Rule of the Bone

EIGHT. THE SOUL ASSASSINS

Probably it would’ve been more polite if I’d’ve cleaned up the Ridgeways’ summer place a little before I split especially with the busted picture window and all but I figured if I left the house funky and more or less trashed like it was they’d have to pay Russ’s Aunt Doris and Uncle George extra to do the job for me. They might even put Russ to work, he was so hot to get a job and all. Pumping a little extra outside cash into the local economy was mainly how I looked at it so with no further a due or thought I slung on my backpack and grabbed the garbage bag with my CDs and stuffed bird and truly glad to be out of there at last I stepped through the window frame onto the deck and strolled down the stairs to the driveway and out to the road.

When I reached the bottom of the hill by the Stewart’s in Keene I had to ask myself for the first time in a while which way to go, west or east. The road through town ran two ways. West wound across the Adirondacks to nowhere, to Fort Drum and parts of Canada I guess, hundreds of miles of little country roads and small towns and the occasional ski resort. But east went to the Northway which is the highway that runs between Montreal and Albany and from where I was standing Albany looked like the gateway to the rest of America and to the wider world itself.

I set my pack and bag down on the road there and started hitching east. I didn’t have any map or anything or any money and I didn’t have a detailed plan except to get out of the northcountry where I had so far lived my whole life and to just go limp so to speak and let fate take care of the rest like I was the pod boy from Mars freshly arrived on earth.

Quite a few cars and pickups flashed past without a look or a pause or else they pulled into the Stewart’s for groceries or gas and I was starting to get discouraged and wondering if maybe I should try to hoof it the whole god-dam fifteen miles out to the Northway where all the traffic wasn’t local like here in Keene, when this old dark green Chevy van that had CHURCH OF THE DISADVANTAGED SAINTS painted on the side comes speeding around the bend. It slows like the driver is looking me over and finally stops a ways up the road and I think what the hell, Christians are people too, although it looks like there’s only the one inside and I run up to where it’s stopped and pull open the door and throw my pack and bag inside and climb in.

I hadn’t even got my bearings yet and the old van is already rocking along at about eighty and all this neat mountain scenery is flying by in a blur and the tape deck is blasting Bodo B Street’s No Mo Hoes 4 Bo, this gangsta-rap song that was pretty popular then at least with black kids I think it was. I’m thinking for a Christian this guy really wails, maybe he’s not even a white guy so I turn and take a good look at him for the first time and it only takes a second for me to recognize him. He’s white all right. All I can say is, Fuck.

He grins over at me and goes, Hiya, kid! Hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya! Remember me?

Yeah, man. I remember you.

It’s the pockmarked porn dude from the mall, Buster Brown. He’s got both hands clamped onto the wheel and his foot mashed flat to the floor and the van’s flying across Keene like a stealth bomber on a search-and-destroy mission. We’re like swooping under the radar and moving too fast for groundfire. I look out the window and it’s way too far to the ground so I’m definitely going to get busted up on the trees and rocks if I open the door and jump and we’re like slipping up on the sound barrier, flying too fast and too low for me to push the eject button without breaking every goddam bone in my body from the force of the ejection so I say the hell with it, man, just go limp and let fate take care of things.

So how’re they hangin’, Buster? I say to him.

Oh! He laughed. High and dry, my boy. High and dry.

Yeah? Where’s Froggy? Your protégé. She still with you?

Ah, yes, La Froggella. The dear old dear-old. Right behind you, lad, he said and hooked his thumb toward the rear of the van. I turned and searched around the junk in back, boxes and suitcases and concert posters and a mattress and so on and finally found her curled up in a corner sleeping it looked like with a Walkman on and her thumb in her mouth like a baby. She was barefoot and had the same old red dress on as before and she didn’t look any too healthy either. Worse than before.

She taking a nap? I asked him.

Yes. Napping. He smiled and then he asked me where I was headed.

