Rule of the Bone

TWELVE. OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS

It was raining pretty hard when I left the clinic so by the time I got to Grandma’s at the Mayflower Arms Apartments down by the bridge I was soaked even though I jogged most of the way and must’ve looked like a kitten somebody tried to drown in a bag because when Grandma came to the door she didn’t recognize me at first and I had to tell her my name. It’s me, your grandson. The only one incidentally but never mind, she’s old and surprisingly self-centered for a person who doesn’t have long to live. Plus she’d probably decided right after the fire that I’d been burned up in it so I was like a ghost to her and nobody wants to recognize a ghost, even the ghost of their only grandson.

She clapped her hand over her big bosom and said, Chappie? It’s really you? My God, I thought you’d been burned beyond recognition in that fire over the Video Den. You know they found the one body, she added and I said yeah I knew.

She gave me the usual hugs and all, carefully holding her cigarette out to the side so’s not to burn me and keeping her head turned so I wouldn’t knock off these big clip-on earrings that she always wears day and night. She was real glad to see me though and liked holding my hands in her old soft ones once she’d put her cigarette in an ashtray and she enjoyed standing back and looking at me and smiling in a teary way and saying like how happy she was to know that it wasn’t me who was burned beyond recognition. I think that particular phrase pleased her because she used it a lot more than necessary especially if she was trying to make me feel lucky for not being dead which is what she told me, that I should feel lucky for not being burned beyond recognition in that terrible fire. Did I know about the fire, had I seen it? she asked like it’d been the highlight of her year.

I like my grandmother and always have since I was a little kid but I never really know what she’s thinking. Part of it’s she doesn’t either. Also she plucks her eyebrows off and then draws in new ones with a pencil or a special crayon the way she’d want them to look in a fashion magazine which is up high on her forehead practically like she’s stuck in a state of cute permanent surprise so most of the time you actually can’t read her expression very well. It’s sort of a mask. Plus she has this habit of reversing how people are supposed to ask you about yourself so that it comes out she’s really telling you about herself only you aren’t supposed to know it and most people probably don’t. Even I didn’t until I got used to it. Like once on my thirteenth birthday my mom had a special family dinner and Grandma when she sat down at the table took my hand in hers and looked into my eyes and said, Did you ever think you’d be old enough to have a grandmother who’ll be seventy-five in September?

I said, No kidding, Grandma. Happy birthday in advance then, in case I don’t make it to September, but then my mom started dissing me because she knew what I was doing even if Grandma didn’t. I was only kidding though and Grandma likes being kidded. She knows attention when she sees it.

This day she said to me, I bet you never thought you’d see your old grandmother again, did you, Chappie?

Yeah, it’s pretty amazing, I said. But I’ve been over in Vermont, I told her and added the bit about the organic school and the hippie family who were these wicked decent older people with kids and this huge farm they all lived on with some other kids like me who were like foster children and they grew all their own food and ran their own school in the barn and made all their own clothes and shoes even, I said showing her my sandals.

Those are nice, the sandals. I once had a pair that they remind me of, she said. Made by Indians from Mexico or one of those places. I got them at an Indian souvenir place in Lake George. They didn’t last though. But yours look fine, she said. I see you got rid of that weird haircut and all the earrings and that ring in your nose and so on, she said.

Yeah, I said. On account of the rules of the school and all. That’s the one drawback, I told her in case she thought I’d done it to please people like her. At the door when I took off my doo-rag on account of it was soaked she’d seen my hair and she just had to like nod with approval which’d made me instantly want to shave my head and grow back the old mohawk as fast as I could. That’s why afterwards I kind of exposed my arm a few times so she could see my crossed bones if she wanted to comment on something, but I guess she was distracted and didn’t see it or probably she just thought I’d had it all along and couldn’t get rid of it like the haircut and the rings so she’d rather not think about it and didn’t. She was like that, she could think about anything she wanted whenever she wanted or she could decide not to think about it at all and then didn’t. Grandma always had her fingernails to paint, her eyebrows to pluck, her TV shows to watch, plus church and her AA meetings. She’s been in AA for half a century or at least since my mom was a kid and her husband, my mom’s dad who would’ve been my grandfather got killed in a car crash when he was drinking, an event Grandma refers to as her wake-up call and still talks about like it happened a year ago and was a blessing in disguise.

