Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

I turned around then and went into the kitchen and picked up my backpack and put the gun inside it and stepped out the door and shut it behind me. Standing out there on the deck I felt incredibly calm and almost old, like I was an elderly and had already lived my whole life and was only waiting around now to die. It was a cool gray day and looked and felt like it was going to rain. The leaves on the trees’d turned upside down and silver. The wind was blowing and a bank of dark clouds was building up over toward Jay which is where a lot of summer storms come from in Au Sable. Slowly I walked down the steps past my old rusting dirt bike and out to the street where I stopped for a minute and thought about Willie and wondered if he’d still be alive if I hadn’t run away. Probably none of us’d be alive if I hadn’t run away, I decided and then I turned left toward town and after a few minutes of walking real slow like in a fog I speeded up some. I was thinking I’d better walk fast if I was going to get to the clinic where my mom worked before the rain started.

By the time I got to the clinic I’d gone all trembly and loose in the limbs. Even my jaw hung down and my mouth was open like I’d been shocked by the sight of something awful, a way bad accident or a bloody crime and I suppose I was. My hands were wet and my knees felt watery and I was afraid I was going to flip out if anybody looked at me the wrong way like with suspicion or even a hint of disrespect. And I was dangerous, wicked dangerous because after the deal back at the house with Ken I was aware now that I was carrying chrome, I was a dude with a loaded niner in his backpack who could start blasting if he wanted to and who could blast an actual person and not just some rich guy’s view of the mountains. For the first time I understood how these pissed-off ex-employees or some divorced guy who didn’t get child custody can walk into a post office or a Pizza Hut full of people and pull out his heater and start firing and not give a shit who gets hit. I didn’t want to do anything like that of course but I felt like if one little thing went wrong in the next hour or two I wouldn’t be able to stop myself, that’s how far gone I was on account of my stepfather and the collapsed situation at our house and family and the fact that ol’ Willie was dead and no one seemed to give a shit and I was trying to come home again but no one seemed to quite get that either, not even me.

The clinic is a low brick building at the edge of town near the ballfield where there was a Little League game going and some parents sitting in the bleachers watching like it was the World Series so nobody noticed me when I walked by. I almost felt invisible or like I was watching a movie with me in it even when somebody passed me on the sidewalk or drove past on the street. Everything was weirdly normal except for the storm coming up and the trees swirling around in the wind.

The waiting room at the clinic was empty of customers and silent like a morgue, spooky. I walked up to the receptionist, this blond mound of renown around town named Cherie who I knew by her reputation from guys but also slightly from before when she used to come around the house with my mom after work sometimes for a beer, and I said, Is my mom here?

She slowly looked up from the People magazine she was reading and said, Huh?

My mom. Is she here? I wanna talk with her, man.

Who’s your mom? she asked evidently not recognizing me on account of my hair grown back and no more mohawk or nose rings and earrings which in the past’d kept people from actually looking at me and seeing my face for what it was which was the whole point of course. But now I was into accepting I-self as I-Man would say and as a result I didn’t give a flying fuck what people thought when they looked at me.

I said my mom’s name and suddenly everything registered in Cherie’s mind, meaning who I was and that I wasn’t missing and presumed dead anymore which raised up a whole lot of new questions in her small mind that I did not particularly want to answer so I said, She’s still in bookkeeping, ain’t she?

Oh yeah, sure. But listen, Chappie honey, where have you been?

Call her in bookkeeping, willya, and tell her that I’m out here in the lobby and I want to talk to her about something important, I said and I turned around and walked across the room to a far corner behind this big plant where I set my pack on the floor and took a seat and crossed my legs and folded my arms. I studied the No Smoking sign and waited.

A minute or two later here came my mom looking all frazzled and scared like thanks to Cherie she expected to see me covered with blood or something. I love my mom, I really do, despite everything. And I especially loved her then when she came running out from the bookkeeping office and rushed past Cherie at the receptionist’s desk and by the time she got to me she had her arms opened wide like a real mom so when I stood up I kind of walked right into her and disappeared inside. That’s what it felt like anyhow. Then she was like crying and saying things like, Oh Chappie, Chappie, where have you been? Let me see you, let me look at you! I’ve been so worried and all, honey, I thought you were dead!

She told me she’d been sure I’d been burned up in that fire but Ken had kept saying no and then when my friend Russell showed up again she’d started to hope maybe Ken was right. And now here you are! she said brightly and stood back and held me by my arms and smiled and I smiled and then she hugged me again and so on back and forth like that until we’d pretty much covered the reunion scene and were ready to move on to more serious stuff.

She wanted to know where I’d been all these months and who I’d been staying with naturally and I lied a little bit so she wouldn’t think I’d been hiding out in Keene and then Plattsburgh just down the road practically and could’ve come home easy anytime I wanted. Instead I said I’d been across the lake over in Vermont almost to New Hampshire living on a commune with these old hippies who ran an organic school. I didn’t know what that was but I could tell the words organic and school eased my mom’s mind somewhat although she’s a long ways from being a hippie. She’s just not scared of them is all and believes anything organic is good, just too expensive and of course school is the magic word. So it was like I was hanging out with rich people.

She hugged me some more and commented on how healthy and tanned I looked and I told her how I’d been doing a lot of gardening for the hippies and lately with the garden in and all I’d had a little free time and I’d started to miss her a lot so I’d come over from Vermont for a visit maybe, in case she wanted me to visit or stay a while or whatever.

I was being careful because I wasn’t sure if she’d want me back again after everything I’d put her through this year and once she knew I was okay she might get mad like before and slam the door on me again, although to tell the truth it was never really her who slammed the door last summer when I left home, it was Ken and in a sense it was me myself. My mom just kind of went along with the boys which sad to say is how she’s always dealt with her problems. Until now that is, with this new AA program she was into and which seemed to’ve gotten her to move out on Ken and all even if it was only to move in with Grandma. Still, this was a promising set of developments, I thought.

I told her I’d already gone by the house and had seen Ken and knew about Willie getting whacked. Yes, she said, she was sorry about that, it was sad and all, he was a good cat. But it was an accident, you know, just one of those things that happen in life. She said Willie changed after I left and didn’t come home much anymore so she wasn’t all that surprised when she found him pancaked on the road a few houses down one morning when she went out to work.