I figured I’d just say the opposite of wherever I thought he was headed so I said north, to Plattsburgh even though that was the opposite direction of where I wanted to go.

Not too smart as it turned out. Buster is going to Plattsburgh too, he says, right into town to a bar called Chi-Boom’s, had I ever heard of it?

Yeah, I say but he doesn’t even hear me, he’s on one of his speed raps or maybe it’s coke except I don’t think he’s got the money for coke. He rips along at about the same speed as he’s driving, yakking about this and that like he’s trying to sell me something only I can’t figure out what it is unless it’s himself. He’s going to meet up at Chi-Boom’s with this band he manages and pay them off and after one more concert dismiss them. He’s gotten back into show business, he says. Only now he’s on the business side instead of the performing side and while the money is much better the responsibilities are also greater, especially since musicians today are not professional in the old-fashioned sense of the word and cannot be relied upon, they have to be treated like children. Especially the niggers, he says which surprised me to hear him dissing black people since he’d been playing the Bodo B Street tape like he couldn’t get enough of it and I’d noticed that there was all kinds of badass gangsta-rap tapes scattered all over the front seat of the van and on the floor in back.

But Buster Brown is a man of contrasts I guess, a guy who at first glance seems to be taking care of a child that he later turns out to be doping for his porn movies, a guy who wants to help kids who’re homeless and all that but also he wants to suck and fuck them too, a Christian in a Christian van who turns out to be a has-been actor with an English accent looking for kids to be protégés and turns out to be a white guy who likes gangsta rap and manages a band and calls them niggers who turns out to be a doper on speed or coke or maybe crack and turns out to be taking care of a poor lost little homeless girl, and so on in a vicious circle like that. Buster Brown was possibly the weirdest dude I’d ever met and I was pretty sure he was capable of almost anything even cold-blooded murder of a teenaged kid so I treated him with the extreme caution and humor that he deserved.

Also I was once again thinking about saving Froggy but this time the idea of substituting myself for her did not occur to me I’m proud to say, as a sign of how much I’d changed in the last few months, since Chappie had become the Bone.

So what’s with the church van? I asked him. You into Jesus and all that now? You finally seen the light, man?

He laughed. The light! Ah yes, I’ve seen the light all right, my witty little friend. You’d be amazed how useful an actor’s skills can be in this vast and wonderfully religious country of ours. A man who gives every appearance of being a man of religion, that is, a man such as myself, can always find shelter and sustenance in America. To become known as a man of religion all you need, my boy, besides a certain verbal dexterity and the usual appearances of sincerity, is a sign. Look for a sign! he said and he laughed like crazy. It’s your only required prop. The rest, lad, is pure acting. But don’t look for the sort of sign those we-three-kings-of-Orient-are happened to see one night arise in the eastern heavens. Or the sort of sign seen by the two Marys when they went to the tomb and found it empty. No, rather you must seek the more mundane sort of sign, the sort you saw painted on the side of my van, the sign of the Church of the Disadvantaged Saints, a sign which having been writ moves swiftly on.

Yeah, I said. How come disadvantaged saints? You mean like crippled?

Hardly crippled but, yes, disadvantaged indeed, for they are the saints who are not yet known to the world at large. They are known, let us say, only to one another.

And of course to the Lord above. Him too. My sign is thus a sign of recognition, a fraternal flag, a secret handshake and a greeting, and wherever I go others like me come forward and offer me shelter and, as I said, sustenance, or as in the case at hand I am able to come forward myself and offer shelter and sustenance to others even less fortunate than I. Which is basically how I’ve been able to get myself started booking musical acts here in the north-country, he said suddenly switching voices and turning into the band manager and booking agent who’d put together this huge rap concert, at least he said it was huge with four or five downstate rap bands none of which I’d ever heard of but that didn’t mean much since I’m not really into rap anyhow, even the Beastie Boys who’re white and pretty good.