At her weekly meetings in the basement of the Methodist Church Grandma is the one who makes the coffee and cleans up afterwards and gets to complain how they take her for granted. I knew she was the one who’d gotten my mom hooked into the AA, she’d been trying for years and it was probably an okay thing and the reason why my mom was living with her nowadays, and I figured once my mom was sure she’d be able to keep going to AA meetings on her own she’d move out of Grandma’s and back in with Ken.

It couldn’t’ve been much fun living at Grandma’s anyhow. It was a crummy old building full of old people on social security and derelicts and drunks and her whole apartment was smaller than a standard-sized bedroom jammed with all kinds of furniture she couldn’t let go of. Plus I knew when it came to food, TV, housecleaning and so forth it was bound to be Grandma who ran the show, not Mom even if Mom was contributing money for rent and food and all Grandma had to live on was her social security check. Grandma was totally self-centered and strong but my mom who was equally self-centered was weak. I kind of preferred my grandmother’s version though because you could see it coming from last Tuesday and it didn’t make you feel sorry for her all the time. Even when I was so pissed at my mom I could hardly look at her like now I was still feeling sorry for her and guilty. Which is why I probably acted the way I did that day at Grandma’s.

I flopped down on her couch and didn’t move when she started wringing her hands and complaining about how I was getting it all wet. She was like a bird whose nest’d been taken over by a bird of a different breed, fluttering and squawking around while I sat there and ignored her. I picked up the remote and started surfing the TV in a dazed way and put my feet on her coffee table which wasn’t cool I know but I was incredibly pissed off way down deep inside and scared too but I couldn’t say to myself or to anyone else what it was exactly that I was upset about. Except of course that it obviously was about my stepfather and my mother, and me not being able to live a regular life with them.

All that’d been true for a long time but somehow it hadn’t upset me before as much as it did now. All at once it felt like everything was way too complicated for me to control and nobody else was in control either so I didn’t have anyone to turn to for help. Except Grandma and with her the second I walked through the door and she didn’t recognize me I realized she wasn’t going to be any help either. It was like I really was invisible or something and no one could see me. No, actually it was more like I was this human mirror walking down the road and all people could see when they looked in my direction was some reflection of themselves looking back because the main effect was nobody saw me myself, the kid, Chappie, Bone even, no one saw me except as a way to satisfy their desires or meet their needs, the nature of which sometimes they didn’t even know about until I showed up on the scene, like my stepdad’s needs for instance.

I guess I shouldn’t’ve been so pissed off at my grandmother for being unable to deal straight with me though. She was old and poor and uptight and probably scared of things I hadn’t even imagined yet, monsters and demons that only visit old people whose lives are completely behind them now and from that angle look wasted and stupid and unhappy and there’s no chance left of them ever changing things for the better. It’s like the party’s over and it was a bummer of a party and there ain’t gonna be any more. No wonder so many old people act like animals that were mistreated in their youth. I should’ve been helping Grandma to mellow out in these last years of her dumb life and maybe help her see how it hadn’t been all that bad after all but instead I was only making it worse by reminding her of what a poor imitation of a regular family we were, her and my mom and me. It was like she was the seed and my mom was the plant and I was the rotten fruit and what I should’ve done if I couldn’t be the good grandson to her was just leave her alone, stay hidden and let the old lady go around telling people that she’s the grandmother of the poor boy who was burned beyond recognition in the Video Den fire last spring. Then they’d feel sorry for her and make a fuss and she’d be happy as a clam.

She had cable so I watched MTV for a while but she kept trying to butt in and get me talking to her by asking me if I’d seen my mom yet or Ken and I’d just nod or say yeah and go on watching TV, flicking up and down the channels when the ads came on and back to MTV for the music videos which didn’t seem any different from the last time I watched about a year ago before I got kicked out of my mom’s. Mostly music videos’re visual headtrips with a sound track and a good one is a quick low-grade contact high requiring no effort on the part of the user to get high which is cool and if you’re already bummed it’s actually enough.

