Rule of the Bone

SIX. SKULL & BONES

We booked like mad through a bunch of backyards and cut down to the river where there’s this narrow brick walkway from the olden days when the mill was running that snakes under the Main Street Bridge. You can stand down there next to the water which in spring comes right up to your feet and smoke a J if you want or just hang out and talk without being seen or heard which is why kids have been going there for generations I think.

Due to the fire and everybody in town wanting to watch it, us getting out of Au Sable without being seen was easier than it probably should’ve been but of course nobody was actually looking for me and Russ yet. They didn’t know yet that we were missing and presumed dead.

It was my idea not to let anyone see us.

Russ said, Maybe they’ll be so busy putting the fire out and keeping it from spreading and all that they won’t notice my stuff and we can go back later for it. Plus he was worried about his car. Russ is a very material guy.

I said, No way, man. Firemen are really smart and they hate unanswered questions. They’re not like cops, I told him, who would’ve just grabbed up all of Russ’s stolen VCRs and computers for themselves like it was Christmas and then busted us for some other crime than stealing. Like arson, even though it was only accidental. And once they found Bruce’s body up there in the apartment which unless he was burned to a crisp they could identify easy because of all his Gulf War tattoos they’d try and nail us for murder although a lot of people’d want to give us a good citizenship medal for getting rid of the bikers regardless of how we’d done it.

Either way I didn’t want to be connected to what had happened to Bruce. I didn’t even want to think about it. He was my friend and he’d tried to save me. It was just had luck that I’d already been saved by Russ.

What we got to do now, man, I told him, is disappear off the face of the earth. If anybody sees us they’ll have more questions than we’ve got answers for.

Boy, is my mom going to be pissed, he said.

Forget that, man. Your mom is like my mom, I said. They’ll both think we died in the fire with Bruce and will be real sad or else as usual they won’t know where we are and won’t really give a shit. Russ’s mom wasn’t married with a regular job like mine, she was sort of a hooker who worked in a bar near the air force base and lied about her age and told the guys she brought home that Russ was her nephew which is why he left home when he was fifteen in the first place. She was a babe but I actually preferred my mom to his although he was better off than I was having no stepdad like mine to deal with.

We stayed there under the bridge in the dark for about an hour listening to the cars and trucks rumbling overhead and the steady roar of the river which was only a few inches below the walkway and the occasional siren as fire trucks from the towns around came in to help. A fire is one of the few things that gets people together nowadays. The bridge was a big stone arch and when we looked out from under it we could see a piece of the sky which was all lit up like there was a night baseball game over where we used to live with the bikers and it did make me want to go and join the crowd so I tried not to look.

What I really wanted was to get high but neither of us had any weed so Russ and I talked for a while about Bruce and what a cool dude he was and what bastards the other bikers were to leave him like that. He had soul, man, Russ said. White soul. You know what I’m saying?

I said, Yeah, but actually I didn’t want to talk about him anymore because of how my feelings were all mixed up. Then one time I peeked out and noticed that the sky was getting dark again so I figured we should book while people were still somewhat distracted by the fire and thinking maybe we had burned up in it. Russ had about ten bucks and an almost full pack of cigarettes and I had nothing but the clothes on my back but Russ said he knew these excellent guys in Plattsburgh who lived in a bus where we could crash as long as we wanted and no one would know because there were always different kids who stayed there between squats, nobody permanent except the dudes who owned the bus.

We couldn’t get out of Au Sable though and hitch over to Plattsburgh without being spotted and we didn’t have Russ’s Camaro anymore so we decided to sneak up by Stewart’s which is like this late-night convenience store where people drive in for last-minute items like cigarettes or beer and sometimes leave their car running outside. By keeping to the alleys and backyards we got to Stewart’s without anyone noticing us and then hid behind a dumpster next to the store and waited. It was pretty cold but I had my shearling jacket and Russ had his Islanders hoodie so we were okay.

