After we paid Art for the tattoos Russ only had thirty-some bucks left which limited our options so to speak and we had nothing to sell except maybe my shearling jacket. That and the nine or ten copies of the Press-Republican Russ tried to unload for spare change as we walked along but it was afternoon already and the citizens weren’t interested. Plus we didn’t have any safe place we could crash except the schoolbus and Russ wisely thought better of that when I reminded him that the Bong Brothers were definitely going to fuck up and get themselves busted driving around in our stolen pickup.
Crackheads, man, they do dumb things, I reminded him.
Yeah but these’re college guys, he said.
Fucking duh, man. It doesn’t matter they’re college guys. Nobody but a pipe sucker’d give you a hundred bucks for the license plates and keys to a pickup stolen from a Stewart’s only twenty miles away, I told him. And the minute those assholes get busted they’ll try to blame us and will reveal our secret identities to the cops who if we go back to the bus will instantly try to entrap us.
Russ said yeah but like Richard and James didn’t know our secret identities, they only knew our old ones which I had to point out were the same thing, it was Chappie and Russ that were our secret identities now, not Bone and Buck. I don’t know why but I really hated referring to him as Buck. He did look a little like a buck, a young one, a four-pointer maybe, gawky and long-faced with big brown eyes and straight brown hair and ears that stuck out, but whenever I had to call him by his new name I could only say it in a somewhat sarcastic tone or else I stumbled over it and almost said Duck or Fuck or Suck. You’d’ve thought a guy who talked as good as Russ would’ve picked a name easier to say and more inspiring to think about.
Anyhow he agreed it was too dangerous now to go back to the schoolbus and he had to admit that even if nobody believed the Bong Brothers when they spilled their guts trying to squirm out of a stolen vehicle charge by blaming it on two poor missing and presumed dead kids that they read about in the newspapers, the cops would definitely be watching the schoolbus for a while anyhow.
But we had to go someplace. We couldn’t hang out up at the mall or on the city streets where Joker or one of the bikers might see us never mind the cops although I figured the bikers by now had split for Buffalo or Albany. And with or without our new identities we still couldn’t hitch out of town to someplace like Florida or California, someplace far away where we could start our young lives over again. At least not until they decided to remove us from the missing and just left the presumed dead part and people stopped watching for us at the side of the southbound lane of the Northway with our thumbs out. That could take months.
I wondered if they’d put our pictures on milk cartons with the other missing kids. I kind of hoped so although the most recent picture my mom had of me was my sixth grade school picture when I was eleven and had long hair and looked really dumb and even younger than I was then. I used to think all those missing kids were living together in some squat like in Arizona and they were all close friends now getting a big laugh every morning over breakfast when one of them went to the fridge and brought out the milk carton for cereal.
Russ did some thinking and said he knew of this summerhouse over in Keene that was down the road from his aunt’s whose kid his mom used to say he was when she brought guys home from the bar. He liked his aunt, she was his mom’s cool older sister and was married to this guy and had some kids of her own although not Russ of course. Sometimes before he officially left his mom’s Russ used to crash at his aunt’s house and him and his cousins used to break into the summerhouses in the neighborhood when the people who owned them were away. There was this one house he said was way in the woods a half mile in from the same road his aunt lived on and it didn’t have any alarm system or anything and was real easy to break into and the people only came up from Connecticut or someplace in the summers. It’s like a fucking hotel, man. They even keep food stashed there for emergencies and a TV and everything.
Since we had enough money left for the bus to Keene which dropped you off only a couple of miles from the house that’s what we decided to do. Russ finally gave up trying to peddle his newspapers for spare change and dumped them in the trash except for the front page that he tore off of one copy, For the scrapbook, man, he said. Then we went over to the Trailways station to check out the schedule.