The concert’d been booked by the student council or something at the Plattsburgh branch of SUNY which is the state university of New York. Buster handed me this printed brochure that said Get Assassinated at the Soul Assassination Concert and promised to have all these bands appearing at the SUNY field house like House of Pain and the Stupid Club and so on. I was impressed. In spite of everything I knew about him Buster was definitely cool.

He then said he remembered I owed him some money which was true, twenty bucks and I didn’t deny it or anything but I did say he could forget about any fucking or sucking and no screen test either. I’m like a free agent now, I said. You understand what I’m saying, man?

Not to worry, mio taro. Not to worry. He was on his way to meet one of the bands called Hooliganz who were from Troy and they’d just cut a record and everything and he was supposed to take them to the motel where they were staying for the concert. It was a little too complicated to follow especially the way Buster explained it due to his being high although I probably wouldn’t have understood even if he wasn’t. Anyhow he owed this money to the Hooliganz from some other concert they’d played down in Schenectady and unless he paid it to them they wouldn’t do the Soul Assassination concert so now because he’d already spent the money on expenses he’d been forced to take up a special collection from the Brethren of the Disadvantaged Saints and he was hoping I’d be able to contribute my twenty bucks to the pot since I owed it to him anyhow.

Fuck that shit, I said. I can’t do that. Besides, I’m stone broke, man. And all I got’s a few CDs. Classical, man, in case you want to buy ‘em. How about I sell you twenty bucks’ worth and we’ll be even. Two, maybe three CDs. Like new, man. From rich people, professors.

He said forget it, but I could work it off if I wanted by I helping him deal with the Hooliganz in Plattsburgh.

What do I hafta do, man? I don’t feel like doing anything dangerous, I said. I’m still just a kid, remember. I wouldn’t mind being a roadie for the concert though.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he said. I could be a roadie, that was fine and tonight all I had to do was follow orders and like hold on to the money he owed the Hooliganz and give it over to them when he said and not until he said because he needed them to sign some kind of contract that he had from the student council so that he could get his cut later when they paid the bands. I was supposed to hold on to the money in case the Hooliganz wanted to grab it off of him and do the concert the next night without signing the contract Buster needed for getting his cut.

I guess being a manager of a band is sort of like being a leech and it’s hard to get yours without letting the band get theirs first but you don’t want them to think they’ll get theirs unless you get yours first or else they’ll just rub you off against the nearest rock. It’s complicated. Anyhow I said sure.

Do you have a good hiding place there in your pack? he asked me. These fucking niggers may decide to search me and they may search the van but they won’t bother you. You’re just a child, he said and he made this sickening dry-lipped smile.

I was going to have Froggy hold the money, he told me. But she’s a little slow on the uptake let us say. And then when I saw you standing there by the side of the road… Well, my boy, my boy, talk about heaven-sent! Halleloo-yah. And praise the Lord.

Yeah. The Lord works in mysterious ways, I said which’s something my grandmother used to say for explaining weird things.

We were all the way out to the Northway now and Buster turned the van left onto the ramp heading north, not the direction I’d originally planned on going but there really wasn’t much I could do about it now. Besides my criminal mind was already kicking in and telling me that if Buster was stupid or high enough to trust me with holding the Hooliganz’s money there was the distinct possibility of me getting some of it off of him before I split. And then there was the matter of Froggy which frankly I was now into viewing as a total green-light rescue operation, a definite Go.

Around five which was when Buster’d arranged to meet these guys the Hooliganz we pulled into the parking lot of Chi-Boom’s but Buster looked over the cars and said they weren’t there yet. There was a McDonald’s two stores down on Bridge Street so Buster went off to get everyone some Big Macs and fries and left me and Froggy in the van. I asked her, You wanna book, man? You wanna get away from Buster?