Quite a few cars and pickups came in and a lot of them were people we actually knew but they were locals and knew not to leave the motor running. After a while the out-of-town fire engines and some of the volunteer firemen with their blue bubble lights on the dashboards started passing by and two or three of them stopped for gas or went in for supplies and the such but even though they were from away they shut off the motor and took their keys with them.

Then this one pickup, a red practically new Ford Ranger pulled in. It was a volunteer fireguy probably heading home to Keene or some other small town where nothing was open this late. After a few minutes he came out with a bag of groceries and got into his truck and started to back out but then he suddenly stopped and jumped down from the cab and with the motor still running walked slowly back inside the store like he’d forgotten something he was supposed to bring home for the wife and was pissed.

Russ ran around to the front of the store, took a quick look through the window and came back to the dumpster and said it was cool, the guy had his head in the ice cream freezer. We scooted across the lot and Russ jumped in on the driver’s side and I climbed in beside him and we were outa there.

At first I thought Russ was going the wrong way but it was only a deceptive maneuver to make the guy or anyone who saw his truck leaving the lot think we were headed west in the direction of Lake Placid instead of east to Plattsburgh. As soon as we’d gone a few blocks he cut left and zipped back on River Street which turns into River Road and then crosses the river on this old wooden bridge outside of town a ways where it connects a few miles further on to the main road to Plattsburgh.

A few minutes later we were doing eighty headed east on Route 9N smoking the fireguy’s cigarettes from the carton of Camel Lights I’d found in his grocery bag and laughing like crazy. There was other good stuff in there too— a twelve-pack of Bud kings, Fritos, some chips, and some Kotexes probably for the guy’s wife which naturally caused Russ to make a couple of his cruder jokes but I didn’t mind because for the moment at least we were like free, free to just be ourselves, driving fast with the windows down and the heater blasting, smoking cigarettes and eating junk food and drinking beer and crankin’ with Nirvana’s Serve the Servants on WIZN screaming from the speakers. It was definitely cool. We even switched on the blue bubble light so if anyone saw us they’d think we were heading for a fire.

Russ said, Yesss! and pumped his fist and I said, Yesss! and did the same although it felt a little stupid because of everything that’d happened. But life is short I guess and you have to celebrate it when you can so that’s basically what we did.

* * *

We stayed off the Northway and shut off the bubble light because there was likely to be staties cruising and took the back roads into Plattsburgh and parked the pickup in a used-car lot out on Mechanic Street where there were fifty or sixty used trucks for sale. It was around midnight by then and not much traffic and only a few local cops who were probably drinking coffee over at Dunkin’ Donuts so there was very little danger of us getting caught.

After Russ took the number plates off the truck with this screwdriver he found in the glove compartment the fireguy’s Ranger looked like all the other pickups on the lot. Russ figured it wouldn’t be discovered there until somebody tried to buy it or else they did an inventory and when they did no way it could be tied to us. Russ was good at criminal activities and even when he was doing something for the first time it seemed like he’d already done it twice last week.

The number plates he put in the bag with the beer and stuff because he figured maybe we could sell them if we met somebody who was into stealing cars and then we booked on foot for the dudes who lived in the bus, which wasn’t very far, Russ said.

It was out past these old warehouses and junkyards where there weren’t any regular homes or stores and you had to go through a break in a chain-link fence and cross a huge field where people had dumped old tires and refrigerators and such. It was kind of spooky out there in the dark lugging the grocery bag over the rough crumbly ground with the wind blowing and everything smelling wet and rusty like it was a hazardous waste site or something. Russ said he’d only been out here once when he took home this girl he’d picked up at the mall and it turned out she was crashing at the bus with these crack-heads from Glens Falls who were going to Montreal for a Grateful Dead concert but never made it.

Was she a crackhead too? I asked him. I didn’t think I’d ever met one. I knew lots of kids who’d done crack a few times but they were just normal like me.

She was into rock, yeah. She said she was sixteen but I think she was real young. Fourteen or something. Maybe thirteen.

Wow. Thirteen. That’s young. For crack, I mean. You didn’t screw her or anything, did ya?