There was a bus to Glens Falls and points south that stopped in Keene leaving in about an hour so while Russ bought our tickets I hung out in the bathroom. He figured we might be spotted by a cop if the two of us were seen together in public like that. So I waited and while I waited I started remembering how Bruce used to like coming here to get blowjobs from fags and would then beat the shit out of them afterwards which seemed weird to me although nobody else saw anything wrong with it. He’d brag about it later and the guys would get all psyched to do it themselves but I don’t think any of them ever did. Not because it was against their principles, they practically didn’t have any principles but more because they were afraid of getting blowjobs from a guy. They only liked getting blowjobs from females. What they did to fags was just roll them for their money and watches. I never really saw the big difference, a blowjob is a blowjob I figured but I was only a kid.
Pretty soon the bus was ready to roll and Russ came and gave me my ticket and told me to get on separate from him and sit way in the back and watch for when he got off in Keene and we’d join up again there. He went first and after a few minutes I followed and stood in line with about ten people between us. The whole time I was half-expecting to feel a cop’s hand yank me back just as I boarded but I got onto the bus without a glitch and walked past Russ who was in the third seat from the front like I didn’t know him and sat alone in the back.
I wasn’t alone for long though. As soon as the bus pulled out of the station this musclebound red-faced guy around eighteen with a big adam’s apple who I recognized as air force because of his buzzcut in spite of the fact that he didn’t have a uniform on left his seat and came and sat beside me. Right away he pulled out a pint of peach brandy and took a swig from it and offered me one which I silently declined because except for beer booze makes me sleepy and I was afraid of missing my stop.
The guy was a motormouth going home to Edison, New Jersey to see his girlfriend who better not be fucking anybody or he was gonna kick her ass blah blah blah. He’d joined the air force because of Desert Storm and the Gulf War which was big right when he got out of high school but he was pissed because the only thing the American military was doing now was feeding starving niggers in Africa blah blah when what he really wanted to do was fucking kick some fucking Arab ass, did I know what he meant blah?
I didn’t answer which wasn’t smart because he got curious and asked me where I was headed.
Israel, I said which was the first place that popped in my mind.
No shit, he said. Well you got plenty of Arabs to fuck with there, man. All that PLO and shit. You Jewish?
Yes I am. But not your regular Jewish, I told him. I said I was an ancient type of wandering Jew called the Levitites, a name I made up which I said translated into Bark Eaters who’re the descendants of the Lost Tribe that’d settled in Canada and upstate New York back before the Vikings. Although over the years some of us’d married into the Indians and had given up the old Jewish ways a few of us’d stayed faithful right up to modern times and now we were slowly migrating back to our homeland which was Israel where certain skills we’d learned from hundreds of years of living alongside the Indians in Canada were highly desirable.
No shit, he said. In Israel? Like what kinda skills?
Oh, like tracking enemies over rock and going for days in the desert without water and enduring torture.
But you don’t know that shit, he said. You’re just a kid.
It’s part of our early childhood training. We spend a certain number of years on the reservation learning Indian skills in case there’s ever another Nazi uprising and then during summer vacation and afterwards our fathers pass on to their sons all the rest of the ancient Jewish lore. The mothers teach their daughters different things.
Like what?
They don’t tell us. Jews and Indians keep the boys and girls pretty much separate, you know. The guy was really into it now and I was too so I sat there and spun him my tale all the way to Keene and almost didn’t notice Russ get up from his seat when the bus pulled in next to a restaurant there and stopped. I gotta get off, I said to the guy.
I thought you were going to Israel.
Yeah but my aged father lives near here and I gotta say goodbye to him and stop by my mother’s grave. He’s one of the Jews who married an Indian, I said and pulled my hood back and showed him my mohawk which even though it wasn’t spiked anymore from no hairspray and the hood and I had all these nubbles of hair growing back it still made me look like a half Indian at least to this guy from New Jersey.
Hey, good luck, man, he said and shook my hand with a power grip. What’s your name?
Bone.
Cool, he said and waved as I hurried down the bus and joined Russ who was standing in the restaurant parking lot waiting impatiently for me.