She looked at me from her corner in the back like she was a suspicious beaten old dog instead of a regular little I kid and didn’t say anything, just glanced up at me and then looked at her bare feet and picked at the bottom hem of her dress. I could see she didn’t know anymore what she wanted which was of course how Buster preferred it and why he kept her stoned so I decided then and there that if I was going to help her I’d have to take Buster’s place so to speak and tell her myself what she really wanted and then go ahead and get it for her. That wasn’t my style, I usually let people do what they want to do or even do nothing if that’s what they want but this time I was fully prepared to take over her decision-making powers and rule her myself at least temporarily.

We’ll get the fuck outa here together, I told her. You just be cool and leave everything to me, man. I know a place we can hide till I find out where your real home is. Maybe you got parents.

Then Buster was back with the Big Macs and all, yackety-yakking about this and that like we were great lifelong buddies, me and him and Froggy, and these rapsters the Hooliganz from Albany or Troy or wherever were out to rip all three of us off and not just him and not him being out to rip them off either. Buster took this thumb-sized roll of bills, mostly fifties it looked like and tucked it into my hand and said to stash it deep inside my pack where no one would think to look.

There wasn’t anyplace like that in my pack, I told him because there actually wasn’t and plus I didn’t want him or anyone else to see my gun which is how I now regarded the niner I’d taken from the Ridgeways’, my gun. But hey, I got this stuffed bird, I said and pulled the ol’ woodcock out of the garbage bag. And it’s all hollow inside. I can hide the money inside the bird, I said to Buster and did it, just shoved the roll of bills up what would have been its asshole if it hadn’t been turned into this neat little pouch that I had already examined long ago to no avail for drugs. See, I said to him and then I put the CDs and the ol’ woodcock into the backpack but on top of everything else right out there in plain sight.

Genius, pure genius! he said and he leaned back in his seat and took a nap for a while as it slowly got dark and cars started pulling into the lot and after a while the place was rocking pretty good and there were pickups and motorcycles and all kinds of cars coming and going. Buster was wide awake now and watching every car that pulled in but still no black rapsters from Troy, just white people, locals it looked like, big guys with mustaches and shaggy hair and thick necks and some females in tight jeans and cowboy boots and the occasional biker when speak of the devil there they were, the men of Adirondack Iron, at least a few of them, Joker and Roundhouse and Raoul and Packer, all four riding their own Harleys this time.

Naturally I didn’t say anything to Buster about them, I just slid down low in my seat so they couldn’t see me even by accident as they walked right past the van and went inside Chi-Boom’s. It wasn’t bad enough I had to deal with Buster Brown the psycho porn king, now I had to worry about the men of Adirondack Iron too. Those guys I definitely did not want to see me even from a distance.

And then pretty soon after that Buster’s rapsters finally arrived, four black dudes in a rusted-out ‘79 Galaxie, big guys wearing doo-rags on their heads and Chicago Bulls sweats and hoodies and Filo sneaks looking straight out of the projects only there aren’t any projects within a hundred miles of here so they really looked like they were men from another planet like Pod Boy except Pod Boy was traveling incognito tonight and the Hooliganz definitely weren’t.

Buster jumped out and ran around and greeted them with all these high fives and get-down street talk which is almost embarrassing for a fellow white person to have to witness with his own eyes and ears and the first thing they do is ask him for the money.

They talked for a few minutes out there and I could pick up most of it. The rapsters wanted Buster to hand over the expense money up front or they wouldn’t sign and he was saying he couldn’t get it from the promoters until after they signed the contract blah blah but he does have a couple of motel rooms for them, he says and he’ll spring for food until they all get paid after the concert and so on.

The rapsters know Buster is lying and why, but they don’t know exactly where he’s lying which is his forte so to speak. The biggest Hooligan was wearing sunglasses and looked bad enough to rip Buster’s brains right down through the roof of his mouth. He draped one of his arms the size of a tire around Buster’s slopy shoulders and very pissed he says, Man, we be needin a drink and you be buyin cause they ain’t no other fuckin way for us to get a muthafuckin drink, you know what I’m sayin. Let’s us go inside an talk this whole muthafuckin mess over, he says and as requested Buster like a good boy scoots along into Chi-Boom’s with them leaving me and Froggy alone in the van with various things but most important with the money.

