Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Hours passed, it was probably like three in the morning and there weren’t any more cars on the road but it kept raining and my body kept walking while the rest of me was trapped inside the family massacre video examining and thinking about every gross detail. Over by Keeseville where the road crosses the Au Sable River I got halfway out on the bridge when I noticed the wind was blowing and suddenly it was like the VCR had jammed with everybody but me dead in the house and it wouldn’t rewind or go forward. It’s stuck on the scene at the end where I go around the house looking for ol’ Willie. Here, Willie, c’mon out, Willie.

For the first time since leaving my grandma’s apartment I stopped walking. I looked over the railing and down about three hundred feet into the chasm and the rocks and the rushing water below which I could hear in spite of the rain beating down and the wind. It was too dark to see the river or the rocks down there and I thought now was the time and place if he was going to do it right for the boy to slay self. No muss, no fuss. Behind him nothing but waste and scenes of carnage. Ahead more of the same.

I took off my backpack and set it down on the walkway and climbed up onto the flat top of a concrete post that the iron railing was attached to and with my hands out at my sides stood there for a while listening to the water way below churning over the rocks and felt the cold wind push against my soaked tee shirt and cutoffs and looked up into the black sky and let the rain fall straight onto my face. I was shivering from the cold and the wet and except for that I couldn’t tell anymore what was real from what was only in my head.

The concrete post was slippery under my feet though. And when I noticed that I realized I didn’t want to fall off the bridge into the chasm and bust myself up on the rocks by accident. I figured I’d better get down and think about this some more. I don’t know why but it seemed that the worst thing I could do now was accidentally kill myself. I wanted to do it strictly on purpose. Not some dumb slipup.

Just then I saw the lights of a car approaching from the direction of Willsboro still a long ways off and I started to turn and get down so I could get off of the bridge before the car got close enough to see me because at this hour it was probably a state cop. But when I turned, my right foot slid off the edge of the post and my left followed and for a second I was floating in the air and then I flung out both hands and grabbed at the darkness and found the iron bars of the bridge railing. I clamped on and hung there with my whole body dangling below the bridge while the steady gush of the rain above and the overflowing river far below filled my brain like that classical music from the Burlington station I heard once on a car radio when I was hitching home to Au Sable from the mall. The music was real mellow and relaxing and all, with violins and clarinets and hundreds of other instruments playing this smooth powerful song that rose like in spirals and fell and swirled around and rose again like it could do that forever or at least for a very long time.

I was starting to think the music was strong enough to lift me up and carry me off like on a beautiful soft cloud if I let go of the iron railings which I clung to like they were the bars of a jail cell and my hands were pretty cold by then and I probably couldn’t hold on for more than a few seconds longer anyhow, when the car I’d seen before got to the bridge and splashed across and cast its lights over everything and made me see clearly where I was, dangling a hundred yards above a killer river in a wicked rainstorm. After the car passed on it was like it’d left its lights behind because I could still see exactly what I’d seen in that split second and it freaked me so I pulled myself up and got one foot onto the bridge and then the other and managed to clamber back over the rail to safety.

I was breathing real hard. My teeth were chattering and I was soaked through and my heart and liver felt like they were frozen solid. I went over to my backpack which was all I owned in the world, my rain-soaked worldly effects it would have been if they’d found it there in the morning and my body all smashed up on the rocks below. Opening it I reached in and pulled out the pistol I’d used or thought I’d used and still kneeling flipped it over my shoulder. I watched it sail into the air turning like a tiny dead animal and then disappear into the darkness and down into the chasm. Then I stood up and put the backpack on again and started walking toward Plattsburgh. That was the closest I ever came to committing mass murder and suicide and until now I’ve never told anyone.

By the time I got to the field behind the warehouses and spotted the schoolbus out there in the middle it was dawn and the rain had finally stopped. The sky was a shiny gray color like it had wet paint on it with these wispy white cloud-tails floating underneath here and there. I crossed through the chain-link fence and the tall wet grasses and ragweed and goldenrod in the field slapped against my bare legs and pasted their seeds to my skin as I made my way toward what I guess I now thought of as home. Although the truth is I wasn’t thinking much of anything then, I was dizzy and shivering and probably had a hundred and ten fever and a couple of times during my nightlong hike I’d been really sorry I’d given the sweater I’d taken from Mr. Ridgeway to Sister Rose at the bus station. It was only yesterday morning but back then I’d figured she was going to places unknown and I was going home to where I had parents who’d buy me clothes of my own so I could afford to be generous.

I don’t really remember arriving at the schoolbus, only crossing the field and the weeds and the seeds and hundreds of daisies and black-eyed susans and the bus getting bigger and bigger until it was the only thing I could see, his big banged-up yellow schoolbus with huge green leafy plants instead of kids looking out of the mostly broken windows, and then I was knocking at the door like I was a kid who wanted to be picked up for school and that’s all I remember. It was like once I’d gotten there I could finally let go the way I’d wanted to let go when I was hanging off the bridge because the next thing I remember is waking up inside the bus on a mattress with a blanket around me and a dry tee shirt on that’s too big like a nightshirt.

I felt like a newborn baby. Sunlight was splashing through the windows and I was warm and dry and there was music playing, reggae music, this light bouncy sweet tune with the words, Hey, Mister Yesterday, what are you doing from today? It was so different from the music that I’d heard on the bridge which I now realized was evil and weird and probably sent from Satan like you’re supposed to hear when you play heavy metal backwards that I became at that moment like a complete convert to reggae. It filled my head with light and for the first time I could remember I was happy to be alive.

I ached all over though, like my body was a box of rocks and I could barely turn my head to see where the music was coming from, somewhere above and behind me when suddenly there was I-Man dancing barefoot and wearing his floppy shorts and flipping his head and switching his dreads to the beat with this big spliff in his mouth which smelled like freshly turned earth and sunbeams. He kept on shuffling in this excellent reggae dance around my bed smiling down and nodding his head like he was glad to see me awake but didn’t want to say anything to interrupt the music, just bopping by to check on Mister Yesterday and then moving on down toward the rear of the bus and returning a few seconds later with a steaming bowl in his hand, still dancing and puffing on his spliff until finally the song ended and he said how I was coming forward now and mus’ drink dis herb fe return to de structure of life an’ de fullness dereof.