Jesus, no, Chappie. Whaddaya think I am, a goddam pervert? All she wanted was money for rock anyhow and I was broke. There were these other guys there though that she gave blowjobs to for only two bucks apiece and then she got her kibbles and bits and got high. I couldn’t relate, you know what I’m saying?

Yeah, sure, I said and we kept walking for a while without talking. These guys who own the bus, I said, are they crackheads?

I don’t know. I guess so, maybe. But they’re cool, he said. They’re college guys or something.

I didn’t see the bus until we were practically in front of it. It was this old dented beat-to-shit regulation schoolbus like from before Vietnam with broken headlights and the windows which were mostly busted were covered over inside with cardboard and no tires or wheels even. It was lying on the ground at a slight angle and looked like it had been dragged there and dropped in the middle of the field with the rest of the junk. It was still yellow but faded and people had painted peace signs and hippie flowers and a few deadhead slogans on the sides and it stank pretty bad when we got close to it like people had been shitting and pissing a lot in the immediate vicinity.

There was the one door at the front and Russ knocked on it and said, Yo, man, anybody home?

Somebody lifted a corner of the cardboard on the window next to the door, checked us out and dropped it again. There was some rummaging-around noise from inside and then this guy’s voice says, We don’t want any we don’t got any it’s fucking late go away.

Russ goes, Hey, c’mon, man, it’s me, Russ. Me and my buddy, we got some beer.

The wind was blowing pretty hard and it was definitely cold out there and weird so I was getting anxious to get invited inside even though maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. The vibes off this wrecked schoolbus were way negative. We waited a few minutes and I was going to suggest to Russ that we should forget it although I didn’t know any other place we could go. Maybe we could break into a furniture warehouse or something, I thought. I once heard about some kids who did that and lived there for a whole winter, when suddenly the door opened and this tall skinny dude with a scrawny rat’s-ass beard and pimples and hair down over his shoulders stepped outside and the first thing about him I noticed is that he smelled really ripe like he hadn’t taken a bath in a year.

Yo, man, Russ says, wussup. Remember me? I came here once, man. I brought the chick who was with the two dudes from Glens Falls.

The guy only looks at Russ with a stoned smile and then at me the same. Who’s he? the guy says pointing a long bony finger so Russ told him my name and the guy said his. Richard, man. Richard. He leaned down then and poked his face into my grocery bag and all of a sudden it’s like he’s in a completely different head and he says, Well well well what have we here a little beer a little bit o’ chips a little o’ this and a little o’ that. And number plates! Stolen number plates I bet! Yummm! We even got us some sanitary napkins, he says pulling out the Kotexes. We don’t need those, do we? and he tosses them into the darkness and goes back into the bag and pulls out a beer and says, It’s like Halloween only the trickers come a-treatin’ and the treaters come a-trickin’. He goes on talking like that, real fast and spindly, sort of to himself but not really, like he basically can’t think of anything to say so he lets his mouth do it all for him.

He didn’t seem to remember Russ from before or not to remember him either— it was like he was empty inside and stuff you said to him bounced around in his head like BBs or paintballs for a few seconds and then rolled to the bottom. After a few minutes of Russ trying to have a regular conversation with the guy he suddenly turned around and walked back inside the bus leaving the door open so we followed him in.

It was dark but they had a couple of candles burning so you could see things okay and I could tell right away that there was this one other guy there who looked just like Richard, tall and real thin, same long hair and ratty brown beard and pimples, same filthy tee shirt and raggedy jeans. He was sitting in the busdriver’s seat with his bare feet up on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead like he was driving someplace and steering with his feet.

Russ goes, What’s happening, man.

You got to pay your fare, the guy says and Russ handed him one of our beers and the guy popped it and instantly started chugging like he was starving.

This’s James, Russ says to me. Him and Richard are brothers.

No shit, I said.

Even though most of the passenger seats had been yanked and the place was surprisingly big inside like a house trailer, it wasn’t exactly homey. There were three or four old mattresses on the floor and some really moldy-looking sleeping bags and a couple of livingroom chairs with stuffing coming out that looked like they came from the dump and a table made from boards and cinderblocks with piles of dirty pans and dishes all over it and old clothes and newspapers and magazines and some kind of old brown rug on the floor that smelled and looked like they got it off a sunken ship and posters on the ceiling and against the cardboard walls from like a two-year-old Red Hot Chili Peppers concert and retro bands like Aerosmith which I guess college guys are into.