C’mon, man, let’s get the fuck outa here! I said and grabbed her by the hand and yanked. But she pulled her hand out of mine and didn’t seem to want to leave. What’s the matter, Froggy, don’t you want to get rid of this guy? He’s a creep, for chrissake.

He’s gonna be mad, she says in this tiny voice, practically the first time I’ve heard it and I think maybe she’s only about six or seven, even younger than I thought. I’m s’posed to stay here an’ wait for him to come back, she says.

C’mon, man. This is our only chance, the rapsters’ve got him scared, I said and reached for her hand again but she pulled away and shrank back against the side of the van. I climbed around the seat and got in back with her and she scrunched herself up like she was afraid of me. Aw c’mon, Froggy, I ain’t gonna hurt you. All I wanna do is help you out a little, help you get away from this creep and maybe find a regular family to live with. Maybe even find your own mom and dad. You got a regular mom and dad someplace? I asked her. Actually I was starting to wonder if anyone had a regular mother and father anymore except on television.

She said yes.

Whereabouts are they?

I don’t know. At home, I guess.

Where’s home then?

I don’t know. Far. Milwaukee, she said.

Jeez, that’s far. How the hell’d you get mixed up with Buster Brown? He your uncle or something?

No, she said. He was somebody her mom knew and her mom had given her to him.

Gave you to him?

I guess. Yeah. She couldn’t take care of me anymore, and my daddy was gone someplace. In jail.

Jeez. Didn’t she even maybe sell you to him? I mean, it ain’t like Buster is fucking Doctor Spock or some kind of child care expert. If you give your kid over to a guy like him you want to get paid for it, you know?

She said yeah he must’ve paid her mom something which to me made more sense especially if her mom was cracked out and maybe had AIDS or something and really needed the cash and couldn’t take care of her kid anymore. I’d heard a few stories of mothers doing that and while it didn’t exactly cheer me up about family life it at least made sense. But it also meant I was going to have a hard time getting Froggy situated with a regular family and all, assuming I could even convince her to run out on Buster in the first place. Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you don’t expect it and the people who deserve loyalty the least seem to get it the most especially when it’s coming from little kids.

Look, we gotta get the fuck outa here before Buster makes peace with the rapsters and comes back and wants his money. This is our one chance. I know this great place where we can chill for a while, it’s an actual schoolbus only it’s been turned into like a housetrailer where you can live in it. I told her then that if she didn’t like it better there with me than here being Buster’s prisoner she could come back to him or she could even go home to Milwaukee if she wanted, I’d buy her a bus ticket with some of Buster’s money. You know it’s illegal to buy and sell little kids, I told her. So it’s okay for you to cut out on him and go wherever the hell you want. This’s America and America’s a free country, Froggy. Even for kids.

I think I pretty nearly had her convinced when all of a sudden I heard this crash and a few feet in front of the van the window of the bar comes down like when I shot lip the Ridgeways’ picture window and a bottle comes flying out and then a couple of people come flying out too, one white and one black and the white guy is Joker and the black guy is a rapster, not the huge guy but one of the smaller ones, and then there’s Buster in the middle of it trying to pull Joker off of the rapster when Packer comes out and coldcocks Buster on the head with a beer bottle and then there’s Roundhouse and Raoul hollering racist stuff like kill the fucking nigger which of course brings on the rest of the Hooliganz who whale into the bikers like this is the most fun they’ve had all month, beating the shit out of a bunch of white asshole bikers from the northcountry. Buster is down on the ground all bloody and getting tromped on by both sides and the lead Hooligan is smacking Joker around like he’s a carpet and the other Hooliganz’re fending for themselves pretty good against a rapidly growing gang of white guys from inside the bar who normally wouldn’t take the side of bikers except when the white race gets into it.

