Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

I freeze and the Chinese guys follow my eyes and slowly turn around and then they see him too and they must be figuring out that he’s the bad guy I’m running from because they don’t say anything, they just go back to work cleaning out their pans and stacking trays and so on. Then I noticed that Buster had Froggy the Gremlin with him. He was holding her by the hand like she was a rag doll. She looked really tired now, like she was in a nod.

They walked slowly past Wang’s and out of the food court on down the mall toward the exit to the parking lot and I watched them the whole time until they disappeared from sight. I felt incredibly sad then. I felt guilty too because of losing my courage and deciding not to take her place when I saw those mannequins in the window.

What you want? the head Chinese guy said to me.

I pointed to a couple of green and brown things in the pans and he dished the stuff into a Styrofoam box and I paid and got my change. I was ready to book through the front when I spotted Black Bart cruising the food court looking spaced like he’d managed to score some weed. It was late, there was almost nobody left in the mall except the workers and Bart making his nightly roundup of the last couple of kids still hanging out and the bums sleeping on the benches and so on, driving them with his stoned smile into the cold snowy night.

Not me though. I slipped through the door behind Wang’s Pavilion with my box of food and returned to the maze of hallways out back where I wandered around until finally I found this janitor’s closet I could sleep in and Bart didn’t find out about me crashing back there every night until about two weeks later. By then everything was cool with the bikers again and Russ’s mom had kicked him out for drinking all her booze one night and busting the place up so we went back to our old crib over the Video Den in Au Sable. Russ had his same room as before and I had to sleep on the couch in the livingroom but I didn’t mind, I knew then that as long as my stepfather was still living at my mom’s I was never going back there.

In the beginning and all winter I was only dealing small-load weed to the bikers which was cool because A, lots of kids in Au Sable were dealing then mostly in school where I never went near anyhow but everywhere around town too so we were like a swarm of flies and it was low-risk to be one of them what with so few swatters. And B, it didn’t feel like a wrong thing to be doing even though it was illegal. Especially given the way I looked at booze in those days from what I saw of its effect on the bikers for one and my stepdad for another and even my mom, which is not something I want to go into right now. Plus it was the only way I could keep my crib in the apartment over the Video Den with my friend Russ and his biker roommates.

I was pretty heavy into skunk then myself but I could’ve dumped it off easy if I’d had a good reason to, which I didn’t because like always high was better than low as those were my only two alternatives. It was cool though, so long as I had a warm squat and adequate food to eat and friends.

Russ was my friend. And the bikers were my friends too, even though they were older and kind of unpredictable. Russ had hooked up with them because of his job at the Video Den, which he’d had since before he quit school and got kicked out of his house by his mom for doing drugs. But the job was only part-time days and he couldn’t afford the apartment over the store on his own so he offered to share it with this one guy he knew, Bruce Walther who was more or less a friendly biker in spite of how he looked.

But then Bruce’d started bringing his friends into the Place because they were sort of a gang although he called them family. He like underlined it when he said it. These dudes’re fam-i-ly, man. You don’t fucking deny your family.

So they moved in, different ones, four or five of them at a time and sometimes their girlfriends who they called their old ladies or just split-tails or gash but the same ones never stayed long. The squat was this big funky apartment owned by Rudy LaGrande the guy who ran the Video Den with three bedrooms and a bunch of mostly broken old furniture. The stove partially worked though and the refrigerator but I remember the toilet was stopped up a lot that winter. Russ still paid half the rent but only got the pantry off the kitchen for his room where he had a mattress on the floor and his old stereo from home and his heavy metal tapes and Playboy collection all of which the bikers used whenever they wanted so Russ kept a lock on the door.

No question my mom and Ken truly did not want to see me anymore so I settled permanently onto this ratty old sofa in the livingroom which was okay except when the bikers were partying which they did a lot of and sometimes passed out on my couch and burned holes in it and barfed in their sleep. Once in a while like when they got whacked on crank they went crazy and Russ and I had to sleep in his car or someplace else but as long as I kept the bikers in skunk the apartment was free for me and usually peaceful so I didn’t complain. I had to unload the weed pretty much at cost to keep the bikers from buying it off of other kids or trying to buy it themselves off of Hector the Spanish guy, who was only into selling sandwich bags wholesale to kids which I think is the safest way to deal in a small town. But I still managed once in a while to pull a few bucks out for myself plus the occasional nick. Besides all I needed money for then was smokes and food which I mostly ate at the mall because if I brought anything back to the squat the bikers ate it. It was smalltime dealing for sure and in spite of it I was usually broke but it wasn’t very dangerous or wrong and my material needs were few.

Plus for a kid without a home it was an interesting way of life. The bikers for instance kept you pretty alert. Bruce was sort of the head biker because he’d been in the Gulf War and knew a lot about Arabs and desert life and weapons and he had these incredible tattoos all over his chest and back and up and down his arms of Arab guys with swords in their teeth and harem girls and suchlike. He lifted weights all day at Murphy’s Gym where he said he was one of the trainers but he only hung out there and got to use the weights free because he was a good advertisement. He had arms and pecs as big as hams and because of them and his tattoos he almost never wore a shirt except for when he went out in winter when he just wore his leather jacket and kept it unzipped. He had an incredible body for a human being, like he was from the planet of the weightlifters, and he had these awesome nipple rings and shaved the hair off of his chest and stomach several times a week. Straights gave Bruce a lot of room and he took it like it was his in the first place, like he was a cop although he hated cops and called them pigs. Bruce used quite a few of those old hippie terms.

I think he was the smartest of the bikers who actually as a group were not very intelligent. Russ was intelligent. More than me anyhow and even more than Bruce although I was two years younger than Russ whereas Bruce was probably thirty. Smart or not, Russ was only sixteen then and thus he pretty much had to take shit not just from Bruce but from all the bikers which was often some pretty stupid shit, like when after they’d seen this old biker movie they made him stand in the middle of the Grand Union parking lot one night while they drove their Harleys around him in figure 8s to see who could come closest without hitting him. I sat in Russ’s Camaro and watched and kept hoping they wouldn’t remember I was there which they didn’t because they were so whacked and into tormenting Russ who I think bugged them on account of his intelligence and the Video Den guy had put the lease in his name so Russ had to collect the rent. Also Russ tended to talk too much and too big especially when he was scared, and around the bikers he was scared a lot so they liked to punish him for that too.