It took us about an hour to reach the turnoff to the summerhouse, all uphill on this old winding dirt road where the houses next to the road were mostly small and beat-to-shit with plastic over the windows and rusting old cars in back. Every now and then we passed a driveway disappearing into the woods with stone pillars by the road and fancy carved signs with names like Brookstone and Mountainview. Rich people don’t like you to see their summerhouses from the road but I guess they don’t want you to forget they’re still around either.
The sign where we turned off said Windridge and they had a chain stretched across the driveway to keep cars out which we just stepped over and a big No Trespassing sign and all these No Hunting signs with bullet holes in them from the locals saying fuck you. The driveway was this long narrow lane that led through tall old pine trees with the wind blowing through. It was dark in there and kind of spooky and the ground was soft under our Doc Martens from the pine needles as we walked along not saying anything due to our nervousness, not so much from the Keep Out signs back at the road but the general atmosphere which was like in a kid’s scary fairy tale where there’s an evil witch waiting in a cabin in the woods at the end of the lane.
But when we came out of the woods instead of a witch’s cabin there was this huge dark brown log house with all kinds of porches and decks set up on the side of a hill with acres of lawns and a swimming pool with a cover over it and a tennis court and garages and little houses for guests and the such. They even had their own satellite dish. It was definitely the biggest fanciest house I’d ever seen in person. It was like a plantation.
These people only live here like on their vacations? I said to Russ.
Yeah. My aunt works for them as a housecleaner when they’re here, he said. The guy’s a big professor or something and the wife’s an artist. They’re pretty famous, I think.
The windows had wooden shutters over them and the place looked like it might be hard to break into but Russ said he’d scoped out a way one time when he came over to help his aunt haul trash to the dump in his uncle’s pickup. You wouldn’t believe the excellent shit they throw away, man. Good stuff. My aunt just keeps most of it. Half her house is furnished with the stuff these people toss out with the garbage.
We walked up the hill past the house and around to the back where there was this little screened porch that stuck out from the second floor. Russ climbed up one of the supports and while he was hanging there with one hand he used his pocketknife to cut through the screen with the other and climbed up onto the porch. I followed him and by the time I got up he’d already jimmied open a sliding glass door and gone inside so I pushed the curtains away and strolled in too like we lived there and this was how we always came in.
The house was dark on account of all the windows being shuttered and the curtains so it was hard to see anything but I could smell fresh paint and figured this must be where the wife did her artwork. I started to pull open the curtains on the glass doors but Russ said, Don’t do it, man. My uncle’s like the caretaker. They pay him to come over here once a week and check it out mainly for signs of a break-in.
For a while we stumbled around in the darkness looking for candles and then moved into this hallway off of the art studio when all of a sudden right next to where I’m standing a phone rings and scares the shit out of me. Then we hear a man’s voice. Hi, you’ve reached Windridge! If you wish to speak with Bib or Maddy Ridgeway, they can be reached at 203-555-5101 and they would be delighted to take your call. This machine, I’m sorry to say, won’t take messages. Bye-bye!
Jesus! What the fuck is that all about? I said.
It’s an answering machine, asshole. But what it means is the electricity must be on, Russ said and started patting the wall by the door until he found a switch and turned on an overhead lamp. Let there be light, man! he said.
After that it was like we were living there. We wandered all over the house looking into closets and drawers and cabinets, checking out everything like our parents’d gone away for the weekend. The one room we closed the door to and didn’t go into anymore except when we needed to go outside was the art studio because Russ was afraid his uncle if he came by could see the lights through the curtains. But there were plenty of bedrooms to rummage through that had shuttered windows and a den with all these bookcases and a bunch of stuffed animal heads and birds and a way huge kitchen and a pantry with hundreds of cans of tomato sauce and soups and beans, all kinds of food in cans including some weird stuff I’d never even heard of like smoked oysters and anchovies and water chestnuts. They also had these humongous jars full of funny-colored spaghettis and fancy kinds of rice and oatmeal and instant coffee and instant iced tea and Tang, everything we needed plus a big freezer and two complete refrigerators but unplugged with nothing in them.