Beck this singer with only one name like me and I-Man was standing in this orange and purple haze with the silhouettes of the leafless trees of death against a pink sky and singing about how nobody understood him either when Grandma finally lost it and she goes, Chappie, please at least have the decency to turn that down! And pay attention to me when I talk to you, young man! You’re not in your own home, you know, you’re in mine!

I flicked off the TV and stood up and said, Yeah, I’m not in my own home. You sure got that one right. I went over to the fridge and opened it and poked through like I was looking for something in particular but I wasn’t even curious, I just didn’t know what else to do at that moment. I think I was only trying not to cause any more damage than necessary but it probably didn’t look that way to Grandma.

You got anything good in here? I said but I wasn’t hungry, I was just filling the air between us with words.

Do you like egg salad? You used to love my egg salad, she said.

Yeah. I was wondering, I said and closed the refrigerator door pretty hard I guess because she jumped. I was wondering if you could loan me fifty bucks.

Me? Her eyes started darting from side to side like she expected me to rob her and was looking for an escape route. I… I don’t have any money, Chappie. I can’t… you’ll have to ask your mother, she said. Or Ken. Ask your stepfather. What do you want it for?

I don’t want it, Grandma. I need it. There’s a difference.

Oh.

Forget it, Grandma. Forget the fifty bucks. I was only kidding.

She was silent for a minute, we both were, then she said, Are you in some kind of trouble, Chappie? You can tell me, honey. You can trust me, you really can. She was like trying to think her way onto a TV show, one of her afternoon soaps because that’s where her lines were coming from now. I’m your grandmother, honey, and if you can’t trust me who can you trust?

I grinned into her face up close and that snapped her back and I said, Yumsters! Yumsters, Grandma! Me want yumsters! Can Grandma give Chappie some yumsters? ‘Cause if she can he’ll be one happy Chappie, all his problems over at last.

Stop that! You… you’re just like your father! She goes, You do the same things to me that he did!

What d’you mean, man! I’m nothin’ like him! That’s why my mom and him tossed me out, isn’t it? Get a clue, Grandma.

I don’t mean Ken. I know you’re nothing like him. Although if you really want to know, it might help if you were a little more like him. Except for the drinking maybe. She puffed herself up a little and after a few seconds remembered what she’d been saying. No, I mean your real father. Paul. He used to talk to me exactly the way you’re doing now. He used to make me feel afraid that he was going to get all crazy on me, although he never actually did. But still that man could make me very very nervous. He wasn’t normal.

My real father used to make you nervous? How’d he do that? Why?

Oh, you know, just by talking in a funny way, real fast and about things that didn’t make sense like you were doing just now, and he didn’t seem to care one way or the other. I used to think he was on drugs or something, the way he talked, and your mother told me after the divorce that she thought he took cocaine and was possibly an addict because of how he went through so much money. He made very good money.

No way! Coke? My father? Wow, I said. Cool. I was suddenly for the first time since I was a little kid very eager to hear about my real father. Usually I just shut down whenever his name came into the conversation and it was like they were talking about somebody I never met and who didn’t have any impact on my life anyhow so why should I care et cetera. But I was like five years old when my father left and I had memories of him and I knew things, although my memories were fuzzy and I couldn’t really see him in my mind except for the picture I once found in one of my grandmother’s albums. It’s this snapshot of him and my mom standing in front of his ‘81 Blazer in the driveway of my mom’s same house which they had just bought then and she got in the divorce later. He’s a lot taller than my mom, taller than Ken too and skinny and he looks kind of good-humored like he knows there’s a joke going on but no one else has caught it yet, and I can see from this long leather coat he’s wearing that he’s on the flashy side, he’s cooler than my mom, he’s a guy who likes new 4x4s and wouldn’t be caught dead in one of Ken’s turquoise nylon jogging suits. Anyhow I never wanted to know much about him, on account of his leaving me to Ken, I guess although he didn’t actually leave me to Ken, I’m pretty sure he never even met Ken, that was after. The point is I just sort of numbed out on the subject of my real father for years and didn’t even want to hear his name. Paul. Paul Dorset.