Actually I was kind of grossed out by the place but I figured it was better than no place and Richard and James seemed nonviolent types which after the bikers was almost relaxing so I came inside and sat down on one of the old bus seats like I was a passenger and opened a beer and ate some Fritos. Russ did the same although he also talked to Richard and James for a while but that’s Russ, he’ll talk to anyone and most people will talk to him.

He was going on about the bikers and the fire and all although not about the stolen VCRs and TVs I noticed, when I got sleepy and lay back on the seat. It was made of imitation leather and felt cool against my face and smelled the same as the schoolbus seats when I was a little kid, like cheese sandwiches and sour milk. I remember just before I fell asleep that night which was the first night of my new life that it would be wicked cool to have a real bus, one that worked and all and fix it up inside like a home and drive it around the country your whole life, stopping wherever you felt like and making a little money off a job for a while and if you got restless just taking off again. You could have friends and family with you some of the time and be alone some of the time but basically, and this would be the best thing, you’d be in complete charge of your life like those old pioneers in their covered wagons.

This bus, man, this bus is the same one me and James used to ride to school in when we were little kids, Richard said.

Cool, Russ said. It was morning but pretty late, like noon I think when I finally woke up and James was gone but Russ and Richard were smoking the fireguy’s cigarettes and talking like normal people for a change so I ate some more Fritos and just listened. I couldn’t talk anyhow because the Fritos made me too thirsty and the beer was finished I noticed and there wasn’t anything else to drink, no running water or electricity for a fridge or anything although in the daytime the place didn’t look as creepy as before. Rays of sunlight were streaking through cracks in the cardboard and the door was hanging open so there was some fresh air coming in. It still smelled a little like a hazardous waste site though, like they’d buried a million old car batteries out there.

Richard was going on about how him and his brother and sister used to ride the bus to school every day but this one time him and his brother stayed home sick and that was the day the bus went off a cliff and crashed in a quarry. A shitload of kids were killed, man, but my sister, man, she was okay, he said. Well not okay, she got busted up pretty good, broke her back and everything and now she’s in a wheelchair and all that. But check it out, this fucking bus, man, me and my brother James, we wasn’t on the bus that fateful day, so this bus was like good karma for us and bad karma for my sister Nichole and bad karma for practically every kid except me and James in the whole town of Sam Dent. That’s where we’re from, man. You know it, you’re from Au Sable, right?

Russ said yeah, he knew where Sam Dent was which is over near Keene where Russ had an aunt, his mom’s sister who was supposedly his mom. But I never heard of no schoolbus accident there, he said. I woulda heard, I think.

Long time ago, man. Eight, ten years. You’re too young to remember. It was big though, TV and everything, lawsuits, the whole thing. But lemme tell about the fucking bus, man. After the accident and all, nobody wanted to touch it, you know? It was like cursed. Except for me and James, on account of how we’d stayed home that day. So when we graduated and came up here to State thanks to our unusual skills at the game of basketball the bus was still around but nobody wanted it so we got it off the school district for free and the guy who ran the garage in Sam Dent hauled it up here for us and dumped it right where it sits today because from when before me and James dropped out of State I knew the guy whose father owns this field and he didn’t give a shit. We just needed a place to party and all, us and the team and our friends from school, and the place got fucking famous, man! But then we started living here because our old man, who was like pissed because Nichole was in the accident and we weren’t, he wasn’t about to let us come back home, and anyhow he knew we were doing drugs and all which is why we got shit-canned from the team and fucked up at school in the first place. But fuck the old man, I’m going back next fall, he said. No shit. Me and James, man, we’ll get our shit together easy. I’m only twenty and he’s nineteen, we can get in shape easy and make the team and get the old scholarships back and boom! Fix this bus up right, you know? Get us one of those diesel generators and a portable toilet and run some water out here in a hose from one of the warehouses. It’ll be cool, man. ‘Cause this thing has good karma, man. You can feel it, he said and he shut his eyes and let his hands float out to his sides and flutter like fish fins. This ol’ bus is going to rock, man! Parrr-teee!