The furnace was off naturally and the house was colder inside than out and smelled damp and moldy from being closed up all winter but it was comfortable anyhow and Russ said we could build a fire in the fireplace in the livingroom after it got dark when nobody’d see the smoke and he thought there was probably some space heaters around. Not a good idea I thought after our last go-round with a space heater and I kind of hoped he wouldn’t come across any which he didn’t.
When I tried a faucet in the kitchen nothing came out and I said to Russ, Hey, the water’s off. So how’re we gonna piss and shit, man? We can’t even wash up.
Russ said he thought maybe we could figure out how to turn on the water ourselves so we hunted around awhile until we found the door to the cellar and when we went down there we saw all this incredible camping equipment on shelves by the stairs including sleeping bags which we took two of to sleep in because the beds didn’t have any blankets or sheets on them. It took a while but eventually we found the pipe where the water came into the house from the well and Russ just turned the handle on the pipe and flipped the pump switch to On and in a few seconds we could hear the pipes gurgling and banging all over the house. Let there be water! Russ said. Then he turned on the electric water heater and said, Let there be hot water!
Our sleeping bags we laid out on the two beds in the main bedroom on the second floor which had its own bathroom with lights all around the mirror like a movie star’s and then after we each squeezed some pimples and studied our tattoos because of the good light and took a piss in the toilet we went back down to the kitchen and cooked up some of this weird green spaghetti they had.
It was pretty good spaghetti but a little on the clumpy side. We made it with tomato sauce and tuna fish from a can mixed in and sat at the long diningroom table and ate it off these great gold-edged plates with instant iced tea in fancy wine goblets but no ice of course. Russ sat at one end of the table and me at the other and we talked like Bib and Maddy Ridgeway’s teenaged sons home on vacation from their fancy prep school while Bib and Maddy’re down in Connecticut making more money to buy us more good stuff.
Pahss the salt down, would you, deah brother?
Why I’d be dee-lighted to, and would you care for another helping of this most exquisite green spaghetti? It’s the color of old money, isn’t that the most charming idea? I’ll have the butler Jerome bring us some.
Why thank you, deah brother, how thoughtful of you.
That first night in the summerhouse was the best I’d felt in a long time even though I knew it was only temporary and we were like burglars more or less. Of course now that I was a fugitive from justice and definitely committed to a life of crime I didn’t worry much about being a small-time burglar. Once you cut your ties to the past like we’d done you’ve gone the whole route. There’s no more near or far, it’s all the same thing—gone.
After supper we watched TV for a while but since we couldn’t figure out how to work the satellite dish the picture was lousy and all we got was Channel 5 from Plattsburgh. We kind of watched Sally Jessy Raphael and then the local news came on with some stuff about the fire which was basically the same as the newspaper had only with not as many details except that now we were presumed to have perished in the fire and weren’t missing anymore. That got us really psyched and we pumped our fists and said All right! and kept hoping there’d be interviews with our moms and all but the news guy just went on to some boring stuff about taxes being due today.
When Jeopardy came on after the news we shut the TV off and went looking through the Ridgeways’ tapes and CDs for some tunes but all they had was classical and Russ said no way with that shit although I wouldn’t’ve minded a little classical. I remembered liking it that one time when the guy gave me a lift back to Au Sable from the mall. There was a portable radio in the kitchen though and we found a pretty good rock station from Lake Placid that came in loud and clear and played old guys like Elton John and Bruce Springsteen and me and Russ amused ourselves by dissing them for a while.
Later when we knew it was dark we went looking for some firewood and when we couldn’t find any in the house we noticed that a lot of the furniture especially in the livingroom was made out of old sticks and logs, mostly birch branches and rough with the bark still on and everything, all these wobbly chairs and tables like a kid’d made them for his clubhouse. It didn’t seem like anything rich people would give a shit about and they came apart real easy so we made a fire with one of the chairs and then just lay back in front of the fireplace on some pillows from the couch and got real mellow.