Now though suddenly I was asking Grandma all these questions, like what kind of work did he do back then and where did he go after the divorce and so on. I think she was relieved to have a normal conversation with me no matter what the subject because she started rattling away and pretty soon didn’t need any questions from me to grease her wheels.

She said that my father’d worked as a medical technician which was cool. An x-ray expert she called him and he made big bucks but she didn’t think he was much of an expert on anything except lying to people since she knew for a fact that he never went to medical technician school or even to x-ray school and he had lied about his so-called military record where he was supposedly an EMS ambulance driver. My mom who worked in personnel at the clinic then knew the truth because she was supposed to check that sort of thing out when they hired anybody and she’d told Grandma all about his lies after the divorce when she was no longer protecting him. Although she had to swear Grandma to secrecy because of Mom being the one to cover for him. He was smart, he’d known to ask my mom out on a date the same day he applied for the job and she fell for him and when it came back that he’d never gone to the schools and that he’d been dishonorably discharged from the air force and all she didn’t tell anyone because by then she was head over heels in love with him.

My father was a fast talker, a smoothie was Grandma’s word which struck me as funny, the idea of my old man being a smoothie and wasting it on Grandma and Mom who were both unusually gullible let’s say especially when it came to men which they pretty much worshiped. But I liked picturing my father’s talents being wasted on them and on the whole town of Au Sable actually, a place that smoothies may come from but if they’re any good at smoothing they never stay. Was he from Au Sable? I asked her. Did he grow up here and have like a family? I’d be related to them if he did. I’d have cousins.

No, he was from away, she said. He was from someplace downstate although you couldn’t believe him about that either and in fact he had a funny accent like he was originally from Massachusetts or Maine where they talk like President Kennedy, all nasal and without any r’s which was attractive and made him sound smarter and better educated than he really was.

I thought that was cool and remembering the picture of him decided that he actually looked like JFK too. The same haircut anyhow. Sort of a young Jack Kennedy, that was my real dad.

So tell me the truth, Grandma, why’d they get divorced? I asked her. I’d been told stuff over the years but mostly it’d come down to him having this girlfriend Rosalie on the side which from letters I found once and read he didn’t really care about, not the way he cared about my mom anyhow. At least that’s what he said in the letters. But usually people don’t go to all the trouble of a divorce especially when they have a little five-year-old kid who loves and needs both his parents equally unless there’s something more wrong than the fact that somebody hooked up with somebody else a few times or even a bunch of times. So I wondered what the real story was.

Well, it didn’t disappoint me they got divorced, she said. The man was no good, he was a drug addict probably which I didn’t know at the time and he drank too much although that’s no sin. But I told your mother that she should be strong and she was.

What?

Strong.

About what?

About getting divorced from him. After she found out he was seeing other women. It was all over town, she said. You wanted her to divorce him?

She said, Oh sure, of course. She was much better off without him.

According to Grandma my father’d claimed to be sorry and all and cried and begged and told my mom he didn’t want the divorce but Grandma made sure my mom got a good lawyer and the judge gave her the house plus a hundred dollars a week child support which she never saw a penny of, and he gave my father liberal visitation rights which he never used since he would’ve had to pay a little child support if he wanted to see me.

So she didn’t let him have any visitations with me? I was wondering if things would’ve been different if I’d’ve had my real father to go to when I was seven and Ken first started in. I think I would’ve gone to him and told and my real father would’ve taken me away with him and for a second I flashed on that, it was like a picture of me and him riding in his Blazer 4x4, he’s like JFK and I’m his little son. With my real father to help me I wouldn’t have been scared to tell like I was with my mom who I couldn’t go to or didn’t think I could because Ken was her husband and she loved him supposedly and never let me complain about him even a little without telling me how lucky I was to have him for a stepfather.