What an incredible asshole, I’m thinking and got up to leave and try to find something to drink.

Where you going! Richard says real loud and harsh.

Thirsty, is all I can manage on account of my throat was so dry from the beer last night and the Fritos this morning. Plus he’d scared me.

Listen, you little shit! he says suddenly all feverish with excitement. I don’t know you, man, so you stay put until I say you can go. People can’t just come and go out here like they please, man! You can come in and you can go out, but only when I say so. Me or my brother James. Nobody else. Me and James rule, man.

Just then brother James himself came in and he slung his backpack down on the driver’s seat and started pulling out groceries and stuff that I guess he stole, mostly canned goods like chili and hash including a half gallon of Diet Coke which I took the liberty of opening and swigging from because I was so nervous but nobody said anything so I passed it around to the other guys.

James tossed a newspaper at Richard and Russ who were laid back on one of the mattresses and said, These dudes are famous, bro. That’s your fire, ain’t it? he said to Russ. You’re right up on the front page of the Press-Republican, man.

Richard spread the paper out on the mattress in front of him and Russ, and I scooted over to the mattress and read over their shoulders. There it was, Au SABLE FORKS FIRE DESTROYS 3-FAMILY HOME, and in smaller print, 1 Dead, 2 Local Boys Missing. There was a picture of our old squat and the Video Den with smoke and flames and fire engines and ladders, the whole scene from the front, a crowd’s-eye view. The one dead was Bruce of course, but burned beyond recognition, it said. And the two boys missing was me and Russ whose names were not released pending notification of next of kin. By now they must’ve been notified though, Russ’s mom and mine and my stepfather and my grandmother. I kind of wished they could’ve notified my real father too since he was as much next of kin as anybody else. You’d’ve thought the cops’d try and find him. But he was like me I guess, missing and presumed dead. Still, I’d wanna know if my own son was burned up in a fire.

Cool, Russ said. Excellent.

What’s so excellent about it? I said.

There’s nothing about my stuff. You know what I’m saying?

Yeah, I said. Russ is pretty single-minded. He was thinking no one’d noticed his stolen electronics and they were still just lying there in the back room of the old state liquor store waiting for him to pick up someday for freight forwarding.

So you guys are missing? Richard said.

Yeah. And presumed dead, I said.

Wow. That’s truly far out. It’s like you don’t exist, man.

The idea of us not existing really got Richard excited and he started asking Russ and even me all these questions about what we were going to do now. It’s like you’re invisible, man! You don’t have fingerprints or footprints or anything! Check it out, you don’t have a past, man! It’s like being dead without having to die first. That is so cool! I truly envy you guys, he said.

Then he switched off and got suddenly serious and tense and he said to James, You bring the rock, man? The dude show up? You get it okay?

James said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, and the two of them went to the back of the bus where I guess they had their bong or whatever and left me and Russ alone with the newspaper since they didn’t invite us to join them. I don’t know if I would’ve although Russ I think would’ve but I don’t think crackheads are into sharing anyhow. Just knowing Richard and James were getting high made me wish I had me a J but there was some bread with the groceries and some bologna so we made a couple of sandwiches and ate them and drank the rest of the Diet Coke. We kept reading and rereading the article about the fire like it contained some secret coded message from Bruce or from our moms like, Come home all is forgiven.

Finally Russ said, I got to get rid of my tattoo.

Yeah, I said. But it’s permanent, isn’t it? Actually I’d almost forgotten that he even had a tattoo.

He rolled up his sleeve and held out the underside of his forearm and examined it for a minute like it was somebody else’s. Fuck those guys, he said. You know? After what they did to Bruce and us, I hate them, man. I never shoulda got this thing.

It was a green Nazi helmet with these black and red eagle wings attached and the words on top and Adirondack Iron below and not too big, about like a half-dollar. Whyn’t you go to a tattoo guy and just get him to turn it into something different? I said.