At a certain point we realized that it’d be perfect if we had some weed and Russ got it into his head that the Ridgeways were dopers because they were like famous artists and his aunt had even said she’d seen some once when she was cleaning house.
Where’d she see it? I asked him.
I dunno, she never said. But let’s start sniffing, man, Russ said and he jumped up and began to feel around in all the table drawers and in the desk and even behind the books on the shelves. C’mon, Bone, give me a hand, will ya? he said. I didn’t think there was anybody who’d leave their smoke behind when they locked up their house for the whole winter but I helped him look anyhow just to shut him up.
I checked out the kitchen for a while and then went upstairs to the big bedroom where we had our sleeping bags and went through the closets and dressers but didn’t find anything. Then I pulled open the drawer of this table that was next to one of the beds and suddenly I was staring at a sandwich bag of about twenty of these neat little already rolled joints.
Excellent discovery.
Then I saw a bunch of condoms and I thought maybe there’s even some coke in here because you get greedy when you’re this lucky so I reached way into the back of the drawer and felt what I instantly knew was a gun and a small box of bullets.
The joints and the condoms I took downstairs with me and showed to Russ but not the gun and the bullets which I didn’t even tell him about although I don’t know why not except maybe because he’s so excitable and all I didn’t trust him with it. Anyhow we split up the joints fifty-fifty and I gave him all the condoms because I didn’t know when I’d get to use them if ever and he said he wanted them because it was always better to be safe than sorry and he was looking forward to screwing some of the local babes. Then we sat down on the rug in front of the fire and each smoked a joint and the evening was way perfect.
Later I asked him how long before the Ridgeways come up from Connecticut.
Long time, man, he said. Not till June probably, they won’t come till after blackfly season. Relax, man. For the next couple of months, man, this place is ours.
What about your uncle, doesn’t he ever like come inside and check things out?
Naw. He just does what he has to. He drives up and looks around and most times he doesn’t even get out of his truck. Then about a week before they come up I guess the Ridgeways call him and he drives over and turns on the water and the furnace and all that.
How’ll we know when to split?
We’ll just hafta keep listening for his truck to drive up and I guess we’ll go out the same way we came in.
What about after that?
What?
After he comes and we leave. Where do we go then?
I dunno. Jesus, Bone. Cross that bridge when we come to it, man.
I was thinking somehow Russ wasn’t into this new way of life as deep as I was. Every time I brought up the subject of Florida or California or life after now he’d try and talk about something else or he’d say we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it like it wasn’t already staring at us in the face. It was like I had gone and changed completely who I was, my name, my whole attitude, my hair even, and he hadn’t changed anything. I was the Bone now for sure but Russ was still Russ.
After the first few days time passed slower and slower until finally it didn’t seem to be passing at all. It got incredibly boring. We couldn’t even look out the windows at the view of the mountains because the windows were all blocked up and it was dark inside so we kept all the lights on day and night and slept whenever we felt like it which was most of the time. We watched TV a lot, the one lousy channel from Plattsburgh which came in all snowy and we tried playing some dumb board games that we found which are no substitute for video games that’s for sure but the Ridgeways weren’t the type for video games I guess. They did have these Jane Fonda exercise tapes that we watched on the VCR though and we got off on those for a while on account of Jane’s tights and all until neither of us could stand the squealing anymore. We ate mostly spaghetti and then sometimes for variety rice or oatmeal and drank powdered iced tea and instant coffee and Tang which is a diet you can get sick of really fast.
In the den where the animal heads and stuffed birds were they had hundreds of books but even they were boring, at least the few I tried because of the titles that made me think they might have a little sex in them like Evolution and Desire, a dog turd of a book that I couldn’t get through the first page of. And this one book I remember, Beyond the Pleasure Principle which I thought was a sex manual only it didn’t have any pictures and one called Finnegans Wake that I hoped would be a murder story with some good plotting but it turned out to be in like some strange language that was made up of mostly English words but was actually foreign. They had a whole bunch like that. I don’t know why people write books that normal people can’t read because I sure couldn’t and I was always pretty good at reading.
