Russell Banks: Rule of the Bone

Sometimes that first summer and during the fall too I thought about going back and trying to make peace with my mom and my stepfather even and offering to pay her back for the coins as soon as I got a job but I knew I could never pay her back because it wasn’t the money. Those old coins of my grandmother’s, they were like my inheritance. Besides my mom was scared of Ken and wanted to keep him happy and since for certain reasons that only I knew about he was relieved that I was finally out of sight and out of mind so to speak, there was no way now she’d let me come home again. So I didn’t even try.

Things went smoothly more or less like that for the rest of the summer and all fall. Unbeknownst to me however I was developing a criminal mentality. Dealing skunk to the bikers and so on I knew was illegal but that didn’t make it a crime so it wasn’t on account of committing any actual crimes that I became a criminal, it was because of my changing attitude toward my mom and Ken and other regular people.

I didn’t go to jail for it or anything but I think of the time I got caught shoplifting at the lingerie store up at the Champlain Mall in Plattsburgh as the true beginning of my life of crime. I mean, that was when I first saw myself as a person who was a criminal. It was coming up on the first Christmas after my mother and Ken’d kicked me out of the house and I was still fourteen and crashing at Russ’s place with the bikers down on Water Street in Au Sable Forks. They were still letting me sleep on this ratty couch they had because I kept them supplied with weed lots of times on credit even but mostly when I hung out there I stayed in Russ’s room. The bikers were older than us and heavier into drugs. I saw one of those guys once rub a line of coke straight into his eye which kind of grossed me out. Plus they drank a lot.

Russ was sixteen and worked days part time at the Video Den so nights we used to ride up to the mall in his Camaro and I’d deal a little weed to the other kids and we’d hang out till the stores closed and hit on the girls. But mostly nothing was happening so we’d sit around on the benches and watch all these cheesy couples doing their Christmas shopping. At Christmas the malls’re filled with people who feel rotten because they don’t have enough money so they fight a lot and yank on their kids’ arms. The carols and blinking lights and the guys in Santa suits are supposed to make you forget your troubles but in reality it’s the opposite. At least for me it was which is one of the reasons I liked to get high before we went there.

This one night about ten days before Christmas I didn’t have any weed and I was thinking about my mom and Ken, how it would be the first time they’d be alone and I wondered what they’d do on Christmas Eve. What they usually did was get smashed on this eggnog and bourbon mixture that my mom said was her mother’s secret recipe and watch TV specials. Around eleven when the news came on I’d open the presents we’d got for each other and hug and say thanks and then they’d go into their room and pass out and I’d smoke a fatty in the bathroom and watch MTV with Willie till I fell asleep. It was okay but not exactly ideal. But we had a tree and lights in the windows and all and last year was cool because I got this excellent suede shearling jacket from my mom and Ken gave me a Timex watch. So I could start coming home on time, he said. I got her one of those long silk Indian scarves that she seemed to like a lot and for him I got a pair of lined driving gloves. Everybody was happy, in spite of the eggnog.

But a lot had happened since then. For one thing, the main thing that’d happened was me getting kicked out of the house. But it also had to do with my mohawk and getting my ears and nose pierced and screwing up in school and even though they never caught me at it my mom and Ken’d known all along I was heavy into weed which was why I’d stolen the coins in the first place. When I left home it was sort of by mutual agreement, I guess.

They would’ve let me come back if I’d wanted but only if I could be a different person than I was which was not only impossible but unfair because I didn’t know how to keep myself from getting into trouble anymore. I must’ve crossed a line but didn’t know it way back when I was a little kid like five or six after my real father took off and Ken moved in.

I knew it was hopeless but I started imagining this scene anyhow. I get Russ to drop me off at my mom’s and Ken’s house. All my stuff including my trademark dirt bike is in Russ’s Camaro and we unload it and set it on the sidewalk. But also I’ve got this huge bag of presents for my mom and my stepfather, truly excellent items like a toaster oven and a microwave and maybe some jewels and a fancy nightgown for Mom and for Ken I’ve got a Polaroid camera and a portable sander and a Polo ski sweater. Then Russ takes off and I’m all alone on the sidewalk. The house is dark except for the string of lights around the front door and the deck railing in back and electric candles in the windows and I can see the Christmas tree lights blinking through the curtain in the livingroom where I know they’re watching the Cosby special or something. It’s Christmas Eve. It’s snowing a little. They’re really sad because I’m not with them but they don’t know how to let me come home without acting like what I did to them doesn’t matter— stealing the coin collection and smoking grass and getting a mohawk and all and living with Russ and the bikers and not going to school anymore which they probably know about by now and dealing weed for Hector the Hispanic guy at Chi-Boom’s which they don’t know about although I wonder what they think I’ve been living on all these months, charity? Also they don’t know that so far I haven’t gotten a tattoo even though Russ has this very cool tattoo on his forearm and is always after me to get one.

So in this scene I go up to the door and knock and when my mom comes out I say, Merry Christmas, Mom, just sort of flat and normal like that and hold out the bag in which all the presents are wrapped in this incredible shiny paper with bows and everything. She starts to cry like she does when she’s excited and my stepfather comes to the door to see what’s the matter. I say the same to him, Merry Christmas, Ken. And I show him the bag of presents too. My mom opens the door and takes the bag from me and passes it back to Ken and gives me a big maternal hug. Ken shakes my hand and says, Come on in, son. We go into the livingroom and I distribute the presents to them and all is forgiven.

They don’t have any presents for me which embarrasses them naturally and they apologize but I don’t care. All I care is that they really like what I got them and they do. Later we’re drinking eggnog and watching TV and Ken looks out the window and sees my bike and all my clothes and things out on the sidewalk with the snow coming down and he says to me, Son, why don’t you bring your stuff inside?

When I got busted for shoplifting it was in this fancy lingerie store called Victoria’s Secret and I was already out of the store with a silky green nightgown stashed in my jacket pocket. The security guard, a black dude named Bart who I actually knew personally and had once sold some grass to put the arm on me and turned me around and took me into an office in the back where the manager of the store and the head security guy were and after they hassled me for a while I finally told them my mom’s name and telephone number. Bart, the black guy who’d busted me had to go back on patrol and when he left the office I looked at him real hard but he didn’t care, he knew I couldn’t pin him for anything without pinning myself worse. And then of course a half hour later here they come, my mother and my stepfather, her looking frightened and upset and him just pissed off but neither of them talking to me, only to the store manager and the head security guy. While they talked they made me sit by myself in a storeroom next to the office where I stared at the No Smoking sign and kept wishing I could get high and a few minutes later my mother came out wringing her hands and her face all red from crying.