Like what?

I dunno. Something bigger, with a lot of black in it. Like a humongous black panther all ready to leap and rip and tear living flesh with his fangs bared and claws and yellow eyes and everything. Or maybe one of those black and orange butterflies, whaddaya call ‘em, monarchs. Or a black guy. I saw a tattoo once of that guy Malcolm X that they made a movie out of and it was cool because the guy who had it was a white dude and it really stood out.

Russ liked the panther idea the best. It’ll be my new identity, he said. My trademark. I’m going underground, man. I might even change my name.

What to?

I dunno. Buck maybe. Whaddaya think?

Your last name is Rodgers, asshole. You wanna be Buck Rodgers? A fucking astronaut?

I’ll change my last name too.

How about Zombie, that’s cool. You can be Buck Zombie, the living dead boy.

Maybe I will, he said but I knew he wouldn’t because in spite of everything Russ isn’t radical enough to be a true criminal. Basically he is an astronaut.

You oughta get a new identity too in case the bikers ever come looking for you again, he said. They’ll be pissed you got away.

It’s you they’re really pissed at, Buck. For stealing their stuff. I’m the one they think is dead, man. Me and Bruce.

People will tell them they seen a mall rat named Chappie. Homeless kid with a mohawk. You got high visibility, man. Myself though, I’m gonna be fucking underground. New name, new tattoo, papa’s got a brand-new bag. You know what I’m sayin’?

Yeah, well, I guess I will let my hair grow out. I was thinking of doing it anyhow, I said. I ran my hand over the shaved part of my head and it was already surprisingly nubbled.

You oughta change your name too. Don’t get me wrong, man, but I always thought Chappie was sort of a cheesy name.

It’s better than fucking Chapman, I said. But Zombie sounds pretty good.

He laughed and said, Yeah, Zombie! Fucking Zombie. Buck ‘n’ Zombie. No last names either. Road warriors, man. American gladiators! Like in Mortal Kombat! he said and he gave me these karate chops and kicks and I did it back— high kick, low kick, high punch, low punch, block, flip, jump, and duck, and pretty soon we’re cackling uncontrollably and falling down on the mattress almost like we’re stoned although the truth is we were really scared and were laughing and falling down to keep from thinking about what had scared us.

* * *

Russ figured we needed about a hundred bucks to get his tattoo changed although I wouldn’t have minded saving some of it for the future for basics like weed and food, but the number plates were mainly his since he took them off the fireguy’s truck and he was the one who’d done all the driving which meant that the truck was mainly his too, so I guess it was okay for him to say what we did with the money. I actually never would’ve thought of trying to sell the plates and the truck to Richard and James in the first place who I didn’t think had any money anyhow except for buying crack with but Russ has this instinct for selling things. He knows when people want stuff and he knows they can come up with the money for it even before they do themselves.

It helped I guess that Richard and James were pretty lifted when they made the deal but I had to admit Russ made it sound very attractive especially after he gave them his idea of stashing the truck in a used-truck lot when they weren’t using it. Just keep moving it around to different dealers, he said, and put it in with the trucks for sale and take the plates home with you and they’ll never figure it out. If somebody wants to test-drive it they won’t be able to find the keys, they’ll just think it’s a fuck-up, and the next night you put the truck somewhere else. The rest of the time it’s yours. Like right now it’s ours.

That is so fucking smart! Richard said. Isn’t it, James? Isn’t it smart?

Yeah, James said. But what’s it gonna cost us?

Five hundred bucks, Russ said. And I’ll throw in the plates free. You’ll definitely need the plates. It’s a four-by-four Ranger, man, almost new.

They said no way and Russ dickered with them for a while until finally he agreed to come down to a hundred bucks, five twenties which Richard peeled off a roll and Russ accepted with a sad face like they’d really screwed him. He told them exactly where to find the truck and they naturally threatened to kill us both if it wasn’t there. They seemed to have a lot of money for crackheads or even for college guys for that matter but Russ said they had these old college loans that they were still spending even though they’d gotten kicked out of State last fall.