Russ’s uncle did drive up a few times and turn around and leave without getting out of his truck but in case he decided to get out and like check the doors we didn’t unlock or use them at all and instead went in and out of the house through the same upstairs porch we’d come in by, making sure each time to put the screen we’d cut back in place so you couldn’t hardly tell anyone had broken in unless you got right up close to it. Generally we stayed inside the house though and when we did go outside we only lurked around the yard since there really wasn’t anyplace else to go, A, because we didn’t have a car or any money and were way out in the boonies where there wasn’t anyplace for kids to hang except a Stewart’s and this one restaurant down on the main road. And B, because of Russ’s aunt and uncle and his cousins and numerous other local citizens who if they saw us would recognize Russ instanly and know we weren’t dead.
Anyhow after the first few times even going outside got boring. We’d walk around the yard awhile and check out the no-net tennis court for the fiftieth time and the empty pool and all that but they didn’t have any good stuff out there that we could use like a basketball and hoop or dirt bikes. We found some split firewood in a woodshed but it was too hard to haul it inside via the porch so we kept on busting up the furniture when we wanted a fire in the fireplace at night. We only used the stuff that was made of sticks and twigs though, not the good things.
The inside of the house was getting real funky and our source of firewood was disappearing fast and there were all these dumb cluster flies buzzing around now especially in the kitchen where the dishes were stacked like to the ceiling and the garbage can was overflowing. Neither of us were into washing dishes so we kept on using new plates until after a while we couldn’t find any more and would just turn them over and eat off of the other side and the pans we figured it was okay to keep on using without washing because when you cook things it kills the germs. Plus there was a lot of stuff lying around that we hadn’t put away because we’d forgotten where it came from originally or just didn’t feel like it, things we’d used or only fooled around with like jigsaw puzzles we’d given up on as soon as we saw how cheesy the picture was going to be and bath towels and emptied tomato sauce cans and Mr. Ridgeway’s clothes that we’d started wearing even though they were baggy and definitely uncool, green plaid pants and alligator shirts and old-guy boxer underwear which I actually liked wearing but outside the green pants not inside. The house was a real mess.
Maybe it was the strain of being confined like that and bored out of our minds and the house getting all grunged out, I don’t know but after a few weeks of it Russ and I started having these little fights, just dumbass arguments over nothing like who was going to cook the spaghetti or whether or not to watch Jeopardy which in desperation I had gotten into but Russ said he hated the smartasses who knew all the questions to the answers before he did, which he faked knowing anyhow.
It was no real biggie but we started avoiding each other so to speak. We even took our sleeping bags and put them in separate bedrooms and used different bathrooms and all so we’d some days go the whole day without seeing each other although we no longer even knew if it was day or night except from what was on TV or unless one of us happened to go outside the house.
Of course we’d used up all the weed long ago and didn’t have any cigarettes either and that probably contributed to the tension too. When we weren’t sleeping we were too wired and too bored for normal conversation. A couple of J’s and a carton of Camel Lights and a couple malt 40s would’ve helped civilize things between us for sure but it still would’ve lasted for only a day or two. When you’ve been high for most of your life it’s hard to be nice when you’re not.
I’d already started thinking about what it would be like if me and Russ were traveling alone instead of stuck here together when this one night, or maybe it was morning—I didn’t know because I hadn’t watched any TV in a long time and hadn’t been outside in at least a couple of days—Russ comes slumping into the guestroom I was using for my crib then and he goes, Chappie, I gotta have a talk with you.
Bone.
Yeah, Bone. Sor-ry. Listen, I think I’m leaving, man, he said. Real casual like he was gonna take a shower or something.
Whaddaya mean? Leaving?
Well, going back, I mean.
Back? Like where? To your mom’s?
