Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Youll probably think Im making a lot of this up just to make me sound better than I really am or smarter or even luckier but Im not. Besides, a lot of the things thatve happened to me in my life so far which Ill get to pretty soonll make me sound evil or just plain dumb or the tragic victim of circumstances. Which I know doesnt exactly prove Im telling the truth but if I wanted to make myself look better than I am or smarter or the master of my own fate so to speak I could. The fact is the truth is more interesting than anything I could make up and thats why Im telling it in the first place.

Anyhow my life got interesting you might say the summer I turned fourteen and was heavy into weed but I didnt have any money to buy it with so I started looking around the house all the time for things I could sell but there wasnt much. My mother who was still like my best friend then and my stepfather Ken had this decent house that my motherd got in the divorce from my real father about ten years ago and about that she just says she got a mortgage not a house and about him she doesnt say much at all although my grandmother does. My mom and Ken both had these cheesy jobs and didnt own anything you could rob at least not without them noticing right away it was gone. Ken worked as a maintenance man out at the airbase which is like being a janitor only he said he was a building services technician and my mom was a bookkeeper at the clinic which is also a nothing job looking at a computer screen all day and punching numbers into it.

It actually started with me roaming around the house after school looking for something that wasnt boring, porn books or videos maybe, or condoms. Anything. Plus who knows, they might have their own little stash of weed. My mom and especially Ken were seriously into alcohol then but maybe they arent as uptight as they seem, Im thinking. Anything is possible. The house was small, four rooms and a bathroom, a mobile home on cinderblocks like a regular house only without a basement or garage and no attic and Id lived there with my mom and my real dad from the time I was three until he left which happened when I was five and after that with my mom and Ken who legally adopted me and became my stepfather up until now, so I knew the place like I knew the inside of my mouth.

I thought Id poked through every drawer and looked into every closet and searched under every bed and piece of furniture in the place. Id even pulled out all these old Readers Digest novels that Ken had found out at the base and brought home to read someday but mainly just to look good in the livingroom and flipped them open one by one looking for one of those secret compartments that you can cut into the pages with a razor and hide things. Nothing. Nothing new, I mean. Except for some old photograph albums of my grandmothers that my mom had that I found in a box on the top shelf of the linen closet. My momd showed them to me a few years ago and Id forgotten probably because they were mostly pictures of people I didnt know like my moms cousins and aunts and uncles but when I saw them again this time I remembered once looking for pictures of my father from when he was still alive and well and living here in Au Sable and finding only one of him. It was of him and my mom and his car and Id studied it like it was a secret message because it was the only picture of him Id ever seen. Youdve thought Grandma at least wouldve kept a few other snaps but no.

There was though this stack of letters tied with a ribbon in the same box as the albums that my fatherd written to my mom for a few months after he left us. Id never read them before and they turned out pretty interesting. The way it sounded my father was defending himself against my moms accusations that hed left us for this female named Rosalie who my mom said had been his girlfriend for years but he was claiming that Rosalied only been a normal friend of his at work and so on. He had good handwriting, neat and all the letters slanted the same way. Rosalie didnt matter to him anymore, he said. She never had. He said he wanted to come back. I almost felt sorry for him. Except I didnt believe him.

Plus I didnt need the letters my momd written to him in order to know her side of the story because even though I was only a little kid when this all happened Ive got memories. If he was such a great guy and all how come he split on us and never sent any money or even tried to be in touch with his own son. My grandmother said just dont think about him anymore, hes probably living it up in some foreign country in the Caribbean or in jail for drugs. She goes, You dont have a father, Chappie. Forget him. She was tough, my grandmother, and I used to try and be like her when it came to thinking about my real father. I dont think she knew my momd saved my dads letters. I bet my stepfather didnt know either.

Anyhow this one afternoon I came home from school early because Id cut the last two periods which was just as well since I didnt have my homework anyhow and both teachers were the kind who boot you out of the class if you come in empty-handed, like its a punishment thatll make you do better next time. I rummaged around in the fridge and made a bologna and cheese sandwich and drank one of my stepfathers beers and went into the livingroom and watched MTV for a while and played with the cat Willie who got spooked and took off when I accidentally flipped him on his head.

Then I started making my rounds. I really wanted some weed. It had been a couple of days since Id been high and whenever I went that long Id get jumpy and restless and kind of irritated at the world, feeling like everything and everyone was out to get me and I was no good and a failure at life which was basically true. A little smoke though and all that irritation and nervousness and my wicked low self-esteem immediately went away. They say weed makes you paranoid but for me it was the opposite.

Id about given up on finding something in the house that I could rob a personal possession that could be hocked like the TV or the VCR or the stereo would be instantly noticed when it was gone and all the rest of their stuff was boring household goods that you couldnt sell anyhow like electric blankets and a waffle iron and a clock radio. My mom didnt have any jewels that were worth anything except her wedding ring from my stepfather which she made a big deal out of but it looked like a Wal-Marts ring to me and besides she always had it on. They didnt even have any decent CDs, all their music was seventies stuff, disco fever and easy listening and suchlike, on cassettes. The only kind of robbing I thought was possible was big time like stealing my stepfathers van while he was asleep for example and I wasnt ready for that.

I was taking one more look into their bedroom closet, down on my hands and knees and groping past my mothers shoes into the darkness when I came to what Id thought last time was just some folded blankets. But when I felt into the blankets I realized there was something large and hard inside. I pulled out the whole thing and unwrapped what turned out to be these two black briefcases that Id never seen before.

I sat cross-legged on the floor and put the first briefcase on my lap thinking it was probably locked until it snapped open which surprised me but then the real surprise came when I lifted the lid and saw a.22 automatic rifle broken down into three parts just lying there with a rod and cleaning kit and a box of shells. It wasnt hard to fit the parts together, it even had a scope like an assassins rifle and pretty soon I was into a Lee Harvey Oswald trip standing by the bedroom window and brushing the curtain away with the tip of the barrel and aiming through the scope at stuff on the street going Pow! Pow! I blasted a couple of dogs and blew away the mailman and nailed the drivers of cars going by for a while.