Then Russ put on my shearling jacket and made me wear his hoodie and put the hood up so my mohawk wouldn’t show and we took off for this well-known tattoo place downtown. First though we cut down to the town park and this little public beach where kids hang out by the picnic tables and cop weed which we did in a minute from this big redheaded dude I knew slightly from the mall and me and Russ split a blunt and just chilled for a while. We hadn’t chilled in a long time.

The sun was out and when the redheaded kid left there was nobody but us there and it was warm and peaceful. We sat on a picnic table and didn’t even talk. Just thought our thoughts. Lake Champlain is huge and you can see all the way across to the Green Mountains in Vermont twenty-five miles in the distance and the water was glittering like it was covered with brand-new silver coins and the sky overhead was bright blue with these towers of puffy white clouds on the Vermont side. Seagulls screeched and swooped past the beach like tiny paper kites and the breeze blew off the lake and you could hear it behind us swishing through the trees which were hazy red and light green because of all the new buds. It was a true spring day and although I wasn’t all that anxious to think about what was coming next for the first time I felt like the worst winter of my life was over at last.

Finally we realized we were hungry so we got a couple of slices and Cokes at the pizza joint on the corner of Bay and Woodridge Streets and headed for the tattoo place which was only a few blocks away. A couple of times I noticed the Press-Republican for sale in street boxes and stopped to check out the picture and read the front page again.

Wanna buy one for a souvenir? Russ said since he had the money. Maybe we should take a bunch, you know? For our grandkids.

Zombies don’t have grandkids, I reminded him. And neither do Bucks, I said although I was thinking they can if they want and knowing Russ he probably would.

Suit yourself, man, he said and he put a quarter and a dime into the machine and cleaned it out, nine or ten copies and stuck them all under his arm like he was a paperboy in those old movies. Extra, extra, read all about it. Homeless boy disappears in fire. Local biker burned to death. Parents in shock. I can’t believe he’s gone! Mother cries. He was basically a good kid, stepfather says. Whole town mourns.

The tattoo place was called Art-O-Rama due to the tattoo guy’s name being Art. It was in this funky old storefront on an alley off of a side street which didn’t look like much but it was famous in the area for doing air force guys from the base as well as kids who were more or less of the punk type so long as they had IDs that said they were eighteen or over which me and Russ did, of course.

Neither of us’d met the guy before but we’d seen his work on miscellaneous kids we knew at the mall and liked it. Besides, Russ’s original Adirondack Iron tattoo he’d gotten from a softtail specialist down in Glens Falls who was a guy who only did Harleyheads and was a biker himself and knew all the other bikers in the northcountry so no way we could’ve gone to him.

Art was this old guy way up in his forties or fifties and his whole body at least what you could see of it was covered with these incredible tattoos, mostly fire-breathing dragons and colorful Oriental symbols with nothing cheesy like stars ‘n’ stripes or Betty Boops or valentines with arrows the way some old guys do. When he moved even a little all the tattoos moved with him like his skin was alive and had a mind of its own and his body inside was following orders from the skin the way a snake’s does.

Russ told him what he wanted which is called a cover-up and Art showed him a bunch of panther pictures and after a lot of back and forth Russ finally settled on the one that I thought was the best too because of the eyes which were emerald green and the fangs. Art said it would cost fifty bucks for the one or seventy-five bucks for the cover-up plus another the same size and Russ couldn’t resist negotiating with the guy, except he was negotiating for me not himself I suddenly realized when Art says to me, Okay, kid, what the hell it’s a slow day, pick what you want from here, and he hands me this beat-up old book of drawings.

Thirty bucks for the panther and thirty for the second, so long as you pick it from these here, he said and he lit a cigarette and went right to work on Russ’s forearm while I leafed through the tattoo book.

The buzz of the needle was like a hummingbird’s wings And didn’t sound dangerous at all and whenever I glanced up at Russ he wasn’t wincing in pain or anything. Does it hurt? I asked him.

Naw, he said. It feels like you got a ice cube on your arm except at first when it feels hot and sort of stings.