Not exactly, he said. What he had in his mind was going to his aunt’s house and in fact he’d already called her on the phone. Just to feel her out on the subject, he said. But he hadn’t told her where he was calling from he assured me because I was like freaked, plus he hadn’t told her he was with me. She’d asked of course, like what about the other boy who was in the fire and he’d said that he didn’t know what’d happened to him. He told her he’d come back to the apartment in Au Sable alone that night and he’d seen the place was on fire and he’d split because he was scared on account of knowing about all the stuff that the bikers’d stolen and stashed there. He’d been afraid of getting busted for accessorizing a crime he didn’t commit.
So what’d she say? Come home to Auntie, Russell, all is forgiven?
C’mon, man, chill. She just said I could stay at her house for a while until I got everything straightened out like with the cops and my mom and so on. So I guess that’s what I’m gonna do, man.
That’s cool.
Yeah. I’ll tell them all this time I’ve been staying by myself up at the Bong Brothers in Plattsburgh. You know, in the schoolbus.
Yeah. Whatever.
Don’t be pissed, man.
What about the truck we stole? You mention that to Auntie?
No one can prove we did that, man.
Okay, I said. Whatever. That’s cool.
He seemed real happy and put out his forearm and the stupid panther tattoo like he wanted me to kiss it. I was lying in my bed with my sleeping bag all around me and my arms inside but Russ looked so foolish and pathetic standing there with his forearm out that I squirmed my own arm free and reached up and like kissed it with my crossed bones tattoo.
All right! he said.
Yeah. So when’re you leaving?
I dunno. Now I guess.
Okay. See ya ’round, I said and rolled over and faced the wall.
Hey listen, if you need me, man, you should like call my Aunt Doris. Even if I’m someplace else she’ll know where I am. He’d already written down her phone number on a piece of paper which he handed to me like it was his business card or something. I don’t think my mom and me are going to get it together again, he said. I’ll probably stay here in Keene and maybe go back to school and get a job in construction or something.
I said thanks but couldn’t think of what else to say to him so I didn’t even try. He rattled on for a while longer about his Aunt Doris and Uncle George and his plans for his new life with them until he finally ran out of words too and then he was silent for a few minutes and I could hear him shifting his weight like he finally felt guilty and he said, Well, see ya ’round, man, and he left the room.
Then a few minutes later when I knew he was gone from the house I started to cry. That only lasted a couple of seconds though because the more I thought about it the more pissed I got at Russ for running out on me like that. First he commits a bunch of crimes like skimming the take at the Video Den and dealing meth to the bikers and stealing their electronics and so on like hey no big deal, Russ’s only a young criminal working his way up the ladder of crime, and then pretty soon I start to see the wisdom of a life of crime myself and we steal a pickup together and run from the cops and deal the pickup to the pipesuckers and get tattooed and break into the Ridgeways’ nice fancy summerhouse and fuck it all up. Because we’re criminals now and criminals don’t give a shit about owning property, they just take what they want and drop it when they’re through and the kind of high that regular people get from having jobs and owning things like houses and pickups and stocks and bonds us criminals get from other activities like taking drugs and listening to music and exercising our basic freedoms and being with our friends. Russ goes the whole route with me, my partner in crime and then all of a sudden he decides that he can’t pay the price anymore which is basically that regular people, the Ridgeways and the Aunt Dorises and Uncle Georges of the world don’t respect you anymore. Tough. Big fucking deal. They never did respect us in the first place unless we were willing to want the same things they wanted. They never respected us for ourselves, for being humans the same as them only kids who people are constantly fucking over because we don’t have enough money to stop them. Well, fuck them. Fuck him. Fuck everyone.