No, Grandma said, I didn’t want that man in the same house with you two. Of course not. Not unless he was willing to pay up the child support he owed your mother. Grandma said she’d offered to move in with me and my mom but by then Mom was seeing Ken and he moved in instead. I could tell that had given Grandma a crossed hair but she couldn’t say it of course or people might think the reason she’d pushed so hard for the divorce was so she could have a nicer place to live for herself. Grandma’s a person with permanent ulterior motives.

I asked her if she knew where my father took off for after the divorce because so far as I knew he hadn’t stayed in Au Sable or even Plattsburgh. No one in town’d ever once mentioned him to me. It was like he was this mysterious stranger named Paul Dorset who looked and talked like JFK and he rode into Au Sable one day and married the prettiest gal in town and then he knocked her up and married her and one day after a little nastiness the stranger rode out of town again and except for the gal and her immediate family no one remembered him as having even been there. They were like, Who was that masked man? And he was like, Hi yo, Silver, awa-a-ay!

Grandma said after the divorce he went to the Caribbean, one of those foreign countries down there like Jamaica or Cuba or at least that’s what she’d heard from someone at the bank, a friend of hers who was a teller who a year or so after the divorce was told in a letter to close out my dad’s account and send the balance to a bank in Jamaica or someplace like that which she happened to remember because right after she did that a whole bunch of checks came in that bounced like rubber balls but there wasn’t anything the bank could do since my dad was out of the country now. They had a warrant for his arrest, Grandma said, for bouncing checks and for nonpayment of child support which she had encouraged my mother to file for since it was criminal for a man not to help pay for his own son’s food, clothes and housing, didn’t I agree?

I guess so, I said. But maybe if he’d been able to get to know me a little he’d’ve been more willing to kick in and help pay for things. The way it is now he’d be busted if he tried to even see me, I said.

You better believe it, mister! Grandma said. She could get fierce when she wanted to, a regular wolf in grandmother’s clothing. And you should be more appreciative of everything your mother’s done for you, she said. And Ken, him too. He’s been more of a father to you than your real father ever was.

Oh yeah, wow, fucking A, man! Dear old Daddy Ken, I almost forgot about what a great guy he’s been all my life. Thanks for reminding me, man, I said and I was up and stomping around now wanting to knock something over, wanting to trash the place or start tossing all the furniture out the window and see it break down on the sidewalk so I figured I’d better get the hell out of there before I did something that I’d really regret afterwards because I didn’t want to hurt my grandmother or harsh on her too much or wreck any of her stuff. She didn’t know any better than to be the way she was.

Look, I gotta get outa here, Grandma, I said to her and grabbed up my backpack and tied my doo-rag back on which had dried out on the radiator while we were talking.

She was wringing her hands and all, saying how she hoped she hadn’t upset me with all this talk about my father and I said no way and if it was up to me I’d go to Jamaica or wherever tomorrow and find him if I could because I had a few things he might be interested in hearing. Stuff about my stepfather, I said to her.

That lit up her screen. Really? she said. About Ken? Like what?

I smiled at her and said, Wouldn’t you like to know. Hang in there, Granny, I said. If things work out you may end up living in Mom’s house with her after all.

She smiled in that innocent way of hers and she goes, Well, I did point out how they had an extra bedroom now. With you gone, I mean.

Yeah, well, don’t worry, I’ll stay gone. The place needs a little bit of a clean-up though, I said. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and went down the ratty old smelly hallway to the stairs and down the stairs to the street. I couldn’t much blame her for wanting to get out of that place and my mom was an incredible wuss to be staying there with her. The whole scene gave me the creeps.

Out on the street it was almost dark and the rain was still coming down. I didn’t put out my thumb or look for a ride or anything though, I just walked straight out of town and along the side of Route 9N toward Plattsburgh. With my luck if I hitched I’d get picked up by Russ or the Bong Brothers, or maybe the Ridgeways in their Saab or why not ol’ Buster Brown in his church van? Better to walk all night long in the rain if that’s the only way to get back to the bus and I-Man. Besides I had plenty of new stuff to think about now, especially about me and my real father.