I was attracted to some of the drawings more than others, like palm trees with a sunset and a howling wolf on a mountain but I figured they were more for ecology freaks, vegetarians and suchlike than kids like me. The severed heads with snakes coming out of the eye sockets and the knives dripping blood and jokers with huge red tongues were okay too but obviously for metalheads and I might be into heavy metal a little now but you never know about the future. A tattoo is forever even if you get a cover-up like Russ so you want to pick a design you can grow with.

Then I saw what I wanted. It was like a pirate’s flag only without the flag, just the skull and the crossed bones behind it which reminded me of Peter Pan from this book I had when I was a little kid that my grandmother used to read to me anytime I wanted. I loved that book. I remember studying the pictures up close like you do when you’re real small and asking Grandma about the flag because it kind of scared me but she said it was just something Captain Hook and the pirates did to make people think they were evil when all they were really interested in was finding buried treasure. It’s a good story. Peter Pan goes to this big city looking for his lost shadow and he meets these rich kids whose parents don’t like them so he teaches them to fly and takes them back to his island hideout where they have all kinds of adventures against Captain Hook and the pirates. There’s an Indian princess and an invisible fairy named Tinker Bell and they help Peter Pan and the rich kids defeat the pirates and it’s like a very cool place for them, this island which is called Never-Never-Land because there’s no adults and you get to stay a kid forever. But eventually the children start to miss their parents and want to go home and grow up like regular people so they have to leave Peter Pan behind on his island alone. The ending is actually sad. Although he does have his shadow.

Anyhow I figured a tattoo is like a flag for a single individual so I decided on the skull and bones flag like Captain Hook’s only without the skull in it. Just the crossed bones. The skull kind of grossed me out and I was pretty sure after a few years of looking at it I’d get bored by it, so I was thinking X marks the spot and Malcolm X like in the movie and Treasure Buried Here and RR Crossing and suchlike. Plus when they saw it people’d still think I was evil even without the skull part which was cool. And whenever I looked at it myself I’d remember Peter Pan and my grandmother reading to me when I was a little kid. Russ thought it was an excellent decision too but he only picked up on the evil part. I didn’t see any point in telling him about the rest.

I had Art put it on the inside of my left forearm like Russ’s so I could show it to other people by making a power salute or a high five and could show it to myself just by turning my arm and looking down at it. The tattooing part actually stung a lot more than Russ said and stayed hot the whole time while Art made it and was sore afterwards but it really looked wicked excellent when he was done except my skin all around it was red and inflamed-looking. But it was a real work of art. The crossed bones had big joints at the ends like thighbones or something and were very detailed. The guy could draw.

Fucking A, man! Russ said and we both high-fived with our left hands. You got the bones! he said to me. I could tell Russ was wishing he hadn’t gotten a panther now but it was too late.

That’s what your name oughta be, he says. Bone. On account of your tattoo. Forget Zombie, man, it sounds like you’re into voodoo or some weird occult shit like that. Bone is hard, man. Hard. It’s fucking universal, man.

Yeah. Forget Zombie. Bone is cool, I said and I meant it and was already viewing myself as the Bone. You still gonna use Buck for a handle? I asked him. I was thinking Buck ‘n’ Bone didn’t sound so good. Country and western. How about Panther? I suggested so he’d maybe feel better about his tattoo but I didn’t really think Panther was such a cool name for a talkative dude like Russ, I just said it.

Naw. I’ll stick with Buck for now, he said. Like the Buck knife company. Or like one of those big twelve-point deer, man. You know, in that insurance ad.

Yeah. Or like in Bambi.

Fuck you, asshole, he says. I could see he was pissed and I’d hurt his feelings about his name and his tattoo.

C’mon, man, I’m only kidding you. The Bone’s a great kidder, y’know.

He said sure and paid the guy for the tattoos and we walked out. Except for Russ being bummed I was feeling truly excellent, like I was a way new person with a new name and a new body even and my old identity as Chappie wasn’t dead, it was only a secret. A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it’s this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want, and a new name if it’s cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It’s the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.