I threw my sleeping bag off and marched straight to the bedroom where the gun was and took it and the box of bullets and then I went down into the cellar and got a backpack and put the gun and bullets and a bunch of the camping equipment inside, a cook kit and canteen and hatchet and even a first aid kit and tied a fresh sleeping bag onto the pack frame. Then I walked through the whole house selecting various items I thought I’d need for survival like a flashlight and a couple of towels and the rest of the canned smoked oysters which I’d developed a definite fondness for and some of the other food that was left. I took one of Mr. Ridgeway’s sweaters and the last of his clean socks and underwear and some other clothes and put on a cool flannel workshirt I found in the closet, the only thing of his I actually might’ve bought myself if I’d had any money and a loose pair of old jeans with paint stains that kind of fit me when I rolled up the bottoms practically to the knees and of course my old shearling jacket which Russ’d been decent enough to leave behind. In one of the pockets I found the folded-up clipping about the fire which I guess he no longer wanted to be reminded of but I sure did, I never wanted to forget it.
Then I checked myself out in the movie star mirror in the big bathroom and the clothes looked pretty decent on me in a grunged sort of way. I remember thinking suddenly that I didn’t look like I used to anymore. I was still a kid and all and small for my age but I looked more like a true intentional outlaw now and not so much a homeless kid pretending not to give a shit that no one wanted him. I took out my nose ring for the first time in a year and my earrings too and laid them on the counter. For a second it felt funny like I was going to sneeze but then it felt more normal than ever. Same with my hair. I found a pair of scissors in the medicine cabinet and snipped off the mohawk so that I had short hair all over like a guy just released from jail.
It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid I wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I’d like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone for the rest of my life this was the person I wanted to be alone with.
One other thing I did before leaving the Ridgeways’ was look around for stuff I might be able to sell for cash. There wasn’t much except for things that were too big to carry like the TV and VCR and the fancy plates with golden edges and some antique furniture and pictures that I thought might be worth a lot but couldn’t be sure of. I took one of the smaller stuffed birds that I personally liked though, a woodcock I think it’s called and put it in a plastic garbage bag and a bunch of the classical CDs but they were things I might keep for my own private enjoyment and not sell unless someone offered me a substantial amount of cash. Otherwise there wasn’t much left in the house for me to exercise my criminal mentality on that I hadn’t already used or eaten or burned in the fireplace or just trashed and left in the middle of the floor.
I stood there in the middle of the huge livingroom with the high ceiling and this enormous picture window at the end because of the terrific view of the Adirondack Mountains on the other side which you couldn’t see because of the wooden shutters outside, and I kept thinking there was something important that I’d forgotten to do or some final thing I needed to rob. I must’ve still been incredibly pissed at Russ for running out on me or something because what I did then was sort of stupid and pointlessly violent but it felt good. I reached down into my backpack and drew out the gun and the bullets. It was a small black Smith & Wesson niner, heavy and solid in my hand and when I checked I saw it was already loaded like Mr. Ridgeway’d kept it right next to his bed so he could reach into his dope and condom drawer and without even getting out of bed he could blow away whoever’d sneaked in to rape his wife and rob his valuables.
I didn’t have to aim but I did anyhow, holding the gun with two hands like on TV and said, Freeze, asshole! and fired at the plate-glass window in front of me. It was incredibly loud like from the world of nature instead of a little metal handheld instrument. I fired again. The third shot was the one that did it, killed the window so to speak and the whole thing shattered at once and fell like a curtain crashing to the floor in a million pieces. It was beautiful to see and I stood there for a minute playing it back in my imagination a couple of times.
Then I crunched across the broken glass and shoved hard against the wooden shutters and busted the hooks holding them and when they swung back it let the light of day pour into the house and fill it like a tidal wave. A couple of bluejays squawked and I saw a hawk making these slow loops overhead and heard the wind float through the pine trees like a river sliding over smooth rocks. I stood there with the warm spring air and the early afternoon light hitting me full in the face and looked across the wide acres of sloping yellowed lawn below the house and the wide forested valley beyond and then up the further side to the dark blue and purple mountains, all cragged and hooked and bulky making this huge bowl of space spread out before me and it was like I was up on the balcony of a castle and could see the whole world from there.
I put the gun on the windowsill and cupped my hands around my mouth and like I was a lone wolf howling at the moon I hollered as loud as I could, The Bone!
The Bone!
The Bone rules!
The Bo-own-n-n rooo-oo-oool-l-ls!