Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Sure, I said. When?

Oh, anytime. Tonight if you want.

Sure, I said and got up from the table and dumped the trash in the barrel like Froggy’d done and Buster and me went back into the mall and headed toward the exit down past Sears and J.C. Penney’s, opposite the way Froggy had gone. I was feeling lucky now because of how things were turning out after such a lousy start— me and Russ being kicked out of our crib by the bikers and Russ going back to his mom’s which was not an option for me and the cold and the snow and no money and no drugs. Now as I walked past Sears with this cool dude Buster Brown it looked like all my problems were solved, at least temporarily.

If I’m going to your place, I said to him, you oughta give me some money. For the screen test and all, I say.

That depends.

On what? I say and I stop right there so he’ll know I’m serious.

He’s like, Well, various things, Chappie. It depends on how much the camera loves you, for instance. You may not be in the slightest photogenic, despite your beauty to the naked eye. That’s why it’s called a screen test, Chappie. You have to pass it.

I’m like, Gimme twenty bucks up front or find yourself another protégé. Plus I don’t do no sex with you. No fucking or sucking. Just the screen test.

Just the screen test, he says smiling and he pulls a twenty from his wallet and hands it to me. You drive a hard bargain, Chappie, he says.

Yeah, well, I had a good teacher, you might say. I’m thinking at that moment of my stepfather, I’m like flashing on his face, the outline of his head in the dark really so not quite his face and his smell of booze and Brut and the sandpaper scratch of his chin on my shoulder and neck. I almost never think about that stuff anymore, except when my mom tells me how lucky I am that he’s my stepfather which she doesn’t do since they kicked me out of the house for stealing and me being into drugs and all.

So how come you bought those pantyhoses? I ask Buster as we pass out the door by Sears into the parking lot. It was snowing fairly hard by now and there weren’t many cars in the lot. A couple of plows were scraping away at the far end.

Pantyhose! What makes you think that’s what I’ve got? he asked and he held up the Victoria’s Secret bag and wagged it.

I seen you buy them, man.

Ah, you were tracking me, were you? Playing detective, eh? And now you’re thinking you’ve caught me, he said. Only maybe instead I’ve caught you. He laughed at that like it was a big joke.

Whaddaya got, a girlfriend or something? I was starting to think he was a Canadian again because of the pantyhose. You see a lot of Canadians down here buying stuff they can’t get at home.

You’d look pretty terrific in pantyhose, he tells me.

Yeah, sure, I say. You can forget that. Forget all about it, man. I asked him where his car was and he said back alongside the J.C. Penney’s building. Then I asked him where’s his crib and he just said not far. Good, I said, because I ain’t going to no Canada tonight.

He said, Hey, no problema, Chappie. No problema.

Yeah, sure, I say. We’re walking side by side close to the building to stay out of the wind and snow and as we’re passing the big J.C. Penney’s windows I notice up ahead that there’s a guy working inside on one of the window displays and he’s got all these naked mannequins that he’s moving around. When we get closer I see that the mannequins are like in pieces with their arms and hands lying on the floor and some of them don’t even have any heads and the ones that do are bald. They have breasts and all but no nipples or pubic hair. It’s like they’re adults but they’re really little kids. Then the guy who’s setting them up disappears through a door into the store to get some clothes for them or something and I stop by the glass and look in at all the body parts.

C’mon, Chappie, Buster said. We’ve done our window-shopping for tonight.

Yeah, wait a minute, I said. I’d never seen mannequins like that before, all naked with their arms and heads looking like they were sliced off. There were these bright overhead lights inside the window that made it look like a dissecting room in a morgue or something. Definitely it was the grossest thing I’d ever seen, at least at that moment it was which is strange I guess because I’d seen lots of really gross things by then.

C’mon, let’s get out of here, Buster says like suddenly he’s afraid someone’ll see us.

I say, I don’t think I want to do that screen test, man.

Cut the shit, Chappie. We have a deal.

No, I say and I back off a few steps. I still couldn’t take my eyes off the mannequins. It was like I was in a dream and I didn’t want to wake up and this guy Buster Brown was standing by my bed shaking me by the shoulder.

He goes like, There’s the matter of my twenty bucks, kid.

That’s when I turned and started running. I ran back the way we’d come, past the Sears toward the entrance to the mall and I hear Buster’s feet slamming along behind me and him hollering, You little bastard! Give me back my money!

Buster was definitely pissed and he ran pretty good for an old guy so when I go through the door he’s only a few steps behind me. Inside there was no one in sight except way in the distance by the fountain but I spotted a fire exit sign a little ways down the mall and a door I could maybe lock behind me once I got through. I raced over to it and yanked it open and went in and slammed it shut just as Buster got there. There was no way to lock it from the inside though so I clamped onto the handle while Buster pulled on the other side until finally I couldn’t hold it closed anymore and when I let go Buster went flying.

Before he could get up I pulled the door shut again and took off down this long narrow hallway. There were doors and other hallways running off the main hall like in a video game maze and with all these fluorescent lights it was very bright, but no people anywhere. At one point I stopped and peeked back around a corner and listened for Buster. I could hear footsteps in the distance, some body running but I couldn’t tell if it was water dripping or him or if he was going in the other direction away from me or about to pounce on me from behind. I didn’t even know how to get back to the mall where the people were.

This time when I start to run it’s like I’m a little kid lost in some kind of carnival funhouse and I’m panicking. I go down one hall and hang a left and come to a dead-end and make a U-turn back the same way I came. A second later I’m running along another hall and when I fly through a door with an exit sign on it I’m in a hall just like the one I left. I’m totally confused by now. It’s like I’ve been taken off the planet earth and set down on this new planet where there’s no people. I think I was almost crying by then.

Suddenly I smelled food cooking. There was a door ahead of me and when I pushed through it I almost knocked over a huge stainless steel counter with all kinds of steaming food in these big pans. I’m back in the mall but I’ve come out in the middle of the food court behind the counter of Wang’s Pavilion the Chinese take-out place and these three Chinese guys and a tiny Chinese woman are staring at me very shocked. They all start jabbering in Chinese at once and waving their hands at me in this very pissed-off way.

I go, C’mon, man, chill out, willya fucking chill, for chrissake! But it’s like they don’t understand English. It was late and there were no customers in the place anyhow but these people were acting like I’m some kind of freako terrorist. I pull out Buster’s twenty and go, Hey, man, I just want to buy some chopped suey, and they shut up for a second and stare suspiciously at the money like it’s not American. But then I glance over their heads into the food court and here comes Buster.