t see the ten-ton truck coming and this good guy pushes you out of the way and says it’s for your own good. But even in situations like that if you’d’ve known the facts you’d’ve gotten out of the way on your own and with a lot less stress too and wouldn’t’ve been pissed for being shoved.

Generally it was true that in my own life so far I myself had not done anything just because my mom or stepfather or teachers I have had or any of the adults who had me in their power told me it was for my own good. No fucking way. And whenever somebody told me that, there was like this alarm that went off under the hood and all I could hear was whoop-whoop-whoop, somebody’s trying to steal something valuable, I’d think so I’d usually do the opposite. Most of the time that didn’t turn out so hot either but I’d’ve never done it in the first place if somebody hadn’t’ve been out to get me for my own good to do the first opposite thing.

Yet here I was practically begging Froggy a kid littler than me to call her mom on the phone like E.T. calling home when it was obvious she didn’t want to. Her mom’d sold her to Buster for money probably to buy rock with but still I guess I just couldn’t believe her mom wouldn’t be real happy and incredibly relieved to hear from her lost child no matter what and vice versa too.

I went inside the supermarket and cashed one of Buster’s fifties which got me a good close once-over from the customer service guy after the lady at the cash register refused to break it for me. I think they both thought the bill was a phony which happens a lot here on account of it being so close to the border and all the smuggling et cetera that goes on but I told the guy my father’s outside driving a special handicapped van because he’s a Vietnam vet in a wheelchair and it’s a huge deal for him to come in and do it himself so I was doing it to make a call to his lawyer for him due to his having to go to Washington to testify about Agent Orange. Which finally got to the guy so he broke the bill in a hurry. I don’t know why but I always like to drop that in just to say it, ever since I read about it in the newspaper and thought Agent Orange was like this cool spy who’d worked for the CIA in Vietnam and when he saw how the war was so fucked up he went over to the side of the vets and agreed to testify for them in Washington like in that movie with Tom Cruise. It might’ve been MTV news I saw it on because I don’t really read the newspapers except by accident like if I sit on a park bench and there it is on the ground staring back at me.