Now suddenly it’s like we’ve got a full-scale race riot going on in the parking lot of Chi-Boom’s and I figure the cops’ll be next to join the fray and are probably already on their way over from Dunkin’ Donuts or wherever. C’mon, girl, let’s us be invisible, I said to Froggy and I opened the side door of the van and grabbed her by her wrist and with my other hand hefted my backpack which actually weighed more than Froggy and dragged her out of the van and around behind it. Then we were running side by side, she was really into it with me now, the two us scuttling along between the cars until we were out there on Bridge Street and ducking down Margaret Street toward an alley I knew and there came the cops only they didn’t see us.

Half an hour later we’re at the secret hole Russ’d shown me in the chain link fence by the field out behind the warehouses. I held the fence back while Froggy slipped under and then I followed and took her hand and led her across that creepy windblown dark field toward the old wrecked schoolbus in the high grass in the middle. When we got there it looked the same, no signs of life but it didn’t stink so bad all around as before. I knocked on the door a couple times and waited and did it again but no answer.

I guess the ol’ Bong Brothers got busted or else they split, I said and pulled the door open and looked inside. Nothing. No one. Looks like we’re home, I said and went inside and set my pack down. Froggy followed and stood there by the driver’s seat examining the place which wasn’t all that bad although it probably helped that it was dark and all we could see were the outlines of the few bus seats that had been left and the mattresses and the old boards on cinderblocks.

What d’ya think? I said.

It’s dark.

I remembered the flashlight in my pack then and when I had it turned on we checked the place out carefully and saw that the Bong Brothers seemed to’ve cleaned all their stuff out and left just the furniture so to speak and from the smell nobody’d been here for a month or more. It smelled clean and dry like it had been aired out and I noticed that some of the cardboard that’d covered the windows’d been taken down and a few of the windows were open. I walked down the length of the bus toward the rear shining my flashlight into the corners and behind the seats and so on until I got to the end where I shined it across the back seat and I saw a body lying there.

I didn’t say anything because of not wanting to scare Froggy who was behind me a ways and I let the light go slowly up the guy’s legs— it was a guy, I could see that much, wearing Wal-Mart sneaks and jeans— on to his hands which were on his belly and I saw then that he was’ a black guy with a plaid flannel shirt on but no wounds or sign of blood so far and then I came to his face and there he was, lying on his back and smiling up at me like he’d just overheard me telling Froggy this funny joke, gray eyes crinkly and open in the middle of a broad coffee-colored face with a humongous flat nose and deep lines almost like trenches around his wide mouth and over his eyebrows and a huge mass of dreadlocks wrapped all around his head like a pillow of blacksnakes.

He puckered his lips and said, Would y’ mine shinin down de torch, mon. I-Man cyan see nuttin wid de light shinin in him eyes so.

Cool, I said and dropped the beam of my light.

Mon got to shine de light from out him eyes fe seein good, he said and he laughed from way down deep in his chest.

Racially this was getting to be quite an unusual night for me. I hadn’t seen this many black people on the same night in my whole life practically and these weren’t your usual black people either like Bart the security guard at the mall and the occasional Air Force dude you saw around town. These guys were seriously black, like, Africans almost.

What’re you doing here, man? I said keeping my light pointed down like he’d asked.

Same as you, mon.

What’s that?

Tryin to get home, mon. Me jus’ tryin to get home.

Yeah, well, I guess us too, I said. Then I introduce myself and Froggy and he said his name was I-Man and shook my hand like a regular white person so as to make me feel normal which it did. Afterwards me and Froggy settled on one of the mattresses and I covered her with my jacket and she fell straight to sleep. I was lying there thinking about all that’d happened when suddenly I smelled the sweet familiar aroma of burning marijuana and I-Man calls down from his seat in the back, You wan’ smoke some spliff, mon?

I said sure and went back there and we smoked and talked a while and before the night was gone I knew that I had met the man